Idea for special event

[Stardouser]

Here's an idea I had, I wanted to get it out on the airwaves.

Let's just say, a year down the road, they've got an AI 4th empire. Or they have the capability to it whether or not they actually do it.

One thing they could do is make it so that there is a hidden continent not normally reachable except when an event is running, and basically, that continent will be full of AI, supplemented by SOE devs and employees. And the challenge of this special event is to invade that continent and kick the devs and their AI out. Basically, the AI will make it so that no matter where you attack, there will always be a presence, but the devs and SOE employees will provide a live spearhead at certain locations, with the ability to use naughty powers here and there to keep the players on their toes.

This would be great fun and as you capture territory from the dev-continent, the likelihood of encountering dev/SOE tags increases. There could be statistical rewards for killing the most SOE tags, the player run news sites could be allowed to somehow "ride with the troops" of either side in order to help them write articles, etc. These rewards could show up on player stat pages like "April 10-12 Weekend DevWar, 2nd Place Killed Most SOE Tags" and it's a permanent entry on their stat page.

There are tons of variations on this theme. The devs could be the invading force(though that would be less fun since live players won't sit around and defend deep bases like AI can), or the devs could occupy more than a single continent, etc.

And basically, how this could work is, let's say there are 6 servers. The devs and SOE employees could run this as a Challenge Event every weekend, hosting it on a different server every weekend in rotation, to give all servers a chance to experience it.

Obviously, instead of hosting this on a different server every weekend, they could have a separate Event Server that comes online only for events, but that would fill up too quickly and it would be too chaotic as far as giving people a fair chance to participate. Some people would miss out every time, others would get lucky and get in every time, UNLESS they've got an organized way of inviting people to them.