Pinging the ARK Events team.

[Dogtrauma]

So, there are alium raids in Bor as a semi regular thing, i guess it's fun to have human run special events, there are however a bunch of problems with the location you have chosen, i don't really feel the need to bring them up, i am fairly sure that it has been mentioned before on these forums and i remember reading something about a mass protest in the olden days, were players were up in arms about ARKs and GMs disrupting their gameplay in various creative ways (long before my time).

Instead i propose an easy fix, get the devs. to give you the tool to create a teleporter/portal maybe with the clever little dropship that hovers above the entrance to iCities, then run the event at another playfield, spawn an "usher NPC" that spams vicinity with a call to arms against the green menace, this way you can run raids and events with no one getting ticked off by idjit snares in Bor.
As an added bonus this makes it possible to host events that are not *intended* to be PvP-events in high gas areas were the efforts of flag-trolls will fail and resources permitting you could do level-range separated events on several PF's in order to let low level toons actually dress up for teams and raids without that 220 NT accidentaly killing their entire mob allowance with a couple of VE's.

[Traderjill]

Bump.. the spawning of aliens at the Bor GMI terminal (nearest to Jobe whompah) was a tad crazy. I logged in to my GMI selling toon and was pretty much dead in 2 seconds.

[Biancha]

More anarchy, not less!

[Agentcora]

More anarchy, not less!

Bump!

There will always be a divided opinion on this though.

Also this thread will probably be picked up quicker in The Fourth Wall.

[Pheats]

Unfortunately your idea will probably never happen, as that is a lot of work for developers (making instanced versions of every major city on rubi-ka) for what the problem is.

The aliens can and will attack major cities as this is an invasion, sure this causes some people issues, afk people sitting in the street may get killed, people may unfortunately log in at a bad time, and it may stop people hanging around there favourite hangout spots for an hour or so, but it should never completely stop players from doing anything, at most it means you may want to sit inside a shop/backyard/bar area to afk safely or go to another town to do your GMI shopping for the time being.

If the protests your talking about are the ones Im thinking of that is when they put hostile faction guards around Borealis and such, which the events team had no involvement in and that was something that permanently stopped players accessing the area.

I'd also point out we don't generally spawn things with the intention of killing people at GMI's and such however once the aliens are on the playfield they will move around like most other mobs in a way we cannot really control, so yes people may die now and then that we do not intend to kill, however you at least do not loose a great deal, specially if you are on GMI alts or such.

The PVP part is another unintended side effect of raids that we have tried to minimize and will continue to try and get around, however again this can be helped by players avoiding aoes where possible and such.

So unfortunately while we don't particularly mean or enjoy disrupting peoples game play in a way they don't enjoy, alien raids will most likely not be stopped as there are many players that enjoy the fact that aliens are invading here and there, we do try and give warning and plenty of ways to tip players off for those that wish to move (the town going green and zone wide messages).

[Dogtrauma]

Putting a circle on the ground that acts as a teleporter is something the current dev. team have proven they know how to do ( Agency APF teleport), the dropship in iCities is pretty new as well, there was the desert rider guy that talked in the vicinity chat, so there is no development needed that could not be ready for test server within an hour if one single designer put in the effort (right?).

There is no real reason to instance the pf's you use for events ( since obviously you use normal Bor at the moment). If you are adamant that "don't use aoe effects" is how you want things to run then you could use the notum miner area for those raids you want to be level range separated since flag trolls will get most people flagged in an open world raid in any case.

If you want reasons ( from an in-character perspective) why raids would not occur in any of the major cities then that is not especially hard to dig up. Borealis for example seems to be handily located in a small valley surrounded by mountains, mountains that could with minimal effort be converted to gun emplacements. A combination of rail guns and energy weapons well protected from orbital bombardment would make the little green guys feel a lot less frisky, no?

[Sharrr]

I prefer keeping them in the city to give us that sense that it is anarchy, and the alien invasion is real. For some it does disrupt gameplay but I don't see it being a major deal. Just like any enemy force, if you see them and can't deal with them, then run for your life and hope you don't get reclaimed; there are plenty of buildings in every major city that we can run inside to avoid the hassle which should take no longer than 5 secs for them to pass onto the next person (usually the high lvl that kills it). Besides I think it's one of those great ideas to keep us on our feet. With that in mind I would like to see more crowd control from the faction that controls the city. Perhaps OT-AF or a Unicorn will drop from a ship and assist in dealing with the vermin (In cities controlled by OT ofc)
For me there's one disadvantage to this; hence I am an enf it is within my professional duties to aoe mongo to protect ppl from death by mobs. Which usually results in me mongoing someone that is flagged. Fortunately for me most of those that were flagged were smart&kind enough not to /zerg /gank me. Keyword most, the 'some' were dealt with in a orderly (and quite hilarious) fashion.

Now there is one thing I haven't seen yet and that's a (massive) ARK Alien raid but done in peace instead of just kill 'em all. I've always wanted to see those floating things (usually the medics) pick us up and drop us from 100 yards, that's sure to scare any newb!