NWPAD - June 18 - July 3, 2012

[Legacy_Lazarus Magni]

               All I am saying is you all promoted this to PWs as something simple to intergrate, low maintenence, and worry free. It's tough for me to commit to something over a month out, especially something I need to do daily work on (checking logs, tallying checkins, ect..), and not to mention our players are quite savy. With out randomly spawning chests, it would be way to easy to exploit. I would love Av3 to participate in this, but as a Dev I already have my hands full, and then some. To participate in something like this it would have to be as low maintenence, and easy to intergrate as possible. And I doubt I am the only PW owner to feel this way. Iduno, maybe I am. But this is all I am saying from my perspective.

Laz

P.S. Regardless of Av3's participation, I commend the effort. Not many games have 10 year playability, and I certainly celebrate that fact about NWN 1, and recognize the worth of this effort.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Lazarus Magni, 15 mai 2012 - 09:36 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               my solution IS simple to integrate, low maintenance, and worry free.

you're the one making it more complicated by wanting PW owners to have to hide dozens of waypoints for possible spawn points.  how long will it take your "savvy" players to find the 10 (20?  30?  100?) possible locations for these chests?  this isn't even specifically for YOUR players - it's for new players exploring your PW.

if you don't want your players to tell each other where the chest for the day (or week) is, then ask them nicely not to.  or better yet, remind them that this is a contest, and that sharing the location of the chest will hurt their chances of winning the grand prize on your server.  then all you have to do is dream up something good enough to encourage them not to share.  and finally, who really cares if they're "cheating"?

we're also not asking you to comb through your logs on a daily basis.  just run a grep at the end of the two weeks and send us the relevant lines.  or better yet, zip up the log directory for the past month.  we've already volunteered to do everything for you including pulling out the prize codes, tallying up your server's results, and cross-referencing all entries from all participating PWs.

------

but fine, if you want the chest to respawn every time it's closed, then you should put something on the order of:

int iRand = Random(100); //or however many waypoint locations you decide to put down
string sTag = "NWPAD_CHEST_" + IntToString(iRand);
object oNWPAD_WP = GetObject(sTag);
if(GetObjectIsValid(oNWPAD_WP){
object oNewChest = CeateObject(OBJECT_TYPE_PLACEABLE, "nwpad_chest", oNWPAD_WP);
DestroyObject(OBJECT_SELF);
}

and put that in the OnClose portion of my script.  note that the above is completely untested, but i imagine is pretty close to what you want.  then you'll have to put down 100 or so waypoints (make sure you mach up the total with what's in the script).  also make sure you correctly number them in sequence and put them all over where you want the chests to be.  also, i guess you should write down where each and every waypoint is so you can go back and delete them all when the event is over.  i hope you're not too busy for all of that.

another cute idea would be to put the above code in the module's heartbeat script then it can respawn every 6 seconds.  haha!

i didn't do this because it's not the simplest solution to the problem and because it's not what i wanted to do with my PW.  i said anybody can modify my code and do whatever they want for their own worlds.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_BelowTheBelt]

               Laz - no worries, mate.

This option is the easiest plug-and-play solution for all worlds (think least common denominator).  Certainly, if a world would like to customize the code to make it more dynamic, that's cool.  If a world wants to customize the code so that it only provides 1 code per reset, that's fine too.  Or, a world can use it as-is.  We wanted to give worlds a tool to easily be involved with the cross-world event.

Managing the logfiles is easy.  After the event, you will be able to e-mail a list of the login/CD info to someone who will do all the tabulating.  The world won't have to do anything other than, if you have regular resets, copy a version of the logfile before a new one is created.

Lastly, you're not expected to implement this "a month out".  This is solely for the period of time between June 18 - July 3.  For now, put it somewhere in your mod that players don't have access to and then move it into place beginning on June 18.  The purpose of releasing it this early is so that you can plan to be involved in NWPAD and have sufficient time to make it great for your world.

Believe me, I understand your time constraints as a dev.  That's why we made the placeables, so you don't have to.  Is it worth the minimal effort?  I believe so, for the upside potential of having your world promoted as a participating world and the exposure/players that may come of it is a pretty fair trade, IMO.

Thanks for your comments, though.  Hopefully this will resolve some concern you have and get you on-board. If not, let us know.  We'd love to have you participate.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_BelowTheBelt]

               All, a quick note that NWPAD was featured on the latest installment of the one, the only NWN Podcast.  We talked about the future of the community, the NWPAD event, and more!  Check it out!

Send me a PM, leave a comment here, or on the discussion thread if your world is participating.

Thanks!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_BelowTheBelt]

               ...And thaks to Rolo Kipp for his help in getting this news up on the NWVault

NWPAD Community News
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_BelowTheBelt]

               Exciting news!!  The NW Podcast team has graciously allowed us to develop a brochure/flyer promoting NWN1 and the community that they will then distribute at the upcoming Origins gamefair.  The NW Podcast team will be recording an episode at the event, which is one of the largest game conventions in the US.  This is excellent news because Origins is a huge convention full of people that are exactly the people that NWN would be appealing to and allows us to reach out beyond our existing community to attract new people.

So, is anyone good at Photoshop?  I can help do the writing, but don't have access to skills necessary to do the layout.

The NWPodcast team will be there at the end of May, so we need to get moving on this quick!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Lazarus Magni]

               I am sorry if I offended you ACD. I was just expressing my concern. I should have mentioned I am not really a scripter, nor very tech savy, and have had bad experiences with cheaters in the past. A group like the griefer group could ruin something like this for everybody if there was not some element of randomness. Thank you for the block of code, and I will try to integrate it into your on close event. It would not take 100 waypoints, even just 2 would do it, or more like 6 or 8.

There is still the issue of equalizing checkins for the varying restart times different servers have, and I still think using a 12 or 24 hour time interval is a better barometer than per restart, but that's all up to you guys.

If I can get the waypoint thing to work, and you all can teach me how to run a grep (I don't even know what that is), or extend my log # (currently it's at 8. Is it as simple as adding additional sub folders, or is there an ini setting?) I will throw Av3's hat into this ring.

Laz

P.S. What I meant about planning a month out is, it's hard to say what my time availability will be at that point.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               yes, we've not decided how to standardize all of the logins.

personally, i'll rewarding players twice a day on my own server, but for the cross-server event, that's quite a bit to ask every player to hit each server twice a day.

that's more of a discussion that we'll be having in the afore-mentioned subforum that BtB created, though.  you can join in it there, or just wait for our official announcement (likely in this thread).
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zarathustra217]

               There's definitely something to celebrate - and I like the idea of a server crawl. However, how about we simply rely on the public CD keys for keeping track of who've been where and leave it at that (still using the server log file to store info). In this way, it should be forward to assure that each individual only gets counted once - of course, there's exceptions where one person owns multiple keys or people sharing keys but it should be satisfying compromise no less. It's very simple to implement and has little to none performance impact.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Zarathustra217, 16 mai 2012 - 03:04 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Zarathustra217]

               A script could look like this:

//Place this on the OnUsed event of a placeable.
void main()
{
    object oPC=GetLastUsedBy();
    if(GetIsPC(oPC))
    {
        string sKey=GetPCPublicCDKey(oPC);
        SendMessageToPC(oPC, "Congratulations! Your public CD key ("+sKey+") has been registered as having visited "+GetModuleName()+" during the NWPAD event!");
        //We print this to the server log file:
        PrintString("NWPAD Entry: "+sKey+" Login: "+GetPCPlayerName(oPC));
    }
}

Each PW then place it on a placeable somewhere suitable in their world and make the placeable describe what the NWPAD is all about.

Once the event is over, each server admin then collects all the entries in their log file starting with "NWPAD" and picks out the unique keys, their (first) login name and then perhaps pass it to one of us who collects all the data for the entire event. People can them approach us with their public CD key to verify once we've picked the logins who've won.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               

BelowTheBelt wrote...

Exciting news!!  The NW Podcast team has graciously allowed us to develop a brochure/flyer promoting NWN1 and the community that they will then distribute at the upcoming Origins gamefair.  The NW Podcast team will be recording an episode at the event, which is one of the largest game conventions in the US.  This is excellent news because Origins is a huge convention full of people that are exactly the people that NWN would be appealing to and allows us to reach out beyond our existing community to attract new people.

So, is anyone good at Photoshop?  I can help do the writing, but don't have access to skills necessary to do the layout.

The NWPodcast team will be there at the end of May, so we need to get moving on this quick!

I think I should be able to swing some involvement time in in the second half of June.  You can add the World of Aenea to your list of participating servers.



As far as the brochure for Origins, can you do a quick sketch of what you want included, scan it, and email (builder at neverwinternights.info) it along with the text you want included?  Or maybe just a really good description of what you have in mind? I can whip something up in Photoshop and email it back to you.

If hundreds of these things are going to be passed out, I think a half-sheet design would likely work best, depending on how the brochures are actually going to be produced...Professional printing? Someone at home with a computer and an inkjet?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               

Zarathustra217 wrote...

There's definitely something to celebrate - and I like the idea of a server crawl. However, how about we simply rely on the public CD keys for keeping track of who've been where and leave it at that (still using the server log file to store info). In this way, it should be forward to assure that each individual only gets counted once - of course, there's exceptions where one person owns multiple keys or people sharing keys but it should be satisfying compromise no less. It's very simple to implement and has little to none performance impact.

this (and the script you posted) is almost exactly what my "chest code" does.  among the things it logs is the public CD key.  i also captured information including the module's name, time, name of area it was found in, player login, player's name, and a unique code for each find.

you also get a neat little piece of paper - people LOVE pieces of paper '>


but you're right, it's VERY likely that all we'll be collecting is public CD key information for the cross-server event.  i just wanted to point out that for my personal server, i wanted a little more information.  it's trivial to collect all the information and still parse out everything but the CD key we need.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zarathustra217]

               Oh, right, I was just confused by the random ticket number thing and the item - seems a bit redundant perhaps? Or is it something you want to have specifically for your server?

Might be just me too - I always like it as simple as possible. But that said, I feel we ought to make a simple parsing script (javascript or something) to help admins filter out the log entries to make it as easy as possible for all.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_BelowTheBelt]

               The cross-world event seems to be the source of a lot of discussion, which is good, but I want to make sure that the differences between how the Official Challenge will be run and how individual servers may choose to add on to that are clearly delineated. 

Official World Walker Challenge Objective:  Maximize new players to your world. 

Because the objective is to drive the maximum number of new players to your world, there are very simple rules for player participation.  This also makes it easy for worlds to manage.  Servers can choose to make it more detailed or offer additional bonuses to players, but basic participation in the World-Walker Challenge is simple.  In fact, I would posit that you want this to be as easy as possible for new players to "check-in" during the course of the event, for Simplicity = Maximum Participation.

For the purpose of clarity, I've outlined, in detail, the Official World-Walker Challenge, as well as how worlds can choose to go beyond that and customize their own challenge.

1)  Official "World-Walker" Challenge:    

• On June 18, participating worlds include the placeable chest item (with custom script) somewhere in their world that a new player can easily reach (starting area or other easily-accessed area as determined by the server admin).
• On July 3, participating worlds remove the placeable item from the server.
• At the end of the NWPAD period (week after July 3, 2012), participating worlds will e-mail to a NWPAD team representative, a list of all the login/cd key info that they got over the 2 weeks of NWPAD from the chest (from their logfile data - opening the chest item writes the data to the logfile). 
• That NWPAD representative will integrate all the data from all worlds and count/clean the entries to determine the unique entries per world per cd/login.  Just to be clear, 1 entry per cd/login per world.  This will standardize all worlds regardless of restart frequency. 
• Based on the distribution of the data, we will be able to rank which players visited the most worlds and determine the winning players (Grand World-Walker, World-Shifter, Seer, etc...) and communicate that to participating worlds.
• Winning players will be notified via some method (central NWPAD website or something else TBD).
• Winning players can then notify the participating world of their choice that they won.
• The participating worlds can then offer the winning player a specific list of rewards that can be redeemed (each world needs to determine an appropriate reward specific to the economy/community of that world, but it should be "significant").
• Participating world then communicates to NWPAD team that a reward by the winning player was redeemed (to prevent winning players from redeeming on multiple servers).

2)  Unofficial Server-specific Use:  Participating worlds are encouraged to expand on the World-Walker Challenge to run/use the placeable to encourage repeat visits to your server.

• Maybe you have certain prizes set up based on the number of check-ins per day, or the number of check-ins during the event, or maybe you decide to not have any special prizes beyond the World-Walker Challenge.
• Special scripting may be required to update the code to act in the way that you want.  As long as you record at least once that the PC checked-in (so as to be aligned with the official challenge), feel free to make up your own rules and prizes.
• This would allow you to benefit primarily your existing userbase, for those are the players that are the most frequent users of your world.

Participation in the Official World-Walker Challenge requires #1 above, but does not require #2.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_BelowTheBelt]

               The Amethyst Dragon - Great to have the World of Aenea aboard! Make sure you take a look at the download that ACD made - it has a sign that you should post in your world asap to alert players that you'll be participating.

Zarathustra217 - Can we count on POTM's participation?

Lazarus Magni- We'd love to have Av3 participate.  Understand that you may not have visibility into next month's time constraints.  However, if you can commit to running at least one "open house" kind of event, then that's all it takes.  While it behooves worlds to be as active as possible during this period, there's no minimum level of participaton during the event.  Just commit (so we can help promote your world), put up the sign in-game that you're participating (so your players will know to participate), drop in the cross-world chest during the event (so players get credit for participating), and then run at least one event during the two week period (so you can showcase your server). 

Servers that make the most of this by promoting it to their playerbase and helping us with the "play #NWN" events stand to benefit the most, but there's no minimum level of participaton and all are welcome.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par BelowTheBelt, 16 mai 2012 - 06:25 .