Purely by chance, I ended up taking part in one of Planetside's "Rabbit Ball" events last night. They've been doing these for a while now, in an attempt to spice up and vary the day-to-day base-capture board-game of the usual session in there.

I'd been pottering about on the smaller peripheral fights, going where-ever the 'Instant Action' sends me, as I tend to do, and mostly found myself bouncing between various small incursions into friendly (NC in my case) continents with perhaps less than ten highly mobile recon/assault troops on each side. I tend to do best in the bigger fights, given my support style - the more friendlies there are to help, the better. So I'd just concentrate on fortifying the various bases and towers our chaps were trying to beat off advances on, with mines, spitfires, and the like. Once the more skilled folks on our team quashed the speculative forays, I'd hit Instant Action again, and off to the next one. My allocation of deployables remain in place, but are no longer 'mine' once I leave the continent, meaning they'll still kill the enemy, just I won't personally get any points for it. But I don't mind too much.

Most of our lot were dug in on one single base on Amerish, a traditional Vanu Sovereignty home continent, along with most of the Terran Republic, and a VS angry, and fresh from a 'Zero Basing', by the look of the world map. Then the earthquakes started, and the CSR system messages (which are more shocking and rare to see than the earthquakes, frankly), and the game was on.

Ishundar had all it's bases artificially turned yellow, indicating neutral ownership, leaving all three teams to scramble like madmen to try and hack (and hold) as many as possible - neutral bases ignore the usual steady progression of lattice links, making them up for grabs by anyone with a hacking tool. Meanwhile, an entirely new window and accompanying strange noises showed up, along with a waypoint to the 'Rabbit'. I didn't actually see the thing myself, but could sort of work out what was going on. Based on the LLU 'capture the flag' type of base capture, as far as I could tell, a member of our team was supposed to pick this rabbit ball up, and simply hold on to it for as long as possible without being killed. The new window showed a point score for each team, and the name of the person currently holding it, and the score seemed to tick up over time while one of our lot held the thing. Winner being the first team to 1000 (seconds, I think).

Trouble is, this whole thing was only new and different to myself, and a handful of others, and in general, the feeling about 'Events' in Planetside is quite polarised, with significant numbers of each team who can't be arsed, and would rather just carry on fighting at the base they were at. I compromised, carrying on my normal duties, but at one of the bases on Ishundar, figuring I could at least help those folks who were keen on taking part. I don't know what was going on in TR CR5 chat last night though, but my god...the Elmos were organised, like I've rarely seen before from any team, and within about ten minutes of play on Ishundar, they'd risen to more than a two-to-one population advantage and owned all but three bases - partly because they'd rolled hard on Ishundar (nominally a neutral continent, but one the TR used to have as a home continent, making them a bit protective of it), and partly because a sizeable chunk of our own army decided not to bother and carry on on Amerish, clearly enjoying the change of scenery - we don't get to go to Amerish much, it being a VS home continent and all. I think the VS sent even less people than us, having two home continents to recapture, which is much more important for morale.

I think the TR were at about 200 points, vs our 40 or so, and maybe twenty minutes in when our CR5 folks gave up and  issued the general recall, effectively conceding the event to the more numerous TR, leaving only a small guerilla force of masochists, new-folks and people who don't take orders behind, and calling Amerish the primary target again - a popular move, given the twenty minutes of horrific brute-force overrun and farming those of us who did go along endured. I decided to call it a night anyway at that point, but I'm guessing TR won - with only token opposition from either the NC or VS, it would be hard not to. And I expect within a few hours, the VS would have regained Amerish too. There's little permanence in PS, only The Good Fight, making any kind of events somewhat transitory at best. All most people seem to need out of the game, is a dense base or overland battle, with lots of the kinds of targets they're equipped to deal with, and lots of friendlies around equipped to deal with the ones they aren't. Living, one base at a time, in the Combined Arms Moment.

Rabbit ball probably looks good on paper, but with most 'sports' events, you're pretty much guaranteed to have teams of equal numbers, at the least. Anything else just gets silly, but the way Command Structure works in PS, i.e. entirely at the individual soldier's discretion, there's not really any way to force attendance. Makes the whole thing a bit hit and miss really, but it's nice to see they (the devs and CSRs) are still trying at least...


"What makes a man turn Neutral?  Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just  born with a heart full of Neutrality?" - Z Brannigan