A few thoughts on possible events that would be available to admins either on command or by opting in (toggle in server settings) for scheduled events provided by Funcom to apply to their server. Things such as seasonal events could be freely enjoyed or avoided by server admins (private servers only as always), and random events to keep players interested in staying up to date such as;
-an additional purge with high chances of named thralls.
proximity to obelisks spawning in waves of enemies with increased difficulty each wave and a prize at the end. Enemy spawns depend on region as does the loot quality.
-Meteor strike in “broad” region (swamp, desert, safari plains, etc) with highly demanded metal (gold, silver, heavy star metal, and others), having players want to find and harvest it before your enemies do. Local tribes will attempt to harvest the meteor as well, so know the timing or you may miss out. This meteor can land in water and hit the bottom, in which case will not be attempted by local tribes, adding to the reward of exploring, as to come across later if you were offline during the event.
-More storms, this is already possible by a / type command but as many have suggested, we need more variety of storms.
-Local AI tribe attempts to summon a god. If successful, the god will roam around the region it was spawned and seek out player made structures to destroy. Reward would be heavy experience with a random recipe sheet despawning after a set limit, and if gods are enabled you also get the god token if you interrupt the summoning. If they summon the god, the reward is not dying or losing your base. These would be rare events as their potential for destruction is rather high for those who don’t play frequently.
-Harvest Moon event, increases the loot chances of various rare resources that you can harvested drastically, and adds some high end tier materials to lesser boss encounters.
It shouldn’t be that difficult to add an option in Server Settings to adjust when events take place.
I know there is one option for setting the possibility for stuff to happen in a certain time frame. And the purge can be adjusted as well.
So all you’d really need is an event tab. Then have each event listed, and a thing that sets the hours when it can happen, whether to disable it entirely, etc.
A solo player can then simply adjust those settings to work with their playing time, to experience that stuff.
It could simply be set at a specific time of day, and will either happen whether the player is on or not and when the login next time they may come across it or the “cleanup” feature will remove it by AI tribe’s going to harvest.
Another possibility would be to designate the events to “solo/co-op mode” and adjust the timings and such based on that server playtime restrictions. With the former, you could make it easier by just relocating those event timers to occur while you are likely logged in.
As for extra players on someone’s private server, that’s always been the case for server “events” hosted by the admin and its other owners. This is more of a platform to manage that experience a bit easier with some world wide events to keep players interested in coming back and playing regularly to keep up with the rewards.
There are many things to consider when it comes to rewards, the content is also very important but the rewards can greatly alter the feel of the game if it becomes a “necessity” so management of its rewards should be taken careful note of to not change the servers market unfavorably.
I think this is an excellent idea. I’ve suggested as much in regards to events (that they must be server-driven rather than client-based). I do believe the good people at Funcom agree with that, as well - they certainly learned from the Halloween event (which I personally liked, but quite a few had problems with).
Of course player-created events don’t need to do anything as big as what happened with Halloween.
I believe some mods - perhaps Pippi - allow for things like this, too? Could be wrong, as I don’t use mods currently.
Nothing like full server wide events with modded loot and rewards tied to the event or anything. I know you can technically make dungeon scripts with pippi but some things aren’t perfectly worked out like “zohnes” and “npcspawners”.