FFXIV Event Ideas Guide

[Beckett]

Player-made events can be a great way to bring an online community together, but it can be hard to come up with good ones. Over the years, my friend Marcellus and I have worked on tweaking old MMO classics to make them work in FFXIV, as well as come up with a few new ones of our own. If you have any other event ideas, please post them here!

Glamour Contest
Organizer Effort: ★
Participant Effort: ★★★

One of the most popular and easiest to set up events of FFXIV is the glamour contest. Participants create their finest outfits, and the best ones win!
There are a few ways you can judge this. In the past, our company has had a panel of judges give scores for our annual Halloween Costume contest. In our most recent glamour contest, however, we had all participants and spectators vote on each entry, with a 1-5 scale, using SurveyMonkey.com.

Trivia Contest
Organizer Effort: ★★★★★
Participant Effort: ★★

This event requires a lot of effort on the organizer’s part. You not only need to come up with lots of good questions, but you’ll need to make macros for each one! You could theoretically do this event entirely in voice chat, but it may be difficult for your contestants to keep track of the questions if they can’t see them written down.
The best way to handle this event is to have each contestant/team write down their answer to each question. Each contestant/team that answers correctly wins points for that question.

When we first did this event, we split up the contestants into teams of 4, and had each team /sh “BUZZ!” to buzz in and give their answers. Unfortunately, this lead to each team fighting to buzz in first, often before the question was even finished, let alone before the team knew the answer!

Jumping Puzzle
*House required
Organizer Effort: ★★★★
Participant Effort: ★

This is a super fun event that takes a bit to set up. You fill your yard with an assortment of random furnishings, set up so that participants will be able to jump from object to object, eventually winding up on the house balcony (or you could use any furnishing as the finish line). When we set ours up, we included several fake paths that lead nowhere, to trip up our contestants. Make sure to mostly use furnishings that can’t be jumped on from the ground or a fence!

If you want your puzzle to be a one-time event, then simple is better. We made our jumping puzzle too hard and our FC members couldn’t complete it in one go! We wound up having to add shortcuts just so they could finish!
If you’re going to have your jumping puzzle be an ongoing challenge (like Silver Rawz and co’s indoor jumping puzzle) then harder is better!

Movement speed buffs (other than Sprint) and mounts are forbidden. Since Ninja has an innate movement speed buff, Ninja and Rogue are outright banned and will be asked to change to a different job.

Triple Triad Tournament
Organizer Effort: ★★
Participant Effort: ★★

A Triple Triad Tournament is a relatively low effort event. All participants need is the starting deck, earned from unlocking Triple Triad, and all organizers need is the ability to set up a simple bracket. You could set up a tournament with open decks, but using just the starter cards ensures fairness, as well as opening participation up to a much larger amount of people. For our tournaments, we allow the contestants to use any rules (except Random) as long as both players agree to them.
We also have another rule in our tournaments. We actually run Striple Triad Tournaments! Each player must have 5 visible pieces of gear equipped (Head, Body, Gloves, Legs, Feet) and for each game they lose, they remove one piece of gear. The first player to lose all of their gear is out, and the remaining player moves onto the next round.

Hyuran Darts
Organizer Effort: ★★
Participant Effort: ★

A classic MMO event, Hyuran Darts has one player (the target) jump off a cliff, and the other players (the darts) all jump and land as close as they can to the target. The closest player wins!

In addition to these basic rules, we’ve added a few twists on the formula.

• Sharpshooter: The classic, land closest to the target.
• Base-jumper: The first to land on top of the target landmark wins (extra tries allowed). For example, if you jump from the Coerthas Central Highlands Observatorium, it is just barely possible to land on top of a nearby tower. We took our contestants to the bottom of the Observatorium, showed them where they needed to get, and told them to get to it! It took several attempts of every contestant running to the top of the Observatorium and jumping down before someone finally made it onto the tower.
• Clairvoyant: The contestants are brought to a jump point, and told to land as close to the Target character as possible, only the Target is logged off! After all contestants have jumped, the Target logs back in and a winner is determined.
• Long-jumper: Land the greatest distance from the jump point (at the bottom of the jump) to win.
• Depth-diver: Land at the lowest elevation relative to the jump start point. This is very unique jump and requires a very specific map layout. In fact, we’ve only found one spot in the game so far that works! Tharl Oom Khash, Churning Mists (X: 18.3, Y: 6.8, Z: 3.5). The idea is to avoid all the protruding land masses and fall down as far as possible!
• Thread the Needle: Another highly specific type, this jump requires players to jump straight through a small opening, without hitting anything. An example is Yanxia ( 29.7 , 5.1, Z: 0.6). Contestants jump off of a nearby spire, through a hole in the bridge below. If you land on the bridge, it doesn’t count!

Movement speed buffs (other than Sprint) and mounts are forbidden. Since Ninja has an innate movement speed buff, Ninja and Rogue are outright banned and will be asked to change to a different job.

While this event has a low barrier of entry, it does still require all participants to have aetherytes (and possibly flight) unlocked.

Hot and Cold
Organizer Effort: ★★
Participant Effort: ★

The perennial game comes to FFXIV! To set up this event, we scouted out several locations, then made several maps where “treasure” was buried.
Here’s an example map:


Each contestant was given 25 Meteor Survivor fireworks to indicate where they were “digging” in the area. After a firework was used to indicate where the contestant was “digging” the judges say how Hot or Cold the contestant is to the nearest treasure.

The way we set it up was each “treasure” was worth a point value, and the points could be traded in for actual prizes such as mounts, minions, gil etc.
For example: Bronze Coconuts = 1 point, Silver Coconuts = 5 points, Gold Coconuts = 10 points
However, you could easily set it up so that the contestants were digging up actual prizes.

Room Escape
*House required
Organizer Effort: ★★★★★
Participant Effort: ★

Set up your house with a series of insidious puzzles that your victims, err “guests”, must solve to escape!
You can check out an example here: https://youtu.be/XSXHqNetruI
If every participant has housing privileges, you can set up more puzzles, but make sure they don’t break anything!

Hide and Seek (and Riddles)
Organizer Effort: ★★★
Participant Effort: ★

Another classic, simply have a number of Hiders spread throughout a zone, and all the Seekers find them as fast as possible!
To make things more interesting, our FC sometimes adds a riddle element to this event. After finding the Hider, the contestant are given a riddle, usually involving items that can be found in that zone. The first person to find the Hider, and solve the riddle by collecting the required item(s) and trading it to the Hider, wins!
Tip: It’s best to stick to 2.0 areas for Hide and Seek. The later expansion areas are way too big, and if you add flying into the mix, finding a target becomes prohibitively difficult.


If you have any other ideas for great events, please share them!

Glamour Contest


Striple Triad Tournament


Room Escape

[Beckett]

And just for fun, here are some of the images we made for advertising our events:

[Jandor]

These are some pretty good ideas, was googling for stuff earlier and ended up here.

[Luna-M]

What is the incentive?

[Beckett]

What is the incentive?

That depends on what you have available, as well as how often you want to have events. At various times my FC has offered gil, rare items such as the Night Pegasus Whistle, Mog Station items and at one point even an Encyclopedia Eorzea! The main draw of the events is supposed to be the fun of hanging out with your FC mates, so don't offer anything you can't afford.

[Caitlyn]

Well, I made an event which contains several elements. Paper chase! Somehow. Got inspired by SE's brutal riddle questline : )

The event starts in the FC House. Players are set in teams of 2, 3 or 4 (dependend on the size of the FC). Players have to find "NPCs" (FC volunteers or friends) who are spread all around the world. The location is rather unknown, but hints are placed near the house. Speaking with the NPC, players will get new riddles/hints or items. Sometimes they had to answer to a question or make a specific emote. At the end, players must find the last NPC, survive a fight using a specific potion or trade a set of right items to the start NPC.

Hints can be:
- Overpriced specific items on marketboard, where the price is a code
- Morse code, anagrams, alpha-numeric pattern in house-, room-descriptions
- Riddles from player NPCs
- weird ordered items in the guild storage
- retainers with items placed hidden in or outside the house
...

An example of my event 2 years ago:
1. Players must enter a specific players room. To unlock it, they must solve (saying) the morse code which is stated at the room description.
2. A NPC is waiting and stating, that something is watch trough the window. Players must leave the house to find a retainer behind the house.
3. This retainer got items like a framed picture of ul'dah landscape, alchemist gear and ul'dah dye. So they have to travel to the alchemist guild in ul'dah.
4. There, another NPC will give them a cloze with rhymes. It contains the location of the last NPC and what to do there. This NPC asks the player a question. The right answer give them a potion.
5. At the last location, another NPC is waiting. The first player/team who is using his potion in front of the NPC wins.

[Sylvina]

Well the 24 WHM, 24 AST and 24 tank ridorana lighthouse runs were fun, also the all healer level synced Dun Scaith.