The Anvil

In Imperian lately, we’ve been working hard to make sure that players have a reason to log in and have fun. Along with the rest of the IRE games, we’ve been offering lessons, credits, and vials during the past few months to encourage people to log in every day.

One new thing that we’ve been trying in Imperian is the creation of various “theme days”, where we basically hold a series of events that revolve around one theme. The first we held several months ago was a whimsical Frog Day, with games, events, and prizes that revolved around giant frogs.

More recently, though, we went all out for a Festival of Hearts held over Valentine’s Day weekend, and I just wanted to briefly write about the planning process for that event, how it went down, and the reaction and aftermath.

Setting the Stage

It all started when IRE decided that each game should do something fun on Valentine’s Day. I don’t personally like to just throw a real-life holiday into Imperian without at least some in-game justification, so that began the process of roleplaying the impending nuptials of Gerolith, the God of Might. Gerolith isn’t really a God, except in his own mind and the minds of some of his followers, but he’s one of our more humorous creations, and the idea of this uncouth, drunken bachelor being married was pretty amusing to us.

The Games

When planning the events and games for one of these themed days, we attack the problem from two directions. From one direction, we like to use most of the standard games and competitions that we have in Imperian. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when we have so many arena events and world games that our players love. So, we first try to put a new cosmetic spin on these games, just to spice them up and make things a little interesting. For example, for the Festival of Hearts, we developed a variant of the popular Bloodbath arena game where an exploding heart would randomly appear in the arena and cause large amounts of damage. The Immortals overseeing this game had almost a little too much fun watching the blood and gore.

At the same time, we also want to interject a little originality and variety into the festival, so we developed a few new fun roleplay games, like a kissing contest, and a rock-lifting strength contest. We wanted to give different types of players different games to play.

The Results

The overall reaction to the entire weekend of games was very positive. Our players really seemed to enjoy the variety of events that we held, as there was pretty much something that every player could enjoy and have a chance of winning. The limited-edition wares that were sold by special vendors were very popular, too, with hundreds of thousands of gold being spent on perfumes, vanity pets, and decorations.

So, in summary, we were very excited about the whole event, and we’re very much looking forward to the next set of games on St. Patrick’s Day. We hope you are too!