A better Calendar

[Glass]

When I look at the entire months calendar in game, there are currently three events. If we take this to be an average, the calendar as implemented is making about two, maybe four specialty cups of coffee a month in revenue. It looks like at one point, from this post, cost per post was reduced to 10WP, but I'm wondering if that ever even caused an uptick in its usage? With it's low utilization and insignificantly low revenue stream, I really think it should be redone.

Personally, and especially with CEF, I would propose a complete overhaul of the calendar system. Key features currently missing are: 

• A personal calendar for a player to add their own events to.
• More prominent placement of the calendar. Replace the calculator button on phones with a dedicated calendar button to bring it out of hiding. 
  • The calculator does not bring revenue to GTAW or immersion to the game. The calendar does....if people would start using it.
• Separate calendars for categories.
  • Eg: Entertainment/Stores/Restaurants/Community Events/Nonprofit/Hours of operation
• A tiered purchase system for calendar events. 
  • Personal calendar events cost nothing.
  • Community events & nonprofit cost least WP, if any. 
  • Stores/restaurants cost medium WP. 
  • Event/entertainment/cover charge events cost high WP.
  • Improperly posted events are encouraged to be reported like any other abuse on the server. 

 

Between CEF, Googles APIs, and very generous limits on calendar thresholds, this entire thing could live inside of a single Google Calendar on a free gmail account and be scripted into the game. On any well established personal (read: Free) google account, you can make 60 calendars every. hour. There is no publicly disclosed limit, but I can personally tell you I've gone over a thousand without issue when making service accounts for organizations with thousands of employees on google workspace. You can create thousands of calendar events an hour and still be under the API limits in google calendar. 

 

And while the below example looks cluttered....in all honesty, if the calendar actually starts being used? I would hope to see quadruple this amount of information on it. Which is where something that scales through profiling events by category or interest becomes important. 

 

I personally think this is needed because calendars like this can also be publicly shared with trivial ease on the forums, or in the UCP for personal ones. The discord bot that posts IC ads is a good start at bringing the immersion out of game. It is a good tool to help plan playtime around events that are interesting to the specific player. I think this is a logical next step in that. 

 

Integrating in this manner would also allow people to share calendars of interests to their own personal calendars if desirable, which would make it much easier for people to think about things OOCly in their own timezones and not miss events since shared calendars would adjust to the end viewers timezone. Public links to subscribe to public categorical calendars could easily be made available in the UCP or on forums. it would be a static URL that need not ever change to attach the calendars of interest to any players own personal list of calendars they can see. 

 

Edited February 24, 2022 by Glass

[Edwardz]

I am not sure I am following, is this a suggestion for the Calendar IG? CEF one?
Or a request for the same calendar on the UCP?

[Noinu]

 

very cool. i would love to have a personal ic calender ig because both of me and my old guy character keep forgetting stuff

[Junx]

Considering making a custom discord bot todo this for our faction ngl

[Glass]

On 3/10/2022 at 12:29 PM, Junx said:

Considering making a custom discord bot todo this for our faction ngl

If Everett/Panda were to allow it and you want help, I'd love to see if I'm useful there. C++/Java/Python experience here, with limited HTML & JS

 

On 3/2/2022 at 5:14 PM, Edwardz said:

I am not sure I am following, is this a suggestion for the Calendar IG? CEF one?
Or a request for the same calendar on the UCP?

A request to completely redo the calendar system in game. It wouldn't even need to be UCP shown since if it's a public resource that anyone in the world can subscribe to, you could literally have GTAW calendar events on your real google or iPhone calendar on your phone. 

 

This could also help businesses in the sense that if you know you are going to open at a certain time in the future, you can, on the "open businesses" calendar, post future hours. Which can help people plan on playing at times when they want to go to those super unique businesses that are almost never open. Which might have a positive feedback look to where then those businesses open more and more because they see people actually coming to them. 

[AtzerriGold]

I would love to see events on the calendar changed to cost Panda Points instead of World Points.

Changing just the calendar posts to Panda Points would mean more people are able to post their events. Making it more accessible like this will see a huge increase in events being put on it, and to boot; it's far better for spreading out the events amongst the community, as people will know when NOT to host an event if they are hoping for a large turn out.

I believe using Panda Points will also be useful because of course they are gained through being active in the game and through players rewarding one another for great roleplay. It would also mean people aren't only spending them on Panda Boxes; therefore adding extra value to them as a form of currency, while increasing organisation and encouraging more events of all different types on the server.

People already use /bad and blips with World Points, which is perfect for the immediate players, people who are more casual, or simply those who don't really use the calendar. I fully support the idea of the tiered system though as originally suggested here. I think the lowest cost for posting would need to be the community events and non-profit events, with the profit and personal gain events being the highest cost.

I can't see any downsides to this besides a slight loss of revenue, but honestly? How much is even being lost if so few events are being posted in the first place? It's a far greater loss to roleplay by lacking some simple organisation and immersion.