For what it's worth, here are the guidelines Twinflame and I used when organizing the Blood Fever outbreak in TERA. Unfortunately, Celestial Hills' community is downright horrible and only a few actually followed some of the most important rules (such as letting us know if they got infected so we could better track the spread and organize folk interacting with one another, also the big one: no miracle cure). However, we ran it and are currently in the "distributing the cure" portion", winding down the RP cause ARR. It's something we had intended to serve as a "pilot" program of sorts in the hopes of drawing up an ARR-appropriate version to run here. ^^
Communication is absolutely key, as well as providing people things to do that doesn't involve getting sick. For the Blood Fever thing, we did this by providing a series of tasks people could complete that could contribute to discovering the extent of the outbreak as well as researching the cure. In an ideal world, folk would report back to the DCB (an IC entity that existed only for this Blood Fever thing) and we'd OOCly fill in the progress bar for the cure... unfortunately, CH is as it is, and most folk decided to just take things into their own hands. So we worked with what we had. It just so happened that the Blood Fever thing also paralleled a personal plot Twinflame, myself, and a couple others had been brewing, so we also got some good roleplay out of that at least. xD
As far as Eorzea goes, as in any world, there's likely no shortage of nasties that can serve as pathogen carriers and certainly no shortage of diseases. It's just a matter of coming up with one that facilitates the most RP. What we found was that the disease needed to be very easily transmissible but also not immediately debilitating, allowing for roleplayers who got infected to continue "as usual" for a while and infect other roleplayers.
It's also important to centralize the search for a cure, organizing players who want to be involved in such a thing around a single group. For the Blood Fever event, we actually created a temporary Disease Control Bureau that anyone could join (it wasn't a guild - folk just needed to contact us ICly or OOCly and we would involve them in DCB roleplay) and contribute to the cure's research and/or the treatment of patients. This helped us keep things on track and also served as a nice hub of information for the rest of the server.
Like all server-type events, however, it doesn't get very far if people don't actively participate and, perhaps more importantly, follow whatever rules are set forth.
Overall it was a very fun thing, however, and something I fully intend to explore in ARR a few months down the line once characters have been better established.
Communication is absolutely key, as well as providing people things to do that doesn't involve getting sick. For the Blood Fever thing, we did this by providing a series of tasks people could complete that could contribute to discovering the extent of the outbreak as well as researching the cure. In an ideal world, folk would report back to the DCB (an IC entity that existed only for this Blood Fever thing) and we'd OOCly fill in the progress bar for the cure... unfortunately, CH is as it is, and most folk decided to just take things into their own hands. So we worked with what we had. It just so happened that the Blood Fever thing also paralleled a personal plot Twinflame, myself, and a couple others had been brewing, so we also got some good roleplay out of that at least. xD
As far as Eorzea goes, as in any world, there's likely no shortage of nasties that can serve as pathogen carriers and certainly no shortage of diseases. It's just a matter of coming up with one that facilitates the most RP. What we found was that the disease needed to be very easily transmissible but also not immediately debilitating, allowing for roleplayers who got infected to continue "as usual" for a while and infect other roleplayers.
It's also important to centralize the search for a cure, organizing players who want to be involved in such a thing around a single group. For the Blood Fever event, we actually created a temporary Disease Control Bureau that anyone could join (it wasn't a guild - folk just needed to contact us ICly or OOCly and we would involve them in DCB roleplay) and contribute to the cure's research and/or the treatment of patients. This helped us keep things on track and also served as a nice hub of information for the rest of the server.
Like all server-type events, however, it doesn't get very far if people don't actively participate and, perhaps more importantly, follow whatever rules are set forth.
Overall it was a very fun thing, however, and something I fully intend to explore in ARR a few months down the line once characters have been better established.
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