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First off... This was done before. In a way that it was CERTAIN DOOM to fail, and I really never got why they bothered making them that way in first place.

They had announcements shown to everyone on the site. Even those who obviously, couldn't care.

The announcements should have restricted themselves as "in-server" so that there would be both more people playing each, making the mini-events not a complete waste of the participant's time and server calculations; and so that people on other servers wouldn't keep jumping around servers when they'd get an announcement to another server. Also, it'd give a reason for people to BE in-game. And would definitely help with some of the least "acquirable" permanent badges, such as, Otami mini-event's.

Now how to do this?

Well, first off, while the code for zOMG! might be a huge mess, from all our initial experience of stuff getting broken where others got fixed, I never get tired to point out what's already there.
And since there used to be global announcement on the main site, there's obviously not just a way for a server to identify that a mini-event is happening, it also has a way to communicate it to other parts of the site's structure as well. Makes me believe that mini-event announcements were planned from the ground up. How much handiwork would be identifying and changing that code, well, it's anyone's guess.

Now, how to perform this without bothering anyone? I know that, even as a in-server thing, no one fighting EB would like to know a bunch of Hive Aliens are breaking loose, with a huge announcement on the top of the screen. Everyone would even hate the look of the messages under the horn if there were 3 mini-events under it, and they were interested in only one of them.

keep it simple: Just a little message in red, kinda like the system announcements. In fact, why not make it a system announcement?
They're discreet, the sound they make is minimal, and usually, no one misses them, as the color stands out among the rest of the coloured chat.



Comments, I DEMAND THEM!

Moving it to the z!F as is in T minus 48 hours unless you guys got comments.

They only appear in the chat window. Far easier to miss if it comes up during skipped dialog or other red messages. Although they do make a sound, so it's not like most people will miss it anyways.

That is rather part of the point. Why would anyone doing SS/EB be ticked off they missed a bombing on Barton? They're already busy doing SS/EB, they wouldn't get there on time.
Well, maybe someone finishing a boss would get mad at it, but to be fair, it is their fault for not paying attention.

Another thing why in-server announcements for mini-events would work and not be as bothersome as announcements for say, a Jack, is that mini-events happen on all layers, so everyone would have a fair chance.

I was under the impression they didn't...

Do they?