Are the manual triggers akin to the old GM events you would see in older MMOs, where in this case a designer, as opposed to a GM, can come in and just create a one-time event?
TL;DRYes, manual triggers work like old GM events, some one-time and some added to a reusable library; he declines to detail Nine Tails but says later events may let threats grow if players don't respond.
That's exactly it. Some of these will be one-time, like Xenothreat or a particular Fleet Week, or other ones will basically just add to our library of things that we can activate simply because we want to liven up the place. The Nine Tails, I don't want to go into the detail, because there's some cool stuff that we'll be introducing that players haven't really seen before. I want to keep some of it under wraps. But it's very representative. Some of the bits of functionality that we're introducing in there will then be exploited in more dramatic fashion in subsequent dynamic events. One high-level example would simply be, the Nine Tails stuff is geared towards a certain area basically being locked down as a result of aggression. And in the future, what we're going to wind up having is, if the player community doesn't beat back that particular threat, then it will grow. And all of a sudden, you've got two or three or four different areas locked down. In other words, you, the player community, have to respond and tamp out this fire or else it will gradually grow. Now, it's possible, of course, depending upon how we set it up and what the current inputs are, the NPC population in some cases may eventually respond sufficiently to do it. But you get the overall effect, which is this one event that's geared towards locking down an area, the area to be locked down is an input, and we can feed it one, we can feed it three, we can basically add a little bit of back-end logic controls, and then which ones are locked down can be replicated across all of the servers. So the community as a whole is fighting, just like they are in Xenothreat, against this common threat.