Arcanaville

Part seven updated with illustration. Part eight looks good for being uploaded late tonight, for availability Friday morning.

Looks like that "Hamidon getting exponentially powerful" thing is having an effect on the war zone on beta.

The Immortal Game

Part Seven: Time's End



At first, it was just a few. It was difficult to know if they were here to witness, or to fight, but as they continued to arrive it was obvious Primal Earth would not go quietly. Honored heroes with legions of cheering fans and ruthless villains only spoken of in whispers. They loved each other, and they hated each other, but they shared a single purpose, a single burning thought. This was our world, and it would not be taken from us.

Cole, Voice of Rularuu, paid them no attention. His work was subtle, sublime, invisible, undetectable, but all important. He was pulling at the fabric of reality with immeasurable power and respinning it into a new form. The Barrier of the Battalion was close now, in just a few short months it would arrive and with it a scourge of the cosmos unmatched and undeterred in a millennia. RulaCole would not give it that luxury. Under his influence the barrier accelerated, racing towards Primal Earth; it would now take mere days to encompass what had been planned to take months. This did not go unnoticed.

The lead element of the Battalion was its advance forces - the implacable Shivan Destroyers and the Kheldian slaves that formed the spearpoint of the Coming Storm, and their commanders the Vanguard of the Battalion. They were ruthless and unyielding and had devastated dozens of worlds. It was they who rode the wavefront of the Barrier, and they who first detected its alteration. At their command, the first wave of Battalion forces willed themselves to Primal Earth. Someone had interfered with the Battalion. They would have to be dealt with.

...

The early arrivals to the Rikti War Zone were soon a flood. So much power was concentrated in one area it almost seemed like the War Walls bowed from the pressure. As they gathered at the place where all instinctively knew the fight would begin, the voice of Prometheus spoke:

"Defenders Of Primal Earth. Behold The Power Of Rularuu."

For a minute, it seemed as if nothing happened. And then, off in the distance, there was a bright flash from the Rikti Mothership. The powerful war machine, symbol of invasion and destruction for so long, was consumed by an immense fireball. The destructive wave blasted outward in all directions, nearly blowing down the gathered defenders. As the dust cleared, for the first time in a decade, White Plains was free. The great mothership was simply gone, vaporized in the massive conflagration. For such large destruction, the blast wave seemed oddly mild, as if the destructive energies were turned inward, imploding the craft to its core. This wasn't a simple explosion. This was an extinguishing. The last connection between Primal Earth and the greater multiverse was severed, the Rikti destroyed as a mere afterthought. Some paused, briefly mourning the Rikti, enemies though they may be. Some cheered, for a variety of reasons. But that was all short-lived. The Battalion had arrived.

They seemed to come out of nowhere, appeared around them and throughout their ranks. The Shivan army engaged the Primal defenders as they had so many before them. But this time it was different. On a dozen, dozen worlds there were those who fought back, those who tried to defend their world and their own future potential from consumption and annihilation. They were always spirited, determined, and ultimately futile efforts. This would not be the case here. This time, Prometheus the Fire bearer brought the full, raw, untempered potential of humanity to itself. Once before, giving humanity the merest glimpse of their destiny was a crime punishable by the harshest sentence by those Prometheus called his masters. This time, the punishment would be self-inflicted. But Prometheus knew the full measure of the destiny of humanity, and he would not allow an outside force to end that journey.

The defenders of Primal Earth were raised to their full potential. Some to the peak of their abilities, many others beyond that to rise to wield the power of the Incarnate. Such power had been working its way into humanity for some time: it was this very fact that attracted the Battalion. But they would not be facing children, working their way to becoming Incarnates. They would be facing the full power they had hoped to tap.

The defenders quickly made short work of the Shivan army. As fast as they could arrive, by the hundreds they came and fell. Never before had a Shivan army been reaped like so much stalks of wheat. But then the Vanguard arrived. Four of them descended upon the Primal defenders and the real battle began. The Vanguard was protected by powerful incarnate strength and wielded as much Incarnate ability as a hundred incarnate warriors. The tide began to turn, and it was now the defenders that were on the defensive. And yet slowly, gradually at first and then with more conviction the Primal defenders began to bring down the Vanguard. It seemed the longer the fight went on the weaker the Vanguard seemed to become. In fact, it was the reverse: humanity, now in full possession of its incarnate potential, and wielding it with a singular purpose, revealed the Well of the Furies for what it really was. It was not a powerful entity with control over humanity's destiny. In fact it was humanity's destiny itself: it was the embodiment of the potential and the consciousness of humanity. It had no voice save what humanity impressed upon it. It had no power save what humanity itself opened the door to reaching. This was the great secret of incarnate potential, which Prometheus had once tried to protect. The denizens of Primal Earth were always limited by only one thing: their belief in themselves and their ability to control their destiny. No man or woman could control the Well of the Furies. But humanity could. And here, at the place once known as the place where The People could look out beyond the horizon and speak to their inner voices about their place in the cosmos, humanity spoke with one voice, and acted with one hand. And the Well of the Furies responded, by releasing its potential to its protectors. Humanity was no longer on the slow path to Incarnate or the fast path. They were on the path Prometheus opened to them: the path of Destiny.

For what seemed a long time the battle raged, but then RulaCole, who had been indifferent to the battle that raged just below him, spoke:

"It is done."

The Primal defenders detected no sign of anything changing, but the Vanguard did. The barrier which once confined humanity now trapped them. And their brethren, on their way to join the battle, felt it also. The barrier now enclosed all of the Battalion, and it no longer allowed them beyond it. In their shock the Vanguard were finally cut down by the Primal defenders. Far beyond the remaining Battalion turned to the Barrier, hurling themselves towards it in a vain attempt to escape. But escape was now not possible.

Cole knew what would happen next: the power of Rularuu told him as much. For an instant, he reflected on his fate. His energy, including much of the power of the Well of the Furies, would be quickly siphoned by the Barrier. He would become a part of the Barrier, trapping the Battalion within it. And in a few days when the Barrier reached its nadir, his power would join with the rest of the Incarnate power within Primal Earth and germinate a new world within a new Primal dimension, a world that was a reflection of this world in Dreamspace. Their world would survive, within the land of Dreams. For Cole, this instant was as a day. He saw a young man going off to war, and coming back changed forever. A girl who would become a woman. A woman who would become his wife. A wife he would ultimately betray. He saw the unforgivable destruction of nuclear fire, and he saw the threat of it end under his slammed fist. He saw the gleaming citadel of Praetoria rise under his rule. He saw all the good he accomplished brought down from without and within. He saw the future of humanity, and the ugliness it held. And he saw the ugliness he created in an attempt to shepherd it. And he saw all of it threatened by these cosmic criminals, these assassins of destiny. He would stop them. And in the end he would help give birth to a new world. The new world would be just as messy, just as ugly as the one he once tried to reshape. But it would forever be protected from those who would steal its potential. Humanity would always have a chance to flourish. Whether it did or not was up to them, and them alone.

This was a good fate, Cole decided. As his essence began to dissolve, his last thought was of her. "Forgive me, M-" And then he was gone.

...

We Have Saved The Innocent: Faathim the Kind expressed.
The Enemy Has Escaped Our Grasp We Must Pursue: Ruladek demanded.
We Must Not Allow These Incarnates To Escape Servitude To Rularuu: Chularn stressed.
Let Us Unravel This World And Entwine It With The Realm Of Rularuu: Lanaruu opined.
Should We Not Take What We Will From This World And Leave: Kuularth inquired.
It Has Happened Again: Uuralur observed.

The many voices of Rularuu, now freed from the Incarnate power of Marcus Cole, now rose up as one and returned to their eternal war. Rularuu was pulled apart, and as he became the individual voices of Rularuu again each returned to their places of power within the Shadow Shard. All but one. The last Voice sought out a human, standing far off from the battle.

"I Would Speak With You, Human."

Mender Silos turned to face Aloore the Watcher. Aloore towered above him, but Silos chose to remain standing on the ground. He looked up upon the expressionless face of the aspect of Rularuu. "I would listen to Aloore the Watcher."

"It Was The Godling That Came To Us, But It Was You Who Was The Chessmaster, You Who Commanded The Pieces, You Who Made All This Occur." It was not a question.

"I would say I was the primary architect of this day."

"And You Know The Price." This was also not a question.

"I know the price." Silos repeated.

"You Are A Planner, A Schemer, A Manipulator. You Did Not Need To Sacrifice. There Is Always Another Way."

"None that wouldn't cost someone else more." Silos stared into the face of Aloore. "I was a schemer, a manipulator, and the truth is I will always be. But today I was not a plotter, I was a general. I was fighting a war. A war that required tactics. A war that required a strategy. And I would not sacrifice my army just to save one man." Mender Silos paused. "Even if it was me."

Aloore seemed to think upon this, and then with no further acknowledgement he turned to go. But then he stopped, and turned to face the Mender again.

"Farewell, General." Silos nodded. And then Aloore was gone.

...

The Primal defenders began to catch their breath. They had won. The Vanguard was defeated. And then it happened. From under the ground emerged a giant orb of power, surrounded by a swirling mist. Hamidon. And it wasn't alone. Rising from the Earth with the being known as the Primal Hamidon was another creature, the Avatar of the Hamidon: voice of the being known as the Praetorian Hamidon. The Hamidon of two worlds were here on a single world. The Avatar spoke, but its words were almost impossible to hear above the din. The Primal defenders elected not to wait for Hamidon to make the first move. As one they attacked. The Avatar of the Hamidon was an incredible force on its own world, but here it seemed slightly weakened, and posed less threat to the commensurately more powerful Incarnate forces of Primal Earth. Strangely, as they defeated the Avatar and turned to the nucleus of the Primal Hamidon, it seemed more powerful. Surrounded by its phalanx of mitochondrian firepower it was more difficult to destroy than it had been in the past. Unbeknownst to the Primal forces, the same reason for the rising power of Primal Hamidon was also the reason for the weakened condition of the Avatar. The Avatar had brought its core essence, the Will of the Earth, from Praetorian Earth and allowed it to germinate on Primal Earth. There, the Primal Will and the Praetorian Will combined, fusing into The Will, and The Hamidon.

On Praetorian Earth, Hamidon Pasalima became one with the Will of the Earth on a world devastated by two nuclear wars. In response, the Praetorian Hamidon never reverted to the primitive raw state it had on Primal Earth. It retained much more of Pasalima to use as a weapon against humanity. The Hamidon on Praetorian Earth had will, it had awareness, it understood the threat of humanity and sought to destroy it. But with that strength came a weakness. The Primal Hamidon became much closer to the Earth, much more of a raw force of nature. It became a much more pure entity. It wasn't burdened with the yearning, the pain, the fear, the anger of the Praetorian Hamidon. And in return, it became far more powerful.

Mender Silos had gone to Praetoria to address the Praetorian Hamidon. He knew that the Praetorian Hamidon yearned for the destruction of humanity but lacked the sheer power necessary to accomplish that feat outright. But for a being such as Hamidon, there was a path to power. It had no connection to the Well of the Furies; Incarnate power was outside its grasp. But there was another way. Ascension. Few beings attempted Ascension, and fewer succeeded on any level. Those who tried typically destroyed themselves. Occasionally they became destroyers: Rularuu was such an Ascended being. And it was a path to the power Hamidon sought: a way to gain the power to completely obliterate humanity for all time, to return the Earth to its natural, undespoiled state, and to guard it against all future threats for all time. And Mender Silos was willing to give this secret to Hamidon.

But there was a catch. To Ascend, one needed a purity even Praetorian Hamidon lacked. On Praetoria, Hamidon fought a constant war against humanity, made deals with its representatives, plotted attacks against its weak spots. Ironically, Hamidon was too human to Ascend. On Praetoria. On Primal Earth, it was different. The Will of the Earth on Primal Earth had reverted to a much more primitive state. Hamidon himself reverted to a highly primitive, *pure* state. Hamidon was the Will and nothing else. On Primal Earth, Hamidon could Ascend. It just didn't want to, or have any awareness of the possibility at all.

Silos opened the door to a possibility for Praetorian Hamidon. This Hamidon could come to Primal Earth and join with the Will of the Earth of Primal Earth. There, it could be the guiding voice of Ascension, and use the pure raw power of the Primal Will of the Earth to do it. The Avatar was not there to defeat the humans, it was actually there to be killed by them. As it was destroyed and the Primal Hamidon was destroyed, their essence would combine in the very ground, and soon a new Hamidon would emerge. An Ascended Hamidon. A Rularuu with one Voice. The process would not take long. Silos asked for only one thing from Hamidon. A cease fire for two days. After that, Hamidon could destroy all of humanity if it so desired, if Silos did not keep his word to remove humanity from the Earth. In the meantime, Silos told Hamidon, it was free to destroy anything else that it perceived to be a threat.

The Will of the Earth was now The Will, the Ascended guardian of Earth. Its power built exponentially with each passing moment. Its power was not of the Well of the Furies, but rather it tapped the raw elemental power of the Earth itself. Its power was the power of life, and death. As Rularuu was the keeper of the Shadow Shard, so was The Will now the keeper of Earth. Here, in its place of power, The Will was the ultimate authority, the ultimate power. It would become the transcendent force of Earth, which would bear no unwanted intrusion from the outside.

The Battalion had ultimately lost its war with humanity, but it would ironically gain the Earth. An Earth isolated from the rest of the cosmos. An Earth from which there would be no escape, no new worlds to conquer, no more Incarnate power to feed upon. A world humanity would abandon to them as they left to seek their own fate.

A world ruled by an Ascended Hamidon.

There was a Storm coming. And this time, it was the Battalion that would be feeling its maelstrom.

...

Note: the last part, Epilogue, will be posted tonight, and crossposted to the Titan thread that mirrors this one.

The Rikti War Zone on Beta is now a target-rich environment.

Wear a helmet.

Attention: The Rikti War Zone is now weird. That is all.

Edit: On beta.

First: Part Seven of the story will be posted later this afternoon (for me, I know its afternoon already for some of you). I didn't have the chance to finish polishing it yesterday due to unconsciousness.

This was a fun, if manicly exhausting event to put together. I can't specify every single detail of it, but I do want to give players who are interested in that sort of thing a behind-the-scenes look, as it were, into how this came together from my side of the fence.

It was really only about a little more than a month ago when I realized this sort of thing might be possible for us to pull off. I won't get into the technical details of who did what, but suffice to say its probably obvious to everyone there that the enabling issue was we gained access to a certain level of admin rights on the beta server. This would allow us to do certain things: we could control things like spawning critters, for example, and even manipulating powers to a degree, and that opened the possibility of creating an end of game event.

I have to admit, it was far earlier - literally days after the announcement - when it became clear to me that there was no formal plan for a shutdown event, in spite of what the formal announcements implied. That bothered me a little, and in the back of my mind I was already musing what such an event should be. To me, we should have had something like an end-of-the-world event that coincided roughly with server shutdown.

The Save City of Heroes movement changed that idea for me: I stopped thinking we should lose such an event, but rather should win it. But how can you win the end of the world, and still have the servers shutdown?

When we gained the ability to do this event, I put serious thought into that. The result is The Immortal Game story, which started with that question: how do you win the end of the world, and have the world end? My answer: there's a threat from outside, and to win we have to cut off all ties from the outside. In winning against this foe, Primal Earth metaphorically also has to cut ties with our Earth, and that's why we can't reach it anymore. We're "disconnected."

From there the idea snowballed. The obvious choice for the enemy: the Battalion, and the Coming Storm. It was also quickly obvious that we would not likely be able to add any new content to the servers: we would have to somehow leverage what we had. So the story had to connect to the kind of event we could likely pull off, which was a slugfest. So we were going to have the players fight some foe(s). It then occurred to me we should make every attempt to let players fight at full power. After all, the game's ending: what difference does it make now if we buff anybody? So I decided as part of the story we'd try to buff players to level 50 and grant them full incarnate status (which eventually worked only somewhat). That's when Prometheus joined the party. He would be the actor with the power to "lock the incarnate potential" of the players.

But he would need to be pushed into it. The current lore has him thinking his own inscrutable way of jerking the players around is the correct path. I needed to escalate the threat, light a fire under him. Long story short: I asked myself the question the Dream Doctor asked himself in part one: why can't we just take our incarnate power and run away from the Battalion. Would they chase us, or still attack undefended Earth. Thus was born: the Battalion as alien devourers of incarnate potential: a Galactus-horde of sorts. And the Battalion barrier. And that's when the Dream Doctor becomes the first actor: he's the one with power beyond space and time.

It had to be three. Prometheus, Dream Doctor - . Nemesis. It had to be Nemesis. Thus Mender Silos was added. It all sort of made sense to me and the more I played with those characters the more it all seemed to make complete sense. The key to power, the master of time, the dream traveller.

They would be the key players, but it would be silly if they could just all get together, buff some players, and defeat the most powerful threat in the cosmos. If you want to credibly fight the most powerful threat in the cosmos, you have to bring the most powerful guns you can imagine. And that's when I thought about RulaWade, and created my own in RulaCole.

At this point we had the basic idea of what the event would entail: we'd have NPCs spawned as the cannon fodder for the players, and player volunteers running buffed up to the gills Battalion soldiers for the players to fight. I tried to make them as balanced and as interesting as possible, and in fact we were trying things out and testing things right up to that morning. I wanted critters that were tough to fight, but not just insta-kill critters. I know we all hate that. And I wanted them to be tough enough to stand up to the players full incarnate potential, but still seem like they were eventually beatable.

For the record, the Battalion soldiers were Tankers buffed with controller pets (not sure if any of the drivers used them: they would have been quickly vaporized), ranged attacks, purple triangles, and shifted +2 beyond the alpha shift. Oh, and to make them really hard to kill, some of you might have noticed they had a powerful green healing and regenerating aura. You guys were fighting Tanker-mitos: that's the healing power of a green Hamidon mitochondria.

So yeah: tanker health, near capped resistances, AV triangles, mito healing, shifted 50+3. Tough, but not invincible - as we saw. I hope you guys enjoyed my attempt to create a balanced opponent for you.

Believe it or not, the idea to blow up the mothership came almost at the last minute. Through our investigations, we discovered how to control some of the scripts in the zone that control the mothership raid. And putting two and two and two and two together we realized we could kill the shield, make the mothership invisible, and set an explosion that would make it look like it exploded, then was gone. We just needed a big enough explosion for something that big. And for those that haven't already guessed, that explosion is the nuclear explosion Tyrant drops on the players during the Magisterium trial. I tested it: if you're standing anywhere in the zone you'll see the blast wave. Some of you saw that even standing in the base when we had to reset something and it accidentally went off before the event started. Its a really big boom.

After the zone crashed and we reset everything, I think when we did the magic to make the Battalion capable of fighting you (ironically, because RWZ is a co-op zone, its tricky to make other players capable of fighting you: that's why we had to lock the zone when the event started) the explosion detonator got messed up. One of us I think fixed it, but rather than take a chance when it didn't go off on cue I replanted one and set it off manually. Thus that little glitch.

So here's the final script we attempted to execute yesterday:

0. Teleport everyone into the zone over the zone limit.
1. Lock zone, flag Battalion as enemy.
2. Gather at RulaCole near mothership.
3. Make announcement, set off Magi nuke, simultaneously make mothership invisible.
4. Make second announcement, begin spawning Battalion NPCs. We tried to spawn Shivans and Kheldians as appropriate soldiers for the Battalion based on Lore, but I think something borked the Kheldians because I didn't see them spawn.
5. Make third announcement, make Battalion soldiers visible, have pilots engage the players.
6. Continue to spawn NPCs periodically, monitor battle between Battalion and players.
7. At appropriate time, make announcements from RulaCole.
8. When event reaches appropriate point, declare "victory". Battalion killed at this point stay dead.
9. When the players think its over, spawn Hamidon and Avatar plus a few mitos.
10. The end.

Needless to say, the following happened afterward:
11. Photo op at base.
12. Everyone with admin access loses mind, begins spawning the encyclopedia. And that wasn't just me. For the record, I spawned the non-combat Nemesis giant thingy, the actual killable version, the Seed that got stuck in the corner, various aspects of Rularuu, the Winter Lord and Lady, the various Rikti, some other stuff. But there were actual devs there spawning things also: the Jade Spider was actually not me. Pretty sure the Warwalkers and anything with tentacles was Black Pebble, because nothing makes Black Pebble happier than when he's surrounded by tentacles and killing other players.


Also, most have posted pictures, but for the record this is who you were killing in the fight:

BattalionGamma - SnowGlobe
BattalionDelta - Starsman
BattalionUpsilon - Codewalker
BattalionPhi - TonyV

Also, I'm pretty sure BattalionUpsilon's universal translator was broken and he misspelled Battalion. Thanks to all of them for volunteering their time both on Wednesday and for providing valuable feedback earlier in the process. And unfortunately you were also supposed to kill me as the BattalionHerald, but unfortunately something glitched on him at some point and I decided to abandon that. It would have driven me crazy controlling the NPC spawns, the dialog, *and* the Herald anyway. But I apologize for those of you that wanted to kill me dead. Maybe next time.

And I have to give special thanks to Codewalker: he not only helped immensely with technical details of the event - in fact I would say he did more technical discovery than I did allowing me to focus on the story, the look and feel of things, and the specific design of the Battalion soldiers - but he was the guy running around like a maniac teleporting people into the zone so as many people as possible could attend.


And to answer a question posed to me several times in-game and in PMs, no, we did not specifically reach out to the devs for this event. All of the devs that appeared did so freely as fans of the game. We did not specifically intend to exclude them, this was a conscious decision not to entangle them in an activity who's legality was somewhat ... questionable. Not that anyone will care in 72 hours, but we didn't want them held responsible for any of what we were doing if our plans were discovered early. I'm glad some of them showed up, and also appreciate that some wanted to attend but were unable to. But to the extent that we gained some unauthorized access to server resources, that responsibility is mine alone.

Finally, thanks again to the players. This was my attempt to try to bring a small amount of closure to the game. I have two more parts to the story to post (as I finish them), but this event was intended to be part of the whole. For we the players to do something for the players to help end the game with some dignity. The effort we all put into this is commensurate with the love we have for the game and you the player community of the game. I am sure I speak for everyone involved when I say you all deserved this, and more, and the best we could deliver was our best effort. I only wish we could have done more. I tell you now if I was given an opportunity to work on an event like this in September and could work with the dev team to create it, I would have worked for three months on it for free. I wish they were given a chance to do it themselves.


I will end on two things. First, while in the process of poking around for this event, I came across something you all might enjoy. This is a compilation of some rough work on cut scenes that were originally intended for Issue 25. With Issue 24 basically in the bag work was already deep into I25 and starting on I26. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9dVlNA1SMM

Second, want to know how to run an event like the one yesterday? Command macros. Lots and lots of command macros.



Full size: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8058/8...c20afdcb_h.jpg

And I was still typing occasional commands. AND I removed all my experimental menus just before the event.


I was asked if we could do this again. I asked the volunteers and I got some enthusiastic responses, but also some non-responses. Some of them may still be in a coma. It would be difficult to do it without everyone and I specifically took time off to help run this on Wednesday, so running the full entire scripted event is unlikely to be possible. There's just a lot of moving parts that have to happen in just the right way and it took practice to get them all right.

However, if the players just want to get together and have some fun, fight some stuff, I would be willing to jump into the zone and serve up a heaping scoop of NPC. Tell you what: I'll "seed" the zone with some stuff, and we'll see if anyone wants to take a shot at them. Having spent the last month on a carefully scripted, structured, *sane* event, I'm up for a little crazy.


BIG EDIT: I accidentally wrote "Codewarrior" when I meant to say "Codewalker." Programmer slip. Edited to correct that error. He still can't spell, though.

Briefly, thanks to everyone that helped put this together, and thanks to the players that showed up and patiently waited while we worked out some of the glitches. We honestly didn't expect to see so many people for an unofficial informal end of game event, but I'm glad we were able to accommodate everyone that showed up (at least until we started - we had to lock the zone for technical reasons once it kicked off).

I'll have the next part of the story posted some time tomorrow, along with some credits for the event, but first I'm going to sleep. This has sucked up most of my nights for the past week or two.

I do have sympathy for the devs running live events. I'll post what my (main) screen looked like during this event tomorrow: if you squint hard, you might actually see *the game*. I have some appreciation now for how hard it is to keep it all together and running and resist the urge to just sledgehammer things. My hats off to the devs there.

Except for Black Pebble, of course, who's idea of fun is to drop a squadron on Extinction Warwarlkers in lethal mode into the middle of the players. He's a psycho.

Because I'm busy setting up the last details, I'm not going to make this all pretty. But here's a basic guide to the event scheduled for Today, Wednesday, November 28th 2012 at 6PM Pacific.

1. The event is being held in the RWZ. There will be announcements in the zone as to what's happening and when, mostly in-character.

2. So people know what to expect, here's what's going to happen in brief.

- RulaCole is going to be in the zone attempting to transform the Battalion Barrier into a Dreamspace shield to protect Primal Earth from the Coming Storm

- Prometheus will also be in the zone, calling the defenders of Earth to rally to the defense of the zone. Prometheus has a special surprise for primal earth defenders: to face this ultimate threat to Primal Earth he has agreed to unlock all incarnate potential in all who have such potential. Anyone, whether they are an already Incarnate hero or just a beginning security level 1 villain will be empowered by Prometheus to their full potential. Prometheus will be in the Rikti War Zone about an hour before the event begins to give defenders of Primal Earth some time to adjust to their new empowerment.

[Note: that is exactly what it sounds like. Prometheus is going to grant everyone who enters RWZ full incarnate status with all the incarnate slots and powers. If you are not level 50 Prometheus will buff you to 50. But you will still have to train to 50 to actually use Incarnate powers, and you will still need to actually slot incarnate powers before using them.]

- While RulaCole is busy with his task, the players will have to take out the Rikti Mothership, which contains the Rikti homeworld portal generators. This time, its for keeps. If we have enough players, we will conduct a raid on the mothership as a warm up activity. Don't worry about it taking a long time: the Rikti Mothership Shield is no match for the power of RulaCole. Meaning: players will not have to run around destroying portals. Someone in the zone will be organizing a league to do this.

- If there are not enough players to form a reasonable raid on the mothership, RulaCole will expend some of his vast power to destroy the mothership.

- Either way, we're not going to be just blowing up a few grates and taking out a few Rikti. When the players finish off the Rikti defenders, someone will set the mothership's reactor to overload, permanently destroying the portal to the Rikti homeworld. Its unclear what happens when a Rikti Mothership reactor overloads. Might be interesting to see.

[Note: i.e. I'm not sure what we've planned will work, but if it does hopefully it will be memorable]

- Neutralizing the mothership and destroying the Rikti homeworld portal will alert the Battalion that humanity is up to something. They will push their advance team to secure a beachhead on Earth and accelerate their invasion of the planet. Expect to see Shivan assault squads attack. They will focus their attention on RulaCole, so players should seek to engage those forces at that location. RulaCole will be in near the heart of the crater and not hard to spot. Rularuu is usually not easy to miss.

- The initial Shivan assault will be reinforced by Kheldian slaves, and then the Battalion themselves. An unknown number of Battalion soldiers will be there commanding the advance forces. Unlike the Shivans and Kheldians, they are immensely powerful Incarnate-class foes with exotic powers. Players should try to team up to take them on.

- Whether the players defeat the invasion force and the Battalion or not, RulaCole will continue his task to render Primal Earth shielded from the Battalion. When he succeeds, the Battalion on Earth will be cut off from much of their power. They will then be much easier to defeat.

[Note: perfect balance is difficult under these circumstances, so the players may be able to beat the Battalion we have cooked up, or they may not. Either way, there's a specific cutout designed into the story to make it easier for the players to take them down at the appropriate time.]

- Mender Silos also has one last trick up his sleeve. He's made a deal with Hamidon to assist in the defense of Earth. However, Hamidon no longer trusts humanity. Hamidon will come to Earth and attack the Battalion, but will not be friendly to humanity either. Players can decide whether to engage Hamidon, or leave him alone.

- Once RulaCole completes his task, he will vanish, returning to the Shadow Shard. This will conclude the event.


- Of course, players may choose to continue on past that point if they wish.


Lastly, this is all happening without a lot of practice or testing due to technical and time limitations. Please be patient if we have technical difficulties or if we have to change things at the last minute. We will do our best to make this as smooth as possible given what's actually possible.

Sorry I haven't made the last few, but thanks to all the organizers for continuing to try until we did get it at least once. We were among the first to bring down Hamidon (the level 50 version), and we were probably the last to get this one, which has a certain symmetry to it.

I've been a tiny bit busy the last several weeks. If anyone wants to see where all my time went, it went that-a-way. Otherwise, Aloha Triumph, my City of Heroes home away from home. Its been fun, and I wouldn't trade Triumph for any other server. We were small, but we had a big reach.

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