Supporters of Emperor Cole are abandoned?

If Cole can empower his Praetors with Incarnate abilities to combat Primal's Incarnates, he can empower Loyalists PCs with Incarnate abilities to combat Primal's Incarnates. There's no reason he shouldn't, or wouldn't. A Power Loyalist is just as loyal (and possibly more so) than Neuron, Marauder, or Dominatrix.

Several people have asked questions in this thread that were on my own mind, and I think that EvilGeko's post above is right on the money.

A lot of this comes down to "What is the Well, exactly? What is it's function or purpose? What are its intentions?"

Looking at this whole business through Jack Chalker filtered glasses, I start to come up with some answers that make the Well look less like a god and more like a mechanism to achieve an end.

In any case - One thing we know is that the Well is a source of spiritual energy and that it has meddled/empowered people in the past. The lore is scant on these happenings and we always just accepted the answer as being the sort of "this explains mythic beings as being really super powered beings" explanation and left it at that.

What happens if we examine the cosmology of Primal Earth a little closer?

Many of our most popular cosmologies include a pantheon of super-powered beings who ultimately must face an apocalyptic end to their "heaven" or whatever their world happens to be.

The ways and means of it vary, but the apocalypse itself is a common motif.

If we accept that early "gods" (meaning real people who inspired the myths or even assumed the mantle of deity themselves as both explanation of their power and a tribute to it) were Incarnates, then we are accepting a belief that some of the myths surrounding them are true at some level. Corrupted by centuries and millennia of retelling and retooling, but still true at the core.

The Aesir faced their Ragnarok, the war with the Giants. The Olympians faced their war with the Titans. The world faced fire, flood, famine and all manner of threats to continued human existence, sometimes CAUSED by the gods rather than fended off by them.

Even the events that the gods could not entirely prevent, though, they usually served their purpose by preserving mankind; either by remaking man or by insuring that a man and woman would survive the turmoils to begin the race of men anew.

In Primal Earth, these events that we view through the lens of mythology (meaning that to most of us we believe it to be folklore or religious dogma, though "myth" actually implies that somebody someplace regarded it as true teaching) may actually be distorted reports of REAL events.

Through all of this, Mankind has endured and the thing we now call the Well of the Furies has endured. Time and again, throughout history, the Well has taken action to insure that a group of "gods" came into existence to protect the world from, or alternately instigate, a world-ending conflict.

The Coming Storm is not some vague future a million years hence and the Well is not making arbitrary or insane "decisions" despite our inability to understand all of its actions. It is carrying out the function it was designed for - to create a hierarchy of tools with which to save humankind from coming destruction and/or to set it on the road to a fresh start.

Just as the geological record shows that there have been anywhere from 10 - 30 major extinction events in history (where the number depends on what you define "major" to mean) and countless smaller events, the mythological record shows that there have been a number of major and minor cosmological extinction events. The Well has been humanities last line of defense or maybe its first line. In any case, the Coming Storm is not the first such event. It may be the most severe event yet, but then perhaps it is not. One wonders what Ragnarok looked like to the people who were involved in it.

Please note the distinction between "saving civilization" and "saving mankind". Please note that the mythological record shows that "saving mankind" only means saving enough breeding stock to insure the continued existence of the species.

If the Well believes that empowering God Emperor Cole and setting him on a path of genocide and destruction across the multiverse will ultimately save the multiverse from the Coming Storm and preserve enough of mankind to insure that men are left to try again after the Storm passes, then the Well doesn't give a tinker's damn about the casualty count.

It's an inhuman entity operating without any human compassion or emotion, to achieve a goal that it was programmed for or trained for or created for aeons ago. It might be a computer on the order of The Well World, or it might be a REAL god with unfathomable goals and thoughts, or it might be force of nature that represents the heart or mind of the cosmos and to whom individual people are just so many red blood cells.

Emperor Cole may or may not exist any more, from the standpoint of having his own identity and choice to be. Opposing him may be the most abject folly if the Well is truly acting to insure that humanity survives the Coming Storm.

There's no way to know, presently. What we do know, is this - The Well does not act to prevent the apocalypse. It acts to survive it. Whatever the cost.

Taking Silos' route of trying to prevent it entirely may or may not be folly. Who can know if Silos himself doesn't know?

One thing is certain - The only way to truly stop Cole is to offer the Well a course of action that is more effective than what it currently has instituted using him as its tool.

I get it, it's just wrong. Or perhaps more accurately, irrelevant.

As for the OP, the simple fact is that Tyrant is a complete monster and so is anyone who sides with him, and you're just not going to get that choice in this or any other MMO.

Westin Phipps is a petty little man. You might want to, in the words of an ex-guildmate, "feed him to Mako's sharks" after doing his arcs but he's nowhere near being in the same continuum of evil as Tyrant.

And no, half this game isn't villains. It's way less than half at this point. Let's try to remember that the most common use of side-switching is to get desired ATs out of redside. Also, the devs have made it pretty clear just how "evil" villain PCs get to be and attempting genocide is not on the list.

It's always irked me the Responsibility Loyalist storyline had you killing people. Of all the factions in Praetoria, the Responsibles should have been the ones to arrest instead of kill.

As for Cole, the last hope of Loyalists would be if this isn't the real Cole, but a Well puppet. The opportunity to bring the real Cole, not the Tyrant Well puppet, back would help justify the entire Loyalist side of things.

WARNING: I bold names.