The Immortal Game: The Last City of Heroes Story

The stink of it was, I thought this was going to happen inside of MA missions, based on what I'd read. So I didn't think there was a very specific time deadline. So, I missed everything up until Hamidon.

I also crashed twice (presumably a memory issue), so I missed a lot more. An even bigger stink was, I have a RAM upgrade sitting on my desk that I bought yesterday. But I didn't think I'd need it for the Beta event because I thought it was an MA mission. *facepalm*

Glad I was able to get in there though, for even part of it. This was the type of thing I was hoping would happen near the end, an epic scripted hellstorm.

In a crowd shot like that you wouldn't be able to see the names in the 3 point font either.

Case in point (from above):

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

What I saw of the event was awesome, and I wish to commend all involved on a job well done.

I actually managed to make it into one screenshot before I crashed out shortly after we had began the event. I was recording so I didn't bother to take any shots myself (doh). I most likely shouldn't have tried to record the event as I lost demo when I crashed, but live and learn it was worth the effort.

It was nice to be there in the beginning when heroes first flew around the city in wide eyed wonder. It was an honor to be there even for a short time at the ending on the beta server and to be in awe of how far the game has come. From the first 100 to the last 100(or so) has a nice symmetry to it.

Finally a shout out had to go to the few of us trapped in RWZ 2 after the event started, either arriving a little late or being trapped because of crashing. We held our own little event and did a mothership raid. It was one of the few raids that I was able to actually enjoy since it started out with just a few of us. My mind is bit foggy as I've only slept for 2 hours or so but I believe it was HP Lovecat that took charge and lead the raid, and I really should have grabbed some screenshots as we took down the pylons but I was having too much fun.

edit: Should have said I was on Controller Grav at the time.

Honestly(and please dont be offended, because i know this whole thing was a lot of work!), the best moment of the whole night for me...Was watching everyone leap/speed/take off/teleport towards the ship in unison. I havent seen that large of a mob of heroes rushing off to battle in so many years. I actually stopped mid leap just to watch it happen. It was so great to share this with you all.

Grr... Family and work made me "miss" the event (logged in couldnt get to RWZ#1). Any chance of doing it again? That's doubtful, I know.

In game and story-wise does Hami and DE serve any other purpose than "ethnic cleansing?" Do they help fight/sequester the Battalion? Con yellow ("neutral but attackable") in game? And are they destroyed or escape? Would be neat to have Battalion and DE deadlocked for eternity - would give DE something to evolve against and Battalion something to want power from.

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.

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

Edit: On beta.

While Dark Respite puts together a real video, have fun with these bits from yesterday's event (use HD!!!):


CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Everybody is here

...even Black Pebble as Waffles!!!

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - RulaCole!!!

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - First Wave: Shivans

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Second Wave: Kheldians

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Third Wave: Battalion

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - An unexpected guest comes to help

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - After battle group pic

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Another unexpected (clipping) guest

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Giant Robot Battle Royale

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Mixed GMs (AKA "How many Statesmen!!!)

CoH "Inmortal Game" Event - Diferent aspects of Rularuu and a surprising powerset for RulaCole


Arcana, thanks again to you and the ppl who helped you to set up this, it was fantastic and I won't forget it.


Fare well, my beloved Heroic companions!!!


@Arda

And again, thanks to Arcanaville and whatever scary black magic she possesses. Getting to play around in the debug menu alone was worth the sleepless nights spent planning and testing things to see what we could do for the event.

My only regret is that I forgot to turn on chat logging. There was so much going on while people were gathering and during/after that it was impossible to keep up with all of it. It was great seeing so many names I recognized from the forums in one place!

FWIW, There were nearly 150 players in RWZ right before the zone crashed. After recovering and giving people some time to log back in, there were 136 in the zone when we locked it and started the event.

The normal zone cap is 50. The "OMG she canna take any more" limit for RWZ is 100...