[Official Event] The Alsace Passage - 2 Mar, 20:00 - 22:00 UTC

[Haste]

..and their battleship got trounced (until saved by GM wizardry), so it was expected that that would reflect the roleplay outcome of the event..

Just to very briefly chime in, it's worth mentioning that that ship only got in the trouble it got into because a torpedo blew up its admin shield as it turns out those have deceptively low amounts of health. It would've come up long before we had to beam otherwise, we just didn't realize what had happened. Meanwhile, the Zoner "flagship" did have its shield come up naturally and was happily fighting while invulnerable. It wasn't just player coordination resulting in the Alma taking a horrible beating and having to be beamed away, it was also a pretty unfortunate, eh, "technical mishap".

But yeah. We're trying to make clear what players can and cannot affect here ahead of time. If the RNC-Burgerhausen was destructible, we'd have to massively change the mechanics of the event. We could enforce limited player slots players have to register for ahead of time, so we can matchmake the fight and make it so at least "logical" faction ships would be the ones to put the Emperor out of his misery, or we'd have to make the ship not house the Emperor but instead some conjured-up no-name Minister of Trade that didn't exist five minutes ago, or something like that. I think having the big man himself aboard an invulnerable - but not immune to damage - Battlecruiser is a good way for players to be able to damage it, get some lore results out of it, but also ensure nothing too insane happens (a mighty alliance of Coalition, Wilde and Nomad ships kills the Emperor of Rheinland in New Berlin orbit, ending the event five minutes in and making for a herculean task for Jammi to somehow write that into the mod's story).

But this is an event to celebrate Freelancer's 21st anniversary. You don't want to lock it to limited player slots. The Emperor himself making an appearance is also fun and lets us show his characteristics in-game for people to see (and hopefully laugh at). And that's what we're really hoping to do here: have a fun celebration of Discovery and Freelancer itself.

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