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

[Front de Libération de Gallia]

[FLG]VG-Mazagran
Call to Sirius
Mazagran attendance message to allies
for Front de Libération de Gallia ([FLG]), the only Maquis SRP battleship in history will attend.

Anyone who wants to fly with the Mazagran, we will RV at DAVOS BASE and try to hit the convoy on their way to Champagne - Hessians and Unioners have Zoi - it would be great if you can join us! We hope staff will extend Zois between Cologne and Zurich for all factions when the patch and canon treaty arrive.

Join discord in description, [FLG] is taking on new members, we have 70+ Shared ships you could use in the event.

---

Gallic Underworld and allies Discord: https://discord.gg/ZT3rAZBFgy

[Stoner_Steve]

Objectives:

• Convoy Defenders: Your objective is to escort the Battlecruiser RNC-Burghausen and Diplomatic Corps liners from Planet New Berlin to Planet New Paris, and kill any attackers impeding your progress.
  
• Convoy Attackers: Score points for your faction by killing escorts, destroying Diplomatic Corps liners, and destroying the sub-components of the battlecruiser RNC-Burghausen. The RNC-Burghausen cannot be destroyed, but arriving heavily damaged will be incredibly politically damaging for both the Emperor and Gallic Union.
  

I think it is a great change for the Events Team to spell out conditions around the primary ship, knowing ahead of time that the Burghausen will make it to Gallia (albeit damaged perhaps) is beneficial for player planning purposes.

[Promotheus]

How will rulings be handed down regarding factions belonging to the attackers not attacking each other but focusing on the target (defenders)? Like if Hessians and Corsairs show up at the same time and attack the convoy and not eachother they wont get smacked for teaming right?

[Kauket]

Only factions with ZoI may enter an event system for the duration of the event

that's not gonna stop waldo

[Arne]

How will rulings be handed down regarding factions belonging to the attackers not attacking each other but focusing on the target (defenders)? Like if Hessians and Corsairs show up at the same time and attack the convoy and not eachother they wont get smacked for teaming right?

I'd say the best way to deal with that is attacking from a different spot.

[Dark Chocolate]

... RNC-Burghausen cannot be destroyed ...

This reminds me of the Pennsylvania event where majority of the playerbase logged as Zoners. And the Liberty flagship got beamed coz people focused it down and it almost died. Then it later came back and killed the Zoner flagship becoz that was the scripted outcome. Here's a video link if anyone wants to see that again:- Operation "Plot Armour"

Then came the Theta Freeport 9 Battles. So after intense and grueling battles, The attacking side actually won. But what happened after? Outcasts were actually victorious but instead of capitalizing on the victory, They decided to abandon the Theta situation for which they spent so many resources on and diverted everything to Atka. Wow. What's the point of fighting 3 days for that victory then? Couldn't they divert to Atka after Freeport 9 thing? This thing below was both hilarious and infuriating for me.

As many of the Zoner captains initially feared, their so-called Outcast "allies" have had enough of fighting in Theta...... The Corsair empire is simply too big to stumble after only a single blow, already managing to replace its losses by cannibalizing existing dispositions.

Translation: Corsair Empire has simply too much plot armour

And Now you want people to participate as attacking side in this event even when The plot armoured flagship RNC-Burghausen is unkillable. Oh Sure "arriving heavily damaged will be incredibly politically damaging for both the Emperor and Gallic Union." -- Yeah, I doubt it's gonna have any significant impact. Significant impact will be when the ship gets destroyed and politicians inside get assassinated and it causes a chain of political destabilizing events.

Well.. what's the point of participating as attackers when you can't significantly affect the outcome of the event. Just for the damn bounty huh?

If you're not open to having the playerbase have any significant impact over the outcome of the event, then why give them a hope that they actually can?

If you want mostly uni-directional outcome of an event,
Why not have all players participate as defenders and have bounties for killing OP NPCs or something. Maybe have an OP boss attacker like the old Cultist bustard with 6 Nightmares or something, Which CAN BE destroyed with coordinated efforts of players..
That way plot armour will be from player side so it would be less infuriating I guess. Then you can have the event fully respawn enabled, so you don't have to enforce the "Please relog and respawn as another ship if you die" thing. This way RNC-Burgerhausen can keep it's plot armour. Everyone gets bounty for kills. You get single outcome. Everyone wins..
But I guess It's either too late for that or I don't make any sense and you guys know better idk.

Anyways. That's just my opinion. Please have fun with the event : )

[Barrier]

You have to understand a basic trade-off between story and player agency.
The more player agency, the more likely the story goes into some contrived direction which does not fit with the overall story of the mod. This is very likely, because players generally do not have to consider the higher-order implications of their action in-rp. Moreover, it's not often fun to do this - you just log your character an rp within your restrictions to the best of your ability. It would be hard to have fun if you constantly had to think about what your actions mean for Sirius-wide geopolitics...
Of course, you also have the outcome where the story is now decided primarily oorp, due to the many alliances and opinions people have about the direction of the mod. After all, if you log enough people for a particular side, that outcome will be secured. Again however, the people logging for a specific outcome rarely care about the overall story - e.g. they want "their" side to win. Which is great, but may produce results that are quite difficult to work with. And this is very difficult to manage on the scale of disco, as opposed to say a 4-player DND game.

The current story team has decided that in order to avoid this complexity and salt that will surely flow, most story events have essentially pre-determined outcomes. The point of the events is to add flavor to what would instead be a 2-3 paragraph CNS report. For example, if we did a Dresden event, the outcomes would be what you see in the report. But you'd still be able to modify the specific details. And it would be hella fun to be there blasting down Bautzen while the big battleships blast everyone in their path.

If you want to focus on events with outcomes decided there and then, I would suggest thinking up some storyboards and make unofficial events based on them. In these events, you can set up very specific rules, slots, and outcomes. Then, as long as your rp around these is good enough, you can submit these outcomes as dev requests. But just as with SRPs, large changes require a lot of effort to be put in, so it's not guaranteed that you will get them. So you can also do what I've been doing and make smaller-scale outcomes that are more related to official faction diplomacy and government laws, which require less staff oversight.

Finally, you complaint about the Theta arc needs to go to those who responded to the red-named posts. This was indeed an opportunity to do whatever you wanted, and Outcasts chose to assault Atka, after the Corsairs chose to reinforce Theta with Vis. If these decisions were different, phase 3 would also have looked very different. But once these decisions were made on both sides and we started planning the event, the outcomes were once again decided in advance, yes.

[jammi]

I can sympathise with that position, but I've also got to reiterate something I've said a few times in the past, which is that we won't ever decide the story's direction by PvP results alone. It leads to bad, toxic behaviour and strange results. It leads to popular factions permanently getting their way, and unpopular factions (or groups with less experienced PvPers) getting left in the dirt.

We've tried it before, and it didn't really work.

The events are here to allow people to play out aspects of the mod's story as it happens, influence details within a broader defined outline, and most importantly, have fun. If the concept doesn't sound fun to you that's perfectly valid, but we do hope as many people as possible will give it a try - with the restarts especially, there's nothing to lose.

We decided early on the battlecruiser would be invulnerable because we wanted as much chaos and as many different groups as possible. Taking the battlecruiser's actual death off the table means we can use a very important character like the Emperor, while providing a mobile objective for defenders that will definitely last the entire duration of the event.

That in turn ensures the convoy will travel the entire route, passing through many different ZoIs and allowing interactions with many different factions. It'd be incredibly anticlimactic if groups had set up large, coordinated ambushes in Stuttgart, Zurich and Ile de France, only to find massed Hessians and Coalition (for example) had immediately ended things in New Berlin.

Hope this explains things a little at least.

---

News article library, feedback and content requests.

[Proselyte]

... RNC-Burghausen cannot be destroyed ...

This reminds me of the Pennsylvania event where majority of the playerbase logged as Zoners. And the Liberty flagship got beamed coz people focused it down and it almost died. Then it later came back and killed the Zoner flagship becoz that was the scripted outcome.

Speaking as a participant of said event who also made exactly this connection upon reading, bear in mind that much of the discontent regarding the Alma not being destroyed came from a mismatch of expectations between the event creator and the playerbase.

The event runners did not intend to let the fate of a significant, storied ship like the Alma be decided in one battle on the grace of who logged what, and were trying to frame the event as a delaying action with an inevitable withdrawal by the Zoner defenders, but with a chance to set themselves up favorably for the future conflict.

From the player/gameplay perspective though, Liberty could not win the field (despite doing good damage to the transports, the actual objective) and their battleship got trounced (until saved by GM wizardry), so it was expected that that would reflect the roleplay outcome of the event - perhaps reasonably, perhaps not, given that the Pennsylvania Zoners in-lore should be totally outmatched by the Liberty Navy in a conventional brawl. Strongest house in Sirius and all that.

This here reflects that the prior incident was learned from: they are clarifying, up front, the event bomber I run just for this occasion isn't going to permanently kill the Kaiser of Rheinland. But you can still enjoy the ride of embarrassing him by killing his diplomats and making him show up to Gallia in a busted jalopy.

[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.

---