17 September

Event conclusion: The Searing Plague

By Serpentius

Way to go, you survived The Searing Plague event!

You held off the Outbreak Bar, battled pro-plaguers, feverishly researched a cure, used a wide variety of mathematics, theorycrafted, chatted with sentient bots, and cured a lot of plagued Elyrians in the process!

As a result, you successfully achieved 6 out of the 8 Cure Bar milestones and won yourselves five Searing Plague event in-game item rewards. Congratulations!

Summary

Starting on August 3rd, 2018 and finishing last Friday, September 14th at 12pm PDT, the Searing Plague Event brought together thousands of new, current, and returning Chronicles of Elyria players in a gargantuan effort to band together (in spite of some working to perpetuate the spread of plague) to determine the outcome of an epic part of Elyrian history.

Depending on the weekly outcome, the lore for the event unfolded and ultimately made its mark as Elyrian historical canon. If you want to catch up on all of the lore that was revealed as a result of your actions, check the Searing Plague blog post here.

Via the event landing page, the special event Discord channel and forum, our community processed, posted, and messaged tens of thousands of times in an engagement event that transcended our expectations.

The studio was eager to see how the history of Elyria would unfold based on your actions, and we remained very neutral during the event. These events are important to us, as having a growing, engaged, and healthy community during development and before-launch is the surest way to ensure a healthy, engaged, and sustained community post-launch.

Rewards

As a result of your incredible efforts and to reward your accomplishment, all pure players who have qualified for a tier 2 role in the event will receive the title "Plagueborn" that can be applied to one of your characters. This character will gain a resistance to the Searing Plague and that trait can be inherited by your character's descendants!

Additionally, you earned the following in-game items and effects:

  • "Treating Disease and Balancing Humors" - a Book of basic medical diagnostic knowledge
  • Disinfectant - a tincture of vinegar and alcohol that can be used to disinfect items (remove infectious agent properties from items). Includes recipe
  • Plague Mask - offers some protection from foul miasma and grants some protection against airborne diseases
  • Healer's Kit - contains: 5x linen bandages, 2x disinfectant vials, 1 utility knife, and 1 jar of leeches in a belt pack
  • World technology reward: Inoculation – introduces an inoculation item type to the Chronicles of Elyria game that will potentially grant players an immunity to a single disease... or if the inoculation fails, can potentially give them the disease when used

These items will be deposited into the accounts of all qualified winners in the near future.

Note: To receive the in-game rewards, you must have performed at least 30 actions as a pure player (someone who has any pledge package) to have been eligible for a Tier 2 role. It does not matter if you had that role selected at the event completion or not.

Groups

Many groups were formed to provide collaborative support to each other in order to determine the best solutions. They shared plans, math statistics and graphs, stats on actions performed, and deep analyses of how the event was unfolding on an hour by hour basis. We reached out to just a few of them and here’s what they had to say:

"I feel that this event was a great experience to have, one that we'll all keep in our hearts as we enter the world of Elyria. The highs and lows in morale as milestones on both bars were hit, and that golden feeling when the cure first surpassed the outbreak bar was incomparable! It was rough at times, and many are left exhausted, but I know as time goes on people are going to increasingly appreciate the time we spent fighting the plague together." - Saint Zachary, Plague Doctors Without Borders

“The event was a fun community group event, that helped to bring us all together, even if for a short time. The GUPR would not have been such a success as it was without the cooperation of community leaders from around the globe. I would like to thank the SBS team for their work on providing the event, as well as NoBull, Emery, iSagan, Stairs, Carewen, Mélia, huntsmaster, Drakos and everyone else who participated in making the GUPR plague network and information campaigns a success, including the entire OCE and TSP Think Tank groups." - Count Taymurâz Zakâr of Aequitas, Chairperson of the GUPR, OCE Section 2 Commander

"The Think Tank started life as a new Discord server on day 1 of the Searing Plague event. It ended up as a collaborative effort involving over 500 members from more than 13 Kingdoms. Over 100 Think Tank volunteers in 6 different teams, supported by 19 Coordinators, contributed to 154 players being cured. A closing survey revealed that 85% of participants felt the Think Tank had a great deal, or a lot, of impact on the event. Ultimately, this event showed the power and fun of community effort, and I am very proud at how many great people did many great things." - Carewen, Think Tank Lead Coordinator

Thanks for sharing your leadership skills; we're excited to see what roles you'll play in Elyria one day!

Additionally, we'd like to give a shout out to Forien for his awesome Searing Plague progression chart!

Stats

We know the Chronicles of Elyria community would love to know everything and anything having to do with the event, but there's only so much time and so many resources to provide that. Regardless, we've collected the following bits of data to share with you in relation to the Searing Plague event:

  • Highest number of recorded purity seals one single player had in their inventory: Over 4,000
  • New forum users during the event: 6,920
  • New Discord registrations during the event: 1,902
  • Total messages in #searing-plague-event & #plague-trading: 197,854
  • Number of trade links created: 520,270
  • Total plagued players cured* : 3,161
  • Total purity seals submitted to the cure bar: 248,746
  • Total plague marks manually submitted to the outbreak bar: 44,534
  • Total negate, submit, and instant actions performed by pure players: 572,895
  • Total negate, submit, and instant actions performed by plagued players: 76,205

* = Only includes players without a package who redeemed 180 purity seals

In conclusion

Ultimately, we at Soulbound Studios would like to thank each and every one of you for your participation and passion during this event. It was truly a sight to behold!

We could continue to wax poetic about all of the unique experiences we witnessed, how the event evolved, what the milestones meant and how the dynamics, math, how proclamations of the groups altered hearts and minds, and so much more... but with so much still to be done for Elyria to become a reality, we decided to leave that to your ancestors to pass on, and for bards to sing about.

Until next time...

More to come.