Hardcore Event

Hardcore Event (aka: March Hardcore Event, Dragon Egg Event, 1 Year Hardcore Event, Hardcore Survival Event) - one of the most known events in Purity's history, where players battled to the death to win the Dragon Egg. *Keep in mind that this article is written almost 3 years after the event, by a player that did not attend it, so all the information is second- or third-hand.*

## Reasons

Previous owner of the Dragon Egg, DouuG1, was permanently banned on 6th February 2020. Penguin did not like the implications of this: the Egg was stuck in an ender chest of a player, that wouldn't ever log on the server - again. Unlike the first time this happened, Purity was now almost a year old and another reset of the dragon fight would surely be heavily criticized. Some players wanted the Egg to return to one of its previous owners, like MiercolesC or Fail\_Productions.

On the other hand, the 1st anniversary of Purity was coming. Staff was thinking about a way to celebrate it. An event of sorts would be cool, but a truly successful event needs a big prize to draw enough attention... *wait a second...*

Right on the day when Purity got one year old, 23rd March 2020, Penguin posted info about the event in Purity's discord. Seems like no one outside the Staff Team knew that this will happen.

   As one can imagine, people were hyped, but many (obviously) complained that this isn't fair, as Staff is de facto "giving the Egg to the biggest PvP faction".

## Event starts

The event started on 23rd March, at 10 AM EST, and lasted for 6 days. It was running on a separate server, accessible via /server event command, and thus it's chat archives were not saved on Purity discord. Up to the last day, that server was physically running on a different machine than the main server, and the main server was not interrupted by the event.

Event was taking place on a map with world border at 5k, meaning 10k by 10k world size. Every Purity player could join, but everyone was limited to 3 lives only - after you died 3 times, you could no longer log on the event server. Initial spawnpoint of any player could be anywhere in the map - making spawnkilling almost impossible. The End was closed, so people could not obtain elytra or shulker boxes.

Alliances emerged fairly quickly after the event started. Soon it was clear that two main powers will decide the fate of the event and all players must join one side or the other to have any chance to win. This is how most contests of any type tend to: you are either "with us" or "against us". See this link for some nerdy talk about how a two-party system is created.

## Two main teams

Chadlet Army:

* Shwmepotatosalad (Hux)
* Ragsterinja (Rag)
* ViViDDiViV (Vivid)
* Zeraxul
* Stornwald
* Mr\_Shnebly
* Tarqshark (Tarq)
* Fiibb
* DanielB1012
* JustAnotherSheep
* NickSGS
* Jamool
* Feraligatrs (Fera)
* Sigha
* Derpac

Team Fear:

* FearTcb (Fear)
* MichaelCycle
* StrangerJ (J)
* GoldenCookie420 (Gookie)
* Daddy Satan
* Popcat
* ICodeViper (Code)
* anihia (Soosh)
* Jake7625
* iSTiNO

Obviously, not everyone agreed with this "duopoly", and some players tried to stay "neutral" or create their own teams. Stornwald, for example, was hanging around mostly on his own to around day 4 of the event. Danish and Snakob tried to draw other members of DB into the game, but none of them were interested. The two once asked Satan for help, so in that sense they were more on the Team Fear. In the end though, all other teams or solo players were either slaughtered or absorbed into two main teams.

As one should expect, both sides try to bias the course of events in their narration, making themselves look better. To make this article as objective as possible, narrations from each team were collected.

## Mid-game

Players started to create bases with villager trading halls, farm up resources like god sets and crystals, and store them in various stashes. Raids were triggered in villages to collect totems, but no one bothered to create raid farms - the event lasted only for a few days, and raid farms weren't very popular on main server anyway, as it just recently got out of version 1.13. Fights between teams were also occurring daily, but most pvpers would play much more carefully than on the main server, due to the "hardcore" aspect.

Narration of the Fear's team:

*Throughout the event our team mainly held control. We would find their bases and stashes, and grief them. Also, any encounters we had, our main pvpers would win* - citation from GoldenCookie420

Narration of the Chadlets team:

*It was clear from the start that in order to win, the Chadlets would have to make alliances with many smaller factions as they were outnumbered 3 to 1. They were losing hope in their fight for the Dragon Egg* - citation from ViViDDiViV

Both sides agree that during the middle part of the event, Chadlets had a harder time than Team Fear. They were griefed numerous times, but Team Fear never found Tarq's "Brewery" base, which would turn out to be crucial to Chadlets in the end game. Cookie states that Team Fear's main base with villager hall was never griefed by Chadlets.

The event was also filled with exceptional amounts of toxicity, as both sides tried to win the psychological war as well. Obviously, the anarchy environment of Purity is full of slurs anyway, but apparently this was even worse than the usual level of toxicity one can observe on a regular day. Recent splitting of the Valhalla faction created tensions that progressed into the event: Vivid and Daddy Satan, former allies, were now among the leaders of opposing teams. Rag had also "turbulent history" with Fear (whatever this might mean). When the Dragon Egg appeared on the horizon as possible to acquire, all of these tensions grew into a true war, with players seemingly forgetting that they are fighting over a couple of pixels in a block game for children.

## Final day

As everyone knew that the final day of the event has come, much more people logged in at once than during the mid-game period. The machine that was running the event could not handle this many people, and the event server was moved to the machine which ran the main server. World border started to shrink: everyone geared up to the teeth and started hunting. After eliminating randoms, two main teams faced each other.

Narration of the Fear's team:

*Rag's team demolished our team mainly because our main pvpers glitched to death (michael phasing into the void through the ground and fear getting stuck in leaves outside of the border, couldn't break them so he suffocated), but also because of their location when the map was becoming smaller -* citation from GoldenCookie420

Narration of the Chadlets team:

*What started off as an even fight became a bloodbath as Shwme started blowing up the enemy team one by one. The cries of wasted hours could be heard as J and Stino were double killed by a single crystal* - citation from ViViDDiViV

While narrations were somewhat consistent during mid-game, they vary drastically for the finale. Team Fear states that most players had terrible ping on the final day, and their loss is blamed on glitches and being unlucky with the position. Chadlets just mostly point out to how good they are and how the other team was slaughtered by them.

The fact is, that despite Penguin saying that the world border will close "on a small area around 0,0", it turned out to be completely different. World border closed towards a random spot on the map, seemingly closer to Chadlets position than Team Fear's. On one hand, it is understandable that WB did not close on 0,0, as any player could just lavacast the area beforehand, and fighting in a lavacasted environment would not be fun. On the other hand, this did surprise both teams quite a lot, and surely did cause a lot more luck/unluck to them, depending on positioning of each group.

Moving the event server to the same machine that ran the main server could also affect the playing. Hardware was likely not optimized enough for two such crowded servers to run smoothly at once. It's hard to say exactly how much troubles this caused.

Either way, Team Fear was defeated by Chadlets, and the winning group then run a FFA to choose the winner. After some fighting, three players were still in battle: Ragsterinja, Hux and Stornwald. Most sources agree that Hux was believed to have the biggest chances in this battle: however, Penguin did an oopsie and closed the border to 0 before they could fight it off, killing all three remaining participants.

After being respawned, they decided to split all of the gear evenly between them. Rag then proceeded to slaughter Stornwald almost immediately, and with double the amount of gear, he was able to defeat Hux.

## Prizes

Ragsterinja, as the ultimate victor, received the main prize - the Dragon Egg.

Chat reactionsRag receives the Egg from Boone
Hux for his 2nd place received the Victory Trident.

Stornwald, for his 3rd place and the most time played, received both Victory Elytra and Victory Sword.

As of this article author's knowledge, none of the Victory items ever changed hands. For the history of Dragon egg, see its wiki page.

## Sources

* Chadlets and Stornwald wiki pages
* DM's with Gookie, Dandy and Soosh
* Glace's vid, History of Purity's Dragon Egg
* Apersu's vid, Top 10 Rarest Items on Purity Vanilla
* Discord chat archives