Unleashed: a famous monster breaks loose in the open world, and everyone who shows up gets paid

Everything else this server built is private. The Gauntlet is your alliance, the raid board is your party, Nemesis is your own arena with your own chest. Unleashed is the opposite of all of it: one monster, standing in a zone anybody can walk into, that nobody can claim and everybody can hit.

Open it with /unleashed. Everything it shows also works typed as !unleashed, or !unl for short.

How a rally goes

• It breaks loose. Every two to three hours, one of the Legend-tier monsters off the Nemesis roster stands up at one of twenty-two outdoor sites across Vana'diel, each of them within sight of an outpost or a home point. The server hears which monster and where — the zone and the landmark, not a set of coordinates.
• You have ten minutes. It stands there passive and unkillable while people port in and form up. It does not aggro, it does not link, and it takes nothing at all. A second announcement says when it wakes.
• It answers to no claim. There is no party to join and no alliance to form. Anyone standing in the zone may strike it, heal the people striking it, or buff them. Your damage counts, your cures count, your songs and rolls count.
• Four accounts open it. Until four different accounts have joined the fight it shrugs almost everything off — five percent of what lands. Once open it stays open, whatever happens to the people who opened it. Four accounts, not four characters: the gate exists to require people, and a six-box is one person.
• It is as big as the server is. Its health is drawn from how many people are online at the moment it stands up — about a quarter of a million hit points on a quiet night, nearly two million on a full one — and it regenerates a slice of what the crowd is dealing, so a bigger turnout makes the fight shorter without making it a formality, and a small one is never regen-locked. You will hear when it passes half, and again at a tenth.
• Then it falls, and everybody gets paid. Nothing is paid at the spawn, at the wake, at half health or on a withdrawal. Only the kill pays.

What it pays

Forty-five Drift Coins, rising with turnout to seventy-five. Every paid account past the sixth adds a coin to what everyone gets, so calling it out in /yell pays the person who called it out. Thirty-six accounts reach the cap.

Your first Unleashed kill of a Japanese day pays double: ninety, rising to a hundred and fifty. Every kill after that pays the normal reward. With as many as a dozen rallies in a day, one big payday and a steady reward after it is what keeps a whole evening of them from outweighing the entire Drift Board — and the normal reward is still worth the trip, which is the point.

You qualify by taking part, not by being there at the end. A minute on its hate list, or one percent of its health in damage, is the whole floor — however big the crowd gets. Healers and buffers earn their place without swinging once. Somebody who died at three percent and home-pointed has already earned it. It is once per account per monster, so a second character of yours is not a second pay.

And a flat hundred Driftmarks, every time. On top of the coins, every paid account gets 100 Driftmarks for the DWRaid shop. It is the same hundred on your first kill of the day and on your tenth -- it is not doubled and it does not rise with turnout -- and it goes to exactly the accounts the coins go to.

Nothing drops. The coins and the Driftmarks are the reward; the monster's own table stays with the monster in the wild.

Getting there is free

While an Unleashed is standing, the home point or outpost its site is anchored to costs nothing — in /port, in !port, and at the counter. You still have to have attuned to it: the unlock is the unlock and nothing here skips one. It is the fare that is waived, and only for that one destination, and only while the monster is up.

The contract and the boards

A weekly contract on the Drift Board asks you to answer three Unleashed and pays ninety Drift Coins for it. It is credited by the pay, not by the kill — if you were paid, it counts.

Two boards joined /leaderboard with it: Unleashed answered, which counts the rallies your account was paid for, and Unleashed top damage, which counts the kills where you were the one who dealt the most.

Five lines at the kill

Every time, to the whole server: who dealt the most damage and what share of it, who held its attention, who landed the final blow, who drew first blood, and how many accounts were paid. The tank gets a line of their own, which is the only leaderboard a tank has ever wanted.

Things worth knowing

• When it spawns is hidden. Not the minute, not the hour, not "in about two hours". The announcement is the only warning anyone gets, and that is deliberate — this is meant to interrupt your evening, not to be scheduled around it.
• It does not aggro, but its area attacks do not care who you are. A world boss is standing in the open world. Sites are picked away from camps, and the announcement says to clear the outpost; if you are farming nearby, move.
• If nobody comes, it slips away. No pay, no callouts, and it is back on a short clock of an hour or so rather than the full two to three — a dead spawn never blocks the rotation.
• A restart does not bring one with it. The clock carries on across a restart, and if it ran out while the server was down it starts over — two to three hours from the moment the server is back. The one exception is a monster that was already standing when the server went down: that one returns to the same spot a minute later.
• It is a Legend. These are the roster's hardest names at the top of the level ceiling. A party will not do it. That is the feature.

/unleashed on its own tells you where it stands, what phase it is in, how much health is left and how many people are on it — and when nothing is loose, it says so, and nothing else. You will hear about the next one the same moment everybody else does.