The length was determined three-quarters IC, one quarter OOC. ICly, a week would have been stretching the boundary of letting ponies prepare as well as how much worry and alarm it would generate; OOCly, wouldn't a week have felt too short and even more futile? I was also concerned that once the reveal hit, the stuff that characters were doing would fall completely by the wayside. It took several days for stuff to get up and running, after all.
A week and a half just seems weird, but maybe that would have been a better time?
With regards to futility and failure as the only option... I'm going to approach this from two perspectives. The first one is that of the player of a villain... which is a far different mindset of "the character as a hero". The villain has to be a credible threat, and up till this point I had specifically been selling Zetta as a legitimate threat. (Stalliongrad, for example, happened specifically to make sure ponies could imagine the danger of Zetta succeeding... from both an IC and OOC perspective.)
So from this perspective, I did my best to ensure that efforts to deal with Zetta had some sort of effort, such as the raid managing to find out there were infiltrators on the scrolls. Despite IC speculation otherwise, that was very much not part of the plan and it could have threatened it. But on the other hand, the plan was specifically proofed against obvious interferences. If other things had been tried (some sort of scrying or locating spell on Zetta, as one example that comes to mind), it could have really thrown a kink into the plans.
And if the plan was cartoonish and easily broken, it wouldn't have been credible even OOC. (And for the record, it was pretty much all mine. The mods weren't involved except inasmuch as the NPCs provided Zetta some support he didn't absolutely need, if it came down to that.) So the balance there is that I did the best to reward efforts against Zetta that had otherwise been negated in the plan, without making the plan obviously easy to break. I did the best I could to avoid the feeling that Nothing Matters And Nothing Works, and I'm sorry you still felt it was that way. If you have any suggestions on where I didn't do enough or could have done better, I'm open to them.
From the other perspective, the truth is that Zetta isn't a villain at all any more. He doesn't realize it, but it's been true for months now. (Ironically, if he was still being villainous, his plan WOULD have had those gaping holes in it.) This is a part of a character arc for him. Also, a plan like this will never work again anyway, so there can't possibly be a repeat of it.
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A week and a half just seems weird, but maybe that would have been a better time?
With regards to futility and failure as the only option... I'm going to approach this from two perspectives. The first one is that of the player of a villain... which is a far different mindset of "the character as a hero". The villain has to be a credible threat, and up till this point I had specifically been selling Zetta as a legitimate threat. (Stalliongrad, for example, happened specifically to make sure ponies could imagine the danger of Zetta succeeding... from both an IC and OOC perspective.)
So from this perspective, I did my best to ensure that efforts to deal with Zetta had some sort of effort, such as the raid managing to find out there were infiltrators on the scrolls. Despite IC speculation otherwise, that was very much not part of the plan and it could have threatened it. But on the other hand, the plan was specifically proofed against obvious interferences. If other things had been tried (some sort of scrying or locating spell on Zetta, as one example that comes to mind), it could have really thrown a kink into the plans.
And if the plan was cartoonish and easily broken, it wouldn't have been credible even OOC. (And for the record, it was pretty much all mine. The mods weren't involved except inasmuch as the NPCs provided Zetta some support he didn't absolutely need, if it came down to that.) So the balance there is that I did the best to reward efforts against Zetta that had otherwise been negated in the plan, without making the plan obviously easy to break. I did the best I could to avoid the feeling that Nothing Matters And Nothing Works, and I'm sorry you still felt it was that way. If you have any suggestions on where I didn't do enough or could have done better, I'm open to them.
From the other perspective, the truth is that Zetta isn't a villain at all any more. He doesn't realize it, but it's been true for months now. (Ironically, if he was still being villainous, his plan WOULD have had those gaping holes in it.) This is a part of a character arc for him. Also, a plan like this will never work again anyway, so there can't possibly be a repeat of it.