February 28, 2009 is a day that will live in infamy for fans of the innovative Sci-Fi MMO: Tabula Rasa. That was the day the MMO shut down its servers and had an exciting, action packed, end of game event to thank its players for a year of loyal patronage.
A few days before the final event, they merged all the US servers into a single server: Hydra. They kept the single European server up as well. This created a very festive atmosphere as these two servers were very active. People ran missions, instances, attacked and defended CPs, and basically played the game as it was always intended.
There were separate, but similar, end game events on both servers. They took place at 8pm GMT and 8pm CST on the European and US servers respectively.
To understand how Tabula Rasa got to this point, read: History, Timeline and Post Mortem of Tabula Rasa.
The event began with increased Bane activity throughout the game world. Control points and bases were attacked by larger than normal forces. Even main bases that normally did not face serious attack were assaulted by Tabula Rasa staff run armies - led by superior alien beings known as the Neph. These Neph were extremely powerful foes that could only be taken down through the concerted effort of hundreds of players.
As the event continued, the Bane slowly but steadily gained control of the two main planets in the game. This blocked the players from using the transportation network to reach those planets. Eventually, a "Last Stand" took place on Earth itself.
The "Last Stand" took place on an instanced map so multiple shards could be spawned. This helped not only with lag but also with making sure more people actually had enemies to engage. The battles were enormous in scale, but eventually the AFS prevailed over the Bane and the Neph.
At midnight (GMT or CST depending on which server you were on), there was a countdown from 10 and then the server went dark.
Tabula Rasa developers posted photos taken from their offices during the event. They also informed their community that many former employees returned to the offices, unpaid, to help play NPCs and run the event. They level of effort put in by the Tabula Rasa developers in the final months of the game was impressive.