Hello again, Apologies for any confusion caused by this issue or our last response. The Special Surge event blocking progression of Guardian Ranks is not intended. We have flagged this with our designers and have confirmed that this is an unintended consequence of the Famine modifier not being able to be applied to the same activity as the Surge. Due to the setup of the event we are unable to quickly change that modifier to being selectable, however they are actively investigating if making this change to future, similar iterations of the event will be possible. Or if not, then they will pursue other mitigations to ensure that player progression is not blocked in the future.