Chapter III: Age of Drama
(May 2008)

"I'm sure that works for you too, I mean, it must be stressful enough being right all the time and then dealing with the hassle of having to justify it because some college hippie disagrees, ulcer inducing."
-Bthorne, Former member of the Golden Shields

As the demand for a new MMO for our guild to play became more desperate I started looking more carefully at what our options would be within the next few months. I frequently kept an eye on which MMOs were near release and began reading more about them on their websites and through other resources. At the time the most anticipated game by far was Age of Conan, a game which made a lot of hype for itself about its highly vaunted combat system and "M" rating. I signed up for the beta of the game and was accepted several weeks later. Keep in mind I signed up exclusively to scout out the game and get an idea of what it was like so I would know if it could be a future game for our guild or not. I surely had better things to do but was willing to sacrifice my own vauleable time to help ensure the future of the Golden Shields. Sadly, it seems I was the only one willing to make such a sacrifice and my efforts were not going to be appreciated by some of the other guild members.

Now this is the point where I need to tell you about a fellow named Draky.

Draky was one of several members we had recruited shortly after our arrival in Guild Wars many years previously. Draky and a few others had been recruited through some well written recruitment posts we had placed on the GAMEFAQs message baords. Those boards are full of trolls so we mostly just got flamed a lot but the recruitment posts were aimed at a somewhat more mature crowd so we hoped that crowd would ignore the trolls and join us anyway. We were right and we gained several seemingly intelligent members through those recruitment posts, one of which was Draky. However Draky is a great example of how "intellignet" doesn't always translate into "mature" and may not even be very helpful at all. Actually, "Intelligent" isn't even a good term to describe Draky. Profundus Maximus is a much better term.

Just a few days after he joined Draky sent me a PM on the private forums demanding that I promote him to an officer. His logic was that he had been playing Guild Wars longer than the rest of our guild so he should be an officer. I explained to him that I didn't promote people to officer positions based on how long they had been playing a given game, but upon how willing they were to take on responsibility and make contributions to the guild. At the time the guild had no official ranking system. The only difference I saw between officers and regular members was that officers had agreed to help take on extra responsibility to benefit the guild. They didn't actually get any extra power or authority over the other members of the guild, they were just people who had offered to help me with the day to day tasks of running a guild. Since it was obvious that Draky only wanted to be an officer to throw his weight around and brag about it, I promoted someone else instead of him. Draky wasn't apparently mature enough to handle a system where all guild members have equal rank, so when I promoted someone else his bitched and moaned contantly on the public forums, suggesting that I had promoted the other person because I didn't like him. Well it was true that I didn't like him, but the reason I didn't like him was because he was behaving like an ass and that was also the reason why I promoted someone who wasn't an ass in the first place.

However, at the time several members of the guild were college students that had been a little too heavily brain washed by the ACLU into thinking that any form of authority or discipline is a bad thing and these people quickly joined the aruement on Draky's side to to be rebellious. With so many new people in the guild due to our new recruitment efforts in Guild Wars I was worried this might cause some of them to get the wrong impression and quit the guild before they even got a chance to know us. So even though I should have banned Draky for causing so much drama during his first week in the guild I was afraid if I did that it would look like I was kicking him out of the guild for disagreeing with me. So instead I had to silence his complaining by implementing a ridiculously complex ranking system, complete with awards, merits and all sorts of arcane rules. It was the only way to give people like Draky meaningless promotions to keep them happy, while still only promotiong people who were acutally willing to help run the guild to officer positions.

But that was not the last time Draky caused trouble. About a year later when we left OGame we briefly played another browser game called "The Reincarnation" which was absoultely awful. I won't go into the details here, suffice to say the the current community of the game is VERY unfriendly to outsiders and goes out of their way to chase any newcomers to the game away. While this fact alone would have ensured plenty of problems for us all on its own, it only made matters worse that Draky was going out of his way to make even more enemies for us. Within the first few minutes after signing up for the game Draky triple attacked the first person he saw. For those of you who are not familiar with browser games, let me explain why this is a serious issue. All browser games are based on attacking other players to steal their land/resources/money/whatever in order to build your own empire. In turn other people will attack you for the same reason. The etiquette of thse games allows players to make single attacks (often referred to as "random attacks") aginst each other for profit only. However if you attack another person when there is no profit or attack multiple times in a short span of time this is usually considered blatantly aggressive behavior and is likely to provoke an equally aggressive response from the person you attacked (and often their friends, allies and guild as well).

The person Draky triple attacked wasn't in a guild at the time and didn't have any visible allies, so Draky probably thought he could get away with it. What draky didn't know (and my guess is wouldn't have cared about even if he did know) was that the person he had triple attacked was actually a well known member of the community who had many friends and allies, he just wasn't in a guild yet because he had been taking a break from the game and had only just created a new account for himself after being away for several months. Obviously he was not pleased that the first thing which happens when he returns is that some punk from an upstart guild attacks him three times in a row for no reason at all. So he got his friends to ally with him, help him rebuild and outgrow Draky and he then proceeded to declare his own private war aginst us with the help of his allies. He harassed us for the rest of that round. The next round a similar group of assholes pulled a similar stunt. I don't know if that one was Draky's fault too but I honestly wouldn't be suprised if it was.

But even THAT was not the last time Draky caused trouble. When we started playing Tabula Rasa Draky was one of the first people to sign up for the game. However he signed up for a different server than every other member of the guild. When he was informed that he had signed up for the wrong server he refused to switch. He then ran off to join another guild on the server that he was on. I wouldn't even have cared if he had stayed with that other guild, good riddance to bad rubbish if you know what I mean. But Draky wouldn't stay gone. When I posted a brief thread on our forums with some tips that had been contributed by myself, Laat, Thunda and a few other members who had gotten fairly high in level in Tabula Rasa, Draky came in a disagreed with every single one of them. While my post of tips was about a page long, Drakys disagreement with them was only a few sentences. I restated my reasons for posting the tips by pointing out the experiences that myself and the other guild member had had and reminding Draky that we were just trying to help new players avoid making the same mistakes we did when we were new to the game. Draky continued to post his brief arguements to contradict me and it was obvious that he didn't know what he was talking about. After all of Draky's pathetic arguments had been thoroughly crushed, he finally admitted that it was the OTHER GUILD which had told him all of the things he had been saying. When I heard that I directly told him that the information I had posted was from OUR guild and was meant to help OUR guild. If he felt that other guild knew more about the game than we did he needed to shut the hell up and go play the game with them.

My hope was that Draky would leave the guild at this point and stop being a constant thorn in my side. But apparently that other guild wasn't as all-knowing as Draky had hyped them up to be because fairly shortly after this he switched over to our server and started leveling up a new character to join our guild again. After a few days he sent me a PM on the forum once again demanding to be promoted to an officer... *sigh*

This is the number of Facepalm's required to express the stupidity of Draky asking to be promoted to an officer again after all the trouble he had caused.

By now you are probably wondering why I'm spending so much of your time telling you about a member of the Golden shields who was obviously little more than an incompetent troll. The reason is because Draky decided to strike again when I started a thread to report the results of my testing of Age of Conan.

The people who have played Age of Conan can easily be devided into two groups: People who are totally mindless fanboys of the game, love it to high hell and will never be convincved that it is anything other than the greatest game of all time. Then there is everyone else, which is mostly people who hate the game. So if you have heard anything at all about Age of Conan you have probably already made up your mind about the game and fallen into one of those two groups. As such I won't waste a lot of my time repeating my report on the game word for word here, suffice to say I found to to be a boring, overly instanced, grind fest with a boring, over-hyped combat system that boiled down to little more than a tremendous amount of over-glorified button mashing. There, I said it, the game sucks. So all you fanboys can begin a desperate search for my email address to tell me what a fag I am for not giving all my money to the developers of Age of Conan just to play the game for five seconds and all the rest of you can nod your heads in agreement with me about what a massive piece of shit the game is.

To get back to the point, I don't honestly believe Draky fell into either group. He hadn't played the game and didn't seem to know anything about it so he couldn't really be a Fanboy. And he surely wasn't one of the intelligent people who hate the game. I think he just enjoyed making an ass out of himself by pretending he knew everything about everything, which somehow involved always trying to disagree with everything I said even when he was well aware he knew nothing at all about the topic of discussion. And such was the case when he responded to my report on Age of Conan. He ranted and raved on what a great game it was even though he had never played it and quoted information off the "official" website which is little more than an a bunch of exaggerated half-truths posted to hype the game. I pointed this out to Draky and reminded him that I had actually played the game and was reporting first hand information here, not just website hype. He wouldn't relent and kept up his asshatery by posting out of context quotes from other beta testers he had found on random blogs of people he didn't know and had never talked to before. As with the previous incident with Tabula Rasa, all of Draky's arguements were only a few sentences long at most, while I would reply with atleast a page of accurate and factual information. Though Draky continued to post out of context quotes and act like an ass, it was obvious that he was beaten once again.

At this point Draky sent me another PM on the forums. Shockingly enough it wasn't a demand to be promoted to an officer as per his usual agenda. This time he wanted my AoC beta account. I had already sworn never to play the game again so I had nothing to lose by giving up the account. And I figured that maybe giving Draky the account would give him a chance to see I was right about the game and shut him up about it. I figured at a bare minimum even if he decided he liked the game then when he told the rest of the guild that he would have to admit I gave him the account and I would still come out looking like the good guy. But sadly enough not even that happened. After I gave Draky the account he just went silent for a few days. Not even so much as a "thank you" in reply to me sending him the password for the account. After a few days I asked what was up and he admitted he hadn't used the beta account at all. He hadn't even tried to download the client. He pretty much missed out on the whole beta due to his stalling. The fact that he still had not played the game didn't prevent him from continuing to post his retarded opinion of the game however.

Draky of course was not the only trouble maker. Another great example is Phylor. Yes Phylor, the famed leader from the old guild. The one with the terrible spelling who was 12 years old. But things change and even 12 year olds with bad spelling grow up. Phylor sadly grew up to be an asshole. I blame this on Shadowbane. Even all these years later its still wrecking so many lives. You see, when the last remaining members of the old guild made the wise decision to get the hell out of Shadowbane, Phylor instead made the very poor choice to stay. And like all fools who stayed in Shadowbane he spent very little of his time actually playing the game. Shadowbane never really got much better. It remained a buggy, unstable, unbalanced and virtually unplayable mess for years. During those long years people like Phylor who were determined to stick with the game but couldn't actually play the game had to find other ways to carry out the pointless feuds and backstabbing which defined that game. So this took place mostly on forums and IRC chats, which quickly earned the nickname Forumbane. Anyone who claims to have "won" any great battles in Shadowbane is actually probably just retelling some BS story they invented in one of their many "Forumbane" flame wars.

Sadly this was also the case for Phylor, whom I honestly beleive was corrupted by that awful game. He was one of the first to return to the Golden Shields when I refounded it after Zion's massive failure with the Comedy Website disaster. As soon as he returned Phylor bragged constantly about how great Shadowbane was and how he had been a leader or an officer in a dozen different guilds (note to anyone trying to impress a guild leader: its not a good idea to mention you have been in a dozen different guilds during the course of only a few years because that will only tell people that none of those guilds were any good or none of them wanted you around for very long). It seemed he was trying to make his accomplishments in Shadowbane sound much more impressive than they actually were. I think this was partly a side effect of the fact that ALL Shadowbane players have to lie about the game a lot to avoid having to admit what a piece of shit it is. But I also suspect that Phylor was trying to get a cheap promotion from all this bragging.

Since Phylor had been a leader in the Old Guild though his bragging wasn't nessary. I would have glady made him an officer in the new Golden Shields if he had only been willing to contribute to the guild and be active. Sadly, it became obvious quickly that he wasn't going to do that. One of the first things he promised to do was help with the guild histoy by telling his own version of the story about how the Old Guild fell after East got banned from the game. But aside from posting a few old Screenshots (I which I ended up using in the guild histoy on my own) he never actually produced any results. Then after the Alchemist clan was merged into the Golden Shields he disapeared and went inactive for long peroids of time. He briefly played OGame but didn't stick with it. Much like Draky he claimed to be an expert at Guild Wars but was never able to prove this. About once every six months or so he would appear out of the bule and ask why his status had been changed to a "retired member" as if this was a shock to him. We would tell him it was because he had been inactive for six months!

Phylor would then demand to be promoted back to a regular member and promise to be active again. I would make him a member again and he would hang around for a week or so, then suddenly start shooting his mouth off about some absurd thing or another. Usually it was Shadowbane or Macintosh computers. He would take some absurd stance that he knew nobody else would agree with and this always lead to a huge arguement. When Phylor would be defeated in that arguement due to his lacking any valid or logical points he would get butthurt over it and disapear again for another six months. Eventually I would change his status to a retired member. Then one day he shows up again and wants to know why hes a retired member, starting the whole stupid cycle all over again.

Phylor

And the reason I'm telling you these stories about Draky and Phylor is to illustrate one of the three major problems the Golden Shields had developed: Instigators. Draky and Phylor were instigators of drama, plain and simple.

Now on its own, this would not have been a major issue except that it was compounded by the second major problem: Boredom. Normally I could just kick an asshole like Draky out of the guild and be done with it. But with everyone losing interest in Guild Wars people were bored. When boredom strikes people who can usually be counted on to behave as sane, reliabe and loyal guild members will quickly degrade into massive Drama Whores at the first oppertunity. And an instigator like Draky was handing these oppertunities out like candy. If I had tried to kick him out then ACLU Brain Washed College Students like Bthorne would have jumped to his defense and accused me of being the reincarnation of Hitler.

Boredom can be dealt with by finding a new game to play but that leads me into the THIRD major problem the Golden Shields was suffering from. I'm having a bit of a problem giving a name to this problem because I've never quite encountered it before, but for now I'm going to call it "An Overabundance of Diversity" for lack of a better term. You saw an example of this problem back in chapter 1 when we tried to get people to play Tabula Rasa and many guild members refused on the grounds that they were either unwilling to pay a monthly fee for a game or because their computer was unable to handle it.

Once I knew that AoC would not be a possibility for our our Guild, I tried to placate everyone by suggesting some older MMO games we could possibly play. My thinking on this was that older games would not cost as much to purchase so people could not cry poverty, an older game would have a minimal monthly fee so people whould be hard pressed to object to that and the older graphics would be easier on those with outdated computers. I thought this would be a good compromise that would have a good chance to unite a majority of the guild behind a single game. If it worked people would no longer be bored and if they weren't bored anymore they would be more cooperative. And if they were cooperative then they wouldn't mind when I kicked out assholes who did nothing but instigate drama. It would be a win-win for everyone.

But despite my last and best attempt to compromise people still refused to cooperate even a tiny bit. Some people still cried poverty and refused to pay for a game. Some still refused to pay monthly fees. Some still claimed their outdated computers could not keep up with the rest of the guild. Some even invented all new and previously unheard of excuses. Not a single person was actually willing to compromise even the slightest bit.

It was quickly becoming apparent to me that I was the only member of the guild who really understood the purpose and function of the guild. Over the years I had worked hard and used my own hard earned free-time and money to support the guild. I kept my computer up to date so I could play modern games, I purchased and tried out games I didn't think I would like because other members of the guild wanted to play them. I was willing to make sacrifices to ensure the success and survival of the Golden Shields. But with every passing day it was becoming more and more obvious that I was the only one willing to make such sacrifices. Everyone else expected to get a free ride. A guild can't function with only one person trying to make it work and everyone else acting as a leech. The fact of the matter was that our three major problems were beginning to compound themselves and with the way things were going the guild would tear itself apart with drama before the summer was over.

I had tried everything else I could think of and there seemed to be only one option remaining. I tried desperately for weeks to think of another option but there just weren't any options left. Time was up...

Continue to Chapter IV: Goodbye