Book II, Part II: The Alchemist Clan

Chapter I: The Search
(Febuary 2005 - June 2005)

"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use."
-Earl Nightingale

In order to continue the story now we must backtrack a little to the beginning 2005 again. I have just returned to the United States after my long trip. Zion is still alive but is acting like a dumbass and plans to turn the Golden Shields website into a cheap ripoff of Something Awful. Knowing this plan will fail my decision is to play along with Zion's scheme until it finally does fail. When that happens it my assumption that he will react the way he usually does and try to dump the site (and the blame for its failure) off on someone else. When he tried to do that I would leap into action by convincing him to give the site to me so I could restart the guild with it.

If that didn't work I had a backup plan as well: The current registration for the domain name was set to expire in October. I knew Zion was going to be having financial difficulty over the next few months and my hope was that he would either forget to renew the domain name or not have the money to do it. Again, if that happened I would be ready to take action by registering the domain for myself and if Zion didn't like it then that would just be tough luck for him.

All I needed to do now was bide my time and wait for the proper moment to move in. Then the long quest of rebuilding the Golden Shields as the great guild it once was could begin.

Meanwhile I needed something productive to do. A guild needs a decent game to play so I decided to start trying out some MMO games to see if I could find a good one for the guild to play once the website was back in my hands.

The first game I tried was actually one I had played a bit before my year out of the country. Planet Side. Unlike most other MMO games it was not just an RPG but was actually a first person shooter. Another great feature was that it did not have any NPCs or Computer controlled enemies. This meant that you never had to spend hours of your time killing hundreds of weak enemies to "level up" your character. All the battles in the game were real battles aginst other players and it was always quite fun. Sadly right about the time I started playing this game again was when the developers started doing shrooms and decided to add a lot of very questionable features to the game which many players weren't happy about. On top of that Sony Online Entertainment (SoE) was the publisher for the game and of the the SoE family of games Planet Side was considered the red headed stepchild of the family. It never got enough attention, server space or funding. As a result a lot of the features the players actually DID want to see added to the game would never be added, even if they were just very basic upgrades that would make the game a bit more flexible such as adding extra slots for equipment profiles. As a result of all these problems I decided the game didn't have the lasting appeal to be a home for the Golden Shields and I moved on.

The next game I tried was also a game published by SoE: Star Wars Galaxies. There were a few things I like about this game. It may sound silly, but I really enjoyed the way that there was a huge array of different races and types of clothing avaiable to customize the appearance of your character with. It was pretty much a gaurentee that you would be able to look any way you wanted in the game and that there wouldn't be any other players running around with identical appearances. There were also a huge number of different classes to play as and a fairly open ended system to develop the kind of skills you wanted your character to have. There were also many planets to explore and a lot of interesting locations to check out in the game. It almost reminded me of Asherons Call back in the day becuase exploring unique locations was always my favorite aspect of that game as well. I wandered the galaxy for a few months as a master marksman and a master scout before the game started to lose its appeal for me. Things really started to fall apart when I realized how many bugs were still in the game. For a game that had already been on the market for several years there was no excuse for all of these bugs to still be unfixed. When the developers released a patch that actually made it impossible to log into the game I was pissed and posted a message on the SoE forum along with many other to complain about it. Everyone who complained got banned from the forum. I quit all SoE games very shortly after that.

While I was pondering what game I should try next I also discovered that Zion was well on his way to wrecking the Golden Shields website. When I heard that he had chosen Andre/Lucas as his webmaster(s) again it reminded me of a time a few years previously when I had played a crappy browser game called Utopia and Zion had accidentally admitted that Andre also played the same game. As a result of that Andre was attacked out of the blue... many, many times. It was quite funny. Remembering that incident got me thinking that I might have to go and try out some more browser games. I already knew that Utopia was out of the question because they didn't allow guilds. I tried another browser game called Earth 2040 or something along those lines which was made by the same people who made Utopia. But Earth was a pretty crappy game and reguardless of what server you played on you would be endlessly spammed by people asking you to join their guild... even on the servers that didn't allow guilds!

I tried out many other browser games after that in an attempt to locate one that didn't totally suck. I tried so many games I can't even remember them all. But even with all of these games I tried my quest to find one which didn't suck was still a failure because the one I finally found and settled on for a short time was a new game which was still more or less in the beta phase of its developement called Zelderex Online. And as you will see in a few moments, it did indeed suck quite a lot.

Go to Chapter II, Zelderex Online