Chapter II: Zelderex Online
(July 2005 - August 2005)

"Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen."
-Compton Mackenzie

By this point I had really given up on finding a "good" browser game. But I still needed a way to pass the time until an oppertunity to retake the Golden Shields from Zion presented itself. So I had settled into working on an old personal website of mine which I used to talk about an unpopular videogame company. I had been using this site for many years to discuss my opinions on the gaming industry but during my year out of the country I had laregly neglected the site due to the fact that I didn't have reliable access to the internet. Now that I was back I was updating it again and using it as a way to pass the time. Sadly (or perhaps not depending on how you look at it) the unpopular gaming company I used to discuss was now so unpopular that nobody with two brain cells really wished to discuss anything about them anymore, so any more debate on that subject was going to be a waste of time. Instead I had taken to adding other types of content to the site instead, one of which was a section reviewing various games I had recently played.

So my plan going into Zelderex Online was to play it for a few weeks, create a review of it for my website and then never pay any further attention to it again. Oh how I wish it had been that simple...

To get started, I have to explain to you in some detail how the game mechanics of Zelderex worked. Keep in mind that several years have passed between the time I played the game and the time of the creation of this document. This does not imply that I don't remember these events accurately but rather that in the time which has passed you can be sure that Zelderex has changed great deal. So the game I am about to describe is nothing like the game you would find if you were to play Zelderex today. With that said I can tell you that what first attracted me to Zelderex was its unique design which was unlike any other game I had seen at the time. Sadly, Zelderex no longer has anything about its design which can be called unique because the owner/designer/programmer of the game (its one guy) decided he could apparently make more money by shifting his game to be more like every other game on the market. I personally find that boring but it is far from the largest problem the game has.

However, way back in the day when I played Zelderex was not very much like those other games at all. Where as most browser games are "war games" which put the player in charge of a country/planet/empire where the player spends most of their time trying to create a vast military to attack his neighbors with, Zelderex had a very different concept. That isn't to say Zelderex didn't relvove around the same concept of "random" attacks which so many other games use because it did. What was different was HOW you attacked. Instead of training a huge military, you had only a handful of soldiers to work with who continued to gain experience over time as they participated in battles. Not only was it to your advantage to keep these soldiers alive to benefit from their experience, but there were multiple other ways in which the system was unique. For one, you did not simply send your troops to attack another player and assume that they could reach this player. You also needed to have a means of transportation for your soldiers and that transportation had to be capable of reaching the enemy. Vehicles in the game ranged from simple trucks to boats and even advanced spacecraft. This was nessary because players could choose to locate their bases in various locations which required special transportation to reach, such as on an island or even in outer space.

Again though, I stress that if you were to play Zelderex today it would look very little like the game I have described up to now. As I've said many changes have been made and sadly the game has become more generic as opposed to remaining unique. As I've been told by the few friends of mine who are foolish enough to continue to play Zelderex, soldiers are now known as heroes and make up only a small portion of your military force. Instead you now hire hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless troops who you treat as connon fodder. In other words it has become much like every other "war" game on the market. However even this is not the single greatest problem the game has.

A larger problem the game has, although it is still not the largest problem, is the "gold accounts" which are a requirement to play the game. Keep in mind that Zelderex is and always has been advertised as a "FREE" game. In fact, I've seen quite a lot of banner ads and other sorts of ads for the game and I've never seen one which even suggests that the game will cost you any money to play. But thats the scam the game is running. You are told its free when you sign up and from a purely technical point of view it is "free" to PLAY the game. It is not free to actually ENJOY however. This is where the "gold accounts" come into play. If you sign up for the game as a free user you will soon discover that 90% of the games content, inculding vehicles, weapons, buildings and so on, is restricted only to the gold members. Now this would not be unusual if you were playing a free trail in an MMORPG for example. But Zelderex is not that kind of game. In Zelderex all players are thrown into the same arena to duke it out reguardless of if they happen to be gold members or not.

So imagine this scenario: You are not a gold member. You have the maximum level of buildings and weapons you are allowed to have. This means your base is just a small castle on the ground with a handful of soldiers protecting it, most likely armed with clubs or sharpened sticks. But there are plenty of gold members within range to attack you. And those gold members are much more upgraded than you are. They have more buildings, more upgrades, better weapons, more soldiers and a lot of other cool advantages you don't have. Oh, and their bases are in outer space and you can't even attack them because you can't access the nessary vehicles. But they can attack you. And they win. All the time.

THAT is what playing Zelderex online is like if you don't have a gold account.

Now, it should be noted that it is possible to rise high in the ranks in Zelderex without having a gold account. This is the defense the Zelderex owner/developer will offer if you calim his game is not free. But there is a difference between being techincally "successful" in a game and actually being able to enjoy playing it! While it is possible to ascend quite high in the ranks of the game without a gold account, all this really does is make you an easy target for much more powerful gold members who will find it quite profitable to attack you on a regular basis. But even this is not the biggest problem the game has.

I did not discover the BIGGEST problem Zelderex had until after I had published my review of the game.

I broke my review down into three sections. In the first I talked about "the good" which was how unique I felt the game was. In the second, I talked about "the bad" where I described how the game had a very unfinished feel to it due it it having been recently released. One example I gave for that was how if you searched the game's help documentation you would discover that most subjects simply said "no help on that topic" or some similar error message indicating that no help had been created on that subject yet. I even inculded a screenshot along with the review showing how I had searched for help on "buildings" which were a major part of the game but that there was no help on that topic.

The last section of my review was about "the ugly" side of the game. In this case the ugly side was the community. Now, this was not exactly unexpected. The sad fact about browser games these days is that they are all "war games" which more or less means the entire point of the game is to build a big army and attack someone to steal their land/money/food/fuel/whatever for yourself so you can build a bigger army, attack more people, steal more stuff, get bigger and so on and on and on like that forever. And when you design a game where the sole purpose of the game is to kill other people and take their stuff, you end up with a community composed of the type of people that have no moral issues about killing people and taking their stuff. In other words, if you build a game for assholes you will end up with nothing but assholes. If you build it, they will come.

For my review I decided to illustrate this by telling the story of my interaction with a perticular group of assholes. This group was a "clan" in the game known as "The Knights" and their leader was a fellow named Jaso. At the time the Knights were the largest clan in the game (they had the most members) so they were everywhere. And because the sole purpose of the game was to attack everyone in sight to steal their stuff without a second thought, this meant I was being attacked by members of this clan on a fairly regualr basis. But at the same time I was getting multiple invitations to join their clan EVERY DAY. What was more was that it was the same invatation every time and it was always poorly written.

In the entire time I knew Jaso I never once saw him use a capital letter. NEVER. He even forgot to capitalize the word "The" in "The Knights" in his clan name.

Now let me ask you this, if you were being attacked every day by a group of players and that same group of players was constantly asking you to join them but their leader appeared to be illiterate, would you join? I would have to hope you would have enough sense not to. I surely didn't and I was getting tired of getting constant invites from this group. When I pointed this out for Jaso he said his members would never stop attacking me and that he would never stop sending invites until I joined. Then his members started attacking me even more. I responded to this by doing two things: I planted bombs in the bases of everyone within the Knights clan who was in my attack range. And by taking screen shots of my conversations with the Knights to show in my review of the game to illustrate the problem with building a game for assholes.

Overall it wasn't a fantastic review of the game. But it was not nearly as bad as I might have made it out to be had I known what was really wrong with the game. Once the review was published was when I finally discovered what was truly wrong with the game. I made a thread on the Zelderex forums linking to my review and then walked away for a few hours. When I came back the thread had been deleted! Not only that but I was getting messages from all sorts of Zelderex fanboys saying that the admins were telling people about how my review was all lies and not to read it. Zelderex had a chat room and I went in there to talk to one of the Fanboys in question only to discover that the head admin of the game (whose name I can't remember because it was something like "Critic" but he spelled it with "L337 H@XX0R" speak so it came out looking like "C17R1C") was in there right at that moment telling everyone what an evil doer I was and how I had lied about the game. Apparently the trick he had pulled was to update the help documentation so that there was now a section on buildings and he was attemtping to convince everyone that the screenshot I had posted was doctored.

But that wasn't even the worst part. I soon discovered that "C17R1C" wasn't just an admin of the game he was also the owner of the game and its sole programmer. It was his game, he made it. And he apparently considered it to be some kind of personal attack when I gave it a less than stellar review. This was apparently why he was going to so much effort to twist the facts around so he could whip all his fanboys up into a frenzy aginst me.

But not even THAT was the worst part. This was where I finally discovered the true horror behind the game. YourMOM. No, not your mom as in the person who gave birth to you. And no, not "your momma" as in the bad insult. YourMOM the admin of Zelderex. "YourMOM" was the name an actual admin of the game was using. Real professional, eh? But it wasn't just that "YourMOM" had a bad name. She was a bitch as well. Of the three admins for the game (C17RIC, another guy named Marsh and Yourmom) she was the main admin in charge of actually respoding to any requests/suggestions/complaints from users. And no mater what the suggestions was, how reasonable the request or how well worded the complaint her response was the same: Shout a stream of profanity and threaten to ban the person.

Loosers?

Now you may be wondering why a person so unqualified to interact with any human being on any level got promoted to be the sole person in charge of all public realtions for a major online game. Like most admins who get their job without earning it her method involved a lot of sucking up. But in this case I mean sucking up in the most literal sense possible. She actually had to suck the penis of the owner of the game to get her job. She was his wife!

And SHE was the biggest problem Zelderex Online had.

Go to Chapter III, The Knights War