Chapter III: The Knights War
(August 2005)
"The greatest oak was once a little nut who held its ground."
-Author Unknown
Thanks to a 19 year old game programmer, his horrible shrew of a wife and the horde of fanboys their lies had whipped into a frenzy, I had decided that it would be a good idea to move onto another game. But before I could figure out how to delete my account and get the heck out of there, I got a message from a player named Wyvernlord who identified himself as the recruiter for the Knights clan I had talked about in my review of the game. He wanted to talk to me in the Zelderex chatroom. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like what he had to say but I figured if I was leaving the game anyway then it couldn't hurt to talk to him for a few minutes.
Obviously the first thing he wanted to discuss was the accusations I had made about his clan in my review. I was expecting that and I once again repeated that everything I had said in my review was the absolute truth despite all the effort the owner of the game and his wife were going to to make people think otherwise. Suprisingly, his reaction wasn't what I expected. He actually believed me. As it turned out he had his own suspicions about the clan leader Jaso for quite some time. Wyvernlord was the clan recruiter and he was proud of the job he had been doing because he had been recruiting people honestly and felt he was responsible for the majority of the people who were in the clan. He already had suspicions about Jaso's leadership ability (or lack thereof to be specific) and finding out now that Jaso was trying to recruit more members behind his back by threatening them was the last straw. Now that Wyvernlord knew this he wanted to break away from the Knights, take many of the best members who he had recruited and start his own clan. I told him I thought that sounded like a good idea.
But that was when Wyvernlord suprised me again. Wyvernlord was so impressed with the way I had handled the Knights who had tried to attack me and the way I told the truth about my experiences with the game that he wanted me to join his clan too. He said that he was sure breaking away from the Knights would eventually mean going to war aginst them and he needed someone to help him devise a strategy to defeat them. Although even to this day I'm still not quite sure how he knew, I can only assume that Wyvernlord had concluded from reading my review of the game that I was an experienced online gamer and guild leader. Although that made his request for my help seem very flattering I was still hesitant at first. Even though it did sound like he could use my help and I did want to help him, I also had the Golden Shields to think about. I knew that within the next few months I would hopefully have an oppertunity to sieze control of the old website and get the guild started again. But I also knew that the window of oppertinuty would be short and I had to be ready to act when the time came. I needed to be ready to make a commitment to my own guild and I didn't think I could afford to be running someone elses guild for them. But Wyvernlord was persistent and turned out to be every bit as good of a recruiter as he claimed to be as he eventually convinced me. But even as I agreed to join him I was telling myself that I had to be ready to leave the moment the time came to do so.
Once it was agreed the new clan was put togeather very quickly. Wyvernlord named it "The Alchemists" and many of his friends in the Knights instantly came to aid him. A new forum went online right away and members of the Knights started to break away very quickly to join the new clan. It seemed that Wyvernlord had been correct when he said that there were many members of the Knights that were more loyal to him than they were to Jaso. But Wyvernlord didn't stop there either. He also used his recruitment skills to bring in many new members to the clan as well. The clan grew so fast I don't think the Knights even had time to react to what was happening and even I was suprised by how quickly things were progressing. In only a matter of approximately one week The Alchemists clan was already as large as the Knights. This was quite an accomplishment as even after Wyvernlord and his friends had left the Knights they still remained the largest clan in the game. Now that the Alchemists had matched the Knights in size, it was time for the two largest clans in Zelderex to go to war.
Wyvernlord called all the officers in the Alchemists to a meeting in the chat to talk about the upcoming war with the Knights. Since he recruited me to be his strategist, this was obviously the point where everyone looked to me for guidance on what to do. I knew two things. First was that in a game where you can't actually kill your opponent all you really can do is demoralize him into giving up. The second was that with a clan as large as ours was we couldn't possibly hope to keep track of everyone, all we really could do was give everyone a job to do and hope that they did it. So the plan that I presented was for us to do a rapid scouting run to get ourselves a list of all the Knights, their ranks and as much other information about them as possible. Then we would choose a series of targets to list as primary targets for the war in such a way that we would have targets in almost every rank so that every member of our clan would have one target whom they were supposed to focus their attacks on. We would then update the list as nessary through the course of the war. The idea was that by getting as many of our members as possible to all attack just a few of the knights at a time we would demoralize those Knights into leaving their clan. Eventually we would whittle the Knights down until there were none left.
Everyone agreed it was a solid plan. The officers went to gather the information While I began building the list. My plan was to post the list on my personal website and then manually update the list each day as members of the Alchemists reported new information on the forums. The first version of the list looked a bit like this:
The plan worked amazingly well. It took a lot of work on my part to sift through all the information being posted on the forums but I managed to keep the information posted on the targets list up to date. As a result people stayed motivated and focused on their attacks. In most cases it was only a few days before any given target figured out he was getting attacked more than he could handle alone and that the other Knights weren't making any effort to help him. Once that happened the person in question usually quit the Knights quite quickly and many former Knights were even joining the Alchemists. As the war went on the Alchemists continued to get more and more powerful while the Knights continued to dwindle away.
When the war began there was only about two more weeks left in the current "round" of Zelderex. A round in Zelderex always lasted three months and at the end of a round the entire game was reset to make everyone start over. By the end of the round the Knights had only a handful of members remaining, most of whom had gone inactive or put their accounts into vacation mode. This inculded Jaso himself who went silent fairly shortly into the war and allowed his clan to fall apart. When the new round began Jaso did not return and the Knights did not reform. The Alchemists on the other hand did reform and retained their status as the largest clan in Zelderex for many months after that. Jaso and his so-called Knights were defeated.
In many ways it wasn't so much that the Alchemists had destroyed the Knights as subverted and conquered them. The Knights recruiter had broken away to start his own clan, stolen most of the Knights members in the process and eventually drove away the old leader and his few remaining loyalists. In this way the war with the Knights wasn't just a victory for the Alchemists clan but also the very foundation of their clan. The Alchemist members who distinguished themselves during the war eventually became the officers and even future leaders of the clan while the forums and targets list continued to serve as a means for the Alchemists to gather, share and use information. From a certain point of view one could say that the Alchemists and the Knights were the same clan, but the Alchemists simply proved to have a better and more motivated leadership.
As time went on I continued to improve the targets log. One of the final versions looked like this:
In addition to providing information on targets the Alchemists were at war with it also provided information on other known enemies of the clan and on targets that might be better avoided.
The Alchemists did eventually fight two more wars. These wars had less to do with the Alchemists but instead were fought in defense of our allies. The first was aginst a clan called "BLOOD AND HONOR" which was much like the Knights in that they were large but had poor leadership. The same tactics that had won the Knights war were applied aginst B&H and they were easily disbanded. The other war was aginst a well known Zelderex clan called Vengeance. They proved to be more stubborn and were not as easily defeated. The War aginst Vengenace was never really ended and I believe they still exist in Zelderex.