Chapter IV: Entropy
(September 2005 - December 2005)

"When written in Chinese the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity."
-John F. Kennedy

Although the early days of the Alchemist clan were celebrated for the victory over the Knight's clan, the next few rounds of Zelderex didn't go as well.

The current leader and original founder of the Alchemists Clan was Wyvernlord, who began the new round of Zelderex by deciding that he needed to make some changes. In his eyes the ideal clan was not large and powerful, which the Alchemists currently were, but was actually a smaller and more close knit community. Wyvernlord was disturbed by the fact that he didn't even know the majority of the people in his clan. Although I agreed that his vision of the ideal clan held some merit, I honestly wasn't sure what we could do to transform the current clan in such a way that wouldn't result in causing signifiant harm to the clan in the process. Eventually we decided to begin enforcing much more rigid rules concerning the level of activity and participation that was expected of members. As a result of this many of our less active members who either weren't playing Zelderex very much or were not visiting the forums began to be kicked out of the clan.

The new policies were not the only cause of the shrinkage of the Alchemists membership. As September rolled in the new school season began and many students no longer had time for online games. Many choose not to play following the start of the new round and of the ones that did many were much less active than they had been before. Although this meant the entire Zelderex community was feeling the effects of this, the Alchemists clan felt it much more than most as the largest clan in the game and thus the clan which lost the greatest number of members as a result of this.

Of course, a loss of members was not the only difficulty the Alchemists faced. The problems I had had with the owner of the game, his shrew of a wife and their fanboys started to transfer themselves over to the Alchemists. As fanboys began to notice that I was a member of the largest clan in the game their hatred for me became a hatred for the Alchemists. Though we had trouble with many fanboys, the most note worthy one called himself "ThE Nimm0R Ø2" but we mostly just called him "Nimm" for short. Nimm claimed he had been an officer in a clan that was run by the admin "Marsh" which was very large because Marsh used his status as an admin to convince many new players to join his clan. Although Nimm was no longer a member of that clan he claimed that they would declare war on us if he asked them to and he tried to threaten us with that information. He had found out that we didn't have a very high opinion of the admins in Zelderex and felt that we were "brainwashing" new players to the game to hate the admins. The ironic part of this was that Nimm reacted by sending messages to some of our lowest ranked members in an attempt to brainwash them into quitting our clan. When we asked him to stop doing that he threatened to make the admin clan declare war on us. This was where we made the mistake of actually taking him seriously and trying to use diplomacy to calm him down. What we didn't know at the time was that he didn't want to be calmed down, he just wanted to play mind games with us. He never had any power over the admin clan, they didn't even know what he was up to.

We eventually figured out that Nimm was just a windbag who was all talk. We told him to fuck off. When we did he and his clan of five other members decalred "war" on us but their attacks were pathetic and resulted in no damage. We mostly just laughed at them because we felt even attacking them back would just validate their shitty war. Eventually Nimm and his clan fell victim the the new school season. Nimm suddently disspeared from Zelderex and shortly after we discovered a personal website belonging to him which revealed he was just a kid in junior high school who had to quit Zelderex because the school robotics club was taking up too much of his time. His joke of a clan disbanded shortly after that.

But while the fanboys were annoying, the admins themselves were the real problem. Amazingly Marsh was the only admin who never gave us any trouble. "YourMOM" on the other hand was a constant source of trouble. She joined up with a high ranked clan called the "Pastafarians" who had named themselves after a very juvenile joke about religion. The "Pastas" as we called them were a young and inexperienced clan, not possessed at the time of a very wise leadership or a great deal of teamwork. But they were very high ranked because they were extremely selective about only letting high ranked players into their clan in the first place. This of course meant they were the notoious group which exists in almost every online game which is successful only because their members were the type of people that are logged into the game 24/7.

It didn't help that Zelderex had recently become the kind of game where you HAD to be logged into the game 24/7 to have any chance of success in. With each new round of Zelderex there was a long list of changes and updates to the mechanics of the game. Usually these changes were quite bad and this perticular round was no different. The changes for this round had modified the way combat worked so that defense was hopeless and attacks were ALWAYS successful. This meant that as soon as you earned any money it was almost certain that someone (usually several people at once) would instantly attack you, steal your money and then instantly spend it themselves. This gave players who were online 24/7 a huge advantage because they could not only attack everyone else all day long but they were also the only ones able to spend their own money without it being stolen. Zelderex was outrageously stressful that round. I remember having to set my alarm clock to go off every hour on the hour at night so I could wake up, log into Zelderex and spend my money just to keep it from being stolen. The only other option was to log in the next morning to discover I had been attacked every hour on the hour all night long and not only had a ton of damage that needed to be repaired but also had no money to pay for the repairs. About three quarters of the way through the round the admins finally changed the system again to make defense possible, but all they ended up doing was unbalancing the system in a new way.

While "YourMOM" was a member of the Pastafarians we attacked her constantly, both in the game and on the forums. She reacted about the way you would expect an obnoxious little girl to act: She cussed us out and spread lies to the other Pastas behind our backs. As a result we had constant problems with the Pastas, none of whom believed in diplomacy. They never declared war on us or even admitted they had any problem with us at all. Instead they just attacked us a lot. And we attacked them back a lot. This was mostly a waste of time for everyone involved because they weren't organized enough to do any real harm to us and we weren't high ranked enough to do any real harm to them.

Ironically (though perhaps not surprisingly) the Pastas eventually got what they deserved for allowing themselves to be manipulated by a teenage girl. Several different versions of the story were floating around the Zelderex community. The Pastas (who would barely talk to me) claimed that one of their members got banned for breaking some absurdly minor rule and had just recently renewed his "gold account" for the next six months as well as buying a large amount of in-game money with real money. He felt that since he got banned right after spending all that money on the game that he deserved a refund. Of course "YourMOM" reacted the way she always did whenever anyone wanted a refund. Cussing and banning followed, the Pastas obviously didn't appreciate that so they kicked her out of their clan, which resulted in more cussing and banning. By the time it was over only a handful of Pastas had survived the massive ban frenzy and they announced that the clan was leaving Zelderex for another browser game called OGame. An alternate version of the story which favored the admins was told to me by someone who claimed to be the brother of YourMOM. This person claimed that the Pastas had to be banned to "protect the game" from some lawsuit they were planning to bring aginst the admins. Nevermind that banning them wouldn't prevent a lawsuit and nothing else about his story makes any sense. At any rate, whichever story happens to be true I believe the Pastas got what they deserved for trying to become a tool for the corrupt admins of a shitty game.

Although most of the fanboys who opposed the Alchemists clan eventually got what they deserved in one form or another, their often humorous defeats did very little to improve the situation. As the fall season wore on the Alchemists clan continued to shrink as more and more of its members quit Zelderex citing either real life issues or a simple dislike for the direction the game was taking as their reasons for departure. At first this was not a major problem as the clan's huge size made it difficult to manage and as people left the clan actually began to become more coordinated and more focused on teamwork. However that began to change when the problems began to effect the clan leadership as well as its regular members.

Wyvernlord began to become less and less active. At first this was handled by passing off some of his leadership responsibilities off to other officers in the clan. However they too soon began to be less active and we eventually even began to have problems with some of our allies who were unable to get in touch with us because some of their contacts were no longer active or were not proplerly relaying their messages to the other leaders of the clan. As these problems became more frequent and more problematic, Wyvernlord quietly informed me that he thought it would be best if he stepped down as leader of the clan and quit Zelderex entirely. At first I attempted to talk him out of this as I thought his departure would be a serious blow to the morale of the clan and I tried to make it possible for him to stay by taking on more of his responsibilities myself. He stayed on for a while longer but then eventually announced his desire to step down to all the other officers as well. Again, I tried to convince him to atleast stay on as a member of the clan to avoid any confusion by the members about why he may have left. However Wyvernlord feared that if he remained a member of the clan he would not be active enough and would be more of a burden on morale than a benefit, so he stood firm that he needed to leave Zelderex altogether.

When Wyvernlord stepped down he asked that I take leadership of the clan. He felt it would be fitting as I was obviously the best qualified and already did much of the leadership work as it was. However I was still in a position where I did not want to lead the Alchemists clan because I needed to focus my energy on rebuilding the Golden Shields. Zion had recently died and I knew I needed to act quickly to sieze control of the old website and try to begin rebuilding the guild again. Instead of taking leadership myself I proposed that a better option would be for all the current officers to work as a team to lead the clan under another prominent member of the clan named Dameliel. With little other choice, Wyvernlord stepped down leaving Dameliel in charge of the Alchemists clan supported by myself and the other officers.

Dameliel was a capable leader who had come from a background similar to my own where he had been both a member and a leader in many previous guilds in other games, so he brought plenty of experience to the table with him. Under Dameliel the Alchemist clan preformed well in difficult times, though the clan continued to lose members as more and more people began to see Zelderex going in a direction they didn't like. Although Dameliel did an admirable job as the leader of the Alchemists, he too eventually decided that he needed to leave Zelderex and was forced to turn leadership over to someone else.

In the wake of Dameliel's departure another prominent member of the clan named Mordred stepped up to take charge. Mordred had been a long standing and well respected member of the clan whose ability to step in during heated discussions and ensure that everyone kept a cool head had won him the admiration of many. Unlike Dameliel however Mordred was not a leader and did not wish to be one. Mordred only stepped up to take leadership because no one else would do so at the time and he did not wish to see the clan die out for a lack of leadership. Although Mordred despised having to deal with all the drama that came with being the leader of one of the most well known clans in Zelderex, he still did a fantastic job of holding the clan together during very difficult times. Though Mordred did eventually tire of the job and step down, he remained an officer of the clan for a long time after that.

Following Mordred's leadership another long standing and well liked member of the clan called "Meatwad 1" was given leadership. Meatwad was probably one of the youngest members of the Alchemist clan and was surely one of the youngest officers. In many ways Meatwad reminded me of Phylor when he had first been promoted to be an officer in the Golden Shields. His behavior was sometimes erratic and his grasp of the English language was less than impressive, but what he lacked in those areas he more than made up for with his determination and skill when it came to Zelderex. He was the highest ranked member of the Alchemist clan in the overall rankings of the game and was often on the highly coveted "page 1" of the rankings listings. Meatwad also was much more active in the Zelderex community than anyone else in the clan by this point, which meant he often had many helpful connections with other clan leaders and well known players. These connections often allowed Meatwad to obtain helpful information and coordinate attacks with other major clans in the Zelderex community. Meatwad's aggressive leadership style was able to maintain the Alchemist clan through some of its final days in the Zelderex community.

However, Meatwad was the last leader the Alchemist clan would have.

Go to Chapter V, Darkness and Light