Chapter V: Darkness and Light
(October 2005 - December 2005)
"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
While the Alchemists were slowly marching toward their end, I had my own problems to deal with. As a male of my species I'm obligated to deny that I possess any emotions besides angry, horny and sleepy. However an impartial observer would probably tell you that I was actually very depressed about the death of my best friend Zion who killed himself at the end of October. I won't go over the deatils of the death again as that as fairly well covered by part one of this book, but suffice to say that at the time of his death he and I did not agree on how he was running the Golden Shields. Although I was not pleased about his death, I did know that it was my best chance to sieze control of the guild once more so that it could be put back on the right track. And I knew if I was going to make that goal happen I had to put aside all other distractions and feelings to get the job done.
My plan was based on the knowledge that the Golden Shields domain name (goldenshields.com) registration was going to expire at the end of October and Zion hadn't had a chance to renew it before he died because of how often he had been locked away in the mental hospital(s). As soon as the domain expired I intended to buy it back and nearly instantly have the website back up and running again under my control. Based on the level of intelligence Andre, Lucas and the others had displayed when it came to the internet I figured that from their perspective it would almost seem like I had stolen the website right out from under them! This would be the perferct way for me to announce that the guild was infact going to become a guild again while banning all the idiots Zion had brought on board during his time as leader. Hopefully the transition would be seamless and rapid, making things a lot easier on me and getting the guild back on its feet sooner.
What I didn't know was that there were certain sinister forces at work on the internet that were already in the process of stealing the Golden Shields domain for themselves. It is possible to backorder domains which are about to expire so you can take ownership of them the instant they do expire. This method of obtaining popular domains that have expired is often used by evil foreign companies who will use the domains as ad space for advertisements that are only vaguely realted the whatever website may have formerly occupied that space. So while I was checking the domain every day waiting for it to expire so I could buy it back, some Korean guy was just playing Starcraft until someone else bought the domain for him. One night I checked the domain before I went to bed and it was still in a "pending delete" status but then when I checked it the very next morning it was already owned by some random company in Korea. Once again the Golden Shields domain name had been stolen from me.
But even so I wasn't willing to give up. I had to go on, even though it was going to be much harder now. I registered a new domain name (goldenshields.net) and began work on a new website.
There was one other important part of a guild besides a website however. And that was a game. A guild needed a game to play. My search for new games had been ongoing for a long time and it was clear that the most recent game I had tried, Zelderex, was not going to work out. Luckly I had one other game in mind that was about to go into an open beta state, which I thought would make it the perferct place to begin recruiting new members into the guild to play the game in the future when it was finally released. This game I was watching was called Dark and Light. Under development by a previously unknown French development studio, the game had a very nice website which actually claimed a lot of the same features that Shadowbane was supposed to have but never did. Plus a lot of other interesting features that made the PvP combat sound very interesting and should have made the PvE less boring as well. Of course with the game coming out of a previously unknown developer and making such outrageous calims I should have seen that this was just another Shadowbane in the making. But I figured if the open beta was about to start it would be okay to try it out and then move on if it wasn't any good, right?
But that was actually the most sinister part of the whole deal. The developers were trying to move away from the term "open beta" and were actually selling access to the beta by calling it a full game! They called it "Settlers of Garaenth" and were actually only giving away a very limited number of free accounts, then selling pre-orders for the final game to everyone who didn't get a free account. The really obnoxious thing is that people weren't limited to getting just one free account, so many people grabbed up as many accounts as they could for themselves and their friends. The free accounts were literally gone in mere seconds. The vast majority of people had to pay for the pre-order.
But despite the great lengths the developers went to to squash the idea that this was just an open beta that they were making people pay for, it was VERY clear that the game wasn't ready to be played at all. The login servers barely ever worked so even getting into the game was nigh on impossible. Once the game was officially opened it still took three days before I could actually login. And once I did I was highly dissapointed with what I found. The game was riddled with bugs and was still clearly in the very early beta stages. They had even mixed up the names of two of the classes so when I made my first character even though I selected the class I wanted to play I had the skills from a different class! They fixed this fairly quickly but only did so by swaping the names on the classes to correct them, but left everyone who had unknowingly choose the wrong class with the incorrect class, thus forcing us all to start over with new characters again.
The next thing I noticed was that there was really noting to DO in the game because it was so clearly unfinished. Only about 10% of the map was actually accessable and the rest was off limits. Even then the parts that were actually open were more or less just empty wasteland. A few bare bones NPC towns were scattered around but you couldn't actually talk to any of the NPCs and there were no quests or missions or anything of that sort to do. You could kill things and level up but even that was a tedious and mostly pointless process. Monster spawns were completely random and would dissapear after awhile so it took forever just to find something to kill that wouldn't kick your ass. Making money was even worse. There was only one shop in the game and the only way to make money was to sell items the mosnters had dropped to the one shop keeper. But he would only buy items from you for one gold coin each. Everything he sold cost several hundred coins so it was nearly impossible to ever make enough money to buy anything for yourself. NONE of the interesting features listed on the website were actually in the game. The one working feature the game did have was the ability to fly a dragon but that got boring very quickly once you discovered there was nowhere to go in a totally empty world.
But the problems with the game itself were not the only problems. The developers had been bragging a lot lately about how they had recently sold the rights to the game to a Chinese publisher who was going to release the game in China. Not living in China and not being a shareholder for this company, I obviously did not really care if people in China played the game or not so I ignored the bragging. However after the open beta went online there were many conspiracy theories popping up about the Chinese players and the frequent "down time" with the servers not allowing people to log in. People began to claim that the times when the servers were supposedly down and the US and European players couldn't log in were actually faked to give the Chinese players sole access for Chinese only events. The developers fervently denied this but people began posting translations of the Chinese website for the game with announcements of in-game events along with screenshots of large numbers of Chinese players gathered around game admins. As the conspiracy theories began to sound more and more probable, the forum moderators simply began closing threads about the subject and banning people who started new threads. Combine that with the huge outrage of all the people who had to pay to get into the beta just to find out the game sucked and the forum moderators were constantly busy just trying to stem the flow of complaints. They had to directly tell people they weren't allowed to talk about bugs because the sheer number of bug reports alone would have flooded the forum non-stop for days on end. It was almost as if they hadn't run any sort of beta at all prior to this!
Things got really bad when the moderators began to get so out of control that they just started closing EVERY THREAD without even listing a reason. After one moderator closed over two pages of threads with nothing more than a one word reply to each thread which said "closed" I decided to send him a private message informing him what I thought of his moderating work. In reply he banned me from the forum for a week! His excuse for this was to claim that my comments about him weren't "constructive" enough for his taste. After that I decided it was time to get the hell out of this game and fast. I closed my account for the beta and got a refund on my pre-order of the real game. When my week long ban was over I sent another PM to that moderator who had banned me and showed him a copy of my receipt showing I got a refund for my pre-order. I asked him how constructive he thought it was to drive customers away from the game. He did not reply.
Clearly Dark and Light was never the game for the Golden Shields. Its failure however had left the guild high and dry. I wasn't sure where to look next.
Some good news atleast is that Dark and Light did get what it deserved for trying to rip off so many people. I quit at just the right time because eventually they stopped giving refunds for the pre-order and I even heard rumors that people were having a hard time canceling their subscription to the game and were still being charged monthly fees even after they thought they had canceled. This behavior pissed off a lot of people and Dark and Light was the lowest rated game on MMORPG.com for a very long time because of it. As it stands they only moved up a notch because someone else somehow made an even worse game that got an even lower rating.
Just for the fun of it (and perhaps just to spite the DnL devs one more time) I decided to cruise down memory lane and find some of the most "non-constructive" comments about the game on MMORPG.com.
Then of course there were my own comments on the game.
I think that pretty well sums it up.
However, despite my ability to laugh at this situation looking back on it now, I must admit that the new Golden Shields was not off to a great start.