Chapter VI: A New Dawn
(January 2006 - June 2006)

"If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it."
-Mary Engelbreit

Following the failure of Dark & Light to provide a new home for the Golden Shields, I was unsure of how to proceed. Meanwhile the Alchemists clan was suffering from problems of their own. They were having difficulty finding leaders and officers willing to stand up and take charge of the clan. At the same time Zelderex was continuing to decline in quality, leaving the Alchemists stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they stayed in Zelderex then eventually all of their members would get fed up with the game and quit. Meanwhile they couldn't go very far without anyone to lead them to a better game. So they too were in the same situation: Unsure of how to proceed.

Eventually the solution came to me when I found a new way of looking at the problems each group had. The Golden Shields had a leader but was lacking members. The Alchemists had members but were lacking a leader. Neither group had a suitable game to call home. Once I broke these problems down to the simplest possible level, the soultion seemed equally simple: Both groups needed to merge into one group, so that the new group would have both a leader and members. Then togeather they could all search for a new home.

I presented this solution to the remaining officers of the Alchemist clan and they agreed. The Alchemists would merge into the Golden Shields and the new group would retain the identity of the Golden Shields, using its name, website and history. In exchange the Alchemists forum would be kept as it already had a large number of posts and a solid design. In return for joining the guild, all the members of the clan would keep their rank, be rewarded for their past contributions to the clan and the accomplishments of the clan would also be recorded in the Golden Shields history(which you have already read about if you have made it this far). In this way the Alchemist clan would survive and the Golden Shields would have the resources it needed to move foreward.

Meanwhile Meatwad, the current leader of the few remaining Zelderex players, helped to solve the next problem of how we were going to find a new home. Meatwad had recently been playing another borwser game called OGame, which he now recommended to the rest of the clan. Though it was a browser game it was not like Zelderex at all, it was actually good. There were no "gold accounts" or any other way to purcahse in-game advantages. It was owned by a fairly large and well known company in Germany (GameForge) so there was little chance of the owners wife going on a massive ban hammer rampage through the game. Plus the mechanics of the game seemed solid. You started with control over one planet which you would build up over time, eventually adding more planets to your empire and a fleet to protect them. One downside is that like nearly all browser games the best way to grow your empire was to steal resources from other players. But while the game was not exactly original in the respect, it did atleast remain much more balanced than other browser games and was actually fun to play.

And so the New Golden Shields declared that its first official game would be OGame. We quickly set up a new branch there and began to encourage those few who were still playing Zelderex to begin the process of switching over to OGame (something most were more than happy to do). At first the new branch in OGame used the name of the former Zelderex clan, The Lost. This was later changed after our first war (covered in the next chapter) to the guild name of Golden Shields. The first leader of the OGame branch was Mordred, one of the former Zelderex leaders. As with Zeldrex though Mordred quickly grew tired of the extra drama that came with leadership, so he passed the job off to the next person. That person was Bthorne, another long time member of the former Zelderex clan. Like Mordred, Bthorne had little interest for the drama and diplomacy aspects of leadership. His strengths were in working with his fellow guild members. Bthorne often sent extra resources to any member of the guild who needed assistance and he was present for nearly every major battle during our time in OGame, his presence often being the decisive factor. Although it would seem that Bthorne would need to make signifiant sacrifices in other to help other members of the guild so often, he actually did quite well for himself as he proved to be a very skilled OGame player. Bthorne was the first member of our guild to amass the resources to research the outrageously expensive "Graviton" technology nessary to buil the largest ship in the game: The Death Star. When Bthorne had built several of these, he continued to use them to benefit the guild as a whole.

While OGame was progressing along quite smoothly, not all members were content with mere browser games. Some members began to clamour for an actual MMO game with graphics and stuff. So the search for one began and someone soon pointed out that the game "Guild Wars: Factions" was coming out soon. Factions was not merely an expansion to the original Guild Wars but was actually a stand alone game that could be played with or without the original game. There was also no monthly fee so the whole thing sounded like a pretty sweet deal to us. We talked many of our members into getting Factions and set up a new branch in Guild Wars right away. The first and only leader of the Guild Wars branch was another Zelderex veteran named Laat. Laat had quickly displayed a huge fondness for Guild Wars and as the most active officer of the Guild in Guild Wars by far he was an obvious choice for leader of that branch. Like Mordred and Bthorne, Laat did not involve himself in the diplomacy side of leadership. But also like Mordred and Bthorne, Laat's skills resided in playing the game with great skill and aiding his fellow guild members.

While Guild Wars proved to be a fun game, it also afforded us oppertunities to recruit new members. There were literally thousands of guilds from all over the world in Guild Wars and competition to recruit new members was fierce between them. But we had some success by appealing to the more mature, serious and intelligent gamers, showing them that we had the history, determination and resources to offer them a stable and long term home. We obtained a Ventrillo voice chat server in order to have a secure and effective way to communicate in Guild Wars. Later we also used the vent server for attacks in OGame as well, so the vent server proved to be a boon for the entire guild and is still a staple of our communications to this day. In Guild Wars itself our members worked hard to earn enough money for us to buy a guild cape, guild hall and all the services that go inside of the guild hall. These actions proved to the Guild Wars community that we weren't just another fly by night group that would be here today and gone tommrow, but a serious guild that was here for the long haul. Although we probably won't ever be the biggest guild in the world, our dedication to Guild Wars did earn us quite a few vaulable new members to help fill out our ranks. Many of these members have stuck with our guild through both good times and bad. Thats a kind of loyalty that you don't earn very easily.

I truly believe it is our perseverance and loyalty that really set us apart from every other guild out there. I also believe you will see even more examples of this in the next chapter.

Go to Chapter VII, The Second Knights War