Epilogue: Perseverance
(May 2007 - January 2008)
"If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change."
-John A. Simone, Sr.
The Golden Shields always goes on. We have had good times and bad and our members stick with us. In this book you have seen a lot of the good times and a lot of the bad ones as well. This epilogue of the second book of our guild history has to cover more of both.
Although our decision to leave OGame was not one of our better times, it was still the right decision to make. Since our departure from the game it has continued to decline further and further. Oddly enough, my mysterious "three day ban" which lasted for three months was reversed and I was able to return for a short time to see how things had unfolded over time for OGame. The short anwser is: Not well.
The best example I can offer for the continued decline of OGame is a recent incident with one of the "Super Moderators" on their forums. Its a well known fact that because the game is owned by a German company, they choose the majority of their volunteer staff from the German players of the game. Its also a well known fact that when the majority of the staff is from Germany, they are MUCH less likely to punish players from Germany when they break the rules. Such was the case with this situation. A German player made a post on the English forums where some of the text was in German. But on the English forums the rule is that you can only post in English. Sadly, while one player tried to report the problem to a "Super Moderator" in the hope that something would actually be done about it, he openly admitted in public he feared that the breaking of the rule would be swept under the rug like so many times in the past. Sure enough, that was exactly what the super Mod tried to do.
When the mod saw the post, he first erased the non-english parts, then claimed that he was powerless to punish anyone because the post hadn't been "reported" properly. I knew this was a lie, because moderators regularly gave people warning not only when there was no official report on the thread, but also when no rule was actually broken! Also, did it make any sense for him to be able to edit the thread to remove the non-english text, but not be able to take any other action? Obviously not and I knew his excuse was a lie.
So I posted a reply to the thread calling him out on his lie. I didn't even bother to go into the whole "German" thing as I already knew that he would simply deny any wrong doing on his part while banning anyone who comaplined too loudly. I simply corrected him by pointing out that he did have the power to give a warning even if the post had not been reported. Sadly, he tried to cover the first lie with a second lie, now changing his story by claiming he never meant what he said before, but that he actually did not warn the thread because he was being "lenient" and it was his "discretion" warn people when he wanted to. Perhaps if he had left it at that he could have gotten away with it, but he followed this half-truth by threatening to warn my post for being spam, even though it hadn't been reported yet! Well, I couldn't really let that go, so I pointed out that if he warned my post when it hadn't been reported for breaking any rules, then he would be confirming that what I said was ture. He responded to that by inventing new lies and changing his story once again, now babbling some double speak that amounted more or less to "I can watn whoever I want whenever I want, or not warn them if I feel like it." That caused me to make this post, to clarify what point I was trying to get across:
The Moderator repeated his previous tactic when he saw this and invented new lies to cover the old ones. Now he tried to claim Dazed Dragon (the person who actually caught the rule breaker and tried to report him) was the one who broke the rules, something that he and no doubt everyone else knew was an obvious lie, but he seemed to believe he could get away with. He was also too cowardly to make his own post so he edited mine with all sorts of jibberish pink text which made it nearly unreadable. Clearly he beleived he could use his mod powers to simply shout me down and win the argument by default. I'm sure anyone who has read any story since "The Boy who cried Wolf" knows what happens when you use lies to get your way. When you cover one lie with another your problems will only compound themselves. Did this moderator get away with it this time? Maybe. But if he lives his life this way then sooner or later things will catch up with him. The only real question is if he will ever learn his lesson or if he will be like Azed, always trying to cover one lie with another only to be caught time and time again.
The only thing I know for sure is that the OGame Staff doesn't have a single shred of Honor, Integrity or Decency left to stand on.
On the other hand our search for a new browser game has not fared much better. After Ogame we briefly tried another game called "The Reincarnation" which I had high hopes for as it was entirely free and supposedly not for profit in any way. While we were not there long enough to have any run ins with their staff, we surely had more than enough with the community to convince us to look elsewhere. People were contantly picking fights with us for no logical reason at all other than just to fight. When we were still very new to the game a guild which was ranked twice as high as us and had twice as many members contacted me to say they would be declaring war on us in one week. The only thing that prevented it was that out of the blue another even bigger and meaner guild declared war on them first and without warning. Of course the worst part was when I went to the game forums to seek allies and saw many other people complaining about the exact same problems we were having. After reading several very long and very well written posts about how the behavior of many players was driving people away from the game, I decided then and there that it was time for us to leave. Even if we overcame the current difficulties, what point would there be if someone was always going to be trying to drive us out of the game? It would never really be our home.
The decision to leave Reincarnation was one of the few major decisions I made without consulting the other officers and leaders in the guild. I was nervous about how people would take it but plesantly suprised to discover that everyone was with me when I said it was time to go. Apparently everyone else was just as fustrated as I was with the game and were relived to hear we were finally done with it.
Meanwhile things have been going slowly downhill in Guild Wars as well. Not nearly as badly as with OGame mind you, we are still quite fond of the game. But sadly the expansions they have released over the years have not been quite was was expected. After Factions many of our members went and got the original Guild Wars, which was good. Then we waited for the next expansion, Nightfall. Nightfall was good and added a lot of quality PvE content. Sadly though it didn't really add any new PvP content and over time the limited PvP content in the game began to get stale. The developers, apparently deciding to cut their losses in the PvP department, decided to focus on the PvE department and hyped up the final expansion to the game "Eye of the North" as the ultimate PvE expansion. Although Eye of the North did add a lot of PvE content, it was actually very short and people plowed through it in a matter of weeks, then became bored with the game again.
In addition to the issues of new content not living up to expectations, our Guild Wars branch leader Laat has told me that in his opinion the developers have ruined the game by getting to "nerf happy" with the skills in the game. Orginally Guild Wars was meant to be a game where you could set your character up any way you wanted with a potentally unlimited number of possible builds, many of which could prove to be quite effective. Sadly in the end though the developers had added too many obviously overpowered skills while nerfing too many others and the end result was that only a very small number of possible builds were truly competitive. Every PvE and PvP situation in the game had just one possible "cookie cutter" option available as far as builds went and you either used that or you didn't play. Even with all the content in the game it was hard to enjoy it when there were only so few ways to enjoy it. Laat also wanted it added that it was sad that Arena Net (The developer of Guild Wars) apparently didn't know how to balance their own game.
But persevering though difficult times is what the Golden Shields does best, so onward we go. There is hope on the horizon. We have opened a new branch in Tabula Rasa which we had been waiting on for a long time. Some of our members, accustomed to not paying monthly fees due to Guild Wars and most Browser games not having them, have balked at the idea of paying $15 a month for the game but those who have put down the money so far have found it to be a worthwhile investment. Plus the Guild Wars developers have said they are now working on Guild Wars 2 which gives us something to look foreward to when Guild Wars can no longer meet our needs.
So as Zion said, and I quoted him on at the end of the first book in the Guild history: "We will go on stronger and wiser from what we learned."