Epilogue
(July 2003 - January 2004)
"The Golden Shields will never die. We've had strong successes in Everquest, Dungeon Siege, and Endless Ages Beta - great impressions that ended in failure in Shadowbane and Utopia - and countless other operations in Unreal Tournament and trivia contests. There's still alot of life left - and we will go on the stronger and the wiser from what we have learned."
-Zion, Order of the Golden Shields
The aftermath of the guild was as much a disaster as the fall of it. But there is some small comfort in knowing that the vast majority of guilds who hinged their bets on Shadowbane also sunk because it was such an awful game.
Even though East had been banned his character was still the leader of the in-game guild and the only way to fix the problem was to disband and start again from scratch. Phylor and another member named Ramza tried to restart the guild as a sub-guild of the Winter Blades again. But that must have lasted less than a month before Phylor and the former leader of the White tower moved to another server and started some other guild there.
East decided to stay with the guild even after he was banned but luckily for the guild, I also stayed despite the best efforts of Andre & Lucas to get me kicked out. In July I caught East trying to hand over the remainder of our members to some random Star Wars Galaxies guild. Zion was actually going to praise East for this because East had somehow convinced Zion that this guild was going to become a Sub-guild of the Golden Shields. Because I was still expecting East to betray us at some point because he had gotten himself banned before he could get around to it back when I first predicted he would betray us. So I visited the website of this SWG guild and then found their leader on AIM. After talking to him it was obvious that he didn't know anything about the Golden Shields. Combine that with a post on their forums were East was offering them free members if they promoted him and it was pretty obvious he had lied to Zion. East finally got what he deserved for a long time and was banned from the guild. As far as I know, he is still a huge cheater and the last time I tried to talk to him he yelled at me for bothering him while he was trying to dupe gold in World of Warcraft.
I'm not even remotely sure what is happening here, but I am sure that it is East's fault somehow.
After this we had lost virtually everyone. East was banned, Phylor was gone and anyone else who was still around like Andre or Lucas was just such a useless human being that we couldn't use them for anything productive. In fact, the only productive thing that happened in the entire month of July was when Zion gave me admin access to the website again so I could fix the problems Andre & Lucas still couldn't figure out. That took me all of ten minutes. Finally Zion came up with his worst scheme yet, giving the guild away. This was a terrible idea and I said so. But I knew Zion would ignore me as he always had, so where I would usually go nuts and yell at Zion, I just let him do it, knowing it would fail. Here was the post Zion made to the Golden Shields website:
"In this newsletter I announced that the Golden Shields has formed a committee to review applicants for the leadership position and the webmaster position. (And yes, I do mean THE leadership position, not just any leadership position.) Applicants should email letters of interest to zion@goldenshields.com. We will consider all applicants, both within the guild and from outside the guild. We are looking for a leader who can use the Golden Shield's already considerable resources to rebuild us into the great organization we once were."
-Zion, Order of the Golden Shields
The "committee" was Zion and I. This was probably fairly obvious as we were the only ones left. Amazingly enough we actually got allot of applications. However, only four of them were any good. We actually did end up picking one of them and asking him to lead the guild but he promptly disappeared as soon as he was announced as the new leader. So as always, I was proved right and Zion's crazy plans failed.
After this the guild website actually sat unused for the entire year of 2004 because I was out of the country and Zion started attending Amherst University. However in 2005 Zion finally made good on his long time threats to turn the guild website into a rip off of Something Awful. That disaster could easily fill a whole other document like this one. Its actually a very good story though, it has a mental hospital and Zion's sluttly ex-girl friend complains about doughnuts. So if I ever get around to posting that one, it would probably be allot more fun to read than this one was. Its actually quite similar to the "Crazy things happen to Zion Story" that was posted on the Golden Shields forums (well, with the exception that when Zion dies in real life, he tends to stay dead).
Before I end this document and finally close the book on the old guild once and for all, I just want to say that despite the mistakes Zion made and the many betrayals we had to suffer, I still think that the old guild would still be standing today if Shadowbane had never been released. Face it, anyone who was a major part of the Shadowbane community prior to the games release will tell you they had more fun playing pretend politics and shit-talking on the forums than they EVER had actually playing that awful game once it was finally released. I still hold Zion responsible for the death of the old guild because of his insistence that he could somehow get away with spending less than an hour a day on the guild (something any serious guild leader would tell you is insane). But it was Ubisoft and Wolfpack Studios who lied to us, cheated us and wasted years of our lives just so they could sell us a product they knew full well wasn't ready and we should never forget that.
But with that said - Zion was right about one thing. We failed but we will go on stronger and wiser from what we learned. "Unbreakable: For the time is near" is still our guild motto, and it means the same thing now that it meant back then.