Chapter III: Ubisoft Strikes Back
(August 2001 - December 2001)

"ITS DAMN HARD TO BE A GUILD IN A NON-EXISTENT GAME!"
-Alatar, Order of the Golden Shields

Now, this is the point where a whole hell of allot of NOTHING went on for a very long time. To make matters worse we really didn't see that coming. What I mean is that at this point about 6 months or so had gone by since the day we founded the guild and we had, based on what an employee of Wolfpack Studios named Ashen Temper had said, expected that the game would be released very very soon. In fact, Ashen Temper's only purpose in life at that point seemed to revolve around starting totally unfounded rumors about the release date of the game. He was good at it, so good in fact, he had the whole Shadowbane community thinking the game would be released in just months and that an open Beta would start any day. The whole house of cards came crashing down on Ashen Temper when Ubi Soft became the new Publisher of the game and released a press release that looked something like this:

Dear Shadowbane fans,
We, Ubi Soft, are the new publishers for Shadowbane. We Published all these best selling games blah blah blah. We are the greatest publishers alive blah blah blah. You should bow down and worship us blah blah blah.
Oh, by the way, Shadowbane won't be released for at least a year, suckers.

Within minutes the Shadowbane forums flooded with "WHAT THE FUCK!? NOOOOOO!" posts and, looking rather stupid, Ashen Temper finally had to own up to the fact that he lied to everyone about the release date of the game. Of course he dressed it up to sound like it was going to make the game better, like it meant there would be time to add more features and all that crap that game developers pull out of their ass when they have to disappoint their fans and delay a game.

This left our guild, along with plenty of others, out in the cold. Allot of fans who had been surfing Shadowbane website every day, posting tons of messages on forums, joining guilds, etc, all just up and left all at once because they didn't feel like waiting another year for the game to be released. Entire guilds just disappeared over night. Even quite allot of the guilds that tried not to eventually died out from lack of interest. Even one of our biggest allies, The Council of Thirteen, just kind of went silent all of a sudden and it took us quite awhile to get access to their private forums where we found out all the members broke up when the leader announced he had to quit because of health reasons. Things were going downhill fast for allot of guilds, even the biggest ones, and the jackass role players like Lok-ri were just patting themselves on the back for running us off even though they weren't really responsible at all. Even one guild that nearly everyone liked, The Penshire Street Bakery, shut down because the leader of the guild decided to boycott the game over his dislike of the way it was being developed.

In my opinion something had to be done to keep people interested in Shadowbane. Zion, of course, didn't want any part of it because he was afraid it would mean that he had to do some actual work.

I made allot of suggestions to Zion, most of which fell on deaf ears. I wanted to send out weekly newsletters to all members to let them know about any events going on, etc, so they would think the guild was still active even if it wasn't. Zion resisted this in every way possible because he refused to let anyone else have the mailing list and he didn't want to put in the effort to do it himself. I bothered him constantly until he finally agreed to send out news letters more often than usual but he never actually did it. He would pretend to forget or argue that he couldn't do it because there was a so much more important hockey game had to go to or a party somewhere that involved two or three people smoking pot on a roof. In the end we were lucky when we got one newsletter out a month.

My next suggestion was hosting Unreal Tournament games for our members. I played Unreal Tournament allot back then and I knew it was one of the few PC games Zion actually owned. To my surprise Zion actually agreed and another one of our members, Phylor also had the game and agreed to help set it all up which meant Zion wouldn't have to do any work. However, there was a LOT of lag on Phylor's connection and I had to try to set up a game myself. On my connection we played a few games and even got a few other members involved. In the end though we had to give it up, even though I was hosting the game over a cable internet connection, between Zion and Phylor's 56K connection we were lucky when we got more than 1 frame per second. After a few attempts we figured out the whole thing was a disaster.

Sadly, this was the best chat the Golden Shields ever had...

My last suggestion was actually just to copy what allot of other guilds were doing at the time and put up a chat room on our website. I wanted to do it the same way all the other guilds were doing it which was to put a little java program up on the site to create a chat room that members could log directly into from the site. Once again, that was too much effort for Zion who said he was just going to set up an IRC Chat. I hated this plan because even the guilds using IRC chats still had a method of logging in to it from their site but Zion was just going to make everyone download an IRC client. As I predicted this chat room never made it off the ground but, to my surprise, Zion's failure to set it up turned into one of the most outrageous chapters in the guilds history when Zion "accidentally" hacked into Lok-ri's IRC chat.

Go on to the Next Chapter: Why Lok-ri needs better passwords