Chapter VII: Alatar Departs
(October 2002 - March 2003)

"In other news it has been announced that Wolfpack does not intend to honor their promise to release Shadowbane by the second quarter of 2002. Once again they will release it on an, 'as complete' basis. These continuing delays are annoying..."
-Zion, Order of the Golden Shields

As you might recall from back in chapter three (Ubisoft Strikes Back) when we first founded the guild we were told by the developers to expect the release of the game within six months. Well, by this point after the failure of the alliance, nearly a year and a half had gone by and we hadn't even seen an open beta yet. Obviously a lot of things happened to the guild during this time span, but nothing compared to some of the things that happened to our members in real life, I'm sure. I am no exception to this rule and if I had known how long it would take for Shadowbane to be released, or how my life would change in that time span, I never would have founded the guild in the first place. And not to brag too much, but without me the guild never would have happened. Zion may have been the "official" leader but I was the one who owned and paid for the website, forums and domain name. This gave me both great power and great responsibility. This is why it was such a huge problem for the guild when the game was delayed for so long and I had no choice but to move on with my real life.

In the middle of the summer of 2002 I was sitting in front of my workplace eating my lunch when I was approached by someone offering me a much better job. This might sound outrageous but you have to remember that my job at the time was about as awful as you could possibly imagine, so I could have been offered a job in the circus as the guy who swallows swords and it would have been an improvement. Obviously I accepted the offer but there was one major drawback: Six months of training out of state. During this time I would have no computer access and only extremely limited access to even a telephone. This situation would obviously not be compatible with my job as the real leader of the Golden Shields, so it was time for me to let Zion take over and hope he would finally take my lesson about the importance of a guild leader to heart.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Up until this point, I can vouch for the accuracy of 99.9% of this history of the Golden Shields. However, after this my interaction with the guild was extremely limited for a large number of reasons and almost everything after this point, to include all further chapters, is only what I have been able to piece together from what I saw from my point of view and what other people have told me they saw from theirs.)

In October of 2002, I left. I didn't actually resign my place in the guild because I expected to return someday but in order for the guild to continue without me, I had to give Zion all my power in the guild. I turned over total control of both the website and domain name to him. I was still the owner of them but because they would need to be paid for again before I returned, he had to have access to the billing controls so he could pay for them. The forums were in a similar boat. At the time we were using a gold membership Ezboard forum and I still control that even today. However, Ezboard had done quite a few things to piss me off (as well as pissing off most of the rest of their customers which is why they are now nearly dead compared to how popular they once were, but that is another story) so I told Zion that he had a choice: He could either get other members of the guild to donate to the forums to keep the gold membership active or he could get some free forums and host them on the website.

In the past, when I had control of the website and forums, I could veto nearly anything really stupid Zion wanted to do. This included letting retarded real life friends of his join the guild (most of Zion's friends were druggies or total bums) or starting up divisions of the guild in retarded games like Everquest. As soon as I left however, Zion did nearly all the things I had asked him not to do.

First of all, I had always told Zion that as leader he was the most important member of the guild and he had to take his job seriously or members of the guild would lose respect for him and quit as a result. This was a lesson I learned back in Asheron's Call when I was part of a "guild" called the Sinathian Order. At its height this guild had over 700 in game members (And I don't mean 700 names on a website, these were actually characters in the game who were sworn vassals of other members) and they were without a doubt the largest group in AC by far. However the guild collapsed because the leader, Sin'ath, wasn't doing his job and mostly ignored his guild so he could camp in high level dungeons all day. Many members of the guild began to complain that Sin'ath wasn't active enough within his own guild but Sin'ath's direct vassals, who were pretty much running the show at that point, more or less just told people to "STFU" and this caused many members to quit. Within just a few weeks, the Sinathian Order went from having over 700 members, to having fewer than 100. Even after telling Zion this story however, he never agreed with me about the importance of a leader and insisted he could trick other "leaders" in the guild into doing all his work for him.

The first thing Zion did was transfer the domain name and website to another company to get total control of them and make sure I never had access to them again. Next he appointed two totally random people who had just joined the guild recently to be the new webmasters. I don't know who these people were, how long they were in the guild or why they eventually left, but that is pretty much all they did: Join, become webmasters and then leave. They did actually put up a fairly nice website before they left but once they were gone, Zion had to find a new webmaster. Zion picked a real life friend of his named Lucas. Lucas was one of those druggie bums I was talking about before. I don't think Lucas ever did anything to the website besides use the built-in admin options to ban people he didn't like. In fact, I don't think he even knew how the site worked. Zion also asked him to get the guild a new forum but all he did was steal the code for a free forum from somewhere else and put it up on the website. He never figured out how to change the default colors to make it match the rest of the site and it always looked (and ran) like total crap.

At the same time that Lucas was ruining the website, his brother "Andre" was starting an Everquest branch on the Sullon Zek(PvP) server. I hadn't ever played Everquest except for one week when it first came out. I cancelled my account because it was such an awful game. Zion played Everquest and even on the Sullon Zek server but also for only a week. As I recall, he cancelled his account after one day when someone had killed the banker and he fell out of a giant tree. However Zion still claimed to know about how well the Everquest branch was doing and according to him, it was the "top ranked" guild on the server based on number of kills. To me, that sounds like it was just andre and a few of his buddies running around PKing noobs and calling themselves a guild but there is really no way to know for sure now. Regardless of what you believe about the success of the Everquest branch the fact remains that it did not last more than a few months, if that long, and it was gone by the time Shadowbane was released.

Go on to the Next Chapter: Shadowbane