Chapter VIII: Shadowbane
(March 2003 - April 2003)

"For the past month and a half I've been wondering the same thing every other paying customer of Shadowbane has been...what the fuck happened in beta? What was accomplished over the 12+ months of beta other than marketing? (Not counting those mysterious 2+ years of alpha no one ever got to play.)"
-Deyth, The Combine

I returned about three weeks before the release of Shadowbane. When I saw how Zion had let the guild slide while I was gone, I was furious. But nobody really seemed to care anymore. During the time I had been gone, our allies The White Tower had become a sub-guild of ours and at the same time many of our older members had become inactive and been replaced by newer members. Most people in the guild at the time didn't know me, or in the case of the White Tower members, didn't really like me either. Zion was nearly the only person who heard my complaints and he didn't agree. Zion insisted that Shadowbane was going live in three weeks, most members were playing the open beta and eventually everyone would be playing the real thing. When that happened, he said, nobody would notice the problems with the website. This was a fairly persuasive argument, so I let everything slide, without much complaint.

I had been told at this point that open beta was FINALLY open and all I had to do was submit an application and I would likely be accepted. So I went to the Shadowbane website and filled out an application, expecting to get an email right away telling me how to download the beta.

But when I went to check my inbox, all I had was an advertisement telling me that if I pre-order the game "NOW" from Gamestop, I will get a "FREE" Beta account. Looking back on this "amazing offer" now, I can see this was Ubisoft's way of trying to salvage Shadowbane. They knew how buggy and unstable the game still was, even though release was only a few weeks away. It was too late to delay the game again, so they came up with this "No beta without a Pre-Order" scheme to force people to buy the game. If they had not done this, and people played the beta, nobody would have bought the final game out of fear that it would still be a buggy piece of shit in three weeks. Although at the time I had no idea this was what Ubisoft had in mind, I still thought this was a highly evil scheme. But Zion didn't agree, he told me it was a good deal. You are going to buy the game anyway right, he said, why not pre-order it? This was a fairly persuasive argument, so I pre-ordered the game. And then I waited.

And waited.

...

...

...

AND WAITED.

The beta was set to end on a friday. On monday of that week I got tired of waiting and I emailed Gamestop and Ubisoft support. Ubisoft, as always, was no help at all. Gamestop tried to be helpful but they didn't seem to have any idea what the hell was going on. After a few more days of emailing and not getting anywhere I finally asked Gamestop to cancel my pre-order but they claimed that because I had gotten the "special deal" for the free beta account it would be impossible to cancel the order. Of course that is when I had to explain again that I DIDN'T get the beta account, which they couldn't explain, but still wouldn't let me cancel the order. I even tried to stop the payment through my card, but because I used a debt card rather than a credit card, the bank said they couldn't help. On friday, THREE HOURS BEFORE THE BETA CLOSED, I got an email telling me I was accepted into the beta test. Grrreat... Thanks allot Ubisoft. As you might have guessed, I never bought another Ubisoft game or ordered anything else from Gamestop.

But that was not the end of my problems with Shadowbane. In fact, it was just the start of everyone else's problems with the game. I'm sure that most people reading this document will already be well aware of what an outrageously buggy and awful game Shadowbane finally turned out to be when it was finally released so I won't go over it again but if you don't know, read this.

When I finally got my pre-ordered game my situation was even worse than most. I could log in, create a character and enter the game without any problems. But everything after that was a constant disaster. The game crashed every two minutes no matter what. If I just stood perfectly still and did everything in my power to avoid any of the many, many bugs in the game, it would still crash every two minutes. No matter what. Further, it would crash if I talked to any NPCs in the starter town. It would crash if I tried to leave the town on foot. It would crash if I tried to attack any of the spiders on the edge of town. It would crash if the spiders attacked me. It would crash if other players were around. It pretty much crashed all the time no matter what I did. Trying to get anywhere was impossible. I couldn't even reach level 2 because getting experience was impossible in a game where combat of any kind crashes your game. After a week of this, I simply quit.

I think this image speaks for itself.

About half of the guild was in the same boat. Most people who could log into the game were actually able to play, even if the game did crash allot. But about half the guild could not log in. Some people had problems with the log in servers. Some people had problems making a character. Some people couldn't even manage to create an account. Like me, most of these people quit when Ubisoft was slow to fix the problem.

Once again, thanks to Ubisoft once more, the guild was in a tough spot. With half our members giving up on the game and the other half mired in the buggiest and worst MMO ever developed our chances were looking pretty grim. But we were still a large guild and even with half our members MIA, we were one of the biggest on the server. We somehow managed to turn it around, gather enough money and members and plant our first Tree of Life. (For those of you who don't know the rules of Shadowbane, a ToL is the center of every town. It flattens the land around where it is planted to give you space to build your city and it protects your buildings during a siege.) Zion was always fond of telling the story of how he had to take the first shift of guarding the tree right after it was planted. It should be noted that his character was only level 9 at this point, so not only was there nothing he could have done to protect the tree had something actually happened but he was in no position to take credit for anything. All the money for the tree had been gathered by other guild members.

The first ToL.

Not long after the first buildings were constructed in the new city of "Golden Aegis" and things seemed to be looking brighter. So, of course, this is the point where Ubisoft had to rear their ugly head again. The ToL became bugged and we were unable to pay the maintenance fees. If something wasn't done, the ToL would die and we would be SoL. We petitioned Ubisoft support to fix the problem but they claimed they needed to "study the problem" more before they could fix it. Nothing was done and the tree died.

You might recall where I mentioned that the ToL flattens the land around it. It is also worth mentioning that when a tree dies the land goes back to the way it was. One day, long after my Shadowbane account was gone, Zion asked me to log into the game with his account to take a look around our "glorious" city. Logging into the game and looking up at a giant hill littered with half smashed buildings (some of which were floating in mid air) was quite a sight. As Zion's character was swamped with demands for help, I tried my best to explain that I wasn't him and I had no idea what was going on.

Two more trees of life were planted and both were wiped off the map in the same way by the same bug Ubisoft had yet to fix. When the third tree was planted this was the message Zion posted on the GS website:

"Many buildings have been built in Aegis, and everything is really coming together. This includes an upgraded Rune Master, forges, a mercantile, an inn, many guild halls, and much more. You may now sell and buy most items in Aegis, and you should be able to train in any profession shortly. Please remember that all items should be bought and sold in Aegis if at all possible"
-Zion, Order of the Golden Shields

That message was followed by this one, three days later:

"As some of you know, our tree has been plagued by a total of three bugs. For the last week tech support has been studying the problem, and proposed completely replacing the tree because they couldn't fix the bugs. This created numerous problems, such that any barracks would disappear. The replacement was suppose to be replaced yesterday, but tech support contacted us saying they needed further time to study our city to make sure these mistakes didn't happen. However, these mistakes appeared to have caused a catastrophe. Due to the fact that we could no longer friend anyone new to the tree, Vadari could not pay the maintenance fees. Twyll was suppose to be able to pay them as a member of the inner-council who was still friended to the tree, but found out that the bug had compounded over time, and that even though he was technically friended to it - he could not pay the costs. Thus our tree was deleted. Since this was caused by bugs that the developers were fully aware of, and stalling to fix, we are petitioning them to replace the tree."
-Zion, Order of the Golden Shields

Ubisoft never replaced the tree. In fact, we never heard from them again.

Things were getting worse in a hurry. Shadowbane was a game much like any other in at least one respect: The vast majority of your time was spent killing hordes of weak monsters to level up your character. This meant our city had never been in a very good location to begin with because there were no monsters around to kill, thus making leveling in our city quite hard. Combine that with the fact that our city had now been leveled completely to the ground three times in a row and you can understand that our members were not happy about the way things had been going so far.

And who could blame them for being disillusioned? It was a terrible situation for any guild to be in. However, when their anger should have been directed at Ubisoft and Wolfpack for developing such a shitty game, they instead directed their anger at the guild. Many of our members were quitting, our city was falling into disrepair and the guild itself was nearly bankrupt. We finally had to become a subguild of our only remaining allies, the Winter Blades.

The disasters did not end there. With many of our higher level players leaving because they believed they could do better on their own or in another guild, we quickly developed a leadership problem. Zion was still being a bum and spending less than one hour online each day (and this was in total mind you, not the amount of time he spent playing Shadowbane). East and Phylor were still with the guild, but most of our other leaders and high ranking members had quit. So it seemed like a stroke of luck when Belthezar, an old White Tower member, asked for more responsibility so he could help out.

However as soon as Zion gave Belthezar responsibility he instantly disappeared and left some totally random person named Vadari with all his responsibility. To this day, Nobody really knows who Vadari was, where Vadari came from or even where Vadari finally went. What we do know is that Vadari used Belthezar's responsibility to steal most of the guilds members and run away with them to build his/her own guild somewhere else. Nobody I've spoken with has any idea why Vadari did what he/she did or what happened the the guild he/she attempted to start.

A picture Phylor took of the betrayers after they broke away from the Golden Shields. Although not picutred, Vadari is somewhere nearby.

This is the point where Zion finally gave up on the guild because he felt we had "passed the point of no return" as he put it.

Go on to the Next Chapter: We rise like the phoneix and we fall like the stone