Chapter IX: We rise like the phoenix and we fall like the stone
(April 2003 - June 2003)

"Well FUCK! I don't know what happened but I got a phone call 20 minutes ago from a Ubisoft agent saying i did some illegal shit with horses.. I have no fucking clue what they are talking about but they suspended my account!"
-East, former Golden Shields member and huge cheater

At this point the guild had fallen as far as we ever thought it could go, to its lowest point ever. Now only Zion, Phylor, East and a handful of loyal members remained as a largely irrelevant sub-guild of The Winter Blades. We still had the website but it was mostly only used for announcements of the few minor in-game events we had and the forums had become empty thanks to the failure of Andre and Lucas to do anything useful with them. With the website and forums reduced to nothing more than a useless figurehead, I was unable to help. It only made matters worse that Zion simply didn't care about the guild anymore and spent more time drinking, smoking pot and going to hockey games (three very odd obsessions of his I hated with a passion, the Hockey most of all) than he spent even online, much less on the guild.

With the way things were going it seemed Zion might be right after all. With me unable to help and him unwilling to even try, we truly were approaching the point of no return. Even I was on the verge of giving up and considering other options... But most of all I was furious at Zion's attitude and his excuse of "Sorry, I'm too busy working at a job I don't even get paid for to help you right now. Maybe in a few months?"

So NO ONE was more surprised than I was when suddenly East appeared one day with more money than we had ever dreamed of. Without pause he planted a new ToL in a MUCH better spot than the guild had chosen the first time (there were actual monsters to fight in the new location, even for high level characters) and then virtually rebuilt the entire city overnight, this time with walls that cost over ten million in Shadowbane currency. Suddenly everything was turned around and we had gone from being one of the least important guilds on the server to being one of the best, simply because of the location and quality of our city.

But not all of our problems were solved. All along, from the very day we founded the guild, I had told Zion that his leadership was the most important factor in our success or failure. I told him that our members wouldn't follow him if he wasn't doing his job, a tough lesson I had learned back in Asheron's Call as a member of the Sin'athian Order. And now I was once again being proved correct and Zion's constant claims of tricking others into doing his work were sounding more and more hollow.

Once "New Aegis" was fully up and running, East was starting to see that he was doing most of the work and Zion wasn't doing any. Zion barely played the game, hadn't even advanced past level 15 and wasn't contributing ANYTHING to the guild at this point. This was in contrast to East who had single handedly funded and constructed the guild's new fantastic city in a prime location and had already reached the maximum level in the game. In East's opinion, Zion simply wasn't needed at all anymore. So he DEMANDED that Zion surrender leadership of the guild to him.

One of the things that bothered me the most about Zion's style of leadership was that he always asked for opinions before making any major decision but for some bizarre reason, he always insisted on doing things his way, even when everyone else was against him. It was very frustrating. When Zion came to me and asked for my input on East's demands, I told him giving the guild to East would end badly, one way or the other. First of all, East was never very bright. At the time he was only 12, most of his posts on the forums were either offensive, obnoxious or just plain spelled so poorly we weren't sure what the hell he was going on about. This was the guy who wanted to change his name to "uggbash" we were talking about here. City or no city, I fully expected him to do something outrageously stupid that would drive the guild to ruin. If he didn't do the stupid thing first, then I expected him to eventually betray us horribly and try to muscle us out of the guild. Once we gave him in-game leadership the only thing we had to hold over his head was the website and he could easily escape that by just changing the name of the guild and telling everyone not to visit the website anymore.

But Zion did what he always did and ignored me, despite the fact that I had been correct SO many times in the past about this sort of thing. Zion was eager to "pass the buck" of leading the guild and was of the opinion we needed a "24/7 player" like East to take over. I'm sure at this point I reminded Zion that if he had donated as much time to the guild as I had always wanted him to it never would of come to this. But as usual, he ignored me, did exactly what he wanted to do and in the end I turned out to be totally right about everything.

At first it looked like East was going to prove me wrong. As soon as he was made leader he enforced new rules in Aegis so that he would "own" all the buildings and anyone setting up a new shop would only have permission to run it. If they failed to pay their taxes to the city, East would take over the building and give it to the guild. Next, when we started having problems with RPK's (Random Player Killers) bothering Aegis East found out they were coming from a city to the south of ours owned by some upstart guild called "Baker's Dozen" who nobody had ever heard of before and nobody ever likely heard of again. East threatened them, placed a Bane Circle on their ToL and apparently frightened them so badly they actually deleted their city before we ever got around to really punishing them.

But I was still convinced East was going to screw things up somehow and this time I wasn't content to sit back and wait for him prove my theory correct. The problem was what exactly I could do about it. The forums were empty and barely worked thanks to the amateurish work of Andre and Lucas so complaining there would have gotten me nowhere. Shadowbane was still a buggy and useless game, not worth playing so actually trying to help in game was off the list of options as well. I had access to the website admin controls, but what good was that? The fact of the matter was that Zion was the only person in the guild who could speak out against East and if he didn't do it, nobody else would. So I came up with a plan where I would use the website to cattle prod Zion into fixing the guild.

You have to understand that the reason Zion was always so busy was because he had a VERY SEVERE OBSESSION with his social standing. He wanted every person on the face of the earth to think he was the greatest person on earth and that he was better at everything than they were. So he was constantly trying to convince skaters that he knew how to skate, gamers that he knew how to play games, skiers that he knew how to ski, lawyers that he knew about the law and so on until he had convinced virtually everyone he knew that he was some sort of sub-genius that had mastered every skill on earth. What made Zion such an amazing guild leader and diplomat was that all this time he spent bluffing people had made him the only thing we really was: A good liar. However, Zion was only able to lie to people effectively when he was there to do it on a daily basis. Now that he had given up on the guild, he wasn't around hardly at all anymore and as such, wasn't any good as a guild leader.

So my plan was simply this: I would use the website to convince everyone Zion was an incredibly lazy bum who never did any work on the guild, which was more or less the truth at this point. If I was right, Zion would return and become the guild leader again just to prove me wrong and to try and convince everyone he wasn't a bum.

When I say I was going to make everyone think Zion was a bum, this is the kind of bum I mean. Hope this clears up any confusion for you Brittish readers who thought I was talking about an ass.

My plan backfired thanks to the inept webmaster skills of Andre and Lucas. I set up a new website called "Zion is a Bum" where an anonymous "hacker" ranted for two pages about Zion being lazy and even showed fake pictures of Zion's family calling them bums as well. Then I inserted some HTML script into the the Golden Shields website that would send anyone viewing it to the bum website after 30 seconds. I figured that because Andre and & Lucas obviously didn't know anything about HTML, they would assume I had used the admin control pannel to foreward people to the bum site somehow and they would simply never figure out what I had done. Apparently one of the two of them was even more incompetent than I gave them credit for so they tried to search the HTML code for the address of the bum website. They found it and deleted it but for some reason they left the HTML script itself in there just without the address of the website. The effective result was breaking the golden shields website because every 30 seconds it would turn into a blank page.

Another thing I changed on the website, this was a personal message from me to Andre and Lucas, thanking them for the WONDERFUL work they had done on the forums.

While Andre and Lucas were tripping over their own feet during their attempts to fix the mess they made, East was doing his best to prove my theory about him correct. It turned out he wasn't merely GOING to do something unspeakably stupid, he had ALREADY DONE IT. That endless flow of cash he had used to build New Aegis was actually a result of him cheating in Shadowbane. Now, there is some debate about exactly what East did. To this day, East still claims he did nothing, despite the fact he has been caught admiting to cheating in World of Warcraft and the guild recruited him in Dungeon Siege when he wanted to learn how the cheat in that game. Zion, many years later, told me an alternate version of events where East actually hacked into Shadowbane itself and managed to teleport people around, delete entire guilds/citys and even give himself a horse to ride when horses had not yet been implemented into the game. The only evidence to support this verison of events is a comment East made on the GS website about a call he got from Ubisoft where they accused him of "some illegal shit with horses" infoming him he had been banned. If this story were true it would shed some new light on what happened to "bread city" after East declared war on them. However, I suspect this version of events was just a wild exaggeration Zion cooked up to make the guilds last hurrah sound more impressive than it truly was.

The other serious theory about how East cheated is that he sent a trojan horse virus to other players in the game that stole their passwords and gave East access to their accounts. East then stole all their money, equipment and anything else of any value before trying to fuck up their characters somehow. This would also explain a great deal of East's sudden success and is also supported by this email he posted on the GS forums and claimed he had gotten from Ubisoft:

Hello Paul

It is with regret that we must inform you that your subscription to the
following service: Shadowbane subscription has been cancelled and banned, due to
Non respect of player agreement, Player Paul has broken rules of the
Shadowbane Code of Conduct and the ubi.com Terms of Use, by maliciously using
other players accounts and by maliciously propagating a Trojan password stealing
virus and by maliciously changing the personal information in the accounts of
other unsuspecting paying ubi.com, customers.  By jeopardizing the security of
thousands of credit card customers, this case and all related proof have been
forwarded to the Internet Crimes division of the FBI in the USA and the RCMP in
Canada.

Your subscription has been ended as of May 13,2003

If you have any questions about your account, please visit:
http://support.ubi.com/

Regards
The ubi.com subscription team

Whatever you choose to believe about East, the fact of the matter was that he was banned along with most of the remaining guild members. For some reason, Zion, Phylor and a few others weren't banned. Zion always believed that Ubisoft went out of their way not to ban him just so he would log back into the game to find himself alone in the huge metropolis East had built, knowing he would never be able to pay the maintenance on it. And of course he couldn't, so for the fourth time the grand city of Aegis was slowly deleted and faded away into memory.

Go on to the Final Chapter: Epilogue