Zion's Rebuttal
By Zion
(Posted and comments Alatar)
Those of you who have read the History of the Old Guild are aware that I feel Zion was not the most fantastic leader this guild ever had.
However, Zion and I debated exactly who, or what, was at fault for the downfall of the old guild up until the very end. Even though Zion is dead now, I'm sure he would reach out from beyond the grave and haunt me if I didn't make sure his opinion still counted for something. This is one of the final emails he sent to me in mid 2004. In fact, it was part of a series of emails that originally gave me a reason to create my own version of our guild history.
This email starts off by responding to my accusation that Zion was the one person "most responsible for the guild's destruction." I have underlined the parts of the email that I will be commenting on at the end of the document.
Most responsible for the guild's destruction? I thought you mistakenly blamed that on Andre, when you meant Lucas. I defend both of them actually. As far as I'm concerned if you're going to blame it on me it's because of the division and alliance systems we made pre-game that just didn't fly and provided the perfect opportunity for everyone to betray us to high hell. That was partially your fault too, however, since you were the one who pressed for twice as many divisions as I wanted, (but who, inversely, foresaw the UF being a load of crap.)
Once we got in the game I wasn't much good because until they patched the game I couldn't run it for more than two minutes - but you faced the same problem. Belthezar demanded responsibility and I gave it to him and he passed it onto that random guy and dissappeared into the void. Then our allies ditched us. The random guy then HORRIBLY BETRAYED us and took Chrisco and a bunch of others with him. You'll recall that this was because Ubisoft deleted THREE of our cities due to glitches (my fault?) If I have to pick one culprit I pick him because that's when we went past the "recovery" point. At this point my computer still couldn't do shit, but hell - my second-in-command's could do less so I'm surprised you blame that on me. Realizing that I alone couldn't do anything to fix the situation I looked for a 24/7 player who could actually run the game that might be able to. The closest I could come was East. At the time I told you "Okay - there's a 90% chance this fails - but that's simply the best odds I got. And if we fail there's a good chance we fail in an outstanding way!" I think this is the point that you blame me - and I demand you look to pregame if you're going to blame me. This was really our *only* shot, and I think it actually worked better than what was most probable. East hacked the game to high hell, made GS the greatest nation on the server with access to the best spots, built great cities, smited all our enemies, and pretty much took down SB in the process. Seriously. I was talking to Rune yesterday who was on another server at the time and had to quit SB due to East pretty much destroying it. Yes, East got banned and so did a good chunk of the loyal guild. But we went down in the most glorious smoke possible! He also got our enemies - namely the rebel factions, guilds that were at war with us, allies that betrayed us, and, of course, Ubisoft. I have few regrets on the East decision. We were past the point of no return.
If *I* had to do it again and correct my mistakes I would have made the leadership structure less vulnerable to betrayal. I would have had more essential leaders ready - like city designers, a third-in-command (in case the SiC dissappeared - which I know wasn't your fault but your comps) and a general in-game membership officer and an out-of-game membership officer. We simply didn't have enough logistical support and that was *all* I was doing for good reason, which wasn't okay. I also would have tried to put a person like East in a useful hacking role from the beginning. Finially, I would have made sure we didn't basically dissolve our branches in other games, since we bet far too much on SB. All the mistakes I made I made *before* the game and frankly I think I did so in conjunction with all the other leaders.
Stop blaming me. Stop blaming "andre". It was a lot of people's fault. I mostly blame Vadari - that was his name. After all - he was the one that betrayed us. And of course luck in the vise of Ubisoft deleting everything all the time didn't help. Alatar, you pretty much weren't there. I'm telling you that's the chaos that happened. I played a role in it, but I think my mistake was in the planning phase. You were also absent when we needed you - for good reasons, so I don't blame you - but it's really hypocritical for you to blame me when I was depending on you mostly as a good-on-his feet enforcer that I could trust to stop crazy shit.
I know your usual response would be to totally disagree and maybe do something crazy if I made you mad enough. For the first please stop and consider what I've had to say instead of regarding me as a Sega nut or something. I know I've rarely changed your mind on anything but this is one of the few times that I genuine deserve to change your mind. For the second response please consider that it was only a game, a game that is well over, and I'd like to move on at some point. I'd like to have you in the new Golden Shields under any role you would like to have.
- Terence
First of all, to explain Zion's comment about Andre and Lucas. I think Zion was under the impression that I blamed Andre because Andre was the one who tried to ban me from the guild after I put up the "Zion is a bum" website. Andre mostly did this because East told him to and as I've recently learned, East never liked me in the first place and probably had wanted me out of the guild for a long time. The main reason I never covered this bizzare little "sub-plot" when I was going through the guild history was because I never really understood why Zion did what he did at this point. When Andre banned me from the guild website I called Zion to ask what the deal was. Zion looked at the guild website, confirmed Andre had banned me and then said he would talk to Andre about it. About an hour later Zion called me back and suddenly changed his story. Now he claimed Lucas had banned me and Andre wasn't even an admin on the website. He had even changed the website to make it look like what he was saying was true, nevermind I had already had him confirm for me Andre was the one who did the banning. To this day, I still do not understand why Zion went to so much effort to get Andre off the hook only to make Lucas look guilty of something he didn't do. One of the reasons it made no sense at all was because I really couldn't care less which one of them actually did it. I don't consider Andre & Lucas individuals but more like one person. Maybe like a two headed ogre.
The next major thing is the divisions systems Zion commented on and said that I had insisted on twice as many divisions as he wanted. This true but is only part of the story. Also, Zion fails to put the blame for this exactly where it belongs: Wolfpack Studios. Have I mentioned lately Ashen Temper is a complete liar who needs to be kicked in the crotch and set on fire? When we first set up the divisions system it was still mostly just Zion and I doing most of the leadership work for the guild. East wasn't there yet and I don't think Nihil was. Phylor might have been but he probably wasn't a leader yet. Zule was still sort of "around" but didn't contribute alot. So really it was up to Zion and I to decide how the guild should be set up. This was not a major issue except that the guild had to be built for Shadowbane and all we had to work with was the limited information that Wolfpack decided to release about the game mechanics.
This is where it gets complicated. At the time Wolfpack was telling people A LOT of things about Shadowbane that turned out in the end to never make it in the final game. And they were even telling people some things that were outright lies (not the least of which was the release date). At this point it was known that there would be different guild "templates" that would offer certain bonuses to specific classes that were part of that template. Although the devs had said you would be able to join any guild you wanted despite their template, they hyped up the bonous system as being so amazing that you would have to be totally insane NOT to join a guild with the template for your class. Looking back now I can see this was just part of Wolfpack's bizzare plan to support the community of RP guilds and not the ARAC guilds. But at the time the Golden Shields, along with nearly every other ARAC guild, believed that we would need more than one template so most (or all) of our members could get these fantastic bonuses the devs were telling us about. So Zion came up with the first system that had only about three or four divisions. He mostly wanted a Wizards Conclave for spell casters, a mercenary company for a bunch of misc classes and one or two other "optional" ones that he didn't even want to put into place until we needed them.
Now I have to admit that if we had gone with Zion's system and only needed three or four leaders going into Shadowbane, things probably would have worked out a WHOLE LOT BETTER for us. But my point is that when we were developing the division system, we had no way of knowing that. We didn't know Shadowbane was going to suck, we didn't know people like East and Vadari were going to betray us to high hell. All we knew is what the devs were telling us about these outrageous bonuses we just couldn't live without! I spent some time with the information we had and Zion's plan and decided that his plan was mostly only going to help magic users and would leave about half our guild without the proper template for their class. This is why I developed and pushed for the system we eventually used which covered all the templates except for Amazons and the Temple of the cleansing flame. We didn't figure we needed an amazon division since almost nobody except for a very small minority of role players even wanted to play amazons. We did eventually get a cleansing flame division but it was mostly a joke because we gave it to Luke and we knew he wouldn't do anything with it. (The temple division later got taken over by Chrisco who ran off with Vadari, as Zion said.)
The last major thing I want to cover is about East and how Zion turned the guild over to him. And Zion is correct about one thing, this is one of the major points I blame him for. Zion said he knew there was a good chance giving the guild to East would fail, but he did not come to this conclusion on his own. I told him. When East demanded the guild, Zion asked me for advice on how to anwser his demands. And, as I explained in the history of the old guild, I told him that East being leader of the guild would end in disaster sooner or later. And yes, I do blame Zion for not listening to me. But what I blame him for MOST at this point was that he wasn't even willing to consider any other option. He had given up and decided that the guild was "past the point of no return" as he put it. I blame him for giving up.
But the important thing to learn here isn't that we should blame Zion, but to LEARN from his mistakes. Zion has left me with nothing. Not the old website, not any of the old documents, none of the old forums and only the members I could hunt down and drag back on my own. But if I have to start over I'm going to make everything right from the very start this time. I'm going to build a guild that is designed at its very core to avoid the exact mistakes that took down the old guild. The new guild will finally live up to our guild motto: "Unbreakable: For the time is near"