Shadow Syndicate

-S- goes to WAR!

Mere weeks before the opening of Warhammer Online several syndicate members began to pipe up about their experiences in beta, sharing their knowledge of the background of the game and building some interest in the RvR system that the game was promising to have upon release. Wary of recent MMO releases with similar promises of being a PvP oriented game, most of the group decided to play it safe and wait for concrete evidence that warhammer would indeed be a game fitting for the guild's PvP intentions.

I am happy to say that participating in the last beta, and holding my personal opinions about the game back until nearly release has helped me more confidently recruit others to our cause and I definately feel this game has good promise of fun for all of us who are giving it a try. Since then we have opened recruitment up on our boards, compiled some good information on the game for our members and have a steady pace of growth for the future of the guild here.

On tuesday night we gathered our first tiny band of players and -S- was born. Thank you Row, Rufus, Renious, Clothkiller, Zeberg and Ryusuke for being at the signing and contributing to the founding of this chapter of -S-.

Since Tuesday we have grown to 20+ members and the guild rank is nearing level 3! We have found friends both new and old this week running around on the Sylvania server (its a small world), and we have already found our first PvP goal...a fake Shadow Syndicate was created on the chaos side. We ran a scenario against them and won, and I look forward to beating them time and time again anywhere they are hiding.

So keep up the good work everyone, and for those of you waiting to see how the game unfolds for us, I encourage you to come see for yourself.

-Atainius

Getting in stride

The few of us who kept playing AoC weren't sure what would happened. AoC seemed to have no direction for patches and the population as a whole was dropping. Going to Khesh and PvPing for no reason other than to kill people seemed a complete waste. Sieging was/is broken. Forming a group to do something wasn't nearly as hard as coming up with something to do.

Our first night out I decided we'd do something I enjoyed doing even if it wasn't considered "competitive PvP." What did we do? Camp Bubshur. Locked it down for hours and had all the lowbies crying. It was a blast. Most of us seemed to enjoy it as much as I did and griefing has become the cornerstone of our AoC play time.

Our griefing sessions are so regular (4-6 nights a week - always from 9pm to midnight eastern) that it's become a focal point of high level PvP for some guilds. They group and come to fight us almost immediately and we tear it up for a few hours. We hit every zone in the game so we're not entirely predictable, but we favor Bubshur, Tesso, Eiglo, & Atzel's. Roughly every 3rd night we have a GM called on us.

Outside of our town runs we've had a nice little war evolve between us and 2 Maidens 1 Chalice. After being shut out of the zone for 2.5 months they finally finished the outter walls and are exploring PLS. Our nightly activity is pretty consistant. We kill them until they log off and they play alts and watch until we set up macros. Once they're pretty sure we're macroing they log in and kill them. They're not very good, but I've gotta give 'em credit for not quitting.

A lot of people ask how we stand on the server for strength. That's a good question and I really don't have the answer. We had all been waiting for the PvP patch go in before we bothered gearing up so the money and resources weren't wasted. A few of us got bored about 10 days ago and did it anyway and it made a huge difference. When our geared guys are together we're able to take on our twice our number of ungeared and even numbers of mix geared players we totally dominate. The only mostly/fully geared group we've fought are The Regulators and it makes a huge difference. We've faced about every guild still playing and they're the only "good" group we've fought. However, in my 3 months of AoC I've only seen TR alone twice. Both times they lost and both times they called in another guild to help (Fracture first time; Darkened Lords the next). However, when they do call in other guilds they are clearly the stronger players. I consider them a good measuring stick for our progress since they're only a backbone away from becoming a force on DW.

That's pretty much it. We're back to playing 7 days a week by choice. We still schedule PvP nights, but it's not really necessary since we log in willingly now. As more of us gear out our performance improves. We've got a nice little private war. It's not the grand game we were hyped up to expect but we've found a way to have fun and we're doing it quite well.

A few posts behind?

Yeah, I guess I am. It's been a busy summer. Essentially AoC has gone from great to shitty to acceptable. I'll leave acceptable for the next post.

Pre-game hype and beta were strong for AoC. Promises of epic battles, destroying opponents stuff, territory control that means something, and a lot of smaller extras we haven't seen in recent games. Going into release we had over 150. Not 150 strays we spammed forums for, but 150 guys we played with or against in other games and their friends. Our diversity was perfect. We had groups from Lineage2, DAoC, Shadowbane, AC:DT, and several old UO power houses. If ESPN covered gaming we would have definitely been a pre-release contender on paper.

In gaming, unlike sports, the teams change if the game doesn't deliver. AoC failed to deliver in grand style. I'll refrain from telling you why it's bad since thatis posted pretty much everywhere else. The effect it had on us was devastating. People would hit 80, hate what the game offered, and within 2 days would either reroll or stop playing. Most stopped playing. We hit Kheshatta with a PVP group every night for 2 weeks, but instead of helping that made things worse. Characters either have 1 shots or massive AOE damage so fights were extremely fast. Winning was more about positioning, who engaged first, and gear then it was about decisions made during battle. The PvP was poor enough we had better player retention doing nothing. The first week we mostly won, but the second week we were fielding weird groups with 1 or no healers and people really didn't even want to go out and fight. Our results weren't quite as good.

We shifted focus back to town and a t3 keep. In 4 days we knocked out the final 6 buildings of t2 and had all but 3 stacks of Basalt from the keep. We had 30 guys on during prime time each night and we were holding out hope for sieging being fun and pvp fixes to come soon. That's when I had to go out of town for a funeral.

When I returned 8 days later we had a tier 3 keep, but no one had sieged. I got in late Sunday, logged in, checked siege times, and wrote Harm down for Tuesday @22:00 eastern. During lunch Tuesday I went to declare and the time showing was 19:00 eastern. That was too early for me and no one I could contact on short notice was able to make it to organize so I posted we'd try to stay up and do the Sinister siege at 3am. Way too late for most everyone. I got in vent @6pm (18:00) and talked to MP who was willing to grab whoever was around and show at Harm just so we could get a feel for how sieging was. Obviously, with no warning of the time change we had a small group. Taking everyone online regardless of level they had 3 groups. They beat Harm around for the first hour, knocked down a few walls, and had a good time until Harm brought in the numbers to double up on them. It encouraged me and a few others to attempt staying up until 3am to screw around at SiN's keep. That one didn't go as well. We only had 11 guys when the siege went live and several of those were sub-80. SiN was prepared to defend with at least 3 full groups and I think closer to a full raid and LotD had brought a full raid to attack. Due to me screwing up the time originally neither raid was organized or expected to succeed. I debated whether we should have even bothered but I'm glad we did. A whole lot of accounts went inactive shortly after that and the guys at the first siege did well enough to have fun. Gotta wring every enjoyable moment possible out of this underachieving game.

I basically consider that the last time we did something while thinking of this game in terms of the future. We got a feel for sieging so we'd be better prepared for next time and we had fun, but the account cancelations kept rolling in and the interest turned towards other games. All those who hope to find a good time in DAoC Origins, Warhammer, or Wrath of the Lich King have moved away from AoC for good. The handful of us who have no interest in those games linger on in Conan, but that's for another post.

Kalecgos down!

-S- Raids Onyx Chambers

Last night we formed a raid and hit Onyx Chamber in Kheshatta.
Had a ton of fun and experienced some of the higher level elite mobs in that dungeon. We rolled a bunch of guilds in there and overall we had pretty good teamwork. Click on the high res pics below to see.. (thanks Pnot!)

Black Temple Cleared!

Illidan downed 6/15.

Whats he doing here?!

So I finally ran into a GM the other day and it will probably be of no surprise to you all where they hang out. Ya thats the upstairs of the Armsman tavern in the Noble district. lol So anyway I had a litany of problems for him to fix for me but I should be thankful that he was even able to fix one. Octavio was a cool GM and managed to fix my Arena quests, the rest....well... This sets up a short discussion of the state of the game. I am sure all of you have had problems with quests and bugged skills. This is to be expected in any new game but I believe AoC has more than are acceptable. Every new patch brings more woe! Perhaps instead of adding dance moves they can put more effort into fixing some really serious bugs. I dont know about the rest of you but since the last patch I have been freezing up and crashing to desktop a whole lot more. Now don't get me wrong, I think the game is great, it has huge potential but it really risks failing unless they make some big improvements. There is zero endgame content at this point. The promise of large scale pvp for these pvp Keeps I hear about is non existant at this point and if someting is not done all these people getting level 80 are going to start dropping off like flies. I mean come on the games been out a month and NOT A SINGLE BUIDLING WORKS!!! And dont even get me started on crafting skills. Lets keep our fingers crossed that they start getting things done in the next month. I know I did not pay to be helping to test a beta product, how about you? click extended for pic

AoC pictorial debut

Hey guys! I just wanted to awe you with a short pictorial of my time in AoC.

Illidari Council down!!

Vox&Co are 1 away from a cleared Black Temple!!

My apologies to the WoW guys for getting this up so late. They took him down May 19th during the middle of our page being moved and AoC early access. I forgot :/ Whoops.

Illidari Council

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Thanks,
Corwin