Shadow Syndicate

Better than expected

Darkfall has played out above expectations so far. The game has been more stable, less buggy, and more fun then I thought was possible. The people who were upset it played like Shadowbane instead of UO or AC have gotten over it. Darkfall is a blast to play.

As a guild we've put our focus on town at the moment. I am fairly certain we're holding in the top 5ish guilds for town building. We've got 4-5 more days of work on town to hit our goal and shift to heavier PvP. Right now the CAPSULE/OrksRUs/DSoM alliance is trying to lay the smack down on us, but they're not up to the task. CAPSULE have higher skills and are better geared for now but their supporting cast(orks/dsom) is trash. In a week we'll be taking it to them all regularly and in 2 weeks I expect they'll have moved to an easier zone.

To those of you holding off on playing DF - don't! You're missing a flashback of the old days. Get your accounts and come have some fun. See ya in game!

Pre-Orders are up!

Pre-order information was posted today for beta testers. We were supposed to have a 2 hour head start on everyone else. Naturally, it was leaked out within 5 minutes of being up. It's been a very chaotic day with only a small number of people getting their pre-orders, but it's smoothed out as of this post. With any luck we'll have 40+ with confirmed accounts by this time tomorrow.

Good luck getting those accounts everyone!

Prepping for Darkfall

The WoW stuff is gone from the front page. I left the Warhammer recruitment block, but mainly because I like having some color. It'll go as soon as I have something Darkfall to put up. When the NDA gets lifted and information is more free flowing I'll start adding DFO stuff. I've left most of the forums up, but as we near release I'll be trimming those too.

Darkfall promises to be the game we've all been moaning for since UO. That makes it our priority game and I fully expect all our guys who are still gaming to play it. I expect several who have quit gaming to makea return. How well it delivers remains to be seen, but the risk is worth the potential reward. Conan disclosed releasing FFA servers just over a month before release (i think) and pulled together thousands of PvPers hoping that would lead to something more. We had over 150 people on release ourselves. All that for a game that only hinted it might offer a taste of the gaming experience we love. Darkfall has been sculpted for the freedom we want. It has pulled from mainly UO & AC for its core aspects. Where many games have had potential, Darkfall could be revolutionary as they claim in their video.

If you haven't seen the intro video click this.

NOTE: We've got a lot of people who don't check the page regularly. Some of the old bastards probably haven't looked in to see that DF isn't just hype and vapor afterall. Hence, it's time to do a mass mail. Odds are I'll do 3 total before release.

Vaporware no more!

It's been a long time coming and is finally here. A release date was posted today. On January 22, 2009 Darkfall Online will become a reality.

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=87239

-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.