Well… A day before Ubi announced 15 free days of gaming to previous subscribers I decided to give the game another try and reactivated my account. I had been considering it for awhile. But with the latest addition of mines I figured it was as good a time as any.

So into the fragments of Shadowbane I went. Thankfully I still had my old characters from the - now closed - Death fragment. Some of them I had already migrated to the Vengeance fragment the last time there was 15 free days. But fortunately I still had one of my primary that needed to be migrated. Fortunately because if you migrate them now (as opposed to when I migrated before) you get ALL your gear from the bank with you too! Nice considering I had a couple of items that can’t be found anywhere anymore.

Well… Being a role-player I figured I’d join the Mourning fragment. Well… Since it seems to be the most active - and the only one with active recruitment by role-playing guilds - it seemed to be only natural. I quickly figured that since my char is an elf I should join one of the two RP-based elven guilds Court of Evermore or House Avari. And since the Avari’s is very restrictive I went with Court of Evermore. Joining the Court was pretty simple. I emailed an application and soon I was in. So I fired up the game and asked the first guy I could find to guild me.

Now. Mourning is - like all but one fragment - supposed to be for US players. But since a lot of Europeans have been playing before there was a European fragment I figured there wouldn’t be much trouble with activity. But it seems my first choice was not too good. The number of players in the Court in European hours is very small. Hell even the times I helped guard our mine (between 2:00 and 4:00 CET - in the morning) there where never more than 8-10 members online. So while the guild seems ideal it’s hard to role-play with people who are not there at the same time.

Still. Player count is still higher on Mourning - when I play - than on the European one. So I guess I should just keep looking. Trouble is I’m ever so picky about guilds I join…

The tale begins a couple of days ago. The clever leaders of Lok-ri and it’s allies (including my guild Lost Souls of Darkness - LSD) decided to attack the nearby town Sol (owned by The Kingdom of the Sun who is a mortal enemy of the alliance). For that purpose a bane circle was produced and the attack put together.

I was online at the time and would have joined the initial attack but remembered that only the day before I had been told there where no engineers available in any of the towns of the alliance. So I asked the question again and was told that indeed we still was without a rank 7 steward and therefor could not produce a contract for an engineer. So after advising to wait for an engineer I declined to join the attack. But it went on anyway as someone had discovered it is possible to damage buildings with pets and some weapons and so the bane circle was placed.

Today came the day of the siege. Cleverly the siege had been set to start right around when the Death server restarts (a daily process to reduce lag spikes that still seems to catch people off guard). When the server came back online the mighty LSD had all of 6 members online (with a couple coming later on) and NO leaders. Still 5 of us headed to Sol and joined in on the attack on the tree of life there. A number of other players of the alliance was there too and resistance in the town was quickly killed off since there where already holes in the walls that had been made yesterday.

Then the hammering on the tree began. After a while people figured out what worked (weapon procs) and a bit later some figured out some weapons actually healed the tree again. With those eliminated the hammering went on and the rest of the attackers generally retreated to protect the bane circle.

After about an hour (I think. Didn’t keep time) the call came that a counterattack was forming with members of Lords of Death added to gain numbers (being the most hated guild on the server it seemed The Kingdom of the Sun had pretty much sold their soul in an attempt to hold on to their town).

That was when the lag of leadership really started to show. Nobody had any clue what to do or where to stand. So far anyone not bashing the tree had been bashing a pice of the wall near the bane circle for something to do. But now something had to be done and coordinated to stand up against the counterattack. In the end someone figured that running to where the enemy was forming would be a grand idea. And soon many was following including myself - Thinking someone had a plan. But after some headless running around I returned to the walls of Sol figuring it would be better to use the town to our advantage.

Then the onslaught started. Many of the healers had for some reason made their way to the front-line of the people attacking the counterattack and was killed off quickly. And the large army of the enemy quickly gained control of the area with the bane circle. I got an all too good view from the walls of how much more quickly they where dealing damage to the bane circle than our forces where doing away with the tree. But because of my machine lagging too much with all the action I gave up trying to help and went home with only 1/8th of the tree’s hit points taken.

It was not long after that it message came that the siege had been broken and everything had been for nothing. In conclusion I suppose nobody should have been surprised of the outcome the attack had from the start lacked everything that makes a good military campaign: Strategy, good leadership, weapons and enough forces to overcome the enemy. High scores for the will to attempt. Low scores for everything else.

After a weeks play my main (and only) character reached level 36 and was effectivly kicked out of the “introduction to the game” guilds. At level 21 he was kicked from the initial newbie lands and now he is bared from safehold guild too. So tonight I had to make a choice where to go next.

The choice fell on LSD. After talking a bit with them they claimed that they where friendly, run as a family (well their advertising said so) and that they encourage RP. And most importantly I got a promise that creating our own guild inside of it would not be a problem. And with the current prices on guild seeds it looks like we need it. So that is our current base of creation.