HAUNT's History

[Laylyn]

A Not So Brief History (For those who want to know or wish to remember)


This is written as a living history.  As such, if you will forgive me, it'll be a little short on form and grammar, defaulting to the timeline told instead.

HAUNT had its beginning in a medium sized pvp guild called Ghost back in 2003.  To the average player in Star Wars Galaxy's Bria at the time calling Ghost, a guild of over 500 members, "medium" would have blown their minds. 

However, you should compare us to other large player pvp organizations like The Syndicate and Goon Squad.  Their numbers are in the thousands.

Back to the history, Ghost was originally founded by Tasaii.  In game, he was a Mon Calamari leader who was looking to create one Empire under one tag.  In real life, he was a police officer who wanted to create a little stability in the game. 

This first leader deserves his props.  Tasaii had several huge successes. 

First, thanks to the efforts of Jasau, Tasaii founded Ghost Town on Dantooine.  It was literally the first Metropolis ranked player city in the entire game.  That's regardless of server. 

Second, by merging with a guild lead by one Highlord Hunter, Tasaii formed the largest single guild army in the game.  Ghost was literally able to zerg over a hundred players at an enemy point within minutes.  For humor alone, I'm told that some of those early days even included running naked into Anchorhead lagging the city out and killing all the rebels inside with sheer numbers.  In SWG, Ghost hitting the ground was like the roll of thunder.

Third, Tasaii created the single most infamous and hated guild in the SWG pre CU game.  The player boards were constantly lit with complaints or whines about the guild from enemy Rebel and supposedly allied Imperial alike.  For example, Need'a'Bone Dreg was often a target of such posts.

It should also be noted, Tasaii created the single most hardened point of base defense in the game.  It was a pair of bases and a shuttle port locked in a wall of Naboo housing. 

Thanks to a combination of dish turrets and hardened defenses, Ghost Town's base complex became known as a deathtrap to any rebel who would enter.  Even a non-declared rebel who used the shuttle port, would be flagged by the dish turrets and killed before he'd even loaded into the zone. 

It was a wonderful, automated, sandbox killing machine.  It stood for months unscratched by whatever the rebel zerg could throw at it, even with numbers over the hundreds lagging through the walls.

It was 2003, this was a time when the Empire itself suffered in a metaphorical Custard's last stand.  If you looked at total server population, the Imperials were outnumbered and outgunned by rebels at least a three to one margin. 

Ghost was one of several Imperial guilds that was making an increasingly hardened stand against a player base of "heroes".  The rebel "heroes" made up the vast majority of the game.  Thanks to SOE's complete lack of policing their own game, they would get caught openly duping billions of credits and then purchasing every advantage the game offered. 

However, to be honest, Ghost itself wasn't completely clean at this time.  It would be a couple of incidents later until we were truly free of trash players.

As for my own part, I was brought in as a Ghost recruit and officer right around September 2003.  At the time, Tasaii had a series of goals he wanted accomplished and he was in need of a propagandist and networker.

At the time, SWG was a living, interdependent, sandbox game.  It had hundreds of players operating in living cities NPC cities like Bestine, Coronet, and Theed.  At Tasaii's bidding, we began to make Ghost town not just a storage facility, like player towns were and would remain on most servers.   

We started with the heart by recruiting player entertainers into the cantina.  We even ended up appointing one Ummagumma as the City Entertainment officer to give voice to this group. 

As such, Ghost Town began to develop a consistent population base of twenty to sixty players, at any hour of the day, seven days a week.  These were players that would consistently stay in this player made metropolis, making it just as alive as Bestine was for most players at that time.   

Because of these changes, other players, from other guilds, began to congregate there as well.  We became a functional model of what a player city actually could be. 

We also steadily improved commerce.  Players such as Jungto began modest vendors that did fair business. 

To be honest; however, it would be over a year before Ghost Town became a true trade hub.  By the end of 2004, we'd be the third largest economy, on the largest SWG server, and the central supply point for all of Dantooine.   In 2003, despite having multiple crafters, we were just a third world economy.

At Tasaii's bidding, Ghost's image was to be improved.  So we began to hit the Bria forums with propaganda in mass. 

Slowly, we did our part to remove the most powerful recruiting tool of the Rebellion, which was the demonization of Imperial players.  With our allied guilds, one sticking point we used was the use of the IP's own material to paint Rebels as terrorists that brought chaos to the masses. 

It was a surprisingly effective propaganda campaign.  It was successful enough to bring more players into our ranks as Imperials and eventually guilds such as FBI.

At Tasaii's bidding, Ghost was to improve its image with the fellow Imperial guilds.  As such, I became Ghost's lead diplomat to the Imperial Coalition, an organization of necessity formed between 26 Imperial guilds fielding over 1,800 pvpers worldwide.  This included other Imperial guilds such as: Fist of the Empire, Left For Dead, Crimson Empire, Forest Bay Independents, Imperial Intelligence Agency, Silicon Soldiers, KIA, CIA, TIE, ST, and many others. 

We began high level Intelligence operations as well.  Imperial Intelligence Agency (IIA) had a operations template very close to the CIA where they actively placed members into enemy units to collect data.   

We took our format from the KGB.  Rather than use exhaustive, time consuming plants, we simply farmed the lower level, disgruntled members of the rebellion for information. 

One story is a lie.  Two complimenting stories from independent sources was a lead.  Three or more lead to a solid piece of information giving you either a clue or an obvious piece of counter intelligence to work with.

We learned about 10% of our own guild was plants from the rebellion.  Our own open recruitment method lead to the most saturated guild of spies, some of whom were even there from rival Imperial guilds.  Thus, counter intelligence operations began as well and Ghost took care not to be too much in the loop of IC operations until boots were on the ground.

Back to the IC, Ghost began working more closely with these guilds and the Empire itself was in mass offensive.  As such, by the end of the Canyon City Campaign, the Rebellion would never again place bases, even years later and the Empire, though vastly outnumbered was left entirely on the defensive. 

Due to the wisdom of the Imperial Coalition, rather than our own, Imperial bases were placed on timers for planets as soon as the drift bug was fixed by SOE.  From that point forward, all the bases on a single planet were vulnerable for a set time, thus easing the strain of twelve hour days of rushing from one point to another for defense. 

The success of this can be further remarked on later.  However, Ghost was about to go through its first major upset and due to Tasaii's own actions the guild itself was not long for the world...   

[Laylyn]

The end begins...


Too much success can be a bad thing.  What had united Ghost had been the feeling of being under siege by the rebellion.  The more the tide turned against the rebels, the worse the disruptions inside the guild became.

Tasaii's open recruitment had lead to merging with other guilds.  As such he had the habit of giving guild leaders officer positions in Ghost.  This lead to several people who had inflated opinions of their own leadership abilities.

Though they were no means alone, the two highest ranking people in question were Highlord Hunter and Mo-NervAgent.   Both began to openly bristle against the other.

First, I'll begin with the one that didn't purposefully betray us.  Highlord Hunter was a highly charismatic person who had a slight problem with focus.  As the fight died down on the rebel side, he increasingly vented an interest in returning to his roots on the rebel side for the pvp.

Tasaii and I managed to keep him tied down, thus solidly Imperial.  However, we did underestimate how much Ghost's teamspeak crew was listening to exaggerated tales of how great the pvp was on the other side.

Also, while Highlord's popularity grew inside the ranks, it rankled others like those with less glamorous jobs and far lesser ability.  The first villain in question would be Ghost Town's mayor, Mo-NervAgent.

Tasaii's mistake here would consistently be my own later.  Like myself, he'd bull headedly refuse to lock the mayor slot of Ghost Town under himself.  Thus, Ghost and later HAUNT would have a consistent issue that never bothered the other guilds.

The first mayor to hold the city hostage was Mo-NervAgent.  Mo literally demanded the means to create his own guild and own town or he'd delete the city hall.

His first breakaway guild was Ghast.  It would soon become ICE.  The high comedy of which was that he and his crew took every chance to recruit raid us for members and ended up consistently self destructing from their own incompetence.  Months later as HAUNT, my favorite part was being asked to go all the way to Talus to defend ICE's city of over one hundred players from five moderately equipped rebels that were griefing their town.  It should be noted, MO also took multiple opportunities to rob his own people, including his XO, who was shocked to find there is no honor among thieves. 

In the end, Ghast/ICE/Ghiest Company's XO went on to become a bullet catcher for another guild.  Mo went on to nothing.

The Ghast/ICE incident weighed heavy on Tasaii.  He'd leave a few weeks later and refuse to pass on leadership guild functions of Ghost, as he went to Linage II.

Highlord Hunter became the default leader of Ghost.  He became slightly erratic and pushed the guild towards a mass scheme of a single huge base complex, surrounded with what became known as the "Great Wall of Highlord".

The wall wouldn't fuse right.  The defenses didn't cover each other.  A rebel base within the structure for farming became a declare zone for the enemy.  In a single week, the total might of the IC wasn't enough to save the poorly designed complex.

Ghost bled members.  ICE actively farmed them.  Highlord silently followed Tasaii into Linage II in embarrassment.

One of Highlord's lieutenants, Soft Fish, became the leader of the largest Imperial guild in SWG and the oldest metropolis in the game.  Soft decided to complete raid the guild's storehouses and blow up the city.  A large portion of the Ghost teamspeak crew drunk on Highlord's pvp stories followed suit.

Before anyone knew their intent, one of Soft's lieutenants named Krunta talked the current mayor, Moesha (who was Jedi grinding), into dropping the mayor skill, saying she didn't need it for the mayor slot and she could pick it up later.  Their hope at the time was that the city hall would vanish.  Luckily, by mechanic or glitch, it didn't.

Second they disabled the guild's function by booting most of the officers, starting with Highlord Hunter.  Tasaii's lack of interest in passing on guild functions or returning during this drama was now nuking what he had created.

As for the Ghost storehouses, they were vast.   Hewy would correctly brag that he had enough medical buff packs to buff the entire server, which averaged over ten thousand online at any time back then.   That was just the buff packs, if the raided stores had been sold as credits by IG, at about $8.00 per million credits worth, Soft's group had made off with what could have been conservatively sold for $11,000.00 American. 

They also stole the entire interior from Ummagumma's cantina and any other private building that they had access too.  Afterwards, they also tried to spin themselves as heroes to the rebel faction.

Soft's crew bought themselves the best gear in the game, flipped rebel, went hot, and began camping Ghost Town.  Many of the officers who had once lead Ghost now attacked it.  They hoped to earn their status in the rebellion by breaking the largest Imperial guild in the game.

The guild functions were locked to end any mathematical chance at staying tagged as Ghost.   It would appear, we were in checkmate as the masses ran...

[Laylyn]

Born in Fire...


John F. Kennedy once said, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan."  In video games, people gravitate towards the advantaged side in droves.  In COX, almost everyone played the game mechanically advantaged heroes.  In SWG, by the time of the NGE, 70% of the player base had access to an alpha class Jedi toon.

Few gamers like a losing toon or a losing situation.  So it should be noted, the players who became HAUNT members in those first days, were outnumbered and outgunned, yet stuck together.

It was days of fighting to regain any footing.  It was fighting outnumbered or often alone.  Yet, we did and by leading by example, our numbers grew.

HAUNT wasn't even our first name, we actually started under, (POE) Phoenix of the Empire.  I dropped the guild hall of the Necropolis in Ghost Town.  Need'a'Bone Dreg followed as the second person.  Other gamers did as well: Jungto, Kayte, Sera' Storms, Skeeter Whatley, Xetai, Darius, Berdan, Furball, Ummagumma, and many others.  We began the scurried race to retake our online home and force the raiders from our land.

Since Soft's crew had taken the old teamspeak, Jungto provided the new one.  The renamed group gelled and restored what it could as quickly as possible.

Furball's great contribution was to save Ghost town in those days by engineering land trades and votes.  Oddly, like Mo-NervAgent, he'd try blow the city up in a fit depression just a few months later.

Berdan became our first war leader and successfully built a squad that made a continuous habit of beating Soft's much better equipped team out of Ghost town.  We then drove them off Dantooine.  We then chased them wherever and whenever we could.

We didn't do this alone.  A fellow member of the IC, Praelian's FOE, became our greatest ally in that fight, identifying Soft's new base on Naboo and blowing up his more expensive property with spy toons.

It's worth noting Soft's group -UG- understood how to equip themselves as duelists and make some money, but were completely inept at managing the long term logistics of a guild.  Due to equipment degrade and lost property, they burned through what they had stolen.  They did so just like an addicted rock/rap star would blowing a thousand lifetimes of earned wages in a year.

Soft's -UG- started as some of the richest people on the server.  They ended defeated, disgraced, and broke.

-UG- ended with a tiny village on Naboo.  It lacked the drive to remove a single large turret that Jungto had placed dubbing it, "HAUNT's Penal Colony".  It's a joke that the turret stood a month after placing it, as we sat camping -UG-s village, talking to a trapped Hewy who hid in his house for three hours.  He was the last of that crew to quit that game. 

Thus ended Soft's -UG- on our watch.  I'm sure they went on to other ventures and did just as well.

As for HAUNT, during the first days of fighting and the unsure times, our numbers were very few.  Three weeks after forming, when the danger and stress had passed, things changed quickly.

As peace was restored and all of the hard work was effectively over, people returned in droves until our numbers swelled over 300.   With the numbers came the clicks and the debates over silly crap, starting with the name of the guild.

After a guild vote, we tried the guild names in succession of voting.  Skeeter's entry of HAUNT actually stuck even though it was the number three choice on the list.

We drafted and adapted a constitution.  We thought of ourselves as a group of brothers and sisters.  We were our own, Knights of the Round table.

Militarily our first major decision was the "No divided defense" policy.  Ghost town wouldn't drop a base, but we wouldn't let an allies fall either.  We became the steward's of CE 5 base complex to our north, holding them for two hours a night, often without help from the guild that dropped them.  We also pulled an extra two hours a night on Naboo. 

There was a full year where no Imperial base fell with HAUNT on the field.  On Naboo, we were part of a huge force and just did our part.  On Dantooine, protecting Mandalore's base complex, we were often more than a bit alone and often had to hold the line on five separated bases alone for 10-30 minutes while waiting on reinforcements.

Internally, we changed the internal design Tasaii had created.  Ghost had been a levy on mass system, where the top spent the resources the rest made, or where 95% of the taxed were poor, so 5% could be rich. 

That system had created the people that made -UG-.   We thus threw that system out for an idealistic service system.  Leaders served the guild and members were limited in what they could give.  The idea was to make a self sufficient guild where people could be independently wealthy inside, a low tax, highly capitalistic guild model that would aid some of those who couldn't help themselves sufficiently.

These were the high years of HAUNT in SWG.  They'd start falling apart quickly enough...

[Laylyn]

The Combat Update...


In a single move, SOE changed the game radically.  Much of the interdependency was removed, things like battle fatigue disappeared overnight.  Many viable builds from the day before were no longer functional for pvp as they left you below level 80 in a newly WOW like system.

We had been built and designed as a guild to retain what we liked most about Ghost.  Now the self sufficient city guild build was openly falling apart.  Entertainers were rendered virtually useless overnight.  Other classes became grossly simplified in many ways.

There are many that would argue the CU was the best part of the game.  From a larger perspective, it's actually a period that killed much of the diversity.  The number of subscribers dropped in the US from 300k to 250k.  The Japanese servers closed.

Players began to wholesale disappear.  Our allies went through periods of time where the entire subscriber base disappeared into WOW and other games.

The Galactic Civil War suffered as well.  By the time the village had come out, players began wholesale disappearing to Jedi grind.  The entire guild and social dynamic had changed for all, effectively killing the increasingly simplified GCW.

Non player cities were now dying.  Player cities were increasingly empty and populations stuck to smaller areas.

We tried a few things to stir the local player base up, even going so far as to provide help to rebel guilds in distress, to keep pvp alive.  Between hosted hunting projects and our sillier crap like the Imperial Beach Party, we became known by our catch phrase, "We're here to help".

We became the broader community builders as the moderates in the Imperials.  Thus, when things like "Operation Blue Balls" occurred, a rebel strategy of staving the Imperial pvp base of fights, we weren't affected.

Our more conservationist stance on making sure we didn't kill off the competition earned us friction with our allies, with a few face offs.  In the end, though, nothing came of it and we kept the game we were obsessed with on as much life support as possible.

The game was dying.  No longer able to be a single game guild, HAUNT began flirting with other games:

HAUNT joined MxO (The Matrix Online).  However, our numbers stayed so small that we merged our members into Furious Angels.

HAUNT entered Guildwars.  However, interest in the game was so small that we never even had 8 members on at one time once for a island war, even three times that number had bought the game.

I ended up needing a break and tried working on other projects.  Jungto took the reigns as main guild leader for a few months and did a great job.   His largest contribution was building the HAUNT Jedi base that would be needed to sustain us for the years to come.  We were the last Imperial guild to do so.

Need'a'Bone was our war leader.  With Jungto, he staged such projects as the Dantooine Blockade and proved remarkably effective at providing the rebel motivation to challenge it by simply posting on the Bria boards.  He also began the first warnings about HAUNT's decaying readiness for combat operations.

Months later, I resumed in quiet.  I misinterpreted the readiness issue and made the classic political mistake of throwing money at it.

We tried to motivate Ghost Town's citizen soldiers by handing out pvp gear valued in the millions to each volunteer pvp toon.  It was a model that had worked well for LFD and FOE that we could finally afford as Bria's 3rd largest economy.  It would turn out to be a huge mistake.

There was a general decay in the inflated guild's ranks.  HAUNT became successively cliquish.  The average age of the player base dropped from 30ish to 17ish.  Drama ensued.

Furball returned, campaigned for mayor and then threatened to delete Ghost Town in a fit of depression.  It was the fifth time, the town hall had been in Jeopardy and the constant drumbeat of that drama had become beyond old.

War operations had to be restarted as a matter of necessity.  A boneheaded move by SOE now allowed EVERY toon to drop 3 bases without costing any personal lots.  The Imperial Dominion (the second generation of the IC reformed under Praelian) had demonstrated the power of this by dropping over 100 bases around a rebel city effectively lagging it out.

This same strain was now effecting Bria's entire grid.  The servers were becoming progressively laggy and the only effective means of dealing with the issue was blowing up these ever multiplying junk bases.

With our allies, we began this in earnest.  Though the IGN value of credits had dropped to about $3 per million, HAUNT literally blew up over $100,000.00 worth of these junk items over a series of weeks on four planets.

Server stability improved.  Our pvp numbers did not.

Senior members were now pumping tens of millions of credits a month into guild members that wasted what they were given.  A guild of over 300 active members could barely muster a squad of eight people for pvp. 

Teamspeak had become a social event rather than a communication tool.  Senior members were now spending twenty to forty hours a week simply maintaining the pre-cu administrative functions whose purpose was long dead.

Discipline continued to slip.  Integrity inside the guild had become a joke for the majority of its membership.   

Eventually, there was a politically motivated power grab.  The illusion of the Knights of the Round table was gone.

The insurgents was a small group of teenagers who had no access to the controls, nor the systems that actually paid the bills.  As most people whose daddy never spanked them, they had no concept of consequences. 

They made a laughable challenge to the charter.  Which would be the same as a bank robber caught, red handed, with the money bundles in hand, saying it was his legally, "since possession is nine tenths of the law."

They sat in shock as we calmly dropped over 150 players who did little more than act entitled to benefits they hadn't earned.  We also took the time to inform our allies of exactly what dirt bags had caused our internal problems and why.

To put it into metaphor, the people trying to grab power were like teenagers killing their parents, then not understanding why the unpaid for power to the house is cut, the refrigerator didn't magically refill itself, nor did their laundry mystically get done.  Nor, did they have any concept of consequences as we drove them from the guild and they made a play for Ghost Town's city hall.

I'd help hold Ghost Town together for six attempts on its existence.  Along with many of the senior officers, I'd grown tired of it.  Having learned from the -UG- experience, we held all the keys to the kingdom and contacted the mayor on our decision.

Logging onto the mayor's toon, as I spoke with Bone, one of the most freeing moments of my life was deleting that city hall. The only thing better was the surprised screams of those that didn't think I'd do it. 

It's worth noting we told them what we'd do if they tried.  It also wasn't the first line we clearly drew and then made good on publically.

The insurgents formed their own guild "eXyLe" and placed their own city hall.  Their mayor blew it up on the others within weeks.  The guild they formed folded just as quickly.

The senior leaders took a break.  We came back weeks later and saw the NGE.  Already divorced of any emotional ties to SWG, we moved on to the next game...

[Laylyn]

HAUNT's rebirth, post SWG


We found a newly released game called City of Villains. Kayte had reviewed it's progenitor game and let us know the basic breakdown mechanics. For Kayte's efforts, he was promoted to XO.

Having grown tired of the crashes with Bria, we avoided the most lagged out server Freedom after experiencing mass lag issues there. Instead, Kayte selected the server Guardian and we leveled to the cap of 40. Once armed, we began fighting the local heroes there.

NCSoft created a system where the other side has more hit points, better damage, better accuracy, better resistances, better defense, better healing and better everything than we did. The lead developer, Matt Miller (a.k.a. Positron), would later boast it was done for "Role playing" purposes.

Though we didn't know it at the time, for a guild looking for an edge and a chance to really fight again, it was a godsend. The game was fast like a shooter and completely unforgiving.

HAUNT rose from the ashes as a guild of three pvp squads. No longer willing to put up with those that didn't pull their weight, we carried a 50% wash out rate with any recruit the first month. After that, we had a 50% wash out rate for the first year. That was after turning down over 200 applications that first year alone.

We found new players that were magic on their toons, like Katarn (Slash), Redgrave, Taint/ Grundle, Robo, Nev, Marjai, Zoom, Starfire, Karl Revok, and Eliv. We then set an increasingly higher bar for ourselves.

It would be hard for a lot of people on Guardian to understand now that we were hated when we first started in the pvp zones. People had built their toons for arena style dueling and they were often in for a shock when HAUNT took the field.

The lack of hero team coordination increasingly became a problem. The zone consistently emptied, until we finally found our most consistent adversary.

It was there on Guardian we discovered a much hated hero guild named the Twilight Avengers. They reminded us a lot of ourselves as Ghost and we began a friendly rivalry.

Outnumbered, outgunned, and out equipped thanks to their hamidons, we jumped into a blender. Over a few weeks, in Siren's Call, HAUNT began to rapidly modify and change tactics.

We broke the game down mathematically and began to reshape our toon strategies. We succeeded in a system that forced us to close range buff every 60 to 120 seconds just to survive.

We had to learn which villain toons had synergy together. We learned to avoid which ones naturally nerfed each other in group. We then had to hold group morale in one beat down after another.

In time, the tide shifted. One night, on top of a tower, beyond the tipping scales of the hero npcs, we held off an organized teamspeak group twice our number for a 30 minute hair raising, non-stop smack down that never let up.

One misstep would have slain the group. There was none.

Free of the dead weight of a year earlier, we had been reborn. HAUNT had arrived.

We networked with both sides. We also made ties with the best ally guild we ever found, the Bane of Prometheus.

Villains were expanded into level 50 gifted with the joke that was Patron powers. The same expansion introduced a death zone called RV that most villain pvpers on most servers quickly avoided like the plague.

Dealing early with the battlefield issues and drawing on our SWG experience, we also started a new experiment in community building. Tapping into what motivated COX's player base, we started a nine month weekly pvp event that we moved into Recluse's Victory called the Guardian Wars.

We built the pvp event as a comic posting and brought the two factions into the creative part of the project as well as the war itself. Though the original thread had long since died, we still have some originals that chronicled our effort here:  
http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=274.0


There are also those that wondered how we did it. Since that game is now gone from the mechanics of the time, here was our strategy.

1. The core of the villain army was masterminds. We formed a core five man squad and kept them up with Corruptors. This meant you had to slug through 30 or more minions, not including the upgradable zone robots. In effect, we returned to the heroes the same tab targeting issues that villains were forced to face in Siren's Call. This group formed the center of our entire visible offensive.

2. As much as heroes hated individual stalkers, we formed a synergetic stalker squad. Stalkers work better not saddled with other classes. They can often cause extensive damage in groups against a distracted opponent. This group was our eyes, since players were often able to see stalkers easily, they simply played and sought cover, as if they were visible toons.

3. Brutes need a full fury bar in order to hit full effect. Teaming them with Dominators or Masterminds often nerfed their ability to generated damage. We teamed this squad with a kinetics corruptor and used them as fast response / close range damage on the enemy.

4. We teamed the remaining squad often made of dominators and / or corrupters as a fast response layer. This left a synergetic group that wasn't interfering with the brute group's ability to deliver maximum damage.

5. While mixing these groups in the HAUNT vent we used our last card to survive which was mobility. Villains actively engaged the control points of the zone encouraging the hero groups to spread as thin as possible. We'd hit the point and smash the response team, then hit the next point.

6. We'd sprinkle in any independent villains in the zone. In the chaos, a weekly, two hour war was born.

7. We'd make sure every SG or VG participating got credit at the end. We made a weekly posting event out of the war and the people who had fun came back week after week. They did; even, when the buggy zone was unplayable. Which could be up to half the time and the event had to go through multiple postponements, due to multiple client side crashes due to game coding issues.

We still have some of those screenshots from those days. Here's a few of the weeks, for those that are interested:

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=6

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=7

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=8

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=10

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=11

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=12

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=13

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=14

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=15

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=17

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=18


This RV effort was not without internal cost. It caused a disruption in the guild itself.

We lost no fewer than four guild members. Several newer players were stressed out by us planting our flag in the hardest pvp zone, for a two hour event a week, and utterly refusing to back out of it.

There were benefits beyond the server recognition though. The War got HAUNT invited to represent Guardian by Rift of the Lion's Den (Victory) in NCSoft's PVPEC (Player Versus Player Event Committee  http://pvpec.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=172980&TabID=1463928 ). At the time, this gave us the direct chance to input directly to the game developers.

HAUNT did fight for more balance so Red side wouldn't die off as a faction. However, we didn't win that fight. It's interesting that Castle did eventually implement one of our suggestions, which was, in the event they didn't balance the math of villain toons, that they allow the preferred classes to cross factions with a recent expansion.

That was politics. We were more successful in game. In the end, at that time, we set the following COX milestones:

1. Longest known weekly villain run event in RV with consistent numbers over 40 vs. 40.

2. The Guardian War became the largest guild run event in COX with over 20 acknowledged super groups and over 20 acknowledged villain groups consistently participating.

3. At its height, the event had the highest level of population participation, by a server. The event managed to attract 33% of the entire server player base online.

4. By request of the PVPEC, it became the largest PVPEC multi-server RV zone event on test center. Even Rift came out of retirement for the event. Other members of the PVPEC, such as Freedom's Thorizdin (Lords Of The Dead) participated.


Years later, we're still getting positive feedback from the Guardian Wars. It was; however, very taxing for people on our side.

We literally broke good players doing it in RV. We have since throttled back on pushing the edge so hard. So far, it is arguably HAUNT's highest achievement.

While on Guardian, we also continued a few other goofy HAUNT traditions like the Imperial Beach Party. In the end though, game balance never happened and red side population fell even further behind. We left searching for a new game.

Thus began our WOW the Burning Crusade years...

[Laylyn]

The Burning Crusades...


The Imperial Dominion had set up to conquer World of Warcraft, just like they had SWG. Facing off against old enemy guilds, they selected Archimonde.

Our Imperial network of guilds then faced a ruthless evil they had never known. It was called purple fever.

In vanilla WOW, brother turned on brother in the name of phat loot. The network of guilds fell apart and eventually raided one another for players.

We had originally entered Vanilla WOW, during a short break in COX. There was a little heart burn in our membership in needing to play Alliance to play with old friends. After all, WOW offered the only known opportunity to play undead and the guild name was HAUNT.

Being just like every other guild at the time, we got a jab of purple fever as well and lost four members to the game. Two were kicked for stealing from people they were PUGing with. Two left to join raider guilds.

As for the rest of us, most didn't care to grind to 60, to then spend up to 9 months equipping, just to be fully armed for pvp. As Redgrave once described, the imbalance of tier three gear was such that he could kill 3 rogues simultaneously with his restro druid.

Most ground a few levels and threw in the towel. The game was a glorified pve grind and we were just there to shoot people in the face.

Personally, I never planned on returning to WOW, nor had most of the guild. Not a fan of COX, Need'a'Bone had predated the rest of the guild trying WOW and stayed throughout, settling as a Horde member on Jaedenar which at the time was overrun with Alliance...


It was over a year later. HAUNT needed a pvp game. The market was barren...


As a compromise, HAUNT returned to WOW as a guild specializing in 29th level twinking. It would mean no endless grind and an option to pvp weekly as a guild again.

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=104.0

Grundle and Redgrave designed our gearing and specs. The group began ripping up Warsong Gulch and / or Arathi Basin on Fridays depending on attendance. We also picked up an old member, Sikte / Kubar, who brought his own brand of humor to the matches.
http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=41


At first, we hit gold and consistently faced off against Nightfall's Alliance twink groups in some wild fights. Unfortunately, it would appear most twinks at the time were just looking for a slaughter.

Nightfall's familiar twink faces started dropping when we'd que in. The waiting times for a Friday fight got longer and longer.

We leveled to 70 and started openly competing in the Burning Crusades. At the time, you could completely gear up from pvp alone for gear only one level below whatever the top gear was.

Jaedenar had dropped numbers since Bone's first outing. We went to work building the community.   First we tried a weekly Jaedennar War event: 

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=193.0

This became a weekly Halaa event. To be honest it had hit or miss attendance. We still have some screenshots here:

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=28

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=30

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=32

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=33

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=35

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=36

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=viewalbum;id=37

To help the event and add a boost to our declining Alliance opponents, we opened the Jaedenar server vent. We openly hosting both sides and providing for fighter jock coms for people fighting.

The vent even provided coms for the first worldwide arena tournament hosted by Blizzard. They were also used by two Alliance pvp crews, Crossdog's Red Equals Dead and Gun's Why so Serious.

We also joined a project started by a member of the Alliance. The Jaedenar Guild Alliance was a server wide association for helping both sides.

In the end, despite the efforts of both sides and multiple guilds, Jaedenar was a virtually empty server. We took a break and looked elsewhere, to WAR and other games...

[Laylyn]

WAR and other games...


We had a brief flirtation with Eve Online. That time's pride and joy was an operation, set up by Karl, against a corporation that had literally gained his email and threatened his life. In response, we placed a mole and nuked a corporation for a few thousand dollars American. It was high marks for us, which was a low bar, some corps had cost people tens of thousands in single operations.

I liked the pvp idea of eve. However, like most of HAUNT, I found the idea of a ship icon only to be boring.

Eve Online was like fajitas. The smell (advertising) was so much better than the taste.



Also, pursuant to the idea of Expanding the PVPEC, we looked into other games and old games.


We did the beta test for Tabula Rasa, which boasted a promising Guildwars mechanic. The game was crap, too pve, and is already dead because it deserved to be.

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=60.0

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=7.0

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=494.0

We took part in a second look at SWG. We set up a call that lead about 200 players back into Bria over 9 months for the promise of a base war that once again failed to start rebel side.

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=114.0

The game community we had known, was dead. Further, the servers were barren.

Though there were several good players in several guilds on both sides there, Bria was at its last spastic gasps as the pvp server of that game. As of this writing, it no longer is.

Despite attempted improvements, WOW style NGE SWG had been reduced to a Restuss oriented shooting fest with ever decreasing numbers. We tried to help and failed.


We did the Beta test for WAR. Despite high hopes, it was the grind that killed us. I don't understand why a pvp oriented game would force that long of a grind. We left after a month or two.
http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=231.0

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=316.0

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=39.0


This also marked my last attempt to expand the PVPEC into other systems.  There simply weren't any bites.


On that note, we also tried a requested reboot of the Guardian War in COX. Unfortunately, despite enthusiasm, the chasm between IO geared pvpers and the average player is so vast at this point, zone pvp is no longer a way to grow new pvpers from casuals. It's just a slaughter. Since this wasn't the idea or the reason for the event's success, we retired the reboot out of respect for what it was, rather the math realities of the current game.

http://ghost-pa.com/forum/index.php?topic=281.0


This pretty much leads us to today...

[Laylyn]

Current projects:


We have a few squads in WOW toughing out WOTLK.  Bone is currently leading the group raiding just to keep bashing face in Blizzards world.


We have a squad in AION.  Nev is leading a group in a game that is both breathtaking and long in its grind.


I'm currently with a growing group of squads in Star Trek Online.  I was hooked by the pvp starting at 6th level, that awards money, xp, and awards for better gear.  I was really hooked the first time a Federation player screamed "Khan!!!" after losing a match to us.


That's it for now....


/salute