The following advertisement for the “Legion of Hing” was posted to the Fear Marshalling Grounds board, before a moderator deleted it. Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you like.

First requirement is to be lvl 55 or higher. When you join, you probably wont exp very often unless you count 1 exp at a time as “exping”.

Secondly, a substancial donation is expected. Items, deeds, contracts, discs, runes. We sell a lot of stuff in Khar or give it to guild members that need. Funding a city without an army of carebear farmers is kind of difficult. We seem to get by. (thnx to all the group we gank) If you arent willing cough up some decent amount, dont bother asking. We arent loot whores, but if you arent willing to make a sacrifice to join, you arent serious about being a part of us.

Thirdly, dont cry if you try to farm/exp and pk’d. Almost the whole server is a threat. I dont wanna hear you bitch about getting pk’d when we are a pk guild and have lots of enemies.

Fourth, if you run from a fight… I’ll set you to kos in the town and you’ll get owned anyway. There’s a difference between “falling back” and “hauling ass without looking back”. If you are afraid to die, which really has no long term reprocussions, then dont bother me.

Fifth, you will act when told. We expect all of our people to act exactly how we would, and do. When it was just Alastior, Alendor, Kervin and occassionally me raping EL farm groups, we went all out and never ran. EL supplied millions in gold, items and contracts. When we tell you to act, we need instant response. If the entire guilds fights like us, we win. If people hesitate or are afraid to die, we lose.

Lastly, you will email me a screenshot of your login screen. If I question the validity of your screenshot, I’ll ask that you set your password to something I generate, give me access to the account so I can see your character list. If I dont request this last process and you are suspected as being a spy, I’ll ask you at a later date, which 99% of the time is how it works. I havent yet, but I certainly will if the need arises.

Da Expo was one big meeting hall packed with arcade games, mostly, and dealer tables selling old consoles and old games. There was a demo of a Homestar Runner RPG made to work on the Atari 2600, but it was just a map demo and opening cheesy dialogue with mugs of the main characters. The rest of the room was filled with sweaty fanboys and mediocre ventilation. At least they bathed more often than anime fans. Didn’t stay long.

Ran into Jeff (Ashton Kai), whom I wasn’t expecting, and Damion (Ubiq) and Sara (Lietgardis) whom I was. Got to talk a lot longer with the latter two. As with my other visits, I left with a better attitude about Shadowbane and its future, though of course there’s still uncertainty. Got easy acknowledgements that stuff needs fixing (errancy as endgame = bad, various class imbalances and how awkward it’s going to be to ‘fix’ them without leaving other imbalances behind, and so on.) Seems Damion has a catch-all scheme to make cities a little more relevant and to encourage guilds to specialize in certain races and/or classes. Sounds promising on paper, though admittedly they need to figure out a worthwhile incentive system for it to be worthwhile to players.

We’ll see. No, I’m not telling you what it’s all about.

Covenant of Swords have announced on their forums that they’re leaving Shadowbane for greener pastures.

CoS was basically the last uber-guild to hold a whole fragment, Treachery, in its sway. Rollin’ 30s are gone from Scorn, Ebonlore barely lasted a month on Fear before Ewle pawned their cities on eBay, Warrior Nation wandered off Chaos and Deathhead Legion’s leader declared last month that the game’s “too immersive,” and moved pretty much everyone out.

Would inter-server travel have prevented this? Most likely not. There are far more deep-seated reasons why this is happening.

Frankly speaking, it’s good this happened now rather than later. Guilds that play to win, ultimately lose. It’s the one thing Shadowbane’s tragically done right.

Only in America. Actually, only in Texas, America. Well, actually, only in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, America, could the DeLorean Motor Company be re-incorporated, and offer an online store for buying your own. Only costs about $35,000 for a 20-year-old auto design which may well have been ahead of its time. Sorry, it doesn’t have a flux capacitor, and you won’t go back in time if you run it to 88 miles per hour.

For those who haven’t seen the I Love the 80ssegment on 1982, or were just too buzzed on Reagan-era excess to remember, the story goes something like this: General Motors hotshot executive engineer John DeLorean founds his own company in Ireland in 1979. Hires the best designers and engineers available to make a unique sports car with doors that open like gull’s wings and looks cool with a chassis of unpainted stainless steel.

Then DeLorean gets busted selling cocaine to an undercover agent in 1982, and gets put away for money laundering, all the while declaring his innocence. The factories were all set to make thousands of these things, but they’d barely been out the door by this point, and less than 9,000 were actually sold.

So this company, located very near the Bush Intercontinental Airport north of Houston, manages to acquire most of the inventory that was shipped to the states after getting put on mothballs at the factories in Ireland, and is open for business again.

So what about the man himself? The Christian Science Monitor found him four years ago; he’d just declared bankruptcy after getting saddled with $20 million in debts, and was apparently trying to start a new car company and a watchmaking company, “DeLorean Time.”

Neither saw the light of day. Business 2.0 reported that his watches would cost $3,500.

He couldn’t even keep his Web site live.

Even though it’s only begun, it feels like it should be half over.

My day job is giving me grief lately. I’m hoping it’s not wrong to wish I was one of those talentless kissasses that seem to have job opportunities cast at their feet like palm fronds.

At some point I’m also going to have to write up an explanation for why this site exists, why I wanted it made and what I’m planning to do with it. Short answer: It’s a blog. It’s not a news site necessarily, it’s just things I want to talk about, when I want to talk about them. No bosses except me, donated space from friends and donated labor from friends who want to learn how to run sites like this.

Me, I just make a living writing. And this isn’t something that will pay me. So participation will get spotty at times. I still haven’t figured out who the audience is going to be, or how to get it started. At this point it seems like a low priority.

Things That Shadowbane Lacks That Aren’t All About Technology Or Customer Service.

I have my own ideas, but then I also have explosive diarrhea. Does not lead to much in terms of writing mood.

Essay will have to be delayed until later in the week. Until then, discuss. No technology stuff (lag, crashes, lockups) or CS complaints (CCRs are impotent, I whined on the forums 55 times about my problem and no one could fix it).

Monday: No entries from me, or anyone else. Hmm. Maybe I should talk about something else.

IOL reports that a Taiwanese man committed suicide “by burning charcoal in his bedroom” earlier this week after his real-life girlfriend fell in love with the alter-ego he created for himself over e-mail, to test if she “really loved him.”

She dumped him for “Mr. J.” So he killed himself.

Matt “Donos” LeBeau, a beta tester for Shadowbane and contributor to the official Shadowbane strategy guide (he did part of an Assassin template which I cut up and used for the Assassin page) reportedly died earlier this week of a brain aneurysm. He was 23.

I can’t say he was a close friend or anything, but I knew who he was. He was an early “evil” player under Burning Legion and later the original Deathhead Legion in beta, and was inseparable from his real-life girlfriend Zisa.

Condolences to all his friends and family.

mmmmm. tentacles.

CHUD reports that Valve Software is shopping around Half-Life as a movie property.

About damned time, says I. Mark Laidlaw did the work on crafting a sci-fi horror story that’s told largely without words, except for some very memorable scenes when characters actually speak (”Don’t shoot! I’m with the science team!” “Body? What body?” “Forget about Freeman…”)

Then again, given the touch and go business of turning hit games into hit movies, why should we even anticipate this turning out well? Should such a classic game plot be subjected to the limits of feature film, or should fans of the game not be so selfish about keeping the story from the general public? Is there even a good chance that it’ll be made into a movie, period?

Fellow SA Forum Goons are busy speculating, and some have already pointed out that Charlie Sheen was made up to look and act very much like Gordon Freeman in the 1996 film The Arrival, but others have wisely suggested Colin Farrell would be a better fit for the hero role.

The problem that I pointed out is that Gordon Freeman, while a memorable character, has no speaking lines in the game. The only hints about who he is as a person come from other people reacting to him and from the biographical data listed at the beginning of the game.

This is probably going to end up like a mirror image of the argument below about famous TV and movie titles like Star Trek getting made into games, and whether it’s worth the bother, so I’ll let this thought die here.