The more time I spend on this game as a clan leader, the more I remember and, regretfully 😀 understand, my previous clan leaders! I have to tell you this is a very stressful job! I knew it was demanding, but not that stressful!
When I set up this clan, I thought that it is just going to be a place where my friends and I (friends that I had dragged with me from old servers) would hang around. Just a small clan, maybe we could get a clan hall if we were lucky and kill our mobs, one by one in peace, say some jokes on discord and life would flow slowly, in harmony and peace, in the long forgotten villages of the Aden Kingdom …
Anyway, I made it clear from the beginning that we were going to be a casual clan, since most of us had at least one full time job, some had two.
How deeply I was mistaken! 😀 The clan took off, gathered a lot of people, and the opinions on what we should do and be, were as many as the people in it. So around 70 different opinions..
And that was when a few people started trying to change us, to change our main ideals as a clan. A few people would play a lot and get levels fast, they invested a lot in this game. And while I have nothing against that, the problems arose when they tried to change us, when they started complaining all the time that we are a noob clan, that people don’t level up, and various other non-elegant remarks. This type of arrogance based on the fact that one has no valuable lifestyle apart from a virtual one, was very appalling to me. It was everything I didn’t want us to be. A group of elitists who believed that they had an inherit social advantage over people with less character levels. I already had to remove one person from the clan who was complaining all the time. The reason I did that was not so much because the complains bothered me, but that the person demanded continuous non-stop attention, and I had better things to do with my time than to continuously reply to him… Then time passed, and the day of the siege was approaching.
Our little casual clan ended up with a clan hall in Rune and a castle in Goddard, how this happened though is short of a miracle.
The truth is that we had no competition from other clans. Since we also chose not to pursue competition at this point and face them in the bigger castles. But our biggest enemy was ourself. The enemy was coming from within. We had to fight off impatience, lack of organisation and negativity.
On the day before the siege, someone suggested we should go and capture the fort next to the castle, so that we can easily teleport in front of the gates of the castle. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I listened to him I had forgotten two very important details. Firstly, we should have been able to summon a flag on the battleground to be able to respawn outside the castle fast. And secondly, most of our clan members were around level 70. Regrettably, most had created support classes, so not only were our levels low, but we had no dds as well :)). It was only a few of us that were around level 80. For the fort we gathered a command channel of around 4 parties, amazing activity! But… it was a disaster, we couldn’t kill all the bosses within 10 minutes. Apparently, thats what we needed to do. 😀 We even attempted to leave one boss at 10% health, go kill the others and return, but that also wouldn’t work. The server was open for just 2 weeks, very few were nobless and … our fort experience was so horrible that people doubted we would be able to get the castle from the npcs the next day.
I knew now that it was not only the castle guards that we had to fight off the next day, but also our own lack of trust in our powers.
So the day of the siege had arrived. In the morning I had recorded two messages, one about the siege and another with some clan tips. Uploaded them on youtube and posted in our discord server.
I posted those along with all the other dozens of announcements that I had made regarding the castles, siege times etc… And as I was preparing my character to gear up with all siege items, players started to ask me constantly about the time and place of the siege. I started replying to a few, then others pmed me about lots of different things, again asked me on clan chat where we re going, but then I realised I had no time left to buy items and prepare. Then the diva of our clan asked again where we are going. Our highest level player apparently not only did not read announcements, not only did not follow all the things I posted on discord regarding siege strategy, but also did not read clan chat. Apparently, he had just logged in and expected to be served individually with all the answers he was looking for. So I said check announcements. Then the swearing followed. The fucks followed and then I thought to myself: “I don’t really have time for this.” :O “Siege is starting in a few minutes! What the hell?” So I dismissed him from clan. Then another person started adding to the comments and said you can dismiss me too. So I kicked him from clan too. The funny thing is that people believe that the leader has nothing better to do that either listen to small talk, or stay and be insulted, while she is frantically trying to organise the siege. Thank god one of my captains began organising the CC (command channel) for the siege and a few minutes before it started I was ready. Yet it was too late to call people to teleport asap to Goddard, as the teleports would stop working when the city would be under siege. So much time lost in dealing with negativity, that no time was left to really organise the people and give the necessary orders.
However, I had to suck it up and walk it off, in order to have any chance at concentrating on the siege. The ones who didn’t make it on time had to walk to Goddard from Swamp of Screams.
The siege started and we all rushed FOR GODDARD, FOR ROHAN and some of us for the Horde… but then we were faced with another unexpected obstacle. I could not summon the headquarters flag. I had double the amount of c grade gems on me and yet nothing would happen. I would get a very strange system message. I tried to summon it, in and out of the battlezone, but nothing would happen. In the end I gave up and we went to attack from the front door. At the same time, two of our dwarves gollems were attacking the castle walls from the right side. What I noticed first was that we were getting A LOT of damage from the guards. We stood there at the main gate and it was very hard to heal. I died a couple of times and thank god I had stacked up many soe to Goddard scrolls (bought from the clan hall the past days), so I would return back fast. In the mean time I contacted the GMs for the flag issue, and while they tried to help for a few minutes it didn’t look like we would solve the issue before the siege ended. So I had to keep returning with soe scrolls, its just that the rest of the people did not have those and had to run back from Swamp of Screams.
Attacking from the front door was not working, we were not progressing from there and we kept dying. Then the walls at the sides of the castle were broken and we regrouped there to rebuff and wait for all people to return to the battle field. Some people individually started to attack guards from the side but once we buffed up we went back to the front gate. Something inside of me was telling me that it was wrong. We tried for a while to attack the middle guards and then to the left, but I could see this was taking too long. People had also started to frustrate and show signs of exhaustion. So I decided to take my chances and ordered everyone go back and enter from the side. Best decision I ever made. We were able to fight off all guards and reach the pray room this way very fast. Once inside the pray room we thought we had killed off all the guards, but there were some guards on the top of the other side that was not accessible to us from there. And those guards were killing me when I was trying to pray at the altar. I died and went back, and ordered people to go around and kill those guards as I was running back. Amazingly they did kill them and by the time I returned the pray room had only a couple of guards. As I was praying they interrupted me a few times but when they also died I was able to pull it off without interruptions. And the Goddard Castle became ours!!!
Another thing to note regarding the organisation is that its better to ask party leaders if their parties are there, than to try and get a reply from all people on discord. The thing is, I hadn’t played l2 in Siege since more than 4 years and didn’t remember a lot of things. But they are coming back to me.
What we also noticed was that Discord lacks cross channel communication and it was not possible to communicate with cps that chose to stay in their own voice channels. Also, sadly lots of people did not join discord, but these are signs of the casual nature of our clan.
Would I change the casual nature of clan just to be more effective in sieges? I would not! We are here to have some fun, so if we have to take our chances in a chaotic manner that is what we will do! 🙂
My goal for the next siege though is to have one party of very responsive players. The most important thing in sieges is that players are able to understand commands and carry them on immediately. So I am on the look out for players who can respond fast, who use discord and are generally able to communicate very well. If I am unable to find those, I will try to find people whom I will attempt to educate. We will see how well that goes! :))
And that is how we managed to get the Goddard Castle. Today is my birthday! So we will all gather in Rune and I will run two clan events! The winners will receive rewards from the clan warehouse! The events will be live treasure hunt and knowledge quizz!!
If you want to play with us, we are currently playing on a x7 H5 server. Join our discord and pm Electa for more information! https://discord.gg/YC34yyQ
The article will be updated with screenshots from the siege in the next few days.
Also, being clan leader may be stressful but it also has its rewards. Once I rode off on my wyvern I was able for the first time in my l2 gaming to visit places and land of roof tops of beautiful buildings and other areas that none can access without it. And there are so many different areas that one can visit on the castle dragon! Such incredible beauty and it is almost a pity that it is available only to castle owners! I wish more players would be able to appreciate the incredible work that the designers of l2 created. And that is why I plan to create screenshot galleries and videos with the best views of the game while flying on my dragon!