A very close rl friend of mine was going to a Quake3 tournament in Dallas and asked if I wanted to come to check it out. Yes, this is the same guy I went to E3 with to watch him play at that Quake3 tournament (among other things). What happened in Dallas was just strange.

Let me give you some background on Mark. I've known him for about 16 years now. He happens to be damn good at a lot of things he's done. He's competed on the state and national levels in chess tournaments and also professionally raced motorcycles with the AMA and WERA. And through all my years of knowing him, I have NEVER heard of him being written up for anything, much less removed from an event of any type. The man just knows how to act professional while being competitive.

Basically, we went to the tournament area, was yelled/cussed at, assaulted (don't fucking touch me), and ejected from the tournament area for.... well.... I'm not sure what the reason was. I think all in all I said three things to the guy : "Yes you did curse", "Take your hand off of him" and "Relax man". Mind you, I'm frequently a sarcastic bastard, but in a situation where my friend's tournament livelihood is involved, we were both pretty calm while this guy exploded at us for apparently no reason.

Basically, we're all a bit taken aback by the CPL and how this tournament was handled.

The upside is that I met a couple of cool mofos and got to see where JFK got shot. The weekend wasn't a total bust, but it certainly wasn't what any of us expected...
- Nighthawk

Oh my god... literally. These people are going to burn in hell. I mean, I know I'm not a poster child for righteousness and all that, but at least I've never made and marketed a Baby Jesus Buttplug. Zander has found some strange links for me, but this one tops them all. As Zander said, "Here's the best part: $35.00 for a baby jesus butt plug. I guess damnation has its price."

And yes, I actually updated twice in one day. Mark your calendar.
- Nighthawk

If you don't play Asheron's Call on the Darktide server, you can probably save yourself a lot of trouble by not reading any further. This probably won't interest you in the slightest. If you do play AC on DT and want to know the deal with JoV over the past couple of days, read on.

Over the weekend JoV began a vote to dissolve the allegiance with the Blood monarchy. I told the guys two things : the vote would end Sunday night and that it would take 75% of the votes to get us to make such a change. I posted how everyone voted on our private guildpage so everyone could see where everyone stood.

We began our allegiance when they were less than 400 members in a massive join effort by pks to make life hell for those antis who lived in AB - also known as The AB War. After the war ended, we stayed allies because JoV and Blood were the only two to stick to the war instead of halfassing it. So, why were we voting to sever the allegiance we'd had? Several reasons.

Our raiding together ceased. As a matter of fact, the only thing our guilds did together was share leveling areas in BH BSD and the island. Aside from that, our allegiance didn't mean anything like it used to. We didn't move to Kara and thus a lot of bloods that didn't read their website/IRC channel had no clue that JoV were allied at all. So, we were attacked a lot by Bloods. All in all, we didn't just want to be allied because we wanted to level easier... we wanted there to be more to it. And unfortunately, the raiding stopped and the AB war never started again as we had hoped.

What accelerated the break was on Saturday night around 3am a guildmate came back to our base saying that he was taken to 30%+ vitae by some bloods in Disaster Maze. Several JoV buffed up to go confront/kill the bloods in question. After having little success finding all of the attackers at DM, they went to BSD and found one. They attacked, the bloods who didn't know what was going on naturally defended their guildmate and a small battle broke out. A lot of words were exchanged in tells, tempers flared, etc. By the next morning, the damage was done.

I left work early to go home and try to handle the situation, but everyone was already on fire. So, after speaking to several Blood cores (Parthor, Zeke and Chupa) and we agreed that it was best that we break the allegiance. Returning to my IRC room with the news, I see that the guild is in an uproar. "My vote didn't count since I didn't vote yet and you guys forced us to break" and other such accusations. God, I was seriously expecting people to go Floridian on me and start asking for a recount.

To top that off, my good friend Azile posted "JoV Declares War on Blood" on DNN. He also gave out our home base location and basically provoked attacks. Obviously, declaring war and breaking an allegiance are two different things. As a matter of fact, I had told the guys that even though we're primarily a raiding guild, that we would NOT be raiding blood in Kara or BH BSD. Yet, Azile decided to stir the pot.

So, now basically the IRC room is in a frenzy. I felt like I was a parent driving screaming kids on a roadtrip. So, since in my eyes the guild had fractured - I logged on and released everyone. People who I'd known for years, rl friends, people new to the guild - everyone. That seemed to get their attention. I took a screenshot of me with no one under me and sent it to a total of two people in blood (it went around plenty fast).

From the minute I broke, I received countless private messages in IRC and some very nice posts on the CoD DT Discussion Board expressing how we shouldn't break, surprise, etc. I let a rl friend from the guild use my account yesterday to exploit the gate-anywhere bug before it was fixed on patch day, and while he was at it he let some people repledge. I was too over the situation to argue it more, so I let myself be talked into staying and reforming the guild under me.

Several of the guild won't be rejoining. Hell, Katz is even going so far as to go nO.otral. But the point is that it's been a pretty shitty past couple of days. JoV currently has no allies and it should be an interesting challenge to see if a fractured had-60-members-before-the-breakup guild can survive against the entire server. Should be interesting.

Forgive the typos (if any)... it's early.
- Nighthawk