<Enlightened Dark>

[Ganjar]

Haunted Dreams bitches!!! Lilstinky , bad motherfoxer !! Gnome warrior

[Valroth66]

ED wasn't all bad. We watched some guild kill blood in ssra once, then took emp from them. No big deal.

[Spitty]

ED wasn't bad at all.

CoS, however, would train you while you were engaged and KS while you were CRing.

[Adnan]

shoutout to <Omen> and <Oathsworn> !!

[dbouya]

I played in ED from kunark through velious only.

During velious we teamed up with SoTN sometimes because we weren't large enough to do some of the larger new raids velious offered. So I'm not sure how hostile this relationship could've been.

During the kunark era we strangled black company's raid targets fairly harshly and so I understand why they ended up interacting with us the way they did. I never had any hard feelings towards them myself though.

I haven't ever played p1999 but I might be interested after lurking on these forums all day today. Honestly when I was in ED we were pretty much a great big friendly family, if you were on the inside. If you were on the outside our stance was that we didn't need to share, we were online longer hours, we arrived first, and we outdamaged the competition. I mean yes.. at one point we successfully completed a raid and the guild leader deleted all the loot, despite it being loot people desperately needed because we had behaved sloppily and nearly wiped. Maybe things got a bit more bitter in later years? I'm not sure.

I never really liked EQ at all during the later years for some reason, some of the charm and magic of spending all night sitting in one spot talking to good friends was spoilt for me, maybe it's just because I'm older and have less free time? Most of my fondest memories are of spending long nights leveling in kunark dungeons late at night, sometimes a fellow party member would fall asleep and we'd fight to defend him. Good times.

[fastboy21]

I was in an Enlightened Dark in Vanguard...forget names atm. Same folks?

[t0lkien]

Originally Posted by Spitty [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

ED wasn't bad at all.

CoS, however, would train you while you were engaged and KS while you were CRing.

Well... that's not the full truth. ED strangled the server for years and cock-blocked everything they could, and were proud of it. They also did as much training/griefing as any of the other "uber" guilds on major raid targets (via Alts), and were chummy with GMs on the server. At least one of the server GMs was in the guild at some point and would log out and onto their GM character to "adjudicate" disputes between them and other guilds. There were rumours of raid targets being popped for them etc.; it was a bit of a joke to all of us actually. ED was in no way the good guy, though I had friends in the guild and didn't hold loyalties either way.

That's not to say CoS and BC etc. weren't bad. There were legendary levels of deception, drama, and treachery. CoS were the drunken, psychotic, rampant street zerglings of the server, and the leader Mack was an unrepentant nerd nutter. Highly entertaining though.

[dbouya]

During the early kunark, late kunark, early velious era when I was playing, I'm not sure any of that was happening. We just showed up first and cleared raid targets 95% of the time before anyone else even arrived. The few times BC did arrive they were attempting to race us at an activity we'd done dozens of times and they'd never done before, our DPS'ers would already have loot from that raid and theirs wouldn't. There were some serious disputes over some revamped cazic thule kills with accusations of our monk training them or their monk training us, and it probably did happen both ways, (personally I only ever pulled CT once or twice when I believe we may have been alone in the zone). There were some situations where we were both attacking dain at the same time, or that one time the zone kael (or was this the dain event again?) was crashed due too many people in the zone and as a result no one got to try.

I felt a little bit bad for BC because I almost joined them instead, they were probably good enough to do the raids. We weren't really sabotaging them in anyway that I knew of. We simply killed every target too fast for them to have any chance to experience the game. I believe it took ED thirteen weeks of attempts at Trak'anon to get our first successful kill. During that entire time I wasn't aware of anyone else attempting it at all, despite him remaining up and uncontested 99% of the time.

To illustrate the point, when I was applying to ED as an applicant I was allowed and expected to attend some raids, basically I was invited along to nagafen kills (during kunark). Despite being a class that could teleport straight to the lavastorm zone, and receiving invitations from the guildleader to attend the raid, I never once saw nagafen. Despite teleporting directly there after receiving a tell from the guild I arrived too late to do anything. So the odds of another guild getting there in time were even lower. I had to wait until ED started raiding trak to attend a raid. During about a one year portion that I played with them we basically just never arrived second to any target, once something was due to spawn, someone would go check, then classes that could teleport would go teleport guildmembers to the target. Instantaneous attendance was mandatory.

I can imagine though that in luclin and beyond ED may have appeared more and more evil, that's believable, because those expansions had more key'ing and more progression. In kunark even if you couldn't kill trak you could still adventure in seb, and in velious everyone could experience all the zones (except sleeper's tomb)... in PoP era I imagine they may have locked down entire zones for ages and really screwed the rest of the server a lot? At that point I didn't play anymore.

In summation I think almost anything CoS or BC ever did was entirely justified during ED's stranglehold because being under a strangehold would've been awful. I'm not personally aware of ED actually doing anything that wasn't fair during the time I was with them. I do remember CoS having a pretty bad reputation for having a temper though, mack was indeed utterly insane.. from what I recall BC kept their cool quite well, we often would race them with neither guild training the other at all. This behavior from ED and other guilds on other servers eventually led to mmo designers putting raids in instances that everyone could always try.