Hi everyone

The next chapter will be posted within 20 hours or so of this post. I just need to tidy up and refine a few things, and then it's ready to go.

Since I need to write 500 words in order to post this, here is an update on the latest events in the game. Today I will talk about two small guilds in our territory – let's call them Gatekeepers and the Horde.

Gatekeepers spend all their time gatekeeping the local dungeon. They stick alt characters in the dungeon with scripts which ping their discord whenever someone comes in. The dungeon itself has an invisible bridge which acts as a natural chokepoint, and can be held by 2 or 3 players against four times that number. Yes, if that sounds familiar, it was the model for the invisible bridge in the Azure Cathedral. Anyway, Gatekeepers are obsessive about that dungeon. They keep their characters logged in there permanently, and will come on at any time of the day or night to defend it. If they do happen to lose their hold on the bridge, they will keep running in to take it back, over and over again. As you can imagine, this makes doing this dungeon a massive pain for my guild. We need to take in a force of 20 or so, to complete a dungeon you could otherwise do with six people.

We have sieged Gatekeepers to loosen their foothold in the area, but haven't been able to eradicate it completely. My guild basically need to learn the invisible bridge properly so that we can fight at the chokepoint more effectively ... but there are better dungeons in the game that are more fun, so although the presence of Gatekeepers is annoying, dealing with them is more hassle than it's worth.

Then we come to the Horde. They randomly attack other players, and if there is a bug exploit they will take advantage of it (sometimes they get banned, but usually bans are temporary, or they just buy new accounts and make new characters). Anyway, this means no-one likes them. When the sieging mechanic was first implemented into the game, our first order of business was to remove them from the area. We sieged them seven times before they finally gave up and went to a different part of the map. However, once they left, we didn't pursue them and decided to let them be. Then a couple of months later they came and tried to siege one of our allies in our territory. So we mounted a punitive expedition, and found that they had made such pests of themselves in their new area that there were several local guilds who were willing to help us siege them there. So, once again, they lost most of their village and had to re-locate.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Unfortunately they came back to our territory and built their new village near the Gatekeeper's dungeon. It's build on a cliff that's very hard to get to, and extremely difficult to siege.

At first we were worried that the Horde might collaborate with Gatekeepers, but no. They hate each other more than they hate us. Both of them have reached out to us to see if we would be willing to work with them to siege the other.

Gatekeepers are really annoying, but they stay in the dungeon and we rarely see them outside it, whereas the Horde have been actively attacking people in our territory.

So eventually we decided that we needed to siege the Horde again ... and Gatekeepers offered us material to do so, which we accepted. We are still in the process of scouting the area and finding the best approach, because there are only limited places to put siege equipment, and we need to be able to get the right angles to hit the Horde's assets.

In the meantime, a big guild from the neighbouring territory to ours came to siege Gatekeepers ... and the moment the Horde saw this going on, they jumped in to help.

So now we have two siege campaigns going on, with two small guilds encouraging larger polities to come in and deal with their rival. But neither of the big guilds care a button for either Gatekeepers or the Horde – we both have our own agendas and would be quite happy if both the smaller guilds annihilated each other, leaving us to claim the area.

Real world politics in microcosm ...