05-07-2014, 03:33 PM
eva311 Wrote:If you don't mind giving me a bit more detail, what exactly did the 12 Prophets do to make everyone hate them so much? What sort of behavior? I didn't play EQ, but I invested a few years in WoW and I've never seen a guild that's attracted this much of a bad rep.
They would run cheats while playing:
For example; they were the first botters I had ever seen in gaming, they would also run speed hacks and resist hacks. Latency in those days made targeting difficult so speed hacks created real pvp challenges for those that didn't cheat.
Pylioa and Shma would run scams on newer players. In EQ when you died you had to recover your corpse. All of your gear was on a dead body left behind where you died. Typically you died because it was dangerous therefore trying to get back to it while naked was difficult enough. As higher level characters Pylioa and Shma would tell people who died to give them permission and they will help by dragging their body to a safe place. Players would give persmission and then Pylioa and Shma would steal all their gear and leave their body there.
12P would also run trade scams. They would advertise selling an item. They would get people interested then run a trade scam. They would put the item in the trade window and do item swaps once the trading partner activated the trade. Alan had his people doing that in every city zone in bulk to turn over lots of game cash.
I could name a few more scams but the bottom line is they used peoples naiveness to run con's on people in game. MMO's were new then and Sony had no protections for those people whose gaming experience could be totally ruined by people in 12P. The aspect of getting conned in a game was totally uncomprehendable to many gamers at the time.
I can't prove it but I am convinced 12P had bribed GM's in EQ. I suffered multiple 24 hour ban's from GM's when trying to stop some 12P stealing scams.
They abused game mechanics to make the gaming experience so miserable for players that players would just up and leave. This tactic was very popular if 12P wanted to farm an area for gear they could sell. Some examples of abuse are hiding under the earth to attack you where they can't be attacked, trains, cross-teaming exploits and other assorted bull shit.
Basically they were players that would go to any extent to ruin the game for other players in order to advance themselves. Their were no lines they wouldn't cross to cheat, steal or harm other people on the server. What is worse is they bragged and did nothing to hide their behaivor and Sony did nothing.
Unltimately for those that stayed on Vallon we turned into players that crossed similiar lines in order to harm 12P and police ourselves since Sony wasn't going to. We developed our own abusive tactics like Red Shirting, Iggles Treatment or Collision exploits to stop 12P. Ironically Red Shirting may have done more harm than anything 12P ever did.
I am sure you can imagine that 6 to 8 months of two opposites sides logging in every night and trying to ruin the playing time of the other side can become quite volatile. In the end 12P was solely in it for the money and we were in it solely to harm 12P. Eventually our methods got in the way of 12P's ability to make cash so things started to turn for the better.
The last time I talked to Alan in game he was bragging how they were doing better on some other server under some other name. I assumed they took their act somewhere else where they had less contention. A few 12P stuck around and joined other guilds but core assholes moved on to greener pastures.