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Now waiting on Aion
North American Server
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 HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG |
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| A summarised version of The Kelly Gang history, dating back to 1999. |
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The first members of The Kelly Gang met back in 1999 playing EQ1 PVP on the Tallon Zek server. We were spread across multiple guilds and teams, and delighted in hunting each other down. Since Australians are always a small community on any MMORPG server and play in a lowpopulation timezone, we got to know each other pretty well. |
A year or so later, Tholluxe Paelles server was launched and a bunch of us "went blue", having concluded that the EQ1 PVP model had stagnated since the removal of item-loot and wanting to "see the end-game". Originally joining a fairly large guild composed primarily of "ex-zekians", we eventually broke away to form our own small guild .. "The Wrecking Crew". It was here that our roots and playstyle as a guild were firmly established. Staying small, hunt with our mates, and using teamwork rather than numbers to beat challenges became our way. Whilst never hitting the status of a tier 1 guild, we indulged very happily (and somewhat notoriously) in FFA mob competition and gained a reputation over the following 3 ears for taking down raid encounters with very small numbers. |
Unfortunately, as EQ1 evolved the encounters biassed more and more towards huge numbers being a requisite .. and most of our core left the game during the Luclin era. Wreckers survived as a social guild (and eventually returned to raiding status), but the core of the family had moved on. |
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After a hiatus, we came together again for Shadowbane .. playing on the Asian servers under the new tag of The Kelly Gang. Our stay there was short (less than a year) but intense. We quickly became the most hated and feared guild on our server, with 90% of the guilds on the server eventually forming a coalition to attempt our extermination. We had a lot of fun, as there were many good facets to the SB PVP model .. however eventually the pain of farming for city maintenance combined with the bugs and lag to make us abandon the game. |
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We then entered a more extended rest period. No game grabbed our united attention enough to bring the gang out in force. A number of us played WoW, but its PVE focus deterred most and the TKG flag was never flown there. |
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EQ2 PVP brought us out in force again. Whilst flaws in the implementation caused us to drop EQ2 in late 2006, we enjoyed quite a number of months in rampant killage mode with our core pvp crew among the best-known/highest ranking killers on the Nagafen Server. |
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Vanguard ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Rampant hacking, continued lack of an end-game, and failure to address major PVP imbalances whittled our crew down 1 by 1 until we finally called it a day. The best fun in Vanguard boiled down to hunting our opposing oceanic guild (Captivus) into extinction, and once they had quit the end was inevitable. |
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We then found ourselves at a bit of a loss. A couple of us had played EVE, and the various threads on the FOH forums about it made it sound absolutely fascinating. Unfortunately, it was unique in that it was a game where you quite literally 'couldn't catch up' since you 'levelled' whilst offline. Nevertheless, a small crew of us spent a couple of months playing the pirating game and had some good fun encounters before giving it away. Definitely a game we wished we'd been around for the beginning of. |
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Warhammer and Age of Conan were looming but still months away, and nothing else fresh was on the horizon. So we turned to an old favourite in Shadowbane. Despite numerous jokes from our newer members about the 'stick figure graphics', we had 3-4 months of superb PVP fun. To-date, I still don't think we've played a game with better PVP than Shadowbane. The rock-paper-scissors of spec group versus spec group, the PVP based competition for resources, and the intense multi-hour siege battles really delivered. Roughly 20 of us enjoyed 3-4 months of PVP, in the end really only abandoning it because the mechanics were very skewed towards US timezones. |
Age of Conan came along, and it took us roughly 2 weeks to call it a failure. Luckily, Warhammer was just around the corner and seemed far more promising. Rolling up on the Darklands Oceanic server, our early times in the game had us thinking we'd finally found a good one. For a change of pace, we opened up the recruiting door and briefly swelled to running 60 odd members. Until level 30, the Warhammer was a superb game. PVP experience meant you could basically PVP 80% of your online time, which on the surface was great. We missed the 'FFA feeling', but the game really seemed to have promise. Rumours suggested the end-game was still pretty much missing in action, so we levelled slowly figuring that a big budget and large development team would ensure it was ready by the time we got there. Unfortunately, excessive CC and AE resulted in 'faceroll PVP' ruling the day at higher levels and the game went rapidly downhill after 30. Many of our core members retired to hit the couch and wait for the next game, and we came to rue our recruitment experiment as we definitely fielded a force quality that didn't live up to our usual standards. To top it off, the endgame stank. Itemisation was horrible, the RVR areas were so small and poorly incentivised that the game was just 'zerg v zerg', and the end-game PVE was mindnumbingly repetitive. After 6 months, we closed down on Darklands, with a small group of 8-10 players extending for a few months by playing destruction on Ironclaw until we got back to max-level and remembered how bad the end-game was. |
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Now Aion looms, and being the eternal optimists we are we're hoping our first impressions will hold true. A small crew of 8 is playing on the Chinese retail release while we wait for NA to come along in September. So far, we love the game and love the feel of the PVP .. particularly with the amazing extra dimension of flight. Based on current progress, we should hit max-level just in time to take a short break and start it all over again.
Come September 22, 2009 you'll be able to find us on the Asmodian team of whichever server gets picked as the 'unofficial Oceanic' home.
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