[NEWS] The Syndicate - Beyond The Legend

A while ago I was informed about a new book "The Syndicate - Beyond The Legend" by Sean Stalzer, also known as Lord Dragons, Guildmaster of The Syndicate. The book is a sequel to "Legend of the Syndicate", which covered the first ten years of the guild.

My own Ultima Online experience goes back to 1997, where I played on the Atlantic shard and I distinctly remember several characters on that shard having LLTS attached to their names. This was before player guilds and guild abbreviations were available in the game, so a character's name was the logical spot to show your guild affiliation. LLTS stands for "Long Live The Syndicate", which is the slogan and battle cry of the guild.

Who would have thought that fourteen years later The Syndicate would still be around, or even that they would be publishing a (second) book about their history. All this made me want to read the book to see what memories (if any) would be brought back to me.

The subtitle of the book is "Secrets to creating a succesful online community". The first section starts with a recap of the first ten years of the guild and then focuses on the years from 2007 until now. Because The Syndicate is a guild that is present in most popular MMO's the book you will find interesting reads about EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and of course Ultima Online. Also, there are some chapters dedicated to the yearly Syndicate conference, known as SyndCon, where guild members and representatives of the game development companies meet each other.

The second section of the book explains the S.U.C.C.E.S.S. factors that you need to create and maintain a succesful guild. Those are Stability, Understanding, Culture, Compatibility, Excellence, Size and Staying Focused. If you are serious about running a guild and be there for the long run, I highly recommend reading this section.

The third section of the book is about the future of online gaming, and focuses on the expectations of players today. Such as; Community Tools, the "Always on" and "Play anywhere" concepts, Setting the proper difficulty level and Communication.

After reading the book I found myself pleasantly surprised. Even though the amount of Ultima Online references in the book is small compared to the ones related to other MMO's (mostly WoW) there were quite a few memories brought back to me. And the second and third sections of the book are an interesting read, no matter what MMO you are playing right now.

Further reading:
- The Syndicate website
- Order book at Lulu

Xena Dragon

Ahh the syndicate you must mean the litter bugs dropping books all over. Don't bother reading that drivel. then again we read stratics not much worse i guess.

*LIKE!*

Hey now! I've gotten a couple of pairs of glasses thanks to those books!

But, I agree any contact I've had with them has been nothing but awful.

Yep we toss these in the trash on sonoma a lot too....
Keep it on atlantic....

I totally agree with Sir Scott. Keep all the syndicate books on Atl. On Sonoma we have our own version of the Syndicate and the guild is PAS - People's Army of Sonoma. We don't drop books advertising our guild or website.

Most of the LS ones get tossed.

Bad form. Shouldn't The Syndicate just buy advertising on Stratics?

If I see them they get tossed! Atlantic has too many of the players that belong to the rest of the shards..... send some home.

With all due respect, this comes across more like an advertisement.

I will echo the sentiments of others. Whenever word of this guild is brought up, it almost is synonymous with distaste shown by most. I would simply ask in the future that posts like this are not brought to stratics, as it simply creates this kind of response from others.

It IS an advertisement of a sorts
recruiting poster more accurately

A Large group of well established players
dedicated to playing by the rules
within the different "modes" of the game
Familiar with UO & Other game models

enough established reputation and "creds" to be invited for high level tours.
humph ... profile out as >exactly< what the game needs ...
but

Oh ... YOU haven't actually interviewed with them ...
ya know ...
Seen for yourself?

yeah ... don't want NONE of that on stratics ...

Sure! reading required before comment?

Sure... and as such, having very little to do with UO, and definitely not sanctioned [NEWS] (note the improper use of the [NEWS] tag...), I would ask though that the post be moved to OFF TOPIC.

Thank you.

Sometimes, you people make me ashamed to be playing the same game as you.
This is one of those times.

I agree that it doesn't belong in UHall.

It's a book review with a link to where you can buy the book. It's advertising and by Stratics staff, too. Bad form, as I said.

Gotta agree.. not UHall material.

And yet you all keep replying, bumping it up to the top of the first page...
The best thing you can do is ignore it, if you don't like it. The forums aren't a democracy, you can't vote posts out of the Uhall house if you find them disagreeable.
Ignore the posts you don't like, and the chances of them falling off the first page increase.

If you post your disagreement, then you're not only bumping the post, but you're also likely to be pissing off the actual mods with all the backseat modding.

If I wrote a book about Ultima Online, could I make an advertisement thread?

(Serious question. I actually have an unfinished 90 thousand world manuscript on a non-fiction informational topic, unrelated to UO. But I like writing and this is an option.)

Once again, maybe it's all the fentanyl, but I've always got the feeling that Dragons is just a bit full of himself.

It's sad, the degree to which this mythology of the pre-Trammel days is continually perpetuated.

*shrugs*

Oh well. Clearly, continually saying what it was actually like, as I've done for years, has done no good whatsoever.

-Galen's player

Is anyone even still in the Syndicate? Active, I mean? I've peeked in on their crafter days and have never seen more than like four or five of them, and usually two or three appear to be AFK. For all I know it's one guy on a few different accounts.

Then there's the WoW division they advertise, where they're like the #40 guild or whatever, on some meaningless server.

These guys haven't been anything but a few peoples tired attempt at self-promotion for a long time.

Considering this is all advertising (which is against the TOS)...why is this thread still open?

I just got "Slaughter House Five" for fathers day, can't wait to read it.
Available at Amazon, anyone want a link??

Syndicate, overrated, self-centered, and as far as a book or two goes........
above and beyond nerdism, geekism, and a laugh and a half to say these least.

I guess some nasal nosed, basement dweller needs to move outta mom & dads, thus he or maybe even a she, needs the scratch.
If you buy the book, I wouldn't brag about it.

GOOD QUESTION!

And yet, if you link to uoforums.com, or whisperingroseradio, your post gets deleted and you get a polite PM saying such sites are against the official UO fansite agreement (despite them being on the official UO fansite program ) and therefore, aren't allowed on Stratics.

For one reason:

Xena Dragon
Webmaster


Sometimes nothing this guy posts shocks me but it still makes me shake my head. Clearly this has been approved by people much higher in the pay scale and it makes little difference to anyone anyways.

Laugh it up with your Stratics riches, Syrus!

Nice try, dearie.

It is not about my hate, it is about yours and others' denial of reality. Pre-Trammel UO, the UO I went into, was a veritable wasteland save for occasional pockets. Sure there were subscriptions, due to lack of competition at the time. But in terms of activity? For the most part all this stuff about communities was a myth. This is not to say that active communities did not exist; Rivendell and Tel'Ruid on LS both existed pre-Trammel. The latter moved, the former did not.

Both were active.....sometimes.

But whenever I tried to seek out places of community in those days, even ones reputed to be active, I found gank squads or I found no one. That activity and community constituted the bulk of the game before Trammel is where the mythology lies. Casual conversations with other players, that did not involve attempts to lure me off to be killed, I can count on one hand pre-Trammel.

The pre-Trammel paradise is an illusion created by the post-Trammel era. People's abilities to create paradises of the mind where they did not exist in actual fact is an amazing thing.

So, no, dear. It is not about hate. It is about acknowledging reality.

-Galen's player

I played with/around Freja for about a year before Trammel was introduced. Guess you just played the wrong places because Freja's neither lying nor exaggerating.

Yeah... post is against stratics tos, but... I wonder if the author will be littering his rl neighborhood with his new trash.

L.L.B.S !

Long Live Bob the Scripter ! Cleaning up Luna of the syndicates daily trash!

a direct link to an "add to cart" page sure seems like advertising to me...

Yeah, I'm sure reporting Xena Dragon would turn out well for the reporting party.

While the concern about whether we are still alive and well as a guild that was expressed in a post yesterday is appreciated; The Syndicate is alive and well with about 1200 members. There are about 200 active participants in UO... about 350 active participants in WoW... Of the remaining members (and in response to the comment about what we are up to..) they are involved in a variety of activities. A huge number are engaged in the development of the future MMOs. We have teams working behind the scenes, both remotely and on site at various studios, on many of the future MMOs both large and small. That has been the case now for some years. The book goes into specifics about studios and projects. We have teams playing most major MMOs but we do so under a private pseudonym as we do not recruit new members within those games. And we have a large team working on strategy guides for Prima games. We remain very interested in and supportive of the UO community and we continue to help influence and shape the future direction of MMORPGs. There are some exciting things on the horizon that many of you will enjoy.

I was in AoD when the syndicate became strong...

I killed over 2000 LLTS in one summer (some very often but never I res killed), we had a head collection.

AoD despised elitism and the way the game was being modulated to become an item oriented money making machine.

The more it grew, the more we killed.

Even at one point, I was so violent (and roleplaying), a seer approached me so I would become a member of the FoA, thats when it got interesting.

LLTS killed us once or twice, in a very *cough* fair fight ... umm 200 against 6 ?

They even brag about this lag fest (on their website) and how it was supposedly an epic win... well we saw a gate pop up, about 20 dragons with tamers pop out... then the whole guild

lag... two earthquakes, blade spirits.

You are dead.

The syndicate was always a symbol of cowardice and elitism in all the groups I joined... they were so much hated that we even had blue guilds paying us to ruin some of their parties.

I never really had a probem with them personally... when AoD came to an end I even went on LLTS island to apologise and face justice (roleplay attempt, part of the FoA storyline which was supposed to involve whole guilds namely LLTS, LoA, OeS etc...)

But when I returned to my seer mentor and told them they didn't even let me finish one line apart from the emote : *waving a white flag*...

Dragons had my body chopped up and fed to the animals, then they proceeded to insult my ghost.

Well he told me to forget it, that LLTS was most likely too immature for the kind of roleplay we were preparing.

They could not take a scout and see who was in our tower, then send I dunno TWICE the number of people (yea we were that good, even if a few in AoD hacked and ruined our reputation)...

But no, this was a strong message that ganking is the way to roll...

This is very interesting to me !