I log into the Abyss Test shard thinking it's going to have monster gates like the last Abyss shard. It didn't, but it did have advancement gates for every skill and stat worth having. I quickly had a 100/100/25 (STR/INT/DEX) char with GM Magery, Meditation, Resist, Eval Int, Wrestling, Tactics and Hiding (I go afk a lot from work, so I needed hiding).

The Dev Team guy who was working on the Abyss Shard, Runesaber, was talking in the lower left corner of the screen about the team wars in the desert. Well, I wasn't about to miss a mass war like the old anti-dread days. So, I started running to the desert.

Runesaber kept talking about "blue team this" and "blue team that". By the time I got there, I found out why - there were hundreds of them and no one really to oppose them. Nuker and I decided to make a Nude team, and as you can tell by that picture, there were a lot of blues to our 2 nudes. However, I'm not much of a follower, so I couldn't imagine conforming to the horde that had already formed. Plus, being outside the team with the most players meant Nuker and I had more targets.

Well, we killed a lot of people. This was before the "kill points", so I don't know how many, but my guess between the two of us was several hundred. Frankly, it was easy. The blue team depended on numbers and their individual skills sucked - we took advantage of that. Slowly people we'd killed or saw us kill figured out who the real deal was and decided to join up. More blues fell as we gained more people with skills. With a whopping 4 nudes, I felt compelled to run headlong into groups of blues - I think Nuker and I died a total of 3 times that day.

Anyhow, the next day when I got home from work, the blues still had vast control over the desert and I couldn't find any nudes. So, again I set off to beat some more ass with a group of JoV friends. Allusion (Vapor), Jesus (Zero), Brules and my self again made a name for the nudes.

We eventually had enough nudes to assault the blue castle. They were casting para fields and Blade Spirits in the doorway and EVs off the outer walls. Pretty good defense, but a couple of Mass Dispels and Zero and I were inside. Granted, we were surrounded by 50+ blues, but we were inside. Well, the guys in the courtyard fell to my EV and Zero's Meteor Swarms. That opened up the front and the nudes rushed the castle.

We cast probably 15 firefields on the front wall on the 2nd level to keep the blues from pussy-EVing from their safe spot as the troops flooded in for toe-to-toe fighting. God the blues were stupid. They kept trying to cast EV on us even though we were inside the castle (not in the courtyard). Man, these people needed to learn the game. Well, I guess we taught them - we taught them how to dominate your opponent at least. Of course, it was ruined by OSI putting res gates inside castles - they didn't have to assault us to get their castle back and it forced us to be res killers (which I hate). But, with meditation and regs everywhere, a newly ressed guy can be lethal in 15 seconds (cast BS + hide = dead crowded people).

The worst part were the people who went nude just because they couldn't handle fighting against us straight up. They had to get behind us and cast field spells/BS/EV on us. I also discovered that the explosion spell gives you plenty of time to talk shit to someone you know is dead. I love mid-death screenshots, so I'll end the story on that note and with the nudes defeating the Blues - like we did all week.

Nighthawk