The End is Nigh

What made EVONY so fascinating originally was its ability to evolve. The longer you played the game, the more you had to adapt to the different ways of attacking and defending. What worked when you started out, didn't apply 6 months down the road. And that didn't apply a year later. It was constantly evolving into a more complex game. People that had left the game for 3 or 4 months were woefully behind the times if they came back to play. But, because I never left, I was on top of my game, plus I liked to switch it up and go visit in different alliances and watch how they did things. Other servers also gave insight in ways of attacking and defending. My first server was showing me the way of things to come. So I started to adapt the way I played on the newer ones.

By this time I was playing 3 servers, it would've been 4, but I gave up playing the very first server I started on and I was slowly leaving the second one behind too. The third one was my playground. I was well known there, and I had (at the urging of a friend from my third server) also started playing on a fourth and we had a close group of experienced players I trusted there.

I now played more for the people I had met and to passed on any knowledge I had acquired over the course of playing. I tried to make sure I was like my first teachers and not sound like I knew everything. Everyday you could possibly learn something new. For the most part tho, I did know the little tricks and ins and outs, and because of my early teachers I had a firm grasp of the battle mechanics of the game. But what I didn't have, was patience or the heart to fight anymore. I really didn't care. Like anything, I was slowly approaching my expiration date. The original attraction was waning.

About Those Perverts

These guys make the best victims. I've found there are 7 distinct classifications for perverts. I'm sure there are sub-classes, but this is the basics.

The Hormonal Teenager: can be any age; always trying to "score"; tries too hard; surfs porn sites regularly; has strong forearm muscles; knows how to type one-handed

The Comic: likes to tease; can be rude and crude, but does it for the laugh and shock value; similar to the kid in the playground pulling your ponytail

The Flirt: a nice guy; teases but hands out compliments at the same time; always in a good mood; a lover not a fighter

The 007: Mr. Smooth; high-brow (dry) humor; very subtle; usually says the right things; a lover and a fighter

The Idiot: not to be confused with the Hormonal Teenager; not naive - just plain dumb; these guys think those cheesy pick-up lines work and get confused when they don't

The Asshole: never funny; makes dead baby jokes; talks shit about your mother, or sister, or kids; always trying to piss you off

The Einstein: the Genius; has the answers for everything; their mind is usually on the game, BUT has the ability to surprise you with qualities of any or all groups (sometimes called the complex pervert)

Now "The Boys", as I call them, led to many, many interesting conversations. Usually all across World Chat. It made for great comedy, and at the expense of their manhood and sanity. I bartended way too long with too many drunken redneck perverts not to have some kind of scathing remark for them. There is nothing better than shooting down one of these guys with the right verbal jab.

I can only remember once that I was at a loss for words. Thank god it was in alliance chat and late one night (so nobody saw it - I had a reputation to uphold). It just so happened to be one of those Einstein's that did it. I was teasing him and said some smart-ass remark. He had a comeback that shut me up right then and there. Took me totally off-guard. I never saw it coming.

But I'll never tell him...

The Responsible One

For some reason, I had acquired the title "RESPONSIBLE". How I managed to do that, is beyond my comprehension. I'm the one that goofs off on world chat, torments my fellow alliance members, and teases the hell out of my host (just to keep him on his toes). So how did I become the one that people entrusted their accounts and troops to? OH! It gets BETTER... they gave me the power to expel and invite people in and out of the alliance. Do you have any idea how much fun I could have! I had the ability to drive all my alliance members crazy on a daily basis (I did before, but now I had a different way of doing it!)

At first, it was only a couple of logins. I could help out with their troop building or farming. Or in the emergency they were being attacked I could jump on and help defend their cities. By the time I finally left EVONY. I could run a decent sized alliance, on 3 servers, all by myself. I had 2 full pages of logins and passwords. Oddly, I was such a paranoid, I rarely gave out my own login and password. I'd heard horror stories of people hijacking your account and basically destroying everything you had built.  I like to think I'm honorable enough that I wouldn't do that to anyone that entrusted me with their account info.

I was also the Mother Hen to the kids in the alliance. My daughter had begun to play. Yes, my little diva, was playing a war game. Her and a couple of other kids played with us and someone had to look out for them. Besides, I refused to pay for the therapy of anyone elses kid, so I tried to keep everybody on the PG level. Sometimes alliance chat could get a bit racy (yes, adults act like children, too), so I tried to make it known the kids were around and keep chat toned down some. I picked on these kids that played. Kids like attention. Good or bad, they still like it. If their own mothers and fathers didn't make them do their homework or behave themselves, I took it upon myself to make them do it (yeah, I was a bit self-righteous). If I had a dollar for everytime I saw the word "UGH!!", because I made them go do their homework... I'd own EVONY by now.

HiJinks & Tomfoolery

I live for April Fools Day. Its one of my favorite days of the year. So a little prank pulled every now and then was right in line for my way of thinking. Sometimes I would get these flashes of brilliance, and then think of ways to implement them. Sometimes tho, it just wasn't feasible. It might've taken too many people to help (and I trust no one - SOMEONE will let it slip out before the great reveal) or the ability to pull it off on someone online is too difficult... not for lack of trying though!

On EVONY, I've found that as men get older, the more perverted they get. Not to say the younger ones weren't... but the older ones were more fun to harrass. The younger guys were crude, and I preferred to be subtle. So I tended to abuse them more.  I'll add another story about this later.

On more than one occasion I dragged one of the girls in on one of my pranks, only to have it taken over and turned into a free-for-all man-abusing session. One time, for example: I posted an "advertisement" on world chat looking for HELP WANTED and then specified for a particular person to be contacted for further information. Unfortunately, reading comprehension isn't a quality of most players of EVONY and I was questioned on the want ad. This was where the loincloth man became somewhat legendary, and one particular person with his speedo gave the rest of us girls nightmares.

I saw him first
so he's mine

We had many willing volunteers to "fill out" the application to the want ad, since I decided to go in the direction of a lawn boy. The applicants had to forward pics to the aforementioned girl in a loincloth (or a speedo) and she could then choose who would get the job. I actually had a picture of a beautiful specimen of a loincloth (see pic) and if they could fill it out the way the model in it did, then I was sure they were guaranteed the so-called job.

If she could get her hands on me, I was a dead woman.

Another time, I decided a friend needed a little more attention. So I sent out mail to everyone I knew and that she knew (probably close to 150). She was going back to college and I thought it would be a great idea if she could get a Sugar Daddy. Someone to take care of her and any bills she might incur along the way.  Anyone that thought they were qualified were to mail her directly.

The qualifications were fairly lenient too:

Must have teeth (if you take them out at night-make sure they are put into a closed container)
Would like to have all appendages in working order (but if medicinal help is needed...no worries)
Must have fat wallet or bank account
Must have ability to handle her many admirers...jealousy is not permitted
She got many, many applications.

I had some serious payback coming my way.

Out into the World

I had discovered WORLD CHAT.

This was a place everyone on the server could "talk" to one another. But there was a price. You had to have "speakers". You had to win them or buy them. And I had won alot of them (there was another way, but if you don't play, you won't understand). There was really only one server that I exercised my right to free speech. Most of the time, people wasted these speakers trash talking each other (see my note The IQ Test - this is where the classless and ignorant apply). I had better ways of putting them to good use. I had the ability to harrass and harangue the WHOLE server! And dammit, I was good at it! I liked to tease and bother friends in other alliances. I could sit and wait for the right opportunity to slide the rightly worded jab and then sit back and watch the fireworks explode. And boy, oh boy, did it.

After awhile and a server merge (FRESH MEAT!) I was becoming known to A LOT of people. Some of the guys would just curl up into a virtual fetal position and cry when I would get on a roll (I was called vicious by a couple - but everyone else just laughed). It was the ones that would fight back that made for truly spectacular entertainment. There was one in particular that made this an almost daily battle. The two of us could go at it verbally for hours and never skip a beat. Back and forth the insults and jabs would fly, and the encouragement from others would spur us on to more and more. At one point we both ran out of speakers and had to resort to using other accounts other than our own. We changed up our story a bit and let it rip. We both loved an audience and the whole server was entertained when we started our "fights". Sadly, he found a real life and left the game too.  I haven't had a decent verbal sparring match with anyone since then.

Being kinda new to the gaming world, I never realized how naive I could be. I had begun to get "followers". Now there is nothing wrong with being a personality in the game. I rather enjoyed the notariety of being one. I just needed to be careful what kind of personal info I gave out. Everyone knew I lived on an iceberg in an igloo in the Great White North (Canada) but somewhere along the way I mentioned what the name of the bar was that I worked at, in alliance chat.

**SIDENOTE**

If you add EVONY friends to your facebook, do not to let them have full access to all your personal info, like where you work and what city and country you live in. You might end up with unexpected visitors. I did. There is nothing worse than being "surprised" by someone that hasn't a clue what boundaries are. This is creepy and weird at best and stalking at worst.

New Friends & Ideas

Most of the people I played with were from the USA. Not alot of us crazy canucks were out there playing EVONY. We were a different breed I guess. I knew of people from the UK, Australia, Holland, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Iceland and Thailand.

Along the way of gaming, I got to know some truly remarkable people. My first server, I had my "teachers", who helped me bumble my way through the way of building and researching. Hardcore dedicated gamers, their mathematical minds fascinated me. They understood the game without sounding like know-it-alls. I'm pretty sure they dreamed in algebraic algorithms and trigonometric forms of complex numbers. Either way, I was gonna need my wheaties if I wanted to even begin to keep up with them. That and a couple of pots of coffee couldn't hurt.

By the second server, I thought I had the knowledge to start anew. WOW, was I wrong. There were still players out there that could kick my ass. But I struggled on. I still had my teachers with me (I had followed them to another server). I was invited into a new alliance with new people and new ideas. I learned more and met more people, and a few became fast friends.

Like junkie's looking for a fix, we were always looking for the next war. One of us got the brilliant idea of a "porting" alliance. We all had 2 cities and a bunch of teleports (Meaning we could jump around all over the map) attacking and then get the hell out before it got too hot. We kept one state our "home" state, and off we went, wreaking havoc and destruction to anyone within a 20mile radius. When we had our fill of fun, we'd port "home". It definitely kept it interesting... BUT it didn't make us any friends! After awhile, the players got wise to us and we were under constant attack. (If you ever want to build one of those huge heros fast - piss off the whole server)

This got a bit old, being under attack 24/7, some were quitting, they realized how time sucking this game was (I hadn't reached this point yet) and some guys started using computer programs to feed their large troop numbers - we called this botting, and highly illegal by EVONY standards. Alot of my buddies were getting knocked off and banned. My guys were leaving me behind. It was time to move on again.

A Breaking Point

Now as time went on, I began to spend more and more time playing... and less and less time listening to the brain dead, useless, piece of shit I called a boyfriend. EVONY gave me the perfect place to hide my head in the sand.

I must say, if it wasn't for EVONY I'd probably still be treated like garbage by the walking trashcan himself. Many props go out to the ones that helped me out one fateful night when the drunken, drug-addled prick used me as a punching bag and broke my phones and threatened me and my kids. They went above and beyond to help me out and had the police here in no time at all. (Once they got the 911 system figured out between the USA, Holland and Canada) Trust me... its not as easy as it sounds.

Thank God for small mercies, he was too stupid to realize what I was doing when I parked my ass down in front of the computer. He thought he'd won again, and I would do what I was told. The look on his face when the cops walked in and cuffed him, almost made some of those bruises worth it. The police questioned me on how I had gotten ahold of them, when they could clearly see my house phone and cell phone busted into pieces. They were slightly baffled that I was able to get help across a world wide online game. Obviously they have never seen a gamer before. We have ways of reaching out to people half the world away, but not know our neighbors.

Now I've read some of these EVONY widows support groups (and how angry they were at the gamer), but not one of them really applied to me and the boyfriend. Our relationship was in direct proportion to my relationship with EVONY. The more I watched him drink and do drugs and try and control me, the more I sank into the world of EVONY. Not everything is the fault of the gamer... take some of the blame, if your the spouse. Why are they falling into the online world in the first place? Same goes if your a friend. Find out why they are doing it. Many players I've found are sick (terminal illnesses) or bored, or out-of-work. Sometimes its depression. Don't toss the blame entirely on the the gamer. Some of the gamers out there are masking full blown depression and they have no idea how to get out of it except to hide in the online world of EVONY because it makes them feel more whole as a person.

I know this because I was one of them.