Everquest Retired As A Main Syndicate Game
The Syndicate has members who were in the first group of 4 people added to the EQ beta test and had been heavily involved EQ for more than 5 years officially and members continued to play EQ on their own for even longer. Having a large and strong presence on Tarew Marr server, the Syndicate was the only guild to be both a strong and active raiding guild but also a team focused, friend focused and fun focused guild. While we defeated all the same uber mobs as any other uber guild, we maintained our focus on friendship and fun which is why The Syndicate never imploded or had mass rebellions which plagued other uber EQ guilds. Our focus was, and will always remain, friends and fun before pixels and phat l00ts.

In April of 2004, The Syndicate chose to retire from EQ, after 5+ years in the game. We enjoyed Everquest and becoming stronger as a guild. EQ offered many different challenges than we faced in UO and we had to learn, grow and adapt too them. We got off to a slow start in EQ due to that learning curve but now that we have mastered the lessons of EQ and UO, with a large guild composed of veteran members who have been with us for years and are all experienced gamers, all future gaming endevors will apply those lessons and be even more successful.

The retirement of EQ did result in the loss of 3 veteran members, 2 newer members and 2 people we had on the chopping block to kick out as problem members. We were sorry to lose those poeple from the team. Overall, however, our first major retirement went as well as one could expect. 60%+ of the guild retired from EQ at roughly the same time and began recharging batteries for our next major game effort. Some of the remaining ones stayed guilded in our in game guild tag. Some went to other raid guilds. A few went to smaller guilds. One funny aspect of the retirement was that other guilds, who routinely talked smack about other guilds (including The Syndicate) readily snapped up the people not realizing (or not caring) that they were still loyal Syndicate members and basically added a number of spies into their guild with full access to all of their private resources.

All in all, lessons were learned from the EQ retirement. We look forward to the challenges ahead of us.