2005

MMORPG Addiction

In the preceding December World of Warcraft was released and about 30 Mystics started playing the game on the USA network and the Skullcrusher server. We lost a couple of Mystic who did not want to play the Alliance, they left to play Horde, but one of them returned later. As the year progressed our American members started to drift away from the game and started playing another MMORPG called Guild Wars. Some preferred this as it didnt have a monthly fee for playing. However, this meant that our European members left the USA network and started playing on the Europe network which had more players around during the hours they were online. Both games flourished with lots of activity. So much so that our web site was not so busy as it was so easy with these games to chat to each other in the game itself.

Age of Mythology was still very active during this year and two of our members managed to get into the top 50 of the ladder, namely Mystic Korean and Mystic Horror. AOM was really the only RTS type game that we played during 2005.

This year we lost some prominent members. Mystic Saracen was the biggest loss, he resigned after nearly 5 years of service and 3 of those as Deputy Leader. We also lost Mystic Thor, another Ruling Body member.

This year also showed the return of some ex-members, especially when Age of Empires III was released towards the end of the year. It was nice to see these members come back to their home once they started playing games again.

2005 was a successful year for the Mighty Mystics in the RTS league. Mystic Marz lead us to some good results in AOM and also in the Guild Wars PVP ladder (Player vs Player). We also tried a new type of "temporary member" in Guild Wars where we had members in the game's clan itself, but not official members at the website, although they had access to their own private forum at the site.