A guild which has ranked first in Abyss Points on the Aion Public Test Server.

We’ve decided to start a regular content feature for Guild Spotlights. The purpose is to help the community get to know each other better and also to support it. Do you have a guild or team and want to be featured? Just get in touch with us at this forum thread and we can work out the details. We’re flexible on the format of it... it could be an interview, or some wall of text that you wrote up in advance, or maybe something else.

First up is Sunless, who had the beginnings of their formation with Aion and are moving on to TERA while attempting a different focus than before. They are a progress driven guild who ranked first in Abyss Points on the Aion Public Test Server, and plan to experiment with reducing their numbers in order to increase their level of intuitive teamplay across the board. The contents of their spotlight are provided by Luciferia, their guild leader and founder.

Read on to see their history, achievements, and future goals.

I am Luciferia, the guild leader and founder of Sunless. Most people refer to me as “Luci/Lucy”, “Luce”, or by my actual name “Bonnie”. I was born in the year 1990 – Fort Worth, Texas, USA, although I currently reside in the ultimate Yankee state – New York. I have many interests other than gaming, such as ancient history, art, fictional writing, model rocketry, martial arts (I study Tang Soo Do, a Korean Martial Art) moonlit walks on the beach… Oh wait, this isn’t eHarmony!

I have been playing console games since roughly five years old, starting with the original Tetris, and Excite Bike. I messed around with these for quite a while, until I got my hands on a GameBoy Color, then later a PlayStation 2 & GameCube. I enjoyed games like the Final Fantasy series, Kingdom Hearts, Vampire Night, and Super Smash Bros. for a few years, while mucking about with RuneScape from time-to-time.

My first “real” MMO, was Final Fantasy XI. I played this for about two years until computer & CD-ROM issues forced me to quit shortly before obtaining LV75 in my fourth class. After I had my untimely removal from FFXI, I meddled with F2P (free to play) MMO’s for a while. Browsed around some…and stumbled onto Perfect World International. However, I only played PWI for a couple months, because I had my eye on an upcoming P2P MMO; Aion. After almost a year of playing (if you include my attendance of the Closed Beta Tests), I grew bored with, and disappointed in the game. Empty PvP, dying servers… The horrible RNG. The bad flight system, the bad fortress system… I got sick of it, and hardly play the game anymore.

I started Sunless when I began playing the Public Test Server(PTS) that NCSoft released for the game; I had grown tired of the main servers and their politics, drama, and the lack of PvP. The name “Sunless” comes from the fact that we played the Asmodian race in Aion – a race that lives in the shadowed half of the world, without sunlight.

While leveling, we had most world bosses on lockdown while we geared out our members, and once level capped, we regularly killed the top tier world bosses to further gear our members. We began running fort sieges very early on in our career on the PTS, and it didn’t take long for us to begin capping the forts – that is to say, getting our name on the Fortresses, and reaping the rewards of ownership.

We built up a member base of truly wonderful individuals – friendly, helpful, sincere. Really rare finds in the gaming community as it stands today. We became a family, like a guild should be. Everyone was more than happy to help out the guild – be it killing bosses, running instances or “campaign” quests for people that needed them.

While the Elyos only usually come out for Fortress Raids, World Bosses, and Dredgion (PvPvE Instance), some of our most epic fights were over Menotios. Menotios is a LV51 Legendary World Boss, with some pretty good gear drops – he is a 24-36 hour spawn time, so anyone that even wanted a chance at him had to be on their toes.

As he resides in the Abyss, where you may fly as long as your flight time and consumables will let you, this bred an excellent environment for long, drawn-out battles in order to clear out all of the opposing faction for the “right” to kill Menotios. Very few legions had leadership that would step up to the plate when it came to PvP. So, on many occasions we worked with our fellow Asmodians against the Elyos, over Menotios, in alliance vs alliance battles that lasted anywhere from 2-4 hours.

Outside of this, our guild is ranked first in AP (Abyss Points/PvP Points) on our server, not only for Asmodian side but comparatively against the Elyos as well. Outside of world and Abyssal PvP, we often ran Dredgion at every time it was available. The Elyos often attempted to close off sections of the Dredgion to force PvE and keep us away from them, but despite their best efforts we always bared down them… because we love killing people.

Sunless Leadership also coordinated attacks on both Balaur-owned and Elyos-owned Fortresses in Aion when they would go vulnerable. Often we would have battles with the Elyos simply for PvP-sake, not actually intending to take the fort, but to kill them once they finally came out of their holes.

Despite everything, it became very quickly apparent that the PTS was on its last legs, due to the many faults of Aion itself; the poor localization, the lack of balance, the lack of reason behind PvP. Once my officers and I realized that the game was dying overall, and rapidly at that, we began researching for new games to move to. One of my officers, Xia, brought TERA to my attention.

I had looked at TERA in the past, but nothing past the original teaser trailer, which to be honest hadn’t caught my attention as anything further than “oooh pretty”. However, after some conversation about the game and game mechanics, I began to do some research of my own, and became intrigued by the lack of a targeting system, along with the lack of a stealth class. I was interested in seeing how this would effect the PvP gameplay! After a lot of research, I decided I would like to play TERA, and I would really love to have the people of Sunless join me.

So began the process of making all my guild members aware of how awesome TERA will hopefully be!

Sunless, in TERA, is taking a slightly different approach than we did in Aion. In Aion we were a rather large guild (Over 80 members at the PTS’ peak), but in TERA, we’re focusing on keeping the guild fairly small. Our intention is to build a strong member base, a family, of individuals who know how to play with each other intuitively. Some of the best teams you will ever play against in PvP games are able to read each other or anticipate another group member’s actions before they actually do them – we believe that by keeping our Legion number small, our members will be able to strengthen that intuition.

Skilled solo and group play are both very important in our members, and prospective applicants to our guild. To the extent of which we are currently perfecting a system to test applicants, and even existing members in their skill at PvP – both solo and group-based. While we maintain a fun and perhaps lighthearted atmosphere in Sunless, we are also a very progress-driven guild.

We will also be focusing less on the PvE content and more on the PvP content. While we enjoy PvE, such as instances, world bosses, and the like, sometimes paying too much attention to PvE puts a guild behind as far as PvP goes. In TERA we hope to gain friends, allies, but we also feel that largely it is us versus everyone else. We are highly competitive players, and to be quite frank, we love to kill people. Perhaps some people get a rush from overwhelming one to a few players with massive numbers, but we, however, do not. We feel that PvP is much more fun when the numbers going against each other are similar or even, and hope to influence our server of choice so that this is a common theme throughout the server. Simply put we are a PvP guild. We are coming to TERA with the intention to PvP our hearts out. To make Sunless a known, feared, and respected name on whichever PvP Server we form our ranks on.

I am however, keeping my excitement to a minimum. Personally I prefer Eastern games over Western, I feel that the majority of Western games are too easy, and do not foster a suitable or pleasant community. But it is not uncommon for Korean games to crash within a year of their release, due to Eastern and Western play styles being so different – Western play styles being quite lazy in comparison. We are hoping that the localization team for TERA localizes appropriately, without taking too much challenge away from the game.

[Sunless Guild Site]