Banana Boyz wannabes of Wildhammer

BBz News — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 12:27:00 +0800

While we have left World of Warcraft as a guild for a few months now, it has recently been brought to our attention that some wannabes felt the need to copycat us and rename their guild to Banana Boyz on the Wildhammer server.

Apparently some ex members of our old Laughingskull guild decided to migrate to the Wildhammer server. They joined some guild there called Hording School and after some time this Hording School guild renamed itself to Banana Boyz. One of the Hording School guys (Epik) even decided to register a domain name with our guild name apparently with the approval of his "guildmaster".

Note that neither the guild leader (UndeadHead) nor the "webmaster" (Epik) have anything to do with Banana Boyz to start with and their wannabe guild doesn't even have a single Banana Boyz founder either (just several ex members from our Laughing Skull guild).

The first defense of these Hording School/wannabe BBz guys was "we didn't choose to rename ourselves Banana Boyz we were asked to by our new members". Then when we get some ex LS BBz within their own ranks to ask for a guild name change, it is denied and they come up with a new defense line : "Your guild name is not copyrighted we can use it if we want to".

At least their new defense line makes more sense. Yes Hording School, you have the "legal right" of being Banana Boyz wannabes, be assured that noone will sue you IRL for that.

It is not like it happends for the first time. There have been many wannabes copycating our guild names for many years and I guess its natural for successful 10+ years old guilds... However those guilds usually had no website or used some free hosted subdomain. I guess that this time, by registering a new website with our name in it, people got even more confused and contacted us much faster to know if it was the real Banana Boyz or just some fake copy.

So this post clears those doubts out: no these guys aren't the real Banana Boyz which have been using that guild name in online games for the past 10 years and will continue to do so in upcoming games. But I guess the post will also provide those wannabes with the moment of fame they've been trying so hard to obtain... So enjoy it while it lasts :)

History

BBz News — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:45:00 +0800

How it started

It all started with a bunch of friends which met on Kali and named themselves Clan Bob. They met another group named LoD there amongst which was Chupa and they all moved to Ultima Online Pacific server at the end of 1997.

When Clan Bob and LoD moved from Pacific to Chesapeake (to get a better ping), the first step was gathering resources. All the Bobs would chop wood and mine all day.

With Ezekiel discovering a dupe bug, wealth soon became a non issue. The dupe bug was used & abused, allowing Bobs to relocate north of Destard and claim it "Bob Town". Six to seven large & small structures were purchased there (Old Keepers of Chaos Tower location). LoD were also there with a two-story house.

The Bob's and LoD's still aren't pking yet, quite to the contrary, they were getting pked, most often by the two same Mages. One night, Ezekiel and Slippy find their Castle north of Trinsic, and with Zeke's new found "Gate House breaking bug" they proceeded to loot and destroy their place thus rendering them out of business.

From there, Bobs and LoDs decided to start PKing. Banana Boyz (BBz) guild was started from a stupid joke from Kali about monkeys leading to Ezekiel making a website named the Banana Boyz. Then everyone started making new chars with names starting with Banana (Banana Gimp, Banana Pimpster, ...). They all were Dread Lords (Red PKs) except one blue char named Chiquita which was a gater. All were wearing banana colours Yellow/Black cloths.

PKing on Chesapeake

Banana Boyz (BBz) started pking around minoc Bridge. The first time was quite ironic since all ended up getting pked...

Then BBz eventually came back other times with 5 to 6 pks filled with Greater Explosion potions and in company of a tamed dragon and PKed a bunch of people. Back then Magic Arrow was also used a lot since it was somewhat bugged and 2 magic arrows were enough to kill someone.

Banana Boyz were pking all over the place from the easy targets (miners for their ingots) to the most dangerous locations like Dungeon Destard filled with dragons or Dungeon Cove filled with so many disturbing crits that you had a hard time recalling out.

Those two dungeons were like BBz's home. Each time BBz came into these dungeons, the first people to get killed would walk back to town and ask for anti help. Then tons of people (20, 30 or even 50+ antis) would group and gate to the dungeons to kick the 5 or 6 BBz PKs camping there. Sometimes BBz were already gone since it often took antis up to one hour to group in town and hunt pks in a dungeon.

At one point, BBz had found a trick to counter so many opponents. They would circle Cove's entrance, cast firefields over the entrance and people entering the dungeon would die to firefields and lag or eventually be finished with Magic arrow. GM's (Ultima Online's Admins) would end up coming and ask BBz PKs to leave the place.

Banana Boyz and Keepers of Chaos

The Banana Boyz were now famous. Other important groups like "The GOD's" ran by Defiance, Syx and Den Of Earth (Later Keepers of Chaos members) were fighting hard on the field. After some good fights with them and interesting ICQ conversations, both groups ended up becoming friends.

Banana Boyz guild was growing fast in numbers and established itself in "Bob Town". The Banana Boyz had a tower there surrounded with tents. About this time, many new members joined, with the likes of Slay, Mordenkainen, Ritalin of God and several others. All of the GOD's were now Banana Boyz.

A group of players dedicated to the greater good of the shard, basically the exact opposite of The Banana Boyz was started and was named MiM. MiM & BBz had it out all over the shard, with each camping the others home base. Other Anti's came to power, they included LoM, PR, LOV & Sangdragons to name a few. They weren't as big or organized as MiM, but they wouldn't back down from a fight. The likes of them included Parthor, Tervex and Plox from PR who we later assimilated into Keepers of Chaos, Brooklyn and Notorious Big from LoM, Ivan & Caranthir from LoV and Rak from Sangdragons.

Huge battles fought in front of Despise, the Chaos Shrine and every level of Cove. With the BBz PKing full time, and mostly hanging out at the Chaos Shrine, Splixx and Magincia decided to throw a house there for easy access when they died, and a guildstone. The guild located at the Chaos Shrine would be called "The Keepers of Chaos".

Around the time of January 1998, OSI announces future plans for stat loss upon death if you are red and their new "Order Vs. Chaos" wars on the horizon. This put a shutter of fear amongst the PK ranks. A month later, the system was in place. We tried to PK and noone seemed to get any statloss. A couple months into the system, more and more people reported minor stat loss but nothing major, bottom line is, we could still PK full time. Most of us made secondary characters to try out the new "Order Vs. Chaos" wars. Since you could macro becoming a Great Lord (Requirements to get a virtue shield at the time) we were soon thrown into the Virtue wars.

May 1998, Stat loss is now unbearable, and PKing as we know it, is gone. The Dread days are over.

The heart of the fights was now within virtue wars and guild wars. Keepers of Chaos became the main guildstone, Banana Boyz guildstone was occasionaly used for second characters to PK with statloss. We would let a few non KoC friends tag with us on the BBz stone aswell since KoC was under a very strict recruiting policy.

Banana Boyz rebirth on World of Warcraft