Was thinking about this today, pretty unique time way back in my gaming past. Belonged to a clan that would play things like War Rock (old F2P game), Battlefield 2, early CoD games, etc.
It was really the only time I belonged to a gaming clan, and I remember (maybe through the lens of nostalgia?) having a great time with it. Someone was always on voice chat, I think we used TeamSpeak then switched to Vent, then finally Mumble?
I remember it being fairly small group, so everyone knew each other. There was also a really wide range of ages as well, so it was almost more like a strange family than a group of friends.
Just funny to think back, how frequently we all talked to each other, without ever having actually met in-person. Then it just kind of faded away slowly, I couldn’t even tell you why / when I stopped.
Anyone else have similar experience / memories? Do you still belong to any gaming clans or guilds today (new or old)?
I was in a counter-strike clan for a long time. We were all varying levels of dork. Clan members doubled as mods for our server, and we ran a server with classic rules and kept it tight. Almost always had a full server (12 people) between ourselves and the randos that joined our community. Spent soooo many hours bullshitting about our stupid teenage lives while headshotting each other. We had ventrilo, a old sql forum, and steam.
Everyone is still on steam friends but don’t talk like we used to. None of us play counter-strike anymore after it moved to CS:GO, so we lost that common thread. I’m mainly focused on my WoW guild and community there now.
When Youtube Gaming was still young I played Call of Duty with people from a gaming community called Hupit.com, which was founded by a prominent COD youtuber. With Covid I found people through Reddit for Simracing, and we have done tons of races together in the last 3 years.
Dark age of Camelot, had a guild made up of mostly locals. Did a custom website, scraped Mythics rankings, put in interactive maps, scroll trading system. It was all a hoot, moved to Warcraft after. Solid group of good people.
I have a super weird experience from my childhood.
I played Asheron’s Call for a long time. If you aren’t familiar the game had an interesting guild system where you would have a “patron” and XP would pass up to that patron. So experienced players would help out their vassals to both keep them progressing but also to keep them sworn to them and generating XP.
I had found a cool patron who helped me out a lot. We got talking and it turned out he lived in my town, and his younger brother was actually in my class the next year. I never really hung out with the guy I played AC with but me and his younger brother became friends.
Wow, that’s a crazy coincidence! That “patron” system sounds pretty interesting too, seems like a good way to incentivize veterans to help new players. Interesting that I haven’t really heard of any more recent games having that (as far as I know).
I was younger, too young to work, so one summer break I joined up with a European guild to raid with. Lots of fun, learned a but about British (primarily) culture. Lots of fun, even when I joined another guild I raided with them from time to time.
The other was a family guild. It eventually fell apart as the adults got busier with their careers and kids and shit. But the inner circle, so to speak, were invited to a bulletin board and we all talked for years after that. Eventually lost contact with them as I grew up and got busy with life.
Lots of fond memories, and a couple not so fond (RNG hates me, in every way). But they were along when RNG screwed me time and again, and were always willing to try again. Lots of love for those folks.
When StarCraft was still relatively new the Blizzard games had a Chat function that spanned all of their games. If they belonged to another game you would see that Chatter’s game as an icon to the right of their name. You could speak to someone playing Diablo at any time. The social setup drove high engagement between players who regularly used to seek playing at a time when the gameplay was typically hosted on a player’s computer rather than on a server.
Clans didn’t have a ready in-game functionality, but fortunately Blizzard had allowed Chatters not only the freedom to change their username quite easily, but to also create Chat Rooms with custom names. By holding the Chat room, you could maintain Administrator rights over the channel.
Early Guilds had to have their users change their names to include the tags in their names, which meant virtually anyone could edit their name to include the tag they wanted. The expanded tag would be used as the name for the Chat Room, which allowed both members and non-members to find it easily enough.
The advent of bots using a Battle.Net login to hold the Chat Rooms and provide admin rights regularly to specific users spiked a new age as Clans became more stable. The bot would be used to blacklist trolls, recognize officers in the Clans, and create rosters to stop people from masquerading.
It created a boom, and in these early days clans rose and fell like the sun. Smaller clans were quicker to join other larger clans and conglomerate into new structures that would require testing and vetting of player skills. Friendships between real players, who formed clans only to incorporate better players from absorbing other clans, were sorely tested as some friends found their skills did not allow them to play regularly any more.
I was in one of these early guilds at the time, a group called the Silver Arrows. I had recently proved that while I lacked strategy for unit construction (as we were playing StarCraft) and combat, I was methodically organized in base construction and could start generating Protoss Scouts while Zerg players were still searching for others to conduct Zergling raids. I was still new to the game at that time and was flounderIng my way through the Campaign. As part of the Clan I found myself playing more often and seeking out games if only to spend time with my clanmates.
I was a member of the -[SA]- clan for about a month when the Silent Assassins {SA} entered into talks with our clan. Different clans with the same initials claimed different forms of their tags. We folded into their ranks and with the additional experience under my belt I found myself joining their first line. I played for a while, but as the boom/bust cycle continued it wasn’t long before I found myself playing relatively alone. Without a support group I gravitated towards Diablo and ultimately Diablo 2, only playing StarCraft socially with my real life friends.
I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan “tags”. I might be imagining it, but wasn’t there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something…) That might have honestly been my first experience with “bots” for things adjacent to games.
Back in the day, around the time of CS 1.6, some co-worker friends and I would have LAN parties. This was when everyone still had CRT monitors so we had to be careful not to trip circuit breakers.
I was in a bf2 clan that was pretty tight knit. I have good memories of that. I was also in another clan when I was 14 and one of the older guys tried to groom me. No DoT, I don’t want to masturbate with you
I did clans a bit. Some message boards were similar. I was a mod of a small guitar-oriented message board and we knew each other’s real names, there were occasional real-life meet-ups where people drove from other states, etc… I miss that.
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I was in a counter-strike clan for a long time. We were all varying levels of dork. Clan members doubled as mods for our server, and we ran a server with classic rules and kept it tight. Almost always had a full server (12 people) between ourselves and the randos that joined our community. Spent soooo many hours bullshitting about our stupid teenage lives while headshotting each other. We had ventrilo, a old sql forum, and steam.
Everyone is still on steam friends but don’t talk like we used to. None of us play counter-strike anymore after it moved to CS:GO, so we lost that common thread. I’m mainly focused on my WoW guild and community there now.
Same… 2 clans actually because eventually one collapsed and the remaining members were absorbed into another clan we’d been friends with…
CS 1.6 right? That game was the shit, so many good memories as a kid playing it all the time.
I’m happy I got to experience it at its peak, it was beautiful.
Enemy spotted!
When Youtube Gaming was still young I played Call of Duty with people from a gaming community called Hupit.com, which was founded by a prominent COD youtuber. With Covid I found people through Reddit for Simracing, and we have done tons of races together in the last 3 years.
Dark age of Camelot, had a guild made up of mostly locals. Did a custom website, scraped Mythics rankings, put in interactive maps, scroll trading system. It was all a hoot, moved to Warcraft after. Solid group of good people.
I have a super weird experience from my childhood.
I played Asheron’s Call for a long time. If you aren’t familiar the game had an interesting guild system where you would have a “patron” and XP would pass up to that patron. So experienced players would help out their vassals to both keep them progressing but also to keep them sworn to them and generating XP.
I had found a cool patron who helped me out a lot. We got talking and it turned out he lived in my town, and his younger brother was actually in my class the next year. I never really hung out with the guy I played AC with but me and his younger brother became friends.
Wow, that’s a crazy coincidence! That “patron” system sounds pretty interesting too, seems like a good way to incentivize veterans to help new players. Interesting that I haven’t really heard of any more recent games having that (as far as I know).
Everquest, the original.
Two guilds come to mind.
I was younger, too young to work, so one summer break I joined up with a European guild to raid with. Lots of fun, learned a but about British (primarily) culture. Lots of fun, even when I joined another guild I raided with them from time to time.
The other was a family guild. It eventually fell apart as the adults got busier with their careers and kids and shit. But the inner circle, so to speak, were invited to a bulletin board and we all talked for years after that. Eventually lost contact with them as I grew up and got busy with life.
Lots of fond memories, and a couple not so fond (RNG hates me, in every way). But they were along when RNG screwed me time and again, and were always willing to try again. Lots of love for those folks.
When StarCraft was still relatively new the Blizzard games had a Chat function that spanned all of their games. If they belonged to another game you would see that Chatter’s game as an icon to the right of their name. You could speak to someone playing Diablo at any time. The social setup drove high engagement between players who regularly used to seek playing at a time when the gameplay was typically hosted on a player’s computer rather than on a server.
Clans didn’t have a ready in-game functionality, but fortunately Blizzard had allowed Chatters not only the freedom to change their username quite easily, but to also create Chat Rooms with custom names. By holding the Chat room, you could maintain Administrator rights over the channel.
Early Guilds had to have their users change their names to include the tags in their names, which meant virtually anyone could edit their name to include the tag they wanted. The expanded tag would be used as the name for the Chat Room, which allowed both members and non-members to find it easily enough.
The advent of bots using a Battle.Net login to hold the Chat Rooms and provide admin rights regularly to specific users spiked a new age as Clans became more stable. The bot would be used to blacklist trolls, recognize officers in the Clans, and create rosters to stop people from masquerading.
It created a boom, and in these early days clans rose and fell like the sun. Smaller clans were quicker to join other larger clans and conglomerate into new structures that would require testing and vetting of player skills. Friendships between real players, who formed clans only to incorporate better players from absorbing other clans, were sorely tested as some friends found their skills did not allow them to play regularly any more.
I was in one of these early guilds at the time, a group called the Silver Arrows. I had recently proved that while I lacked strategy for unit construction (as we were playing StarCraft) and combat, I was methodically organized in base construction and could start generating Protoss Scouts while Zerg players were still searching for others to conduct Zergling raids. I was still new to the game at that time and was flounderIng my way through the Campaign. As part of the Clan I found myself playing more often and seeking out games if only to spend time with my clanmates.
I was a member of the -[SA]- clan for about a month when the Silent Assassins
{SA}entered into talks with our clan. Different clans with the same initials claimed different forms of their tags. We folded into their ranks and with the additional experience under my belt I found myself joining their first line. I played for a while, but as the boom/bust cycle continued it wasn’t long before I found myself playing relatively alone. Without a support group I gravitated towards Diablo and ultimately Diablo 2, only playing StarCraft socially with my real life friends.I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan “tags”. I might be imagining it, but wasn’t there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something…) That might have honestly been my first experience with “bots” for things adjacent to games.
Good memories, thanks very much for sharing!
I have no idea anymore, but I do distinctly remember some bots having red names instead of green.
Glad to bring that all back for ya.
Back in the day, around the time of CS 1.6, some co-worker friends and I would have LAN parties. This was when everyone still had CRT monitors so we had to be careful not to trip circuit breakers.
No
Interested in starting a clan for the clanless?
I didn’t say I wasn’t in one, just that it was lame
I was in a bf2 clan that was pretty tight knit. I have good memories of that. I was also in another clan when I was 14 and one of the older guys tried to groom me. No DoT, I don’t want to masturbate with you
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I did clans a bit. Some message boards were similar. I was a mod of a small guitar-oriented message board and we knew each other’s real names, there were occasional real-life meet-ups where people drove from other states, etc… I miss that.
Yeah. I miss my boys. Shiny balls of light, you mongrels.
Maybe one day they’ll come back online.
Last online 8760 days ago.
Quake 3, Soldier of Fortune 2, Tremulous, Star Wars Galaxies, Tribes 2, etc. Lots of fond memories.
I remember playing AOEII online many years ago someone asked me if I was in a clan and I said “No, I’m not Scottish”.
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