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)?
My clan started with Quake. Eventually it grew to IRL get togethers. We all grew up and had families and jobs so we don’t game together as much, although sometimes a new game comes along that gets us all playing together again. But 26 years later we still come from all over the country to get together IRL once a year, without fail.
It’s pretty awesome.
When I was a teen I used to run them frequently, tons of great memories. First was in a medium-sized MUD (early purely text-based mmorpgs), playerbase of around 100ish. Had active pvp, which made things harder for the newbies, which kinda capped the server’s growth.
Since my teen self named us “Souls of Chivalry” and we had grown into the second strongest guild, we set out to protect the defenseless.
It became common for a chi member to teleport in shortly after a new player joined. Tutorials didn’t really exist yet, so we’d answer questions and give them a prepared bag to help them survive the early levels. We’d patrol pvp-heavy areas looking for high level players spawn camping and shit, whereupon we’d kill them and confiscate their stuff. If a player bought land or something and came under attack while they were farming, a single server shout could bring half our guild teleporting in in the next 45 seconds, sometimes to quite the war.
Fun times.
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!
Yeah. I miss my boys. Shiny balls of light, you mongrels.
Maybe one day they’ll come back online.
The best time I had in Warcraft was forming a new guild that had splintered off of an existing one (leadership was unpleasant). It was pretty scary at first, not knowing how it was going to turn out, but we had enough of the guild come with us that we managed top 50 raid progression on the realm the following year. It was super validating to have that kind of success in a casual raiding guild after all the turmoil.
I stayed in contact with our GM, and she and I still play on and off (we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately).
