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)?

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      That sounds amazing, it is good to hear there are still some groups that have kept in contact, even after all that time!

  • Candelestine@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s awesome when you can organize an in-game group like that to achieve something you couldn’t do alone. Sounds like fun times for sure! :)

  • Remmock@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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!

      • Remmock@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • tok3n@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I joined and ran many clans growing up but my first was in Rainbow Six: Rouge Spear. I spent many of hours sniping on bunkers and swearing at each other over Teamspeak. One guy I met took me under his wing and showed me all about each level. The mod scene was pretty good too, granted you had to manually install the mod locally or the server wouldn’t let you in.

    My most memorable game was America’s Army. The challenge of the gameplay really drew me and my RL friends in and we ended up making a clan. We liked it so much we rented a legit server so we could get honor on our own turf. Between us and the players coming in it was some of my best time on a shooter.

    Just for sheer amount of hours, Counter Strike 1.6 reigns supreme. I remember when I first saw my America’s Army friends playing it and was in awe. The movement was janky compared to America’s Army, but had way faster gameplay and more weapons. At first I had trouble getting the hang of it and it took a while but eventually I could somewhat keep up with them.

    Needless to say, I got zero sleep as a kid.

    • Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Oh shit, other America’s Army players exist!

      I wasnt supposed to be playing online video games, so I spent all my time on a Christian server figuring I could leverage that to avoid punishment

  • Ashtear@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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).

  • atrielienz@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yeah. I miss my boys. Shiny balls of light, you mongrels.

    Maybe one day they’ll come back online.

  • iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • scottywh@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Same… 2 clans actually because eventually one collapsed and the remaining members were absorbed into another clan we’d been friends with…

    • detinu@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Furimbus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I helped co-found a guild back when WOW was new - I was the guild webmaster. The guild never really got that big or active, but here it is 20 years later and I still occasionally get credit card offers in the mail for “The Blackrazor Brotherhood.”

    Some of my favorite gaming memories are from my time in a guild called The Sylvan Guard on an EverQuest server around 1998 or so. It was a small guild but the last time I saw a question similar to this posted, on Reddit a few years ago, I checked in and so did a former guild-mate I hadn’t spoken with in decades.

  • all-knight-party@kbin.run
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    i play guild wars 2 in bursts, and then stop for a while in between. about a year ago i was grinding hard to get the skyscale mount, which was quite a grind at the time, and i normally only play solo, but there was a step that required me to beat a small open world dungeon that was just a bit too difficult for me to get through by myself, so i solicited help from some random guy who was standing outside.

    That guy helped me a great deal and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. after we finished the dungeon he offered for me to join their guild, which, on my own, i would never do, but coming off the high of finishing the dungeon, and feeling like i owed him, i accepted. i ended up doing guild weeklies with them quite a few times and going on discord chat and all, super chill people, it was honestly pretty fun. but alas, i fell off the guild wars 2 train and they removed me due to inactivity, but extended an offer that i could return if i ever got back into the game.

    overall an awesome experience, i’m still grateful to that guy, and grateful to that guild for giving me some entertaining guild chat nights where i spent more time shooting the shit with them than actually playing the game.

  • pushECX@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m in my 30’s and I’ve gotten into clans within the past couple of years or so. I started playing games that none of the rest of my friends played, like Hell Let Loose and Squad. Joining a clan for those two games was huge because it gave me a ton of people to play with at pretty much any time of day. For these types of games, at least, clans are still a pretty big thing. All of the clans that I’ve seen use Discord these days.

    My Hell Let Loose clan has over 1,000 members and my Squad clan has even more - not entirely sure how many. What’s really interesting is that I know and have played with a ton of those members. Made lots of good memories, too.

    Anyway, in my experience clans are totally still a thing. You should seek some out! Maybe you’ll find a good group that you vibe with.

  • raptir@lemdro.id
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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).

  • SoapyYogurt82@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    Quake 3, Soldier of Fortune 2, Tremulous, Star Wars Galaxies, Tribes 2, etc. Lots of fond memories.

  • Crackhappy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    My current name comes from a Quake2 clan. I belonged to the [CRACK] clan, and everyone called me Happy.