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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
In Ultima Online I was part of a really big guild on Napa Valley. We had pretty much all the land north east of the Britannia swamp. We were one of the first, if not the first, guild to defeat the Harrower.
Afaik, yeah. I haven’t played on the official servers for years though. If I ever have a hankering to play it, I find emulated shards that duplicate the experience as it was in 1997.
Edit: I just had to look and see; not only is it still up and running, they recently had some kind of event on the 18th.
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.
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.
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.
When I was younger my parents got a new pc. It had a stupid Game Center trying to sell you games. Being a bored teenager who enjoyed games, I looked through it. I found a game called Dark Orbit. It was the only game I was ever in a clan/guild. I bounced around a few guilds, but I was always friends with the big guilds. I had my own guild for awhile.
One of my friends gave me the top guild because they wanted to start a new one and knew that I really liked their guild tag. Everyone used to hang out on GSC which was a chat client nobody seemed to have heard of. It was like a precursor to discord. I had a lot of really good times hanging out with my guild mates. We sometime just hung out and talked without even playing.
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