Making a Clan — TWL Forum Archive

2006-07-25 23:54

TeamWarfare League™
www.TeamWarfare.com

Heckler & Koch

It failed. In my twenty short years, the computer lab has produced very few good ideas. During the boring Minnesota winter months of 2001, the ideas we concocted in the computer lab were directly related to the fixation we had on the "latest" game: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. A competitive spirit rose out of the brick roads of Remagen while the low frame rates (we didnt have good computers) of Snowy Park kept us camped on one side. MoH:AA, as Ill call it from now on, was my first truly competitive game. Competition, as we know, requires time, skill, money, dedication, leadership, and a team. My friends had a couple of these things, though Im not really sure which. Either way, we decided that competition was the reason to start a team.

Lets consider the creation of a team that is destined to fail under its initial leadership. As a gamer that has started and joined teams, I compare the process of creating and maintaining a team to that of recruiting for a fast food restaurant. The "HELP WANTED" sign on the window or server title attracts a hastily created team that will only scan through applications, maybe ask when its newcomers can be around, and then sends them to an orientation with the promise of a pay/rank raise every few months. The leaders, if you want to call them leaders, will care only as much about the future of the team as much as the future of the team affects them.

Since we are now on leaders, Ill give a model of what not to do: My team, started in the course of an afternoon by a bunch of bored 15 year olds, did not have the right idea. First, our primary concern was with the name - we wanted to sound cool. My friend, a bit of a firearm collector, liked the gun company name Heckler & Koch. We promptly visited the companys website at school an action probably only allowed at our school. Having stolen our logo and posted it on our Angelfire Website (At least we thought that far ahead!) we needed a name that fit the H and K profile.

The name is where everything starts making even less sense. Somehow, after fifteen minutes of ideas including "Heretic Kore", random historical fact and a picture of Germanys Erwin Rommel (leader of the Afrika Korps) led to "Hero Korps" and a new nickname for my friend and "co-leader", =|HK|= ^Desert Fox^, yes, complete with ears.
The team will follow the trends of its leaders. As you can tell, our trends were pretty random. So random in fact that a server was ordered from iLanGame the very next day. We sat, excited, as we installed the "All Seeing Eye" gaming browser on a school computer- another thing we shouldnt have been allowed to do. The server, under my friends credit card (a 15 year old with a credit card is a lethal combination) launched immediately. We gasped as the =|HK|= Hunting Grounds quickly filled. Random.

A clan was created

Under the guidance of Desert Fox and I, HK quickly grew into a group of more random individuals. We signed up for TeamWarfare and began a recruiting session that invited anyone capable of maintaining a positive record and in the end, not turning anyone down, simply because I would feel bad for doing so.

So it had only been about a week, but we were already challenging someone. Exactly who we played and how we did, I dont recall. Honestly, the worst things possible happened.

We won. The team seemed like a good idea, even a success in some context. Our record reached 5-0, defeating a Danish team and playing another team whose leader threatened to hack my server and beat me up because he was a Golden Glove boxer, a title I still dont understand all through MSN. WTF. Seriously.

Imagine our winning streak in the context of the fast food restaurant. Receiving our first few pay checks and were maybe given the title shift leader with praise by the manager, but when we accepted the job, some of us never really considered WHERE we were going. The manager Desert Fox, was never around, I was too inexperienced to understand what we needed for continuing success, and we did not seem to care about what happened either way. A plateau. Our skill level could be raised, but no one wanted to practice. I preferred the easy going attitude of not making anyone doing anything. Uh oh.

Without going into too much detail, Desert Fox and I got bored with the team and joined another team that we thought was more dedicated and skilled. Our new team was successful, even reaching #1 on the TeamWarfare TDM ladders more than once, but in retrospect, we did so by abandoning the friends we had created even my brother and another friend were still in HK. The rest is a combination of a blur and a no-brainer: Commitments change. People come and go. Goldfish fed by five year olds can last longer.

Years later, Ive been apart of some very good, well-thought out teams.

So that this article wouldnt be entirely about my experience, I also posed the following question to the popular gaming forums on TeamWarfare:

What makes a good team?

ReverendStrife said: "Personally, I think that if you get a group of people together who can stand each other and share mutual respect, then you have a good team. Skill often fuels ego, which often is the fuel used to spark a fire which ends a clan. If your team has all the skill, but you all hate each other, your clan wont last long."

-=NBH=- Bananahands

SFBuckWild said: I think making a "good" team all comes down to one issue, Leadership. If you have strong leadership then you will make it through the ups and downs of keeping the team together and strong. The leadership will make or break the team.

Peiduxtreme

Cure-IMR said: "A lot of things. For a team to last long/win competitions you need a very dedicated leader with very dedicated members. You also have to spend a lot of time preparing for matches, scriming and doing tactics. It can take a long time to build a good foundation for a great team but of course sometimes people get lucky and found great teams very quickly. If you try to make a team goodluck."

Instinct

=GvL= Hobbes said: If you want to know how to stay together for a long time then the answer is easy. You have to have a bond within your members. All clans weather stormy times, but the ones that stick together or the ones with a friendship that lets the members work thru the problems like a family might. It helps to have members with a healthy sense of humor and an understanding of fair play and sportsmanship. It only takes one or two unsportsmanlike teammates to quickly ruin a clan.

{Hfx} MadJester

On a side note, during one of my first matches with my first clan in Medal of Honor, the entire six man team entered the roof of Algiers. While attempting to do some sort of tactical maneuver, the squad leader threw a nade that bounced off the inside of the door. Rather than warning us, he simply said "OH #$#$", followed by six deaths appearing on the top of the screen. Good times.

GDI said: my team has been around for 4-5 years. Basically stick with your core group of guys and build around that. People will come and leave, but the core guys will stay. You also need good leadership and have those 1-2 guys that can crack everyone up. You also have to be able to take a loss and shrug it off. You win some, you lose some."

From my team, many have gone and left but the 6-7 guys that started off together back in MoH:AA, are still around.

Having read through many of the responses, the most important part of a team is a combination of what the above suggests.

Something to come back to.
We play video games to stave off boredom, provide ourselves with an alternate reality in which your mortality is dependent on a health bar, your reflexes, and some planning and those dont matter because you will always have a second chance. Adding voice chat, a sense of humor, people you get along with, and the thrill of victory make the experience worth more than a few hours of a week. Teams that stretch entertainment into valuable friendships clearly have the greatest degree of success.

And just a note. Many of the responses testified to the importance of leadership. Obviously my first group suffered from a poor leader (I wasnt the leader, so to speak, but I took charge of some things), but many of our were members were good friends. HK is still alive, not entirely competitive and certainly not in Medal of Honor, but they are now an example of what can happen when people take charge.
My brother still returns to our old team and now plays Guild Wars and Call of Duty 2 with them. I guess the Hero Korps worked out for someone. Fantastic.

What TO Do
The story behind this final set of paragraphs just happened a minute ago, but it got me thinking about teams and what I had typed. After about three paragraphs explaining the different things you could want, considering whether or not people were leaders, and eventually closing the article, I realized that like right now, I was really blabbering.

The goal of gaming is plain and simple: Have Fun. Fun is the reason why people come back. Fun is the reason why people compete, especially after they lose. Simply consider your definition of fun - is a late night on voice chat fun? Is competition fun? If you aren't having fun, you are heading down an annoying, slightly stressful path. I won't question what you want or need to do, I'll just give you my personal experience. I have played at least a half dozen games competitively since HK started, seen clans rise and fall, and watched my favorite team die because of inactivity . They died or I quit because we were not having FUN.