Regarding our clan

Ok, I’ve remained mostly silent during the drama these last few months but felt I had to step in.  I just logged in to get a half dozen messages from people saying they’re leaving ST and offering reasons why.  I just want to make sure everyone understands WHY we’ve come to this point.  It probably won’t change anything, but I think it’s important.

First let me say that I don’t believe we were ever a real “clan”.  With the exception of a few sporadic clan battles we really don’t operate like a clan.  What we have always been is a group of somewhat like-minded and easy going folk who enjoyed playing together.  That’s it.

There are three things that I think have brought us to this point:

1. After GRAW 2 the games we have played as a group have allowed less and less total players in a room.  We went from 16 in GRAW 2 to 12 in COD4/WAW HARDCORE to 8 in L4D. This meant that fewer and fewer of us could play at once.

2. We started seeing an influx of new people coming into the group.  This is a GOOD thing, and many of them have been awesome additions!  Unfortunately, this caused our overall numbers to grow which only made item #1 above even worse.

3. We started diverging in gameplay.  Basically, some of us liked some of the games we were playing more than others.

This left all of us having to pick and choose who to play with.  Let’s face it, this was UNAVOIDABLE.  We simply have too many people to all be able to play together all the time.

Now, to make all of this worse, some of us have not handled the 16 people and only 8 chairs equation very well.  Some people have just jumped out of a game to play with a different group on a different game.

This has lead to feelings being hurt and people being frustrated.  Some of us enjoy playing with most of the group as much as any other person.  Some people in our group simply like playing with some players more.  That’s ok, really.  Could we have handled this better?  You bet.

I’d love for us to hit the “Reset” button on all of this and just go back to being a fun group who play together.  It may be too late for that for some people, and that’s understandable.

For me, I am going to just continue playing the games I enjoy with whoever happens to be playing them from our group.  Some days I’ll be in the mood for WAW, other days I’ll feel like L4D.  I won’t take it personally if you don’t want to jump in a game with me or if you’d rather play with another group, and I hope you won’t either.

If you don’t like playing with someone, don’t play with them.  If you don’t like a particular game, don’t play it.  If you want to leave the clan, that’s entirely up to you.  I’ll be sad because it means we all may drift apart and play less and less together, but our clan should never have been something so SERIOUS anyway.

I enjoy playing with you all and hope we keep doing so in the years to come.

Smack