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Author Topic: Sheep Tag (East) A Complete History  (Read 8307 times)

drewisfat

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Re: Sheep Tag (East) A Complete History
« on: July 17, 2017, 07:05:44 am »
Chapter 9 -- Clan ESS

Although I did have fun playing Snipers, I still missed Sheep Tag. It was a great game and I didn't want it to end like this. So I spoke with the last SGOD.

Pure, X_Pure_X, egPURE, ngPURE, had many accounts. I've mentioned him before but I would like to elaborate more on him. He was my mentor and someone I had always respected. He was also probably my most memorable and closest long-term friend on wc. I really regret losing contact with him. He was a terrific wolf player and I learned much from him. But he was a very smart player in general, and in all games he played, dota, ladder, he had insane game IQ. His sheep as I said was somewhat mocked because he built randomly, but he turned what others would consider trolling into a very difficult to kill sheep. By building randomly he made it difficult for wolves to truly cut him off. He was ahead of his time, and I wish he would have played ST in the later days. I think he would have enjoyed it.

But perhaps the most important thing about Pure at this point in history, is he was the last of the SGODs. If there was going to be continuity with the east that was, he was the necessary leader. He had very little interest in this though. He didn't like leading clans, or even clans in general. And while he still liked sheep tag, he wasn't losing sleep over its demise. I impressed upon him the importance for him to take an active role in bringing back the game, and after a week of debate, he agreed on one condition: that I would be co-chief and that we would share duties so he would not be required to play sheep tag full-time. With that Clan ESS: Elite Sheep Sensei was born.

We were pretty much the only pro sheep taggers remaining at this point, and we had a hard road ahead of us. The main clan, ESS, would consist of the best players, which at this time meant pretty much anyone who had ever played the game before. We would have revolving chief/shaman accounts. I, however, would spend most of my time leading the training clan tESS, or maybe ESSt, don't really remember. But I was the one who actually wanted more people to play this game and I was going to do the brunt of the recruiting and training. Pure would be in charge of the war team and handle 'foreign policy' as it were. We both knew that was mostly a joke though, as there were no other clans at this point.

It was remarkably easy to find new members. The game was still very active and there was clearly a high demand for an organized clan for people to join. Ultimate ST was becoming a real issue though and there was a struggle to get members to focus on the pro maps. As part of that struggle, we finally accepted 7.5 was dead and that 7.1 Rev III would be the main map. It was more popular for new members, (i.e. everyone) and the bigger concern was with ultimate. TheWinner, maker of ulti, had some contact with the pro community and I spoke with him several times. He was not good himself though, and had no interest in joining the mainstream community. He was happy with his map being noob, and did not accept any suggestions that anyone gave him. Thus, Ulti was viewed with some hostility.

~~~Westy Contact~~~

We did in fact have the occasional contact with westies. It's hard to remember with who exactly and when. In modern times westies were thought of as nice, almost naively nice. This was not the case back then. Westies were an absurdly arrogant bunch and most of those that visited east were giant A$$holes. The most notorious jerk was the OC, aka Ubersheep. Pure really, really hated that kid and had told me about his evilness since I started playing. So when westies did arrive, pure was extremely cautious and suspicious about them. He also, I later came to realize, was embarrassed at the state of east and didn't really want them to see how weak and dead it had become. We were challenged to a clan war and debated about what we would do. I wanted to play. He told me bluntly that our defeat was a foregone conclusion. We would be humiliated, they would gloat, and we may even lose members to them. So his policy was mostly to avoid westies and limit their access to players.
~~~~~~

That said, it wasn't lonely for long. Our clans grew and grew. Eventually tESS came to outnumber ESS as we handled the influx of players. 5+ new members would walk in every day, and most of them would be sent to the training clan to learn the basics of how we played. I had no idea who these people were, most of them just walking into the channel saying X told me to join, and half the time I didn't even know who X was. This overwhelmed pure, and for the latter half of ESS I had become in practice the main chief making all decisions for the clan, while pure became more and more bored with ST. This confused me, and with all the new members I didn't really understand why pure was getting bored and didn't put enough effort into keeping him involved.

At its peak tESS had grown to 100 members, and this actually forced me to start "graduating" kids early to shuffle them into open slots in ESS. The clan(s) had grown to 150 active players total. In 2 short months we had gone from nothing to the largest clan perhaps in ST history.

Why then, has no one ever heard of ESS??? That's A LOT of people. That's like the size of the whole modern day STC! I will tell you why. One day I had a really dumb idea.

It was time for a clan meeting! Why? Dunno. I had a list of things I wanted to address and needed to discuss with the n00bs, get them all on the same page, inform them of clan policy, etc. But mostly..... I just wanted to see how many kids I could get in the channel at the same time, not gonna lie. The answer was 56. So yeah we had to have this meeting in two channels, lol. And this is before modern bots were really a thing, so that didn't end up working well. Eventually it consolidated to 40, just from people being left out and playing a game instead.

So what did we talk about? Oh the elephant in the room. We had too many people to even fit in one channel at the same time. So spyblade offered this suggestion:
"We should split up."
A lot of people agreed. Pure was unwilling to clan war westies because we were too bad. But here I was teaching kids to be "good enough to war", with no targets. Many people echoed spyblade's complaint. In a desperate effort to retain control, I came up with a compromise saying we'd make different teams, an ESS A team, an ESS B team, a C team, etc. I knew this was still a flawed approach, but at this point I just wanted this discussion and the meeting to end. They wouldn't be organized enough to act on this on their own. I could ride out the storm. So that was that. I said "I'm bored, let's play some games" knowing that would be echoed by many, and the meeting ended.


Pure was present throughout the meeting but was eerily quiet. Later that night, after everyone went to sleep, he came back online. He logged onto the shared account and disbanded ESS. Then he logged onto a shaman account in tESS and kicked everyone out.

I did not handle that well. Seriously, young drewy rage moded and burst quite a few blood vessels. I suppose rational drewy would have just remade the clan and got as many to rejoin as possible. But that's not what I did. For starters, I didn't even know most of their names. And secondly, I had been backstabbed by Pure, my best friend in the game. I was done with this sh*t. I told Pure and spyblade to go **** themselves, removed them from f list, made another account and joined a snipers clan.

Many reading this might agree with Spyblade and I get that. And that may be right. But from my perspective I had just put in a TON of effort for months to essentially build my mega clan, and just when it was starting to get good, it was over and a friend had backstabbed me. And what ever did end up happening to all those members? There was no organization, no leadership. No one made a single clan after it disbanded. They all just disbursed. People weren't around each other long enough to form enough friendships or connections, and without the clan channels where would they go to meet each other to form new clans? And most of them were probably like 10 years old anyways. So that was it, even quicker than it came, it was gone. 

 

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