Friday, January 16, 2009

Is this some DRAMA?

Yeah if anyone knows me for any period of time it's that I fucking hate drama.
Sort of inevitable though whenever a clan depends on another for servers.
Long story is while I was first trying Team Fortress 2 for the first time, about a year or so after release (man was I late) I was looking for a server to call home.
My boss, a former Call of Duty {LaW} clan member and also owner of probably the most popular CoD4 server in the midwest, recommended me Smackcentral, as he said that is where his clan had grown from and that the crowd there was of the older generation.
(Yes we're old :V)
Anyway, I visited, and had a really rocking time.
Skill level was on average higher than usual, and certain people made really fast impressions on me as to their skill.
(NC-17[CIA], B-Man[CIA], Skro, Chaos, to name a few.)
I bounced around a bit testing other clan servers but nothing really said "home" like Smack.
Brought some friends from #shrinemaiden as well, namely Pickie and WhiteKnell, but Whiteknell has the attention span of a flea and also loves to be a jerk.
He was inevitably banned for map exploits and being an overall jerk :V, though there were quite a few accusations of hacking (which he didn't, honestly he's not the type of guy to care so much about a game to hack...more like gimmick bat for 10 straight rounds)
Pickie stayed around though, through thick and thin.

Anyway there was talk of starting a sister clan to CIA, it had existed before, called NCM, or Not Clan Material.
From experience I had sort of figured out that CIA wasn't really interested on being a super-competitive clan, membership was sort of based on other things besides pure skill, I was fine with that.
If I couldn't get into CIA though I'd love to join NCM, as it would be made of regulars of Smack.
I also have this weird sense of loyalty in games I play, I stayed with the same halo pc clan for all of its lifetime on TWL until it was removed from the game list.
Same with Melty Blood, Sp00ky will always be some sort of godfather figure to me.
So I turned down an invite to The Stolen Eye, a pretty well-established and good clan, and joined NCM under the leadership of Skro.

Competitive play is quite a different mindset than public or even private servers.
There's a whole different mentality you have to bring in, but the biggest one is "you're not expendable."
Every time you die you are potentially fucking up a push or fucking up a defense.
Let's just say that some of our members were less than stellar at their roles or didn't even have set positions.
We had a good core of maybe four-five, but outside that we had a lot of people who sort of filled gimmick roles but didn't excel at anything.
People were getting more and more inactive though as time went on, and I do the thing I do with a lot of competitive games where I rotate on how much I'm playing them so as not to get burned out.
In short though we started showing up short-handed to matches, running lineups that I was uncomfortable with and that really had no clue beforehand what they were doing.
It wasn't TOO terrible but we really had to shape up.
At the same time though it seemed like CIA was having roster issues as well, they had forfeited a lot of matches because of numbers.

In short, CIA held a poll that might as well have been called "How do we fuck up NCM by splitting their roster?"
This involved voting for the top three players AMONG THE NCM ROSTER.
Top three winners (Chaos, Pickie, and rdmqwerty) were approached with invitations to CIA.
Then the thread got wiped, so the new people couldn't see what went down.

This is uncharacteristically FUCKING GRIMY of CIA.
It also indicates to me three things:
1. No one in CIA objected. At least, enough of them participated in the vote to basically say YEAH LET'S FUCK NCM!
2. They actually think rdmqwerty has done more for the community or is a better player than Skro, which is downright hilarious.
3. The chance of me and Skro getting into CIA is fairly low.

So yeah, in their quest? to be competitive CIA split us in two.
There was a match directly after the split and of course we were undermanned and lost terribly.
The hilarious thing was all three of our former members were still online at the time, so we would have had more than enough players.
I had no doubt that we would have won that match with a full roster, how the hell do you even win once on Badlands with a man down?
Which we did somehow.

I feel betrayed.
I know we're dependent on CIA for use of their servers for matches but what the hell is this shit about poaching members behind our backs?
I feel even worse for Skro, because as the leader of NCM they told him jack and voted a worse player over him to boot (no offense rdm, but chaos is a better demo than you, and I'm a better medic.)
Like what a punch in the balls this has turned out to be.
Now we have lost two of our best players and a decent player and are left with a roster with more holes than a cheese grate.
I honestly don't know what we'll do from here.

Seriously though, Smackcentral, and especially CIA, is the last place I expected to run into drama llamas.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry you feel this way. You should have asked any of us about it and we would've cleared up your misconceptions.

1. We didn't approach anyone in NCM, we were approached.
2. We talked with Skro first.
3. Skro was told from the very beginning of his involvment with NCM that NCM has been a farm team for CIA for years.
4. Skro was specifically asked if NCM would survive if we were to recruit some of his players and he didn't seem worried.
5. Instead of recruiting NCM players, we asked Skro if he'd be more interested in forming a joint CIA/NCM roster. Skro wasn't interested.
6. At the time we were looking into potential recruits you had a ridiculously low number of hours playing TF2, which didn't jive with our whole reason for recruitment: having people available for matches.

Anonymous said...

After some recent comments by other NCM members, I had a growing concern that some or all NCMers are completely unaware of the true course of events in this matter. It's truly unfortunate you decided to wrongly and publicly incriminate a clan with an excellent reputation spanning more than 10 years. Surely you were suspicious that these events seemed out of our clan's character?

In my haste, I'd like to only highlight Thermo's points 1 and 5 for now. You will notice that our clan name in the TWL is "CIA and the Tramps". I chose the name so that CIA could join the league along with some active Smack regulars, if they so desired. When NCM did not join the TWL (6v6 league) by the deadline, I approached NCM management about your clan's situation and whether you'd be interested in playing along with CIA in the league. It was at that time I was informed that NCM players might be interested in joining CIA instead.

Way to jump on the dramawaggon, sibladeko. I love the irony.

PS - There was no poll.

NC said...

I can't even begin to tell you how wrong all of this is Sib.

CIA began it's recruitment process looking exclusively at NON NCM players because we didn't want to harm NCM. It was Skro who came to us asking if we'd recruit any NCM players. We at the time told him we didn't want to poach anyone from NCM because it wouldn't be fair. Skro then made it clear over several dicussions with myself CheapShot and Thermo that Skro (and other NCMers) expected CIA to recruit from NCM and that some even wished to join.

This lead to an extremely intense and long debate within CIA about whether we should recruit from NCM and whether it was possible or not to do so without putting NCM out of action.

As an alternative we proposed to Skro an idea that we should combine our active rosters on TWL under a different name and just have CIA and NCM compete together. This offer was turned down.

In the end we decided against recruiting anyone from NCM. This is when we picked up Moltex, who has become an excellent scout for us.

Well a couple months go by, L4D comes out and we're right back where we started. We're short on starters, and so is NCM. We talk with Skro again, and again get the green light to recruit from NCM. CIA again debates internally whether we should or not, this time we finally just bite the bullet and decide to offer a spot to three NCM members.

At the time we offered spots to the people who we felt were most committed to playing TF2 and to this community (i.e the ones who had been most active and around over the past few months).

So there it is. There was no devious objective, where we set out to destroy NCM.

Anonymous said...

its me. im that jerk. im the jerk in that post with the attention span.