Loyalty and Honor

I have found that the two biggest factors that make people friends in my eyes have been loyalty and honor. I am going to go super nerd tonight, so bear with me. I need to tell a story about my video game habbit and why I'm writting this post. I know a lot of you will look at me sideways for me being so passionate about something so meaningless and so stupid. OK, here goes. On my birthday, 2003 aka the worst fucking day of my life, I received a package in the mail from an ebay auction I won. It was Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3. I had played a few of the older games on the computer a long time ago and always enjoyed them. I had xbox live at MU and it was the only escape I had. So I pop it in and go directly online. Now on Xbox Live you have a friends list. You have to send someone a friend invite and they have to accept it and then you can tell, just like on AIM, when they are online and what they are doing. My friend, Scoob, from England was on because it was about 10 AM EST or 3 PM in England. I hopped into a room with him and we started playing. It was very hard to learn, but once I got it, I loved it. Scoob and I both had a guy named "Six Shooter" on our lists so we hopped into his room after a few rounds in some random room. Six loved a map called City Streets Large and had a very fast connection, so we would hang out in there and play CSL for hours. Then when he had to go, he'd set up a dedicated room so we could keep using his connection. He had no idea how to add maps, so we'd just play CSL over and over and over. Over the course of the next month we met a bunch of guys that were consistantly showing up in Six's server and we all ended up exchanging friend invites and making sure we were on the same team and all that good stuff. As it turned out, when 6 of us were on one team (it's mostly 6v6) we were pretty much unstoppable. One day Six sent me an invite and I went to his server and it was just me and him. He asked me if I'd ever heard of Clan competition and if I"d be interested in starting up an R6 clan. I thought, "man, clans are for nerds, but we are pretty damn good, so let's give it a shot." We exchanged emails and went to go sign up our roster at www.teamcompete.com. We started out hot and ended up 30 and 3 before we moved to another gaming site www.gamebattles.com. It was at GB that we basically ran the table and went from a no name squad to the number 2 team in the world. Our team name is Old Boys because the three leaders, Six, Gundam79, and myself are 35, 34, and 24 respectively. We are old for the gaming circles so we are the Old Boys. So time went on and things were going great. We were playing matches that we would organize over www.gamebattles.com every single night of the week. I would spend hours reading and chatting on the forums and we would practice strategies, learn new angles, and just have fun when we weren't competing. We played on a consistant basis from December of 2003 to August of 2004. Then the makers of R6 released the sequel Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow. We all bought the game on opening day, moved our team to BA, and then realized the game sucked. It was nothing like R6. The older members were having trouble finding the time to play and the younger guys that were interested in playing quit the team and the ones who didn't really care fell off the face of the earth. You learn a lot about the character of a man when things aren't going well. Anyone can join the number 2 team in the world, but who will stay when we are not playing 10 matches a week? A lot of fighting went on and a lot of awful things were said and now we're basically the older members who are very inactive still waiting for the game that will grab our intrest again like R6.

So then, the second coming of our savior, Halo 2... and it was nothing. I waited in line from 10:30 to midnight the day before opening in the freezing cold and took a day off from work so I could just play straight through the night and the whole next day. I really like the game. It's a great and amazingly programed game, but it just isn't what I'm looking for. So then Ubisoft, the company that put out R6, comes out with their answer to Halo 2, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2. The GR series has been very strong and the people (like Six Shooter) who were in love with the original couldn't sit still until that game was released. Now it's another amazing game, but just not what I'm looking for. Unlike Halo2 which is polished and perfect, GR2 is just about worthy of a beta. You can't even access your friends list because of a glitch in the game. The game is quirky and has problems all over the place. Of course, other than the friends list, the problems aren't that bad unless you are playing with jerks who want to exploit them. R6 had HUGE problems, BA had even worse ones, and then GR2 comes out incomplete. If GR2 had been as nicely done as Halo2 I might not be typing now, but it just makes me angry that a company as powerful as UbiSoft could put out such an unfinshed work. I blame it all on xbox live and their system of updating titles. UbiSoft relies on the fact that they can release a game unfinished and then 1 hour after release when everyone's banging down their doors about all the problems, they can say "Our development team is aware of the problems with GR2 and are working night and day to fix the problem. A patch will be released soon." Soon? The game was released in November and they still haven't even fixed the friends list. Fucking assholes. If I didn't hate them so damn much right now I'd be trying to get The Old Boys back into it.

So for those of you keeping score at home, this is where we are: Old Boys were at the peak of our game and then BA was released, the team basically fell apart, Halo2 and GR2 were released and both had their problems that were too much for too many people to bring the intact roster to either game, so now it's probably 10 of the original 30 still on the roster. Now here's why I titled this Loyalty and Honor. 3 of my BEST friends from Live who were all Old Boys, including Scoob who was the first person I ever added to my list, Trebek who is my best friend in real life, and Archangel75 who I've spent DAYS of my life hanging out with till 5 in the morning playing games, broke off from TOB to form their own clan HolidayInn. This kind of stuff burns me to the core. I know it's a game, but these are real people we're talking about. I feel like the world I built for myself online is falling apart because I can't even get my closest friends to stay loyal. I am the leader of a clan full of ghosts. The people who are on the roster don't play and the people who play aren't on the roster. Why those 3 and everyone else who joined them couldn't have played under the TOB tag I have no fucking clue. This clan has meant the world to me. It was there for me when I was absolutely alone out in PA, it was there when I was unemployed and had nothing, it was there when I got my new stupid job, and now it's nothing. Me, Six, and Gundam (I call them by their real names, but I don't think they want them out there) keep in touch over the phone and via email and I see a lot of ex members online, but the fact that a bunch of people who are active in Halo 2 have broken off into little separate clans to play instead of trying to revive TOB kills me. I am sitting here typing with my friends list loaded in front of me. I am ocnsidering just totally clearing it out and starting all over. I was nominated to the allstar R6 team and did very well against the best gamers in the world. I have been recruited to join at least a dozen teams that I can remember, but I will not leave. I am loyal to the bottom of my soul and I have more honor than any man that I have ever met. These people that are my friends didn't even have the common courtesy to let me know what they were thinking. Trebek at least should have known what this would look like. I guess I'm not as important to these people as I thought I was. I need to step out of this online life for a while. I am tired of the bullshit. My cousin Phil is an Old Boy. He sucks at everything, but he's loyal to the end. He would never leave... EVER! Him and I have been playing together for the past couple of days and it's been fun, but every time I get an invite to play with the guys I spent more time with than anyone else for the past year and see some whacky clan tag where it always used to say TOB it makes me sick. It's like I came home to find the enemy in my living room, but they all had familiar faces. To all the cool people reading this saying what the fuck is wrong with this guy, I know, I suck, but I need to talk, so here I go.

Now you also might be asking yourself why I feel so attached to gaming competitively. The answer is simple. When I am not playing sports I have a gaping hole in my heart. I need to feel that rush of me vs you. I need to dominate like I used to dominate in real life. I do play football in the spring, at least I hope I still do, but when I thought my career was over, and I wasn't playing in any sort of adult league (because I'm too young) I really started feeling empty. Even though this is a stupid video game, it helped fill that void. I would get online and I was one of the most respected members of a community for how good I was at what I did. After a match we'd tally up the results per player and I would always end up at or near the top every single time. There were times we'd be down a few men and I'd just take over and kick some ass. Nothing felt better than knowing we were being surrounded and making the decsion to fight my way out instead of waiting in a corner to die and then turning the tables. I was reliable and did my job exactly as it needed to be done day in and day out. It felt great. Now that I don't have that anymore I want it. I am getting to that point again where I don't care what fucking game it is, I just want to be back leading my team. I need that competition even in small doses. It keeps me feeling normal. I'm back down to 40 hours a week now that we aren't going to sell any more phones for about the next 11 months, so I have the time to do it again. I just need to put the band back together. I feel like it's never going to happen again. At least not like it was, but maybe I can get lucky and round up a few of the old guys and then start the recruiting process all over again. I hate recruiting because it's like picking up mercenaries. You never know if you can trust them, and once they get inside, they almost always screw things up. The second part to my deletion of my friends list would be that I would start up a new clan, Loyalty and Honor, with my cousin Phil, and with whatever Old Boys are still around. It might kill me to lose the title "Leader - Team Old Boys" after all the time and effort I put into building the team, but it might have to happen to stop the bleeding. I will think about it more tonight and make my decision by this weekend.

I know I've just become the lamest person you've ever heard of, but I don't care. This is my Blog and my life. If you have a problem with it, get the fuck outta here.