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Today is our first team anniversary. Let’s remember how we started and what we have done in the past year.
Actually a group of good friends started already in 2011 to play Swat4 with AST clan tags. We had our own Swat and mumble server and also a small website with a forum. But no real internal organisation, no structure. With more and more people joining this group, internal conflicts arose. The result was sad: one founder and good friend left the team in anger with a destructive act.
At the 7th January 2012 AST had almost nothing left. The servers were gone, the forum empty, a lot of members inactive. What was left were good friends and the will to go on. And if you ask me: we made it ;)
We were able to get a new Swat4 and a Mumble server running pretty quick. And they ran and run stable with just very few down-times. During the year we have added an Swat4 SAS mod server and a private Raven Shield server, and lately a private Arma2:CO server. We had also some more swat servers hosted by friends, thanks again Vazant and Uniqu3. We will see which new servers we get running in the next year.
And of course we used this servers not only for normal, every day game play. We had really a lot of great training-sessions, either to teach newcomers the basic stuff or to practice advanced tactics with awesome team mates. I also want to remember at the Operation Medical Shock, our first Live Operation. And the gaming together with ITS in December: we had a lot of fun playing hostage rescue in VIP mode and paintball at a special map. We also tried to organize some contest or tournament events, sadly so far without success. But I guess we will try again, and for sure we will repeat all the things that already worked out good :D
Besides the gaming we put a lot of effort in our internal structure. We created rules and guidelines concerning permissions and the way we make decisions. We don’t want to re-experience such a devastating conflict with a team mate and friend like we had it at our start, never again. Of course the structure wasn’t perfect at the first try. It developed. We made a big step in November when we opened our team officially for new games. And today we have a pretty good system to make quick and reasonable decisions, to distribute responsibilities and work, to ensure the tactical quality of our members and have fun with great tactical team play in different games. Still the system is not perfect yet and we will keep on working on the details.
Another aspect of every community is presentation to the outside. Our website and forum made really some huge steps forward, thanks to our webmaster ShadowManu. We also founded a xfire and a gametracker group to represent us and stay in close contacts with members and friends. Lately we opened our own Youtube channel. But we are still working on the content, like we are working to improve quality and quantity of our website content.
As some of you may remember we started as “Advanced Swat Tactics”. Well, the name makes sense if you consider “Swat” as term for police special forces. But not if you write it out: “Advanced Special Weapons and Tactics Tactics”. So we simply switched “Swat” to “Squad” in our name staying with the same abbreviation AST. When we changed the name, we already had in mind to play different games than Swat4. And I think it fits our team really good. We also agreed on a team motto: “In Unity There Is Strength!” This describes very well our game play and the internal team organisation. And during the next year we will also agree on a team logo (hopefully ;) ).
A pretty important part of our team are the tactics. We had really nice tactics for Swat4 from the beginning. But nothing written. That makes it difficult for new members to learn about all the details. We worked on it step by step, and today we have a nice collection of tactical thoughts and articles in our forum. Now we need to order them better, rewrite some Swat4 specific parts in a way that they fit all realistic FPS, and of course add new tactics for the new challenges in the new game we are going to conquer.
I have saved the most important aspect of our team for the last paragraph: the people. I met a lot of nice, friendly, tactical minded team players. Sadly some left or disappeared again. But others stayed around, became friends. Some returned after a break. A few even joined this team. I enjoy every minute of gaming with you guys (well, almost every minute.. :P ).
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Category: Anniversary |
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