Camelot

Introduction

This is the account of Camelot's history written by Sir Mordecae. There have not been written accounts of Camelot's history since the beginning of our alliance, and this account was started on 19-1-2001 roughly 3 years after the original foundation of the Camelot alliance. I will tell you how I experienced the history of Camelot. To this the versions of other old Camelot members may be added later. I did not know all the details, certainly not from the early resets, but I will try to tell the history to the best of my ability.

First Reset: May-August 1998

It was at the beginning of this reset, or perhaps at the end of the reset before that a group of colleagues in California decided to form their own alliance in 1a. Dismayed at the level of cheating and dishonor in the game, they took up the idea of the King Arthur legend as a base for their alliance. Starting off small, the founders of Camelot set up a website at Geocities. We had a board from Echelon boards (Swirve was called echelon back then, or rather Swirve hadn't taken over Echelon yet). The Knights of Camelot had moderator or admin access (I am not sure which) to these boards and could post in a special area where members could not. At the time of my joining (at the end of the reset in August 98) Camelot had 40 members.

Shortly after me joining, Camelot got in a final reset week war with Armada. We found out the hard way that alliance gaming was something other than tourney play. Armada kicked our butts and left nothing much of us alive. This was to have a profound impact on our future gaming. King Arthur had an imposter during this reset, and this focused a lot of attention towards us, getting us a lot of new recruits. Aside from that, Sir Ector, alias Crud, our recruit officer was doing a terrific job recruiting. At the end of the reset, Camelot decided to swap over to the Infernal Domain websites, later called EZclan. The 6 level system was impressive and we were stunned by the new website. Still at some times we look back with nostalgia towards our old Geocities site. Until a short while ago it was actually still up. I don't believe it is now though.

The test game: September 1998

After a great first reset, Camelot suffered dearly from moving and even more from the test game Mehul put in. The change involved introducing oil into the game and for some reason Mehul wasn't overconfident in his change working, like he normally was. For Camelot this test game was particularly badly timed, because many Cameloters did not play in the test game. We dropped back to 30 members during that "reset", despite a serious recruiting drive and the test game was pretty uneventful for us.

The second reset: October 1998-November 1998

The major event during this reset was me getting icq. :P I wanted to climb the ladder of Camelots rank structure because it appeared to me I was no dumber than any of the Knights out there. Sitting at university, downloading ICQ on workstations where it wasn't allowed, spending hours of chats with KA and the Camelot Knights with the constant threat of a university network manager catching me really added to the excitement. From this moment I have a better knowledge of the things that happened. However, until the last year I never had full knowledge of what happened within Camelot, since I obviously did not have the rank. King Arthur talked Camelot into The Sovereign Alliance, at that point consisting of MD, SoL, Sky (Elites) and several smaller alliances that were growing fast. This gave Camelot the chance to grow, because the friendship of two alliances that were really at the top at that point (MD and SoL) meant a lot. Several wars were avoided thanks to the influence and threat of TSA.

Camelot crossed swords with HAN that reset, and we did a much better job than we did earlier against Armada. Before, Camelot was generally seen as a role-playing alliance, but people were beginning to realize we could do more than pretend to be knights. At the end of this reset Lady Guinevere started to get actively involved in the leadership of Camelot. During this reset, a leader in Camelot was found to be a hacker and a cheater that went by the name of Codes or Codebreaker. He launched the idea to start a covert spying alliance as a team of Camelot. Upon refusal he attempted to take control of the site, but was removed by King Arthur in combination with Inferno. I learned this from later talks with Lady Guinevere. Codes used the knights name Sir Galahad.

Later History

The first two serve well to give you an idea when it was that Camelot was founded. In the early resets, Camelot developed themselves as a fighting force, even though the opponents were generally multi clans of little fame. We grew slowly toward 70-80 members. In the meantime a culture started in Camelot. Encouraged by Lady Guinevere and Shock, or The Poet, Camelot actively posted poetry, and eventually an entire message board was dedicated to Shock's Poetry, where Camelot members came together to post their poetry and read the work of others. Shock's Poetry survived for a long time, even though Shock no longer played and Lady Guinevere was hardly ever found on our site. Later, Merlin was introduced. His workshop was filled with riddles and wisdom. Our members called upon him when they had trouble in real life or simply had questions about anything that was not Earth related. This tradition and culture flourished and Camelot became a real popular place.

However, ever since the foundation of Camelot, we have always been either loved or hated. No middle way was possible it seemed.

At some point, Camelot grew beyond 100 members and we ranked pretty high in the overall membership. Camelot members started to feel confident they could play an important role in the game. Gradually the ideas in Camelot changed from having fun in the game towards becoming a strong political force. Still, honor was high on our priority list, and after being wronged and insulted by RD, Camelot declared war and we killed off every tagged RD country in the game. At that point, Mr. Teal and Mr. Red were twice our highest country's networth. Still, they were all eliminated. RD expressed the wish not to carry the incident over the reset and that's where the hostilities ended, at least openly. In the idea that we could really matter in this game, Camelot started a massive recruiting drive. We were very successful at that, and Camelot grew from 100 members to nearly 190 members at some point in the next two resets. At that point only MD was bigger and the number 3 came in at around 130 members.

However, the Camelot organization became stretched up to the levels it could take. Brigade numbers were exceedingly high and we were forced to create extra teams to accommodate all the new recruits. At the same time, old vets from the beginning were resigning. Together, this created big gaps in leadership structure. Unable to compensate, new squires were promoted quickly, and Brigades were run inefficiently. Most importantly, RD had not forgotten about us just yet. With our open door policy towards new recruits, it had been very easy for them to plant a spy in our midst, and with our leadership spread thin, climbing the access levels must not have been all that hard for the RD spy either. It did not take long before wannabe leaders were feeling jealous and let down because young squires were passing them by in rank. In the meantime, the gaming element was still going well. Since netgaining does not require good teamwork, individuals were doing great. Camelot enjoyed serious tag protection and our members were generally double the size in acres others were. We finished that reset close to the top 10 in alliance, but we were not yet experienced enough to contend for the real top.

A sad event, shortly before the RAG affair, was the killing of Sir Eayze's country. Our FA at that time gave Legion the go ahead to kill our highest ranked country (number 1 at that time). Sir Eayze was not even consulted, and the punishment was unfair. Lady Guinevere was ill and under medication at the time. Eayze demanded that Camelot would declare war on Legion anyway, and after a long talk I convinced Lady G that the best option for Camelot would be to declare war on Legion anyway, because if not, Eayze's brigade would suicide on Legion. However, ill and unable to make the call in time, it took two days before Lady Guinevere returned to the game. By then, Eayze's patience was gone, and the Crusader brigade had tagged Crusader and was fighting Legion. I do not know who, but someone in Camelot put our own members on the kill list and half our members were attacking Crusaders, and the other half refused to fire on our own friends.

The Fall of Camelot

The RAG affair took place not long after the war against RD. About halfway through the reset, Distopia started complaining that Camelot had put a spy in RAG. Of course we denied this, convinced of our innocence. However, Distopia was collecting more and more evidence. The concluding evidence was delivered by Sir Laronel Thone. As a wannabe RAG leader, he betrayed an oath he had taken and handed his ICQ logs over to Distopia. The shock that went through Camelot was unbelievable. Most of Camelot never had a clue what was going on, but an entire network of spies in all alliances that had been hostile towards Camelot in the past was uncovered. At this time it is still not certain who the brain behind this was. ICQ logs point at Lady Guinevere and she has also been accused of this. However at the time of this happening several knights had access to her ICQ account to take care of business she could not manage.

What happens to an alliance built around honor when it is proven to have been immoral? Camelot has never cheated, but this was really a smack in the face for most of us. RAG declared war on us the same moment, and 30-40 people left Camelot instantly. When bad things happen, they all come together at the same time. While this happened, Lady Guinevere and her husband King Arthur were going through a divorce in real life and she hardly was around.

At that point it became obvious how much Camelot had been leaning on Lady Guinevere for the organization of our alliance. It is amazing how much work she must have put in to make everything work. There was a void in Camelot leadership, and no one really knew who was deciding on what. At such moments, the bold and impetuous step forward before the wise and modest do. A few knights went into unauthorized negotiations with RAG. One of them actually surrendered Camelot in order to rebuild and first strike on RAG. Of course the RD spy made sure this leaked, and Camelot was caught with their pants down again. At that point, I resigned my commission to Lady Guinevere because I could not take the dishonor any more. Luckily, before this all started, Killer had joined our ranks. He was very experienced in site administration, and had a good idea how to run an alliance. He was put in place, and after I explained to Lady Guinevere what was wrong with Camelot at the time, she asked me to take co-command and restore what was left of Camelot's diplomatic ties. This was no easy job, because a knight had just given all ambassadors the boot without notice because he was afraid they were spies. Aside from that, TSA, itself in decline, was putting up all sorts of insulting demands to Camelot, which in fact came down to "surrender Camelot into our hands or you will never recover from this".

Camelot was not designed to fit into programs that they suggested, and handing over the leadership of Camelot was not acceptable either. I was fairly unknown, except perhaps among TSA, and that did not help much either. Before I continue with the history of Camelot I'd like to share my perspective on the fall of TSA.

The Fall of TSA

The rise and fall of TSA pretty much coincided with the rise and fall of Camelot. I believe both are related, as they parallel to a development in the game. At the time of Camelot's fall, there was a major trend toward massive alliances, and there had been several attempts (I recall FoG) to gain domination in 1A by ganging up. TSA has always been a defensive project and a project to help young alliances develop. In the period of FoG, the TSA alliances (note: not TSA) played a major role in the downfall of this monster alliance. At the same time many of the TSA alliance had made a stand against cheating. Most noteworthy of these were of course Omega, Camelot, and to some extent SoL. TSA was growing big with new alliances joining up, and specifically MD was not happy with the amounts of new allies they got. At that time Samoan was no longer leading MD. Ampy was the MD leader and Locutus was working his way up in TSA.

Up to that time TSA never had any leadership of its own, but you could see wannabes grabbing straws of power in a place where there was room. Fed up with the internal power struggle within TSA, Omega stepped out. Omega was the only TSA alliance that stood up for Camelot while our guilt was not yet proven, and this shows their unconditional commitment to their allies. The other alliances were doing nothing except fighting amongst each other. After Omega left and Camelot was decaying, MD quickly bailed out to prevent getting stuck in an alliance that was of no benefit to them. At the end of the reset, TSA consisted of The Cult, Camelot and two or three new small alliances. Since the only thing we'd be able to set up together would have been a power based alliance, and none of us were willing to be in such an alliance, we decided to disband TSA.

During the RAG war, organization was completely gone. Still at 150 tagged countries, we were doing roughly 0.5 attack per member per day, and it was obvious half of us were inactive and the other half didn't believe in Camelot anymore. We had to take a step back. And not just a step back, we were taking a leap back. The next reset we started with 45 tagged members. It was not surprising that morale was down. It is hard to swallow when you just experienced the advantages of tag protection, to be all out of the picture again.

Worse still, no alliance was willing to have anything to do with us. Our long time and close ally CWG cut all ties and left angry after bad diplomacy had insulted them beyond belief. Jiggles, a good friend, had put in loads of time to try and hold things together. But in blind anger, annoyed members insulted anything that crossed their path. At the end of the RAG reset my insite message box was filled with an incredible pile of profanity that was send to and fro with mass-messages. But, back at 45 members we found the family atmosphere that had been missing after our massive recruiting drive.

The rebuilding of Camelot

I have the utmost respect for the Knights that stayed and worked with me and Killer to make something out of Camelot again. Tied up with RL issues I stepped back from co-command and took up a brigade. Rogue Knight took up vice presidency. The biggest problem ever since the RAG affair has been the FAM position. Obviously all the experienced people left our halls. Those experienced that were left had no time to be on ICQ enough and those that did have the time were "anti-diplomats". Some also call them hotheads. :)

Not understanding the diplomatic trouble Camelot was in, our FAMs after this period generally worsened the situation by showing to the Earth community that they were inexperienced, and Camelot's reputation of having only newbies worsened. Angry about the responses they seemed to get "for no reason" the FAMs responded in very different ways. Some tried at great length to please other alliances, and pissed off many members by making promises our members didn't agree with, and by accepting demands that were humiliating to Camelot. Other FAMs went the other way around and sided with our members, but fighting with other FAMs is not the way to run FAM either. Every FAM since Lady Guinevere left Camelot angry. The first one that didn't was Rogue Knight, who resigned his FAM commission at the end of 2000. We slowly creeped up to 60-70 members. Negative publicity on AT had been the most damaging to Camelot ever since. Every action Camelot undertook had been greeted with scorn and disdain. Everything we did was ridiculed, even though tons of other alliances were doing exactly the same.

Warm thanks from Camelot during this period go out to SEAWOLF and SOL. These two alliances were among the few bigger alliances that kept alliances with us through our hard times. Slowly, we seemed to be getting a little more credit. At this stage we were able to sign NAPs again with a few bigger alliances, and this reduced the amount of farming we suffered. Because the process of rebuilding is also a story of farming. Not only did we fall back to a level where retaliating hits was difficult, aside from that 90% of Earth hated Camelot truly, and that is not a good way to avoid getting grabbed. The reset ending in January 2001, we had a few countries near the top 500 again.

Historical thanks from Camelot

Camelot owes thanks to the following persons and alliances. (Apologies to everyone that should be here, but who I forgot) Moral Decay, and specially Samoan, Diocletian, and to some extent Ampy. MD helped Camelot a lot in the early stages. CWG, and specifically Jiggles, for his hard work to keep Camelot together and for the great fun we had. SoL, and specially Norcal and Al-man, and recently Jody of course. They played a big part in Camelot joining TSA, and their friendship with Lady Guinevere helped a lot. AoD and Ascendant, for the times of friendship. Glory, for the hunting of the RD multies that hit us during our war with them, and specially JAT and Rapper.

Among the Camelot members: Of course Camelot owes all to King Arthur, and even more to Lady Guinevere. To Sir Ector (Crud) and Sir Excalibur, for loads of work and Ector for great netgaining early in our history. To Sir Jouster, for being the honorable conscience of Camelot. You never deviate for the golden path... To Lady Valiant and her incredible effort of turning Queens Chevaliers into a true family. To Sir Gareth, or Gareth as he prefers, for being the first true Brigade leader and setting an example to Camelot. To all the knights that stayed during all this crap we went through.

Notes from Sir Greyson

I joined Camelot in November of '98, a day or two after Thanksgiving to be more exact, and stood by her through thick and thin until I made the call to disband Camelot as an alliance at the end of 2003.

I can't add much to this extremely well written history, but I can offer a few more insights. The Sir Eazye debacle was the closest I ever came to leaving Camelot. I had recruited Eazye into Camelot from Utopia, where we had both played on the same team there. He was an exceptional player and what happened to him was wrong on every level you could think of. Sadly, shortly after he left Camelot, he deleted his ICQ account and I haven't talked to him since.

When it comes to spying in other alliances. The person who proposed the idea was Sir Zandr Storm and Lady Guinevere approved of it. I believe there were about 7 alliances that Camelot had placed spies in, but whether Camelot ever gained any useful information that Camelot either benefited or gained from? I don't think Camelot ever did benefit on anything before being exposed.

To pick up a little where this left off: With the tarnished reputation that would haunt Camelot until the end, the remaining members of Camelot were able to bring back a lot of former Knights who had left Camelot either to retire to join other alliances. For a while, this was very beneficial. We had experienced players and provided very good tag protection and there were times we were even going for #1 ANW in the earth. The downside of this became apparent in later resets. Camelot had a policy of once a Knight, always a Knight. So even though Camelot was doing well, it was extremely top heavy in leadership positions and to add to that, was that Camelot was recruiting and promoting a lot of new members (many with little to no experience) to leadership positions a little prior to the other Knights returning. To many of the members in Camelot, there were no more ideals being held or actually practiced. The members would give lip service to the Chivalric code of Camelot, what the "old knights" wanted. Camelot, to many of the new members, just became a game of "what level of access, or power can I achieve?"

I'm aware that the last paragraph was a little bit of a rant, and it really only owes to a few rotten apples, but to me, they seem to have spoiled the barrel for a few resets in Camelot.

Back to what I was saying before. I don't believe that Camelot ever did get above 80 members again. It seemed that every reset, we would start off with about 30-40 members as other members began to leave Camelot to go to other alliances for a better chance at getting a leadership position than in a top-heavy Camelot. Some left because of Camelot's reputation. Even though, Camelot seemed to weather through these changes rather well. But this wasn't to last.

I can't remember exactly the year, but I'm thinking it was later in 2002, that Camelot got decimated in a surprise FS by Paradigm. The official reasons for the war was that earlier in the reset, PDM was involved in a war with another alliance and several Camelot members had taken to farming some PDM countries with little or no fear of retaliation from PDM due to PDM's focus on their war. PDM requested DNH but it was either not granted on the Camelot embassy or it was ignored. When that attack came, about half of the Camelot membership left. The rest were tag killed.

It took several resets for Camelot to recover its membership, but eventually she made her way back and was back to having another good netting set with a goal for ANW again. When one of our allies had gotten involved in a war, Camelot was honor bound to defend her allies. We entered into a war knowing that we would be destroyed, but this is how Camelot honored her allies. That was pretty much the last blow to Camelot. For the remaining resets that Camelot existed as an alliance, the membership grew fewer and fewer, until finally, towards the end of 2003, there were only four members that were tagged, including myself. I had been placed as the leader of Camelot and it became my duty to announce to Earth that Camelot would no longer exist. I closed the doors to Camelot and then came to PDM, largely in part due to Detmer being there.

Notes from Sir Balin

It is a little ironic that in this war (which many Camelotians will point to as the final blow to the castle) Camelot ended up defending the alliance that had crushed her membership only a few sets prior: Paradigm. Also ironic, of course, that the remaining Camelotians would find refuge to this day in the Paradigm tag. Anyway, the set of Camelot's last great war was hailed as the second "Triumphant Return" of Camelot. With many of the great Knights returning to play in the Camelot tag, we had also landed some of Earth's best netters (Waser and his entourage) and were well on our way to ANW when our strongest allies, ICN, were under siege by IX. At some point, PDM had joined in against IX. Camelot (under the leadership of Sir Uthor Pendragon, former PDMer who went by the name Duke here) decided to jump right in against IX, using our net-heavy reps and theos as literal cannon fodder against the IX war countries. Needless to say, we were decimated, having only taken out the top five or so IX countries. The "Triumphant Return" was turned into a lot of complaining and tagjumping, and thus began the final fall of Camelot.

Meanwhile, Detmer had come to PDM around July 2002 and worked his way to the Senate. Despite being the impetus for the two great membership losses in Camelot history, Camelot still had strong ties to PDM. In February 2004, several old Knights and members of Paradigm began to join PDM in response to Detmer's public call for Camelot to reunite in the PDM tag. Sir Sun, Verger, Sir Random Factor, Sir Balin, Sir Marogian and Sir Uthor Pendragon joined Sir Greyson and Sir Detmer who were already playing in PDM. Marogian, RF and Uthor eventually left, but Detmer, Balin, Sun and Verger formed a Camelot team in the Orcs division of PDM. The team later grew to include old knights Sir Mordecae and Sir Jouster (and Jouster's son, Defiance) as well as some new members who were ushered into this new age of Camelot.

Very briefly during this period, Sir Excalibur mysteriously reappeared, claiming to have been hiding in LaF for a long time. Excalibur provided evidence to support that he was in fact the original Sir Excalibur, and made a huge effort to bring back the Camelot tag. Camelot began a Summer 2004 reset with strong allies and 18 tagged members, led by Sir Excalibur and supported by Sir Marogian, Sir Mordecae, Sir YoYo and some other very old Knights. In a wave of RD deletions, however, several Camelot countries were deleted and Excalibur instantly vanished. In the face of poor membership, Excalibur had been running multies to compensate for members not playing countries. Camelot instantly fell apart, the members feeling very betrayed. Sir Mordecae joined the Camelot team in PDM.

The Camelot team performed extremely well in both war and netgaining sets, often landing among the top 5 of all Paradigm teams. By the end of September 2004, Camelot had mustered enough support to break off from the Orcs division and form their own division in Paradigm.

Notes from Sir Jouster

King Arthur and Lady Guinevere (Steve and Melissa Burkes)

They had no idea what they were creating when they started Camelot nor could they even comprehend the enormous undertaking they were starting. Even more incomprehensible would be the ability of Camelot to survive through countless trials and tribulations.

I came to Camelot right before the move from the Geocities site to the d2fl server(ezclan). I can still remember applying for membership (in character) asking for admittance into Camelot's gates. Trying to think of a fitting name for both Camelot and Earth I remembered on of my favorite video games as a kid - Joust, where you were a Knight on a flying Ostrich battling over lava and dodging pterodactyls. Thus, Jouster was born.

Camelot was an experience unlike any other. I had played in Earth standard for a few months and grown bored. Looking for more to the game I joined the alliance server and began looking for a home. I had just gotten my first computer and new very little about it let alone the internet, ICQ, HTML, Miva, etc.

I remember when I first came into Camelot as a squire, learning how to upload stats, amazed at how everyone talked to each other and helped each other out. After a brief internship in squires I was placed in Sir Ector's brigade "Kindred Spirits".

I learned quickly, not only the game, but the ways of Camelot. Warring multis was what we were about. They were rampant in the game and blatantly so. Killing countries was easy back then, 1 turn per attack, no oil, no humanitarians and much less impact of diminishing returns. Most kills were done by SS, land kills were a beautiful thing.

I was spending 2-3 hrs a day online, meeting people, helping new members and learning from old ones. I watched the news for attacks on our tag and looking for clues of multis. We had no IRC, and our only real method of communication was ICQ.

I remember being online and getting an ICQ chat invitation from King Arthur and a message from Lady Guinevere that King Arthur wanted me to enter the chat now! Lady Guinevere was active but King Arthur was still in control at this point. In the chat was KA, LG, Sir Ector and several other Knights. My first thought was that I had overstepped my bounds as a soldier in someway and KA played upon that with great skill. Just as I was sure I was to be booted from this place I had come to love LG stepped in and asked THE question. I had no idea what the question was for but I soon found out.

Instead of being booted found myself Knighted and granted access to the Round Table. I had to decide two things, my Knight name and the name of my Brigade. Most had taken on names of the legendary Knights, but I chose to retain Jouster. That was easy, now for the brigade...what name could bring justice to this honor. It had to be something that symbolized Camelot, something that protected the crown-Knights of Excalibur was chosen, and in time she proved worthy of her namesake. KoE would become one of the most active Brigades in Camelot and spawn many of the future Knights and leaders of Camelot.

Being a Brigade Commander in Camelot was not easy, my time on Camelot grew to 4-6 hours each day. Checking stats and news, training new members and organizing attacks. KA and/or LG were on 24 hours a day. Camelot continued to grow and prosper. The constant uh-oh of ICQ never seemed to stop, and I never minded. We would spam the Earth boards and laugh about the Cammie slamming that resulted. Mordecae was right, you either loved us or hated us, but as a Camelotian it only mattered how we played the game and how we treated each other.

In 1998, in a round table chat, a discussion opened about a Camelot meeting. About a dozen of the Knights committed to the meeting which took place at KA and LG's home in California. In attendance were myself, Sir Shock, Sir Lancelot, Sir Bruce, Lady Kayland, Sir Calgorac and his wife (forgive me if I forgot anyone).

Talking with people on the internet is one thing, but meeting them is another. You never really know what to expect. LG picked me up at the airport and met me at my gate. LG was a small lady, close to 5' but out of her small frame came great strength, courage and one of the kindest hearts I have ever encountered. You would think it would be awkward but it wasn't, It was like we had known each other forever.

So it was with all the others, we played, we partied and we planned. It was there that the foundation for the castle was planned. In a RL Round Table meeting it was decided to take Camelot to the next level. We would stay on the Infernal Domain but would take on our own domain. CastleCamelot was born and we were soon moved to our own server which granted us greater control in customizing the site. We left hoping to meet like this once a year. Sadly it would not happen again.

The toll Camelot was taking on KA and LG was becoming difficult. KA slowly slipped into inactivity and LG took up the slack but it grew increasingly difficult for her as well. To aid her she decided to create a new position to be second in command of the alliance. She called me to the throne where I appeared again before a council of Knights and the queen. Trusted with the throne in her absence I became Sir Jouster, HRK (Head Royal Knight). I shared command with LG for some time before she fell ill and began having personal issues at home.

My first full command of Camelot for an extended period came during the RD war. We had been having problems with multi tags all reset and discovered that RD was behind them. I called council with Sir Bruce and we planned a FS on RD. We took the alliance to yellow alert for a period of two weeks while we planned the attack all the while negotiating (or trying to with RD). At this time, we had about 150 members, but RD countries' networth far exceeded our own. The only people who knew the target was myself and Sir Bruce, everyone else was told that war was inevitable and the target would be difficult. Finally we felt that the alliance was ready and set up a warchat to coincide with the final negotiations with RD. As the negotiations broke down, as we were certain they would and RD was telling us where to go and what they would do to us I gave Sir Bruce the go to launch the FS.

I have not since seen such a strike take place anywhere in earth. Each Brigade had been broken into teams, each team had RD proper tag targets, each team, almost all 150 members launched at the same time. The result was almost the entire RD proper tag killed or disabled in one massive blow.

And the icing on the cake was while still in negotiations with RD, as they were threatening to kill us was a simple statement...

"umm, I think you better check your countries"

they came back with several expletives and the negotiations were suddenly ended.

The RD multi tags came out of the woodwork and hit us full force, we stayed targeted on the RD proper tags and absorbed the multi hits with minimal casualties. The final result was an RD tag kill in a war that our allies had abandoned us in and told us we would not win and fight for resets to come. The reality, Camelot earned great respect for our fight against RD, and lived in relative peace with them for some time.

Notes from Sir Killer

I joined Camelot when Camelot was switching to their new website with the help of Tom (Ezclan). I had formally only played in Tournament and FFA and I recall Melissa (Lady Guinevere) had recruited me off of AT. She was, without a doubt, one of the best people I had met - truly caring and compassionate and was like a mother to me. I was honoured to have talked to her on the phone many late nights and got to know her and her family quite well. She helped me and others I'm sure, through personal problems over the years. Camelot became a family and was an escape from reality where you were accepted and not just another number in a gaming alliance.

Almost right after I had joined Camelot I became the Brigade Leader for Royal Guard, where to this day, I wouldn't trade any of the people in that brigade for anyone in Earth. Royal Guard soon came to be a fierce netgaining brigade (and an all Rep Casher brigade) amongst the already spectacular divisions Camelot was comprised of. I recall fondly the competition and trash talking between the brigades that kept things so fun for everyone. Pie throwing was the norm.

The previous round had been rough for Camelot with the RAG and spying incidents, but we retained some excellent allies throughout including MD and SOL, without which, Camelot would have had a tough time getting started in Earth. A lot of the history before this has already been posted so I will avoid that and instead ramble about some of my memories of things we did in Camelot to make her so fun.

We would have chat rooms till the wee hours of the night joking about everything and having a great time. Promoting someone to knighthood was an extremely honourable event where each knight would ask the person a question and at the end, Lady G would ask the same question to every knight that he/she must answer to become knighted -- followed by celebration. Despite hard times in game for quite a few rounds, Camelot always retained the internal community and sense of family and Camelot theme tradition - something that truly wasn't in many other alliances. There was always a sense of belonging and family values to Camelot and young kids often played.

Eventually I got the honour of serving as Head Knight under Lady G and worked closely with Sir Mordecae, Sir Jouster, Sir Rogue Knight, and later Sir "Someone" (forgot his name..) who became Assistant Head Knight after Sir Rogue Knight left. Netgaining strategies became a more integral part of Camelot and some rounds Camelot did extremely well in the ranks as we had many good people playing for us. Squires was a big part of Camelot and integrating them into Camelot's ranks, and Lady G always took the time to get to know all of them on ICQ. I'm sure many of the past members/knights can agree when I say we had 1000+ people on our icq list from over the years of this game!

Having CastleCamelot.com was very unique to Earth alliances in that few other alliances had their own website domain. We had some very old logos and traditions (poetry board, shield logo, hierarchy system, castle logo on main page, brigades, awards, etc.) that to this today I believe many still exist. Castlecamelot actually was host to quite a few other games we played in, not just Earth. It is a real shame our site got taken down.

There was definitely some rough rounds for Camelot with low membership and sometimes low morale, but the heart of Camelot remained and since you guys are still playing today, that makes Camelot one of the longest running Alliances in earth - something everyone who came from day 1 to those who are newer and playing now, should be very proud to be apart of. I only wish newer people could have experienced the old Camelot as I wish I could have experienced the first few years when Camelot began - but I hope you all take the pride and happiness and family-like atmosphere I have tried to explain here and use it in the Camelot of today.