So tomorrow (the 30th) is our sixth anniversary. It's very strange for me thinking about the fact that six years have gone by since the clan was started; whilst it appears the mod and the number of active players is truly dwindling, the fact that anyone at all is left, to me, is a wonder.
I was trying to find the new VC:MP forum today, so I googled 'vcmp forum'. The VU forum came in as the seventh result. I don't know much about SEO, but I feel like this website is not particularly optimised. Instead of painstaking SEO, it has risen to the top, it seems, out of its sheer popularity. Taking a quick look at the stats, you can see that there are
59134 Posts in 4738 Topics by 1437 Members; and 6,166,814 pageviews. That is phenomenal. We could add considerably more onto that number too, if we take into account the posts made on the original forum, back when we held VCDC 1. (For anyone who doesn't know the story, our first forum was very popular but I violated the host's TOS by sending a mass-email, they took it down without notice, and we had made no backups haha.)
I don't mean this post to sound like an obituary - though I'm sure plenty of people would think that appropriate - but I think it's important to review what we've done here. It is no exaggeration to say that this clan has been a vital cornerstone in the history and development of VC:MP, and a review of our key achievements to date will interest the uninitiated and stir nostalgia in the oldies.
Before VU (Or ArS as it was first called) started, I'd attempted to form a couple of other clans. I'd only belonged to MK before, and I'd left them in September 2008 frustrated by the absent and stubborn leadership. My attempts had failed, because I was trying to form an elite group in an already-minuscule community. Back then the global playercount would reach a daily high of 30 if we were lucky, and would spend much of the day hovering near or at zero. The small handful of other clans back then (KFJ, DnA, MK, Killer and Strike's DS, Ka, R3V, DU and a few others) were largely inactive, and their acceptance policies were either rigid and unforgiving, or too loose. In fact, back then it was very rare for someone to 'apply' to anything. Generally, if you wanted to be part of a server or a clan, you would attempt to make friends with the people involved and wait to be invited. By trying to emulate the elite-oriented clans, my attempts floundered. With VU (ArS) though, things were slightly different. We decided to introduce two training tags, ArSr and ArSt, which no clan had done here before. Most clans didn't even have one training tag; you were either a full member or nothing.
The training system was a good one, and through its ranks came some great members - not least Knucis. It needed refining though, and there was a great number of internal problems between N0W4R, Thijn and I that prevented ArS from getting off the ground. The decision to re-open the clan as VU, with myself, Knucis, aXXo, Kontrium and a dude called Hydra as the only members proved to be a success. Instead of being a clan that opposed something (ArS stood for anti-roofing, anti-spazzing - lame, I know), we decided to go forward with an open and positive ethos. We noticed that all decent fighters were already in clans, and wouldn't leave to join us. So to gain members, instead of waiting for them to come, we would have to actively and recruit and train others, and bring them into the community.
What we pioneered was the mod's first three-tiered training system, through which some of VC:MP's best players have gone (I won't list them, but go and look at the memberlists of ULK, DnA and Ka as well as our own, and there'll be more than one in each). Our two conditions were that the player could speak English, and that they were friendly. Everyone could learn how to fight, we thought, but people's personalities are fairly set in stone. We'd approach any English-speaking player in a server, train them how to use the game, and then bring them into our ranks as part of a group of friends. Our
private tactics board grew to feature original and exclusive guides on practically all current techniques and tactics that players could use. Our numbers swelled exponentially. We went from having just five members to having more than thirty in just a few months, and in our second wave (I took a year off during university) we had more than 50 active members. And everyone could fight.
Soon after we re-opened, aXXo suggested that we host a tournament in order to engage and bring together the whole VC:MP community. Back then no one would play clanwars, and tags were largely meaningless. aXXo, and the rest of us, wanted to inject some real competition into the game, and boy did it work. The
Vice City Dueling Championship (VCDC) was completely unprecedented, and saw the leaders of all the major active clans coming together to facilitate 40 players in a fight against each other. There was a lot of drama, and a lot of arguments, which made it perfect. It brought together players who had never spoken to each other before, who usually kept to their own forums and their own servers, bridging many gaps and laying the way for a real VC:MP community to emerge
The participant list makes for an interesting read.
Soon after VCDC, VU hosted a new, much larger, ongoing community event: the
Vice City Ladder. The ladder was to be a ranking of 1v1 fighters in VC:MP, up which any challengers could try to climb by fighting the person above. I'm too lazy to work out the stats for the first Vice City Ladder, but a great number of people played and an insane number of matches were fought. Once again, it brought the community together on this forum. The 2011 ladder was also a great success, and both can be viewed archived
here.
In 2010, we released the server
'Sharks vs. Marios'. The concept was simple: limited to Prawn Island, with only two teams (the sharks and the marios), players would have non-stop combat on a varied-level terrain aided by a number of special features, unique at the time in VC:MP. They included XP points in order to gain rewards, ranks and titles based on XP level, teleportation pickups with variable access depending on XP-stage achieved and a small number of XP-earned ownable cars. Whilst not constantly in use, SvM would attract players who valued high-intensity and challenging gameplay. It was where the real pros of the game would go to fight, and gained something of a cult status among a few players who would play virtually nowhere else. Unfortunately
this is pretty much all that remains of SvM, but those who played it I'm sure will remember it kindly.
Throughout 2010 and 2011, VU members became an integral part of the XE server. Notorious for its laggy scripts, but famed for its freedom and rational (compared to other servers') and involved management, it became our stomping ground. Thijn and I personally got very involved, and when the scripts were so bad that the server became virtually empty, I
wrote an entirely new script, inspired by the old one, in squirrel, and upon release the server was once again stable. As one of three managers at the time, I was able to combine the community built here with that which was there, and brought players to the server who had previously shunned it. Whereas in 2008 and for some of 2009 XE was a dirty word, it soon became the only place for serious players to go. It became, once again, the most popular server in the mod, and started to become defined by the daily battles that VU and ULK would have there. Interestingly, had SvM not been made, things would have looked a bit different. Had I not been busy with SvM, ULK.HeAD - overall manager of XE at the time - said that he was going to give me his role as owner of the server (I'm expecting someone to call bullshit on this one, but if you go into the private management section of the XE forum, you can find a post from HeAD that confirms it to be true. Although I'm sure as soon as he sees this, Aki will find that post and delete it haha).
During Summer 2011, VU created and hosted another unprecedented event, the
Vice War. Two teams, totaling 113 players, fought against each other for 24 hours. The second Vice War, also held during Summer 2011, stepped it up a notch. During the 24 hour event, 207 competitors played a combined, cumulative 31 days, 16 hours and 21 minutes, making 36,094 kills and scoring a shitload of points. It was unlike anything before or since, and can probably be described as the height of VC:MP competition. The archives can be found
here.
The Vice City Clan Tournament was VU sponsored, but not VU owned. It was an idea that many of us had had swimming around our heads for a while, and eventually Zegro approached me saying that he thought the VU platform would be a good place to host it from. Our reputation for holding events, the fact that our forum had become a community centre, seemed to make us the logical hosts of the next big event. The first VCCT didn't work out so well, as the logistics relied so heavily on everyone involved being diligent - and when dealing with some of the VC:MP community, that expectation is entirely unrealistic. The second VCCT, headed up by Morphine, was far more successful. The final between VU and ULK was incredibly close, and a tied score had to be settled with a basic LMS which ULK won. During the run-up to the event, and during it, VU held twice-a-week training sessions and explored tactics at length. The patterns of teamwork and camaraderie between the members grew to an astounding level, and we were able to prove that as well as being community-focused, we are also some of the best fighters in the game. Like the other events mentioned here, the tournament was unprecedented and nothing of similar weight has been hosted since. The archive for the second VCCT can be found
here.This is going to sound corny, but I think that of all our achievements to date, I think our greatest has been our friendship and ability to have fun. We've not only sought to fight in the game, and we haven't engaged with each other or outsiders purely on that basis. Rather, we wanted and succeeded in growing a group of friends who can/could discuss anything from politics, to religion, to music, to 10 hour long videos of nyan cat. We've welcomed, and will continue to welcome, as a matter of principle,
anyone from anywhere, and make an effort to learn about them and let them learn about us. Though there have certainly been hiccups and mistakes along the way, by and large,
we have fought to be inclusive and positive towards the players of this stupid little game that has eaten so much of our lives.
So happy sixth anniversary VU. I want to say thank you to all of the members, past and present, and to wish you all a happy new year. Perhaps we should have a reunion at some point in the future.
P.S. I may have missed a lot off of here, so if you have something to share please post about it below