I joined a Linkshell (guild) in FFXI a few months ago and they’ve been great to me. Everyone is always helping one-another and we run weekly events every Saturday night. I don’t have much of a social life in my 30s so it’s been a great time for me to spend time with folks.

In Ultima Online I was part of a really big guild on Napa Valley. We had pretty much all the land north east of the Britannia swamp. We were one of the first, if not the first, guild to defeat the Harrower.

Everquest, the original.

Two guilds come to mind.

I was younger, too young to work, so one summer break I joined up with a European guild to raid with. Lots of fun, learned a but about British (primarily) culture. Lots of fun, even when I joined another guild I raided with them from time to time.

The other was a family guild. It eventually fell apart as the adults got busier with their careers and kids and shit. But the inner circle, so to speak, were invited to a bulletin board and we all talked for years after that. Eventually lost contact with them as I grew up and got busy with life.

Lots of fond memories, and a couple not so fond (RNG hates me, in every way). But they were along when RNG screwed me time and again, and were always willing to try again. Lots of love for those folks.

I did clans a bit. Some message boards were similar. I was a mod of a small guitar-oriented message board and we knew each other’s real names, there were occasional real-life meet-ups where people drove from other states, etc… I miss that.

I remember playing AOEII online many years ago someone asked me if I was in a clan and I said “No, I’m not Scottish”.

I have a super weird experience from my childhood.

I played Asheron’s Call for a long time. If you aren’t familiar the game had an interesting guild system where you would have a “patron” and XP would pass up to that patron. So experienced players would help out their vassals to both keep them progressing but also to keep them sworn to them and generating XP.

I had found a cool patron who helped me out a lot. We got talking and it turned out he lived in my town, and his younger brother was actually in my class the next year. I never really hung out with the guy I played AC with but me and his younger brother became friends.

When StarCraft was still relatively new the Blizzard games had a Chat function that spanned all of their games. If they belonged to another game you would see that Chatter’s game as an icon to the right of their name. You could speak to someone playing Diablo at any time. The social setup drove high engagement between players who regularly used to seek playing at a time when the gameplay was typically hosted on a player’s computer rather than on a server.

Clans didn’t have a ready in-game functionality, but fortunately Blizzard had allowed Chatters not only the freedom to change their username quite easily, but to also create Chat Rooms with custom names. By holding the Chat room, you could maintain Administrator rights over the channel.

Early Guilds had to have their users change their names to include the tags in their names, which meant virtually anyone could edit their name to include the tag they wanted. The expanded tag would be used as the name for the Chat Room, which allowed both members and non-members to find it easily enough.

The advent of bots using a Battle.Net login to hold the Chat Rooms and provide admin rights regularly to specific users spiked a new age as Clans became more stable. The bot would be used to blacklist trolls, recognize officers in the Clans, and create rosters to stop people from masquerading.

It created a boom, and in these early days clans rose and fell like the sun. Smaller clans were quicker to join other larger clans and conglomerate into new structures that would require testing and vetting of player skills. Friendships between real players, who formed clans only to incorporate better players from absorbing other clans, were sorely tested as some friends found their skills did not allow them to play regularly any more.

I was in one of these early guilds at the time, a group called the Silver Arrows. I had recently proved that while I lacked strategy for unit construction (as we were playing StarCraft) and combat, I was methodically organized in base construction and could start generating Protoss Scouts while Zerg players were still searching for others to conduct Zergling raids. I was still new to the game at that time and was flounderIng my way through the Campaign. As part of the Clan I found myself playing more often and seeking out games if only to spend time with my clanmates.

I was a member of the -[SA]- clan for about a month when the Silent Assassins {SA} entered into talks with our clan. Different clans with the same initials claimed different forms of their tags. We folded into their ranks and with the additional experience under my belt I found myself joining their first line. I played for a while, but as the boom/bust cycle continued it wasn’t long before I found myself playing relatively alone. Without a support group I gravitated towards Diablo and ultimately Diablo 2, only playing StarCraft socially with my real life friends.

Back in the day, around the time of CS 1.6, some co-worker friends and I would have LAN parties. This was when everyone still had CRT monitors so we had to be careful not to trip circuit breakers.

When Youtube Gaming was still young I played Call of Duty with people from a gaming community called Hupit.com, which was founded by a prominent COD youtuber. With Covid I found people through Reddit for Simracing, and we have done tons of races together in the last 3 years.

I’m in a Hell Let Loose clan. We play twice a week. As a boring adult, its a nice way to schedule game time that otherwise would get pushed aside.

I played unofficially with the same group of guys on CoD MW and the sequel to the point where we just dominated every match in hard core. My HC win streak was over 150 games when one of the guys I played with jumped to the other team just to stop my streak and bust my balls. We would hold a side, have one guy per lane with two floaters and just played so often together that we always knew what to do on each map to support each other and get the win. Never had a clan name or anything but we were a gang for sure. Good memories :)

The best time I had in Warcraft was forming a new guild that had splintered off of an existing one (leadership was unpleasant). It was pretty scary at first, not knowing how it was going to turn out, but we had enough of the guild come with us that we managed top 50 raid progression on the realm the following year. It was super validating to have that kind of success in a casual raiding guild after all the turmoil.

I stayed in contact with our GM, and she and I still play on and off (we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately).

When I was younger my parents got a new pc. It had a stupid Game Center trying to sell you games. Being a bored teenager who enjoyed games, I looked through it. I found a game called Dark Orbit. It was the only game I was ever in a clan/guild. I bounced around a few guilds, but I was always friends with the big guilds. I had my own guild for awhile.

One of my friends gave me the top guild because they wanted to start a new one and knew that I really liked their guild tag. Everyone used to hang out on GSC which was a chat client nobody seemed to have heard of. It was like a precursor to discord. I had a lot of really good times hanging out with my guild mates. We sometime just hung out and talked without even playing.

i play guild wars 2 in bursts, and then stop for a while in between. about a year ago i was grinding hard to get the skyscale mount, which was quite a grind at the time, and i normally only play solo, but there was a step that required me to beat a small open world dungeon that was just a bit too difficult for me to get through by myself, so i solicited help from some random guy who was standing outside.

That guy helped me a great deal and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. after we finished the dungeon he offered for me to join their guild, which, on my own, i would never do, but coming off the high of finishing the dungeon, and feeling like i owed him, i accepted. i ended up doing guild weeklies with them quite a few times and going on discord chat and all, super chill people, it was honestly pretty fun. but alas, i fell off the guild wars 2 train and they removed me due to inactivity, but extended an offer that i could return if i ever got back into the game.

overall an awesome experience, i’m still grateful to that guy, and grateful to that guild for giving me some entertaining guild chat nights where i spent more time shooting the shit with them than actually playing the game.

Quake 3, Soldier of Fortune 2, Tremulous, Star Wars Galaxies, Tribes 2, etc. Lots of fond memories.