Recruitment

If any clan is looking for an uber-l33t engineer with 99% headshots (1% toenail shot), 30-kill streak per game abilities... then please look further, you won't find him here. But, on the other hand, if you'd welcome a fresh recruit who is more
adept at obtaining objectives than fragging people, willing to follow clear orders and willing to bare his arse to defuse that dynamite, then please leave a message. Just remember this old dude already has a life with marriage commitments.
NOTE: LordMagic retains the right to refuse even the best
offer.

Such was my post on a local gaming forum for recruitment into a clan - a step I was hesitant to take due to my being married and committed (as highlighted in the post itself).

However I soon made up my mind due to the following reasons:
1) Playing on your own in a team-based game is not easy and very unsatisfying
2) To belong to a group is always a nice feeling
3) I felt I can learn more from other good players

At first I was approached by a veteran who wanted to create a clan for the newbies for them to learn tactics and clan-work. Then I was approached by a member of a stabilised clan who was undergoing refurbishment - basing itself on mature, team-oriented players as opposed to younger ones who retaliated if they were left out of an important game because of their not being up to standard.

I decided to accept the latter since I felt a team of players would teach me more than a team of newbies who were just beginning.

Lazy Start
Unfortunately I joined at that time of the year when everyone is doing exams. However I managed to attend a couple of training sessions and already I've seen improvements in my gameplay. I'm getting more and more headshots and my light weapon skill level is increasing faster than my engineering skills.

Gather Slowdown
The gathers have taken a blow due to the exams too, and I have stopped admining for now since there are hardly any takers for any gathers I used to make. Will re-enter when the lull is over.

ET Gathers and Ventrilo

Gathers

Running around on public servers I could feel that the game of ET was dying... the regular players, the clan-members, were nowhere to be seen.

Then I happened to fall upon the Gather channel on quakeNet. And happened to find out where all the elites were going: private servers especially for balanced gathers with pre-booked places. There was also a ventrilo channel specifically for these teams and boy was I happy! At last there was coordination, communication, tactics being formed.

Blitzkrieg

At the same time I was reading a book on the German blitzkrieg tactics used to capture France (and Norway, Holland, Belgium along the way). In this book, Guderian's ideas were explained and depicted as well as discussed and honored. Guderian was the one in charge of the Panzer fleet in the Nazi regime. Compared to the Allied attempts at forming Tank supports for infantry, his approach was totally based around the Panzer itself - using radio to communicate between the general in the tank and the regiment commanders on foot.

Thus I was very appreciative of the use of Ventrilo (A Voice over IP software) to communicate with the other players.

Gather Admin

I was also made a gather admin and admined for a number of weeks until examinations caused a lull and I never found enough gathers to make a gather. Will wait for this period to pass by.