A colourful tapestry of leaves begins to settle on the ground amidst a swirl of Crack Clan adventures that have us all very excited with a mix of great successes, growth and eager outlook to settling in with a few new initiatives too:

Gathering Times
We recently parted ways after another one of our amazing IRL gatherings, this time celebrating our 20 years together with an amazing group of people that reunited in Toronto to go through a range of activities which included a myriad of awesome experiences! North America’s 5th largest city played host to a dizzying array of sights and sounds and served as the environment for us to take on everything from incredible food and drink to some really entertaining activities. We were subjects to a wild selection of beer with incredible imported samples as well as attending a 400+ cask festival, we were stunned by a world-class Aquarium, escaped from a prison using just our team work, subsidized countless Uber/Lyft drivers zipping around to and fro while being spoiled by stunning meals sourced from the finest butchers and prepared by the best of friends. There was already talk about our next Gathering and some of us are planning to have one sooner than later – once a year is not enough. Thanks so much to all the Crack Clan members that make these possible and shout-out to special guests [|56|]West and Bad Chef from the Blue Scholars – miss you already!

It’s all about the leadership..
What started as an experiment has grown far beyond initial expectations with the help of all of the amazing supportive people out there! Every Monday and Thursday at 9:00pm ET we enter our full public Squad server and insert squad leaders who have received instructions from strategies made along with commanders that have been preparing in the days before. Splitting up our clan and providing some structure (instead of stacking on one side) has turned out to be beneficial to everyone involved and we’re seeing great interest in continuing this activity. You can now track progress, gain transparency in to the strategies, watch replay videos, see what is coming next and much more by looking at our brand new Squad Commander Battles Portal. We are also thrilled to announce that cc//BigDaddyScott, cc//D3monicrampag3 and cc//Shepe have been promoted to Squad Staff at Crack Clan and remind everyone that you can get involved in so many ways, you don’t have to be a member! With your help (just connect to our Discord to ask how you can play/lead/etc) and the latest V12 release we’re looking at a game with a life and future unlike many others. If you haven’t already checked this out, you really should!

Da dum dum da dum dum – Battlefield 5
As some of you may know, Battlefield 1942 presented us with a real renaissance: things were never quite the same again once we picked up and dove in to Desert Combat, our competitive groups created a fascinating standard that we still enjoy and honour today. It should come as little surprise that the latest Battlefield V beta caught the attention of several of our BF vets and built some internal hype as the changes made in the game seem to harken back to how it used to be. With fantastic gunplay, emphasis on teamwork, a well-adjusted pace and no more “shooting at doritoes” we find ourselves today snarfing down hours on the latest release. With new lessons learned from Squad there is a sentiment of wanting to carry over something similar to this franchise and extend our legacy with the game. We’d like to take this opportunity to put this out there: we’re reaching out to all of the cc BF vets and are also placing a general call to anyone that is interested in the game to connect with us and explore the new title together.

Server Fun
With gamer time increasing as the weather turns, we’ve also increased our server presence in a few significant ways: on top of our popular Squad server we’ve also rolled out a brand new Ark server for all your dinosaur and tree-chopping needs as well a new Insurgency: Sandstorm server in support of the current beta. As always, we’re very open to suggestions as well as volunteers to help admin our servers – you can also support our ongoing activity on Patreon as we continue to bring career/family-oriented gamers the best of experiences. Last, but not least, we just celebrated our 1,000th member in Discord — what’re ya waitin’ for? Click here to join us!.

There’s been plenty happening around the ole crack fire, for those of you that haven’t been sitting with us beside it I may as well share with you some of the stories that have been being passed around with the s’mores, hotdogs and high fives; it’s long overdue in any case.

Squad has continued to engage us taken us along another path: we’ve been hosting a Squad server that has been providing a lot of good games for members and visitors alike. It seems to be doing really well, largely in part to the support we receive both in-game and financial from our Patreon campaign not to mention the awesome feedback we get from caring players. It’s really a lot of fun and we’d like to issue a shout-out to the entire server population and remind you that you can come in at any time to our Discord and give us your feedback, suggestions, criticisms or just share a cool/fun video moment that you had in the server.

In other news we’ve begun to sink back in to multi-gaming by way of doing a whole bunch of stuff. We’ve always got guys like cc//Fast Eddie and cc//fuegoredux putting time in to League of Legends or stomping around with Mechs and/or trying out the latest and greatest new releases. We’ve also had a couple of organized events like this week where we’re reaching back to oldies-but-goodies like Tuesday’s Battlefield Bad Company 2 night where we loaded up 10 of us in to a server after re-installing the game and marveled at how well it’s aged (aside from the whole can’t run while strafing thing). It’s almost sure to return next week as the two hours that we put in to the game’s excellent Rush mode implementation simply wasn’t enough to fully scratch that itch.

We’re also trying out things like Post Scriptum Wednesdays which are a natural extension of our Squad activities but it doesn’t prevent us from firing up other titles like the latest No Man’s Sky patch and giving it a go or bringing interested people up to speed on our own Rust server and assembling a raid (tonight!) to spread our wings and see what else we can pull off.

As always we are super keen on getting good people together for good games and encourage our membership to tell the rest as to what’s got their attention and how to play together. We also seem to be collecting more interest in sharing our experiences with video so there’s some anticipation that we’ll be firing that activity up again soon after a long hiatus so stay tuned for that (and if you’d like to contribute then let us know!)

Hi, it’s dox here. I’ll start with the big stuff because – though I’ve seen it coming for a while – it’s only become real now. We’re 20. Yup. 20. Twenty. Twenty years of character and camaraderie as Crack Clan has plowed through what’s turned out to be the vast majority of my gaming life. We started by mailing out speakerphones and hosting conference calls and now we’re using Discord. We used to play on dial-up and now we’re on fiber optic connections. We used to save up for our Monster 3D cards and now what comes default on our motherboards (and phones) kicks the crap out of them. Someone, please pass me my cane..

I think it’s almost impossible to talk about these last two decades without slurping through a pile of nostalgia.. but I think I’ve spilled enough of it up front and, since it appears we’ve achieved the impossible, I might as well surf the wave. Let’s get this out of the way: I didn’t plan it. This whole thing grew way longer and further and bigger than most things I’ve even done or even dreamed and it sure as heck wasn’t my sole doing. It’s been such a truly epic journey that has been so integral to my existence for so long that it’s easy to start forgetting the countless details and interactions that have happened over two decades. What’s impossible to forget is the reality that I’ve been gifted by so many people: voices that turned in to high5s that turned in to great friends. Relationships that led to laughter, betrayal, births, deaths, jobs, firings, tears, fears, joy and trust. The countless times where effort and support for a pastime ended up being real and sustained and more than just playing games.

Bottom-line? Thank-you!! Having such an amazing group of people who have stuck together and worked toward building something together that delivers so much, is so easy to access and regularly delivers experiences to an uncommon standard is really unprecedented in online experiences. The group has grown from teenagers and 20-somethings into people with families and careers and those that are left have found a way to and have adapted toward working all of these elements in to a balanced life is the model set by my gaming brethren that I am most proud of being a part of. That the group remains open to adding people of all abilities and backgrounds is even more amazing. Thank you!

Squad Update: the NAS experience
Let’s move on to Squad: we were warm to the game months ago but it’s really taken on a bigger life and reached awesome heights this past Sunday as Crack Clan represented in a competitive event hosted by the guys at NAS. The rough plan is to have 4 clans face off against 4 clans in an organized battle in a non-toxic environment and NAS delivered! Crack Clan had a great showing and led both sides in the last competitive event of our teen years, our roster did the clan proud. It’s an incredible way to kick things up a notch and though we’re currently limited to 9 people per squad we’re open to having more come up and help increase the amount of time we can spend with the game. Salutes to the 10 soldiers that represented and let me play alongside them: cc//FifthYangPro, cc//Healslut, cc//John Flenaly, cc//PyroCarp, cc//Smithy, cc//BigDaddyScott, cc//xelldaa, cc//Nolag, cc//d3monicrampage3, cc//AmselD