Eek, it’s been a very, very busy half year – well past due for an update, let’s see if we can keep it short or not! (Also: we really need a writer to keep up with affairs and update the site – apply within!)

Happy 21st Birthday

Another May 4th rolled around in 2019 which took Crack Clan in to its 21st year of operation; an incredible achievement only possible by the continued support and efforts of its membership! This year was all the more poignant: they say that you raise children for independence, this also seems to apply for the clan as the group embraced a new operational standard after years of iteration and learning. It’s a truly impressive step for the group as we challenged our core structure and values with a long term view and ended up stronger than ever. Our endless thanks to the amazing people that provide significant, continual loyalty toward providing a positive environment in good times and in bad. Much love and congratulations for building such a unique creation, you all share in this milestone!

Squad Developments

Our relationship with Squad changed significantly in the last few months as well. The concept of Squad Commander Battles was significantly matured and grown to the point of requiring its own staff to support another season of gaming. The idea of engaging every player and opening the battlescape toward a higher level of gameplay for all participants ended up being very warmly received by many and thus we contributed directly to the launch of Rebound Gaming Network: an initiative specifically made for these kinds of alternate, positive twists on playing games. As a result, RGN has enjoyed significant exposure and a lot of GGs with incredible highlights including many new teams joining, amazing in-game moments with unprecedented video support and even some awesome support from the developers themselves! Lastly, the rapid growth of Squad at Crack Clan also created some significant quality challenges which were ultimately alleviated by RGNs creation – we were able to address those and part ways with some negative elements, move our Squad support elsewhere and close the book on a mind-blowing chapter of our history. Thanks to all those who were part of it, we wish you the best going forward and appreciate those who went beyond the game and have contributed to our core and resulted in a growth that’s gone beyond what we had before!

Battlefield 5, Space Engineers, The Division 2

The never-ending flow of games continues to provide entertainment and opportunity for teamwork, it’s always been our core pursuit so it’s no surprise that working with other people continues to attract like minds and improve the way we spend our spare time.

Recent announcements of Battlefield 5 getting servers has hyped some of our group to turn an eye toward the return of Squad Conquest and potentially having some competitive fun in that arena.

A friendly query between friends about how Space Engineers has matured has led to the creation of a successful server that’s proving to be an amazing learning experience and collaborative sandbox.

The Division 2 exceeded expectations, has proven to be superior to its predecessor and created an incubator of growing activity in our group to run missions together.

All of this and more still carries an open invite for career and family oriented gamers that need/want to play on a schedule with other adults. The best way to get started is to simply join our Discord server, say hello and get involved – come find out why we’re still here 21 years later!

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!)