So that brings us to the leadership. Barbecue, as I mentioned, stayed in his role of Group Two leader through most of if not my entire tenure, until we eventually reconsolidated into Group 0 for a bit toward the end.
Group One, being more involved, tended to have turnover. Fima was probably our first management burnout case, dropping off around Caiger. And while I did miss him, his moving on opened the door for one of the best leaders we ever had in the horde, a guy who certainly could’ve been a Papa if being a group leader hadn’t inspired some serious life choices for the better. (Or at least I hope for the better.)
Phungus420 was a guy who had a firm, but unpretentious style of leadership and an analytical eye for how best to wreak chaos and havoc. After Caiger, the zombie population was in dire state. We fought like hell to liberate Ridleybank from a survivor invasion from basically every group in the game. But, as I pointed out at the time and a line for which Sid/Wcil likes to quote me, I was looking even then at what we had in terms of targets after we got out. We were going to be able to go in any given direction and just wreck things.
Stanstock came and went, and coming out of that, we got Feeding Groan. Some thought that was an inadequate balance for the Headshot change, but both Jorm and especially Phun were telling the rest of us no, this could be good.
So I knew Phun had over a hundred zombies and was ready to go, so I told him to kick off what we called March to the Sea, where he took Group One and just headed straight for the southeast border of Malton.
Along the way, he would develop the scout-crack-groan tactic that essentially doubled his firepower, as he accumulated a huge following of ferals feasting on the buildings we were opening up for them.
He got so good at it that we had one guy in particular arguing that the game was becoming too slanted against survivors (still 55-45 majority at the time) and that at our current rate of progress, we were going to just wipe the whole map.
Obviously did’t happen, but it did put us right back in business after a pretty ebb tide for the zambahs of Malton.
Phun would eventually come to me, just aglow from his experience of running Group One, and tell me that he’d really come into an appreciation of what leadership was like, and it had convinced him that he needed to get more active in his community as a leader. So with that, he would go on to… whatever it is he got up to, but I’m sure he was great at it.
In the meantime, Barbecue was the springboard for the idea of the DOHS, because he had the idea of using Group Two to lead our newbies around and feed them, which turned into a dedicated cadre that would hold Ridleybank and feed newbies to keep their travel distances short. Which worked, for a time, but we know how the game changed, and eventually we had new issues and invasions to deal with.
