Group One, Group Two, and the DOHS.
So back in the day, we had over a hundred players in like… three days. And when we hit around 150, it was just getting ridiculous. We crushed everything we hit, and so easily that half the horde couldn’t get kills. Everything was being organized in a single thread on Desensitized and I decided that we should divide up a bit, cover more ground, and after we consolidated our control of Ridleybank, move south and slap Stanbury around a bit. (Thus creating our first rivalry with the Stanbury Renegades and Sonny nee Saromu.)
So in the thread I simply had every poster alternate one or two, creating the simply named Groups One and Two.
(I suck at names, okay. I have a character in a novel I wrote named ‘Soumer’ literally because in the first novel his first name never gets mentioned and my cowriter asked me for the second book and my answer was “So… um… er… ‘Soumer’, pronounced ‘Sue-mer.’”)
This was also where I started punishing people who were active in the thread with promotion, handing Group One over to a buddy from another forum, and Group Two to Barbecue
For pretty much my entire tenure, the Groups would be the backbone of what we were doing. Leaders came and went (mostly in Group One, which I’ll get into in a minute) but when we needed a whole lot of shuffling bodies on a target, the Groups would come in. They represented a low-investment way to be part of things- just sign in, find out where the group was, and go tear down some barricades and eat stuff.
What was interesting was the personality that developed around the Groups, which was entirely unplanned but balanced them so very well.
Group One, led initially by my buddy Fima, would in time become the operational group, the group that experimented on tactics, coordinated (not to the degree of a strike team, but still they were actually aiming for specific targets and so on.)
Group Two was more chill, which is why I think Barbecue lasted so much longer in the role. They were fun times, traveling around doing tours of the zoo and the like, and honestly really kept some of that original funtime spirit of the horde alive where the rest of the horde was professionalizing and hardening up for the conflict.
