Guild Wars
2004 - 2011
In around April 2004, we began to become aware of a new game on the horizon called Guild Wars. We're a guild, and we've been warring for quite a while, so naturally many of us were curious, from its name alone. What we found during that E3FA event was a game that was very compatible with our style of gameplay, tactical combat is something we relish. It has been unsurprising therefore that a good turnout of people representing SF made its presence felt in the BWE's. We continue to follow the ideals set up from the start. Have fun, but remain competitive. We don't take ourselves too seriously, but hell, we love winning.
2005 was a mixed bag overall for SF. Our success in Guild Wars was very rapid. By the time of the final BWE, we were an established and successful top 20 guild. For a time into release, this success continued. Our successful play culminated in May with our participation in Arenanet's "Beat the Devs" contest - where we managed to "go the distance" against a team of developers playing on the floor at E3. It was unfortunate that we weren't given the time to get our win, as we were undoubtedly on the verge of doing so before the Dev Guild pulled out for time.
RomBurns resumed leadership of SF in July 2005. This transitioned to Jedbacca in 2006 as GM of SF.
It has been sad that our success has been limited since, as we quickly fell out of the top 100, and descended into obscurity. Various reasons contributed to it, none of which are really important to what we wish to do in the future. To get back to where we were. Many of us are determined and spurred on by our historical success. We will be back. Indeed, we have recently taken on many new members, and our drive to return to the ladder remains as spirited as it always has.
Outside of the game, we all maintain a great friendship. In April 2006 a total of 11 members were involved in our first ever true guild meet up, in Orlando Florida. Two weeks of insane madness that I'm sure most of us will never forget as a truly great experience. This was followed up the next year in Orlando with a majority of the same group but we suffered a dear loss when Brandon Riggs (Bugatow) was tragically killed in a car accident. He was a huge piece of Strike Force and overall just a great person and will be truly missed. We had a small get together in Chicago in 2008 which would serve as the last of the core Guild Wars group as many members needed a break or grew tired of the game.
In 2009, the guild went under new management within Guildwars, which is/was our prominent game that members are connected to on a single roster. The new management wasn't technically new, new, but a fresh set of eyes on the scene. Amy was the GM for the GW roster running players through dungeon runs practically having people beg to get on her teams due to her leading capabilities as a GM and skilled player in those aspects.
We did experience some downtime in GW after players experiencing GW burnout, this was weighing heavily on members, which is fine, every roster goes through it. We also had the development of the PvP team in GW that was in full effect that year, Hoschi had taken over as a fine GM for the competitive roster. Hoschi was very clear on what his expectations were for the team and followed through even with rough times and limited resources to get him going. Hoschi as a GM for that roster gets a round of applause for leading and dealing with the stresses that come with the role of a competitive roster.
During this year we had a lot of development and revamping talk and implementation as a guild. We had the addition of more TF2, Left 4 Dead, Aion, World of Warcraft, Diablo 2 gameplay. That just lists the quick spectrum of what players have been involved in. By the end of December and opening of the new year, the WoW roster is going more official and having a Strike Force branded PvP team that is looking for going for high rank. The captain of the PvP portion of the team has been announced as Standerd (Kyle). The GM/AGM combination for the game that has been announced is Standerd/Yarg (Kyle/Ben). Dan's projects throughout the year were to implement steam servers as a test to grow the SF population in other games, these implementations were to test and see what types of people we could be able to add to our community of SF. Another big project during this year was the LC putting together and working on the implementation on how we run SF as a whole. We want to become more diverse to expand the team into different games and be more lenient on how our roster works to make the jobs of our own Game Managers that much easier.
We did have a couple of downfalls as well, but who doesn't right? City of Villains/Heroes as a roster was implemented for a short stint through this year. We also had periods or lulls in our GW roster activity, which has now just gone to the development of the weekend warrior program. The "program" was developed so that a lot of the older members/players can just get together and run GvG's non-competitively and still show that we have a face in GW. We also weren't able to essentially pull what we wanted out of the Steam crowd either, this is in reference to the possibilities of recruitment. Yet, we never went official within any of the steam games and had a guild/team setup that was dedicated. Although there may be a little negative, we generally were able to pull some good notes and positive from our experiences as a team.
As if we couldn't get enough of get togethers, another was held in 2010 thanks to Becca and Jeff. We all got to meet up at Texas De Brazil, the steakhouse in Shaumberg, IL. I hope I spelled that right. The turnout was quite nice, we had roughly 9 members at the dinner. Quite personally, I think this guild LOVES the sausage, especially when one of the main meetup spots to stop at was The Brat Stop! We had also figured that we will no longer let IV (Scott) pick out restaurants to eat at. We had the lovely graces of Xeeron coming into the states as well for a period of time and for dinner we got the lovely crappy service of the Italian restaurant that Scotty picked out >:). It's O.K. Scott, you are still loved like a red headed step child. I'd also like to mention that we did celebrate 10 years as a guild, congrats to us on 10 years as a community and team and being able to grow into a fine dysfunctional family.
2010 saw a core group of the members playing League of Legends with Fix leading the current Guild Wars team as well as Dan having a small team in Rift. This carried into 2011 until the announcement of a Magestorm revival project was announced in November. With the game slowly gaining steam again with all the old members returning, the old group we had in the early 2000s, as well as some new faces, ran on a nostalgia train into early 2012. This was the most active the guild had been in quite some time and playing the game that it was mainly founded on made it that much better. A small league was held for a few months which kept activity high. The game slowly lost players due to loss of interest.