In May of 2010 I arrived at my first duty station. During my time at Smith Barracks, I befriended the first member of what would become my future family, Mobius. Through a deployment, and even back to garrison life, he and I built a small group of friends in a handful of games we were interested in at the time.
As time went on(and the mechanics of permanent changes of station), our time in those worlds came to a functional end. On June 5th, 2012, I logged into Stellar Impact for the first time. My first MOBA, with a small player-base, I began to notice a few names popping up with some regularity. I had run across a small group of guys who were part of a clan called Disagreeable Persons Disposal Unit. Over the next few months I would be welcomed as one of their own, becoming permanent friends with Lego and Sightless. Through other worlds, and a handful of additional shorter-term friendships my time with DPDU began to wain.
The next major milestone for me came after a horrid break-up, and the release of New World on September 28th, 2021. Over two or three months, I managed to convince the vast majority of my gamer friends(all 10 to 12 of them at the time) to join me on the server I had elected to play on. Without delving too deep into the mechanics of progressing the storyline in NW, we all found ourselves needing to run the same dungeon. Unable to find anyone willing to walk us through, we eventually began to run it over and over again, until we were veritable experts. As it became more and more public knowledge that we were both there and willing to help others, we began to get ever more frequent requests to team up and push through. On and on, expanding to the other handful of dungeons, it became common to see someone in global chat asking if "those guys from the Bandit Alliance company" were online.
Overnight, I'm sure, our tiny group of mostly IRL friends expanded to fully fill the 50 player limit of a company. Such wild character as Hippo, Shannon, Chicka, Weasel, amongst others, had joined fan favorites Kam, Ninja, and Mobius himself. Our dungeon team was catapulted into the lime-light, with even other opposing factions requesting we run their people through. BA was born!
At some point, we moved into the realm of player versus player and end-game content. As we expanded server-wide, we found ourselves suddenly 'important'. With no apparent rhyme or reason we sat amongst the 'elite' nerds found in our tiny corner of the internet, putting our mark on the purely digital society we had found ourselves belonging to. Over weeks and months we spent our nights together, growing from the same 5 or 6 people to close to 100 all ribbing, joking, and needling one another in our discord.
Surviving the server merges that eventually destroyed that world we had built together, we have moved on into the present, where we maintain our lineage, and our presence, in whatever world we find ourselves a part of.