c/revived-game-clans

Setting up a dedicated Age of Empires 2 LAN took me 4 hours longer than I planned

So last Saturday I wanted to get a few old buddies together for an AoE2 LAN party, nothing fancy, just 4 of us in my basement. I thought it would be a quick plug and play thing since we all had the HD edition on Steam. Turns out the lobby system kept dropping us and one guy's laptop refused to see the router no matter what. I spent a solid 4 hours messing with port forwarding, firewall exceptions, and even downloaded a third party tool called GameRanger before we got one stable match going. Has anyone else had this much trouble just getting a simple old game to run on modern wifi, or do I just have cursed hardware?

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victor_carr54•23d ago

The Halo 2 player count stat that blew my mind last night

Was digging through Bungie's old archived stats for a clan recruitment post and found that Halo 2's peak online player count back in 2007 hit over 200,000 concurrent on Xbox Live, but now on the Insignia server we're lucky to get 300 on a Saturday night. That drop is brutal, but it actually made me realize how dedicated the remaining crew is. I've been playing on Insignia for about 4 months now with a group from Ohio and Texas, and the lobbies are small but everyone knows each other. Anyone else checked the old stats and felt weirdly proud of the tiny community that's left?

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drew_grant52•23d ago

After our clan leader quit, randoms on XLink Kai saved our Friday nights

I had a solid group of 8 guys for Halo 2 on the original Xbox, we ran clan battles every Friday night for about 4 months straight. Last week, our leader got a new job with night shifts and just quit cold, no warning, and then two others followed because they only played with him. I thought the whole thing was dead, honestly, I was ready to pack it in and go back to solo matchmaking. Then on Saturday I joined a random lobby on XLink Kai and mentioned what happened, and three strangers said they had the same issue with their old clan last month. We ended up playing until 2 AM, just messing around on Lockout, and now we're forming a new clan with 12 people total, all of us refugees from dead groups. The key was just finding people who still care about the game, not the original crew. Has anyone else rebuilt a clan from strangers after a total collapse, and how did you handle the first practice together?

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karenf40•24d ago

Why does nobody question the "fun" of 24/7 Halo 2 customs?

Last month I joined a revived clan for a 6 hour marathon on Lockout and honestly, half the lobby was just two guys spawn camping with sniper rifles. I called it out and got told to 'get good', but I left and started my own server with a 3 cap rule on kills. Has anyone else ditched the sweaty meta to just go back to silly rocket launcher only nights?

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sagelane•25d ago

The Halo 2 lobby that turned toxic on us in 20 minutes flat

Last month our revived clan of 8 jumped into a custom match on Coagulation and one guy kept team-killing us with the banshee, so we banned him, but then he started posting our gamertags on some Discord and now we're getting spam invites, has anyone else dealt with a salty ex-player sabotaging a comeback crew?

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evah40•25d ago

Dropped $85 on a Halo 2 LAN adapter and it resurrected our whole clan

Last month I bought one of those old Xbox LAN adapters off eBay, the official one with the two ethernet ports, for $85. Our group of 6 kept getting booted from system link matches because of lag, so I figured it was worth a shot. Plugged it in, set up a 4v4 in a basement in Akron, and it ran like butter. No disconnects for 3 straight hours. Now we're talking about doing a monthly LAN instead of online only. Has anyone else found that spending on hardware is the only way to keep these old games alive, or do you just stick with what you got?

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green.jessica•25d ago

Clan rules that ban 'meta' loadouts killed our TF2 group in 3 weeks

Last month I joined a revived TF2 clan that prided itself on 'classic' play, so they banned anything considered meta, like the Cow Mangler or Direct Hit. Seemed fun at first, but by week two, half the team stopped showing up because matches were just slower and more frustrating. My buddy from Portland said it felt like we were fighting with nerf bats, and honestly he was right. We lost our core four players last week, and now the whole thing is dead. Has anyone else seen strict rule sets push people away faster than the game itself?

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