Clan Spotlight: [VILIN]

We interviewed these players to learn more about the history and future of VILIN:

Armorghost - Clan Commander; does a bit of everything
Buff_Rumblecrunch/eNumbra - Diplomat; is around for moral support most of the diplomacy goes through Armorghost)
Dogbeast - Deputy Commander; handles a lot of Clan back-end tasks, video creation, and strategy management
LZ_Schneider - Deputy Commander; does a bit of everything when Armorghost is unavailable and dabbles in everything from Admin to battle calling
Mac116 - Soldier; makes fun of Armorghost and shoots arty

Where did the name VILIN come from?

Buff_Rumblecrunch - There was a long series of hosts back when we were still “HAVOK Rising”. At one point, DunxtonChexton was calling Armorghost a “mustache-twirling villain” many times and during the process of us trying to find a new name, one of those posts came up and it sort of clicked with me. That’s when I went and found the Snidely Whiplash icon and it all sort of came together!

You mentioned being “HAVOK Rising” -- could you tell us a little bit about how VILIN started, how long it has been around, and how VILIN developed as a whole?

Armorghost - Yeah. The Clan started in 2012. The Clan was formed back on the Europe map as HAVOK’s landing clan. They brought a bunch of players in to hold landings. The Clan evolved into a Landholding Clan where the Clan took over provinces and HAVOK (blackcompany) started heavily recruiting for the Clan. A couple of us, eNumbra and myself, were brought into the Clan pretty early on. The Clan evolved after the “Purple Dounut” war where it was run less by HAVOK and we became something more self-sufficient. We went through a series of growth-spurts, growing-pains, and we eventually got to a point where we didn’t agree with how the “Burning Legion” was running things, (diplo-wise and everything) and we sort of out-grew being under the HAVOK umbrella. During the First Campaign, at this point we basically decided to part ways because of disagreement. We ended up leaving, renaming ourselves, and here we are!

A lot of times when a Clan splits off from another, there is a short period of success and then the Clan fails. What has been different with VILIN that has allowed you to succeed?

Buff_Rumblecrunch - Camaraderie. Did we lose anybody when we left? 2-3 people at most?

Armorghost - No players left the Clan when we had a break-off. That’s probably the biggest reason Clans fail when they break-off because a bunch of people leave because they think the Clan is going to fail now without the parent Clan there.

LZ_Schneider - There is a large basis of friends when you come into VILIN. There’s the old guard of friends that have been here pretty much since the beginning and everyone else has been added in since then. If you ask me, that’s really the core of what keeps the majority of people in VILIN. It’s the friendship from that basis that extends and branches out to everyone that joins in. The friendship just carries through and you don’t want to leave your friends because you have a lot of fun here. That’s mainly why I think we have one of the highest personnel retention rates on the server.

Mac116 - VILIN is actually secretly a social Clan…

LZ_Schneider - It’s true!

Is it easy for people to join?

Armorghost - Recruitment is pretty easy. People apply and we look into the player. We run through a couple of platoons. If we like the player’s attitude and gameplay, then we talk to them about joining the Clan. When we talk about platooning, that’s usually 1 or 2 nights of platooning. It’s pretty easy to get in if you have the player ability, the wanting to be part of a great group of players, and the desire to learn and grow as a player yourself. The ability to have fun with it and participate in Clan Wars is a big key factor.

What were your first fights like? Do you have any interesting stories about that?

Armorghost - Our first fights? We fought a bunch of scrubs just like us. We were pretty bad! Our first real fights didn’t actually really get going until we left the Middle East and went to Europe. That is where we fought StuG LyfE and GSA, PBKAC. It’s about that time that we started to see what more competitive Clan Wars was about. The growth in the Clan, that’s when it really started to happen, because we as a unit went from fighting lesser competitive Clans to a lot more highly competitive Clans. Then we moved off and did the whole Purple Dawn war and that was another growth-spurt of the Clan. We had to improve. Definitely fighting RELIC helped to turn us from our old mentality way of thinking into basically what we are right now. Fighting RELIC was probably the biggest thing we went through. They really helped us grow as a Clan.

You detailed a huge amount of growth. How would you give tips to a new Clan who also wanted to grow like you have, and what do you think got you to where you are now?

Armorghost - Learning from your mistakes. You’re gonna make mistakes. You’re gonna lose games. As long as you learn from your losses…

Dogbeast - Find what works for you… for your Clan. Another big benefit that will help is the training of multiple callers. Yeah, Clans can work with one caller, which is usually their Commander. This has worked for us in the past. Armor might remember that, but having multiple callers helps a lot. It relieves stress. It allows people to focus on just calling and that’s it. On top of that, sometimes you might find that some callers are great at some maps, certain styles of maps, like open maps. Other callers are great at closed city maps and vice versa they might be really terrible at other maps. They might even love a map, but be really bad at it. You find out niches like that and try to tailor-make certain maps to certain callers.

If nothing else, you can always train new callers on the new landing zones because it’s not a do-or-die situation. Find out what you’re capable of, what works and what doesn’t, and you can always apply again the next day. There is no point in not applying to any landing zones every day.

How would you say VILIN views Strongholds?

LZ_Schneider - I personally like them. I haven’t called many of them myself yet. I’ve called a few, but we definitely use them to train up our trainee FCs. It is a massive help in doing that because we currently own land and it’s such a hassle to organize a training fight a night or mess with the training rooms compared to now doing Strongholds where you can go in with the whole Clan and get a benefit out of it (and not have to worry about stats). There are some players who, even though it’s one battle a night, complain about that. We also have a group of players that love to do Strongholds every night and there are some other players that you kind of have to ask to get in. It has kind of spread over the entire Clan.

Let’s talk a little bit about current events. What’s going on on the Global Map right now?

Armorghost - We went through a phase for fighting for, pretty much, two years straight and we’re sitting here until something happens or until the Clan gets very bored again.

LZ_Schneider - We’re kind of just taking advantage of having the other map [Twilight of the Gods] up for a little while because we expanded way past what we should have been able to, in reality. We are sitting on the Clan Wars map while everyone else is on the event map and now we’re kind of consolidating back down and seeing what’s going to happen.

Any shout-outs that or anything else you want the public to know?

Armorghost - We’re just a relaxed Clan that platoons and plays together. We enjoy playing Clan Wars! People who want to join can apply via our Clan Page or message myself or one of the DCs and/or a recruiter in-game and we’ll get back to them.

LZ_SchneiderThere is never a reason not to contact us if you’re interested. If you come into the Teamspeak and say you’re interested, we will always speak to you and we go through the same process with everybody.

Armorghost - To close things out, just want to give a shout-out to our ex-members and especially a big shout-out to our ex-DCs: __Crusader__ and SirVex. They were in the Clan and helped us to grow, quite a bit! Also, a shout out to the Clans that we’ve worked with in the past.

Stronghold Skirmish Details

What: Champion Stronghold Skirmishes
Who: [VILIN] and WGA employees
When: Oct 1, 16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT) to approx. 18:00 PDT (21:00 EDT)
Where: NA East server

If you face off against our Spotlight Skirmish, you'll have a chance to win Gold prizes!

If you are streaming on your own Twitch.tv channel and you send a link to your stream with the time at which you face us, your entire team will double their winnings! This link must be sent in a PM on the forums to HBFT by 09:00 PDT (12:00 EDT) the following Friday morning.

If you have any questions you'd like us to ask [VILIN] while on the stream, please leave them in the comments thread for this article or you may also ask them in the Twitch chat!

Gold from this event will be distributed by Wednesday, Oct 8, 2014.