Monkey

Kinda like Facebook as a whole 🙃 A discord would be cool though… we should do that.

We were out of options (also a reason for closing in the first place). FSK would never have accepted. DF, VR, and ROT were all crashing each other I believe, and we wanted a clean fight. I don’t remember what TT was up to, but they weren’t as flexible as RSD with fight times. Same with Solace - they would have asked for like 10 GMT start or so. We knew RSD would give us a clean fight and a reasonable start time. Unfortunately we didn’t feel that we could get that from any other clan. Finny randomly added me on Facebook when we were in TR. Based off his activity there I can tell you that he’s probably still alive, but I haven’t been in touch with him. I honestly don’t remember why we reopened in 2015. I think Dan felt there was some potential for the clan world being reinvigorated and wanted to give it another shot. But yes, nostalgia certainly got the better of us. Not sure what the best option would have been. Maybe just opening a new clan to begin with would have been better, since a temporary reunion might have been a tough sell.

Haha no, I’m pretty sure @Des Troyer and @Clugred didn’t know about The Boss. Not sure how popular he is in the UK.

When Bruce Willis was dead at the end of The Sixth Sense

Kind of hard to remember smaller clans. I liked Downfall a lot before they started crashing. WL and TCL were cool, although not that much smaller than us. Maybe Dragonwood Favorite team cape was 28, since that was ours. If TR hadn’t been The Rising, it should have been named No Surrender. Not because that’s a good clan name, but because The Rising is a Bruce Springsteen song and so is No Surrender. Gotta keep the pattern going. Tbh I needed my ass kicked when I was in TR. Madz was a weird kid. I think after he got declined for the 4th time, something broke in his brain and he was never the same. Legend has it that he wanders the wilderness to this day, still trying to find our fights so he can prove himself worthy. These questions are always hard because we had so many great members over the years, but the ones that come to mind are the most recent ones. Just a few… Mihkelm, The Kiler655, Metsa Hirvi, Krosan4eva. Top 5 members who weren’t officials is basically impossible to come up with because there were lots who tried being a mentor and didn’t like it or people who were trial PK leaders and didn’t pass the trial. If I had a full list of everyone who was ever in TR maybe I could do it, but that would be overkill. There are a few candidates for worst fight. We had unprepped fights against LDK which were bad because it was 30-40 vs 100. Our organization/quality was better but that only goes so far with numbers like those. We also had an uncapped fight vs TMC where they decided to try to outlast us and we turned the tables and outlasted them (although really we had the upper hand for over 75% of that fight). It went at least 8 hours before they ended. In terms of most depressing fight, probably during the CWA era (late 2008 or 2009 I think) when we pulled around 10 people to a fight. And I don’t mean a no prep fight at like 3 AM. This was at least a day prep, people just hated CWA. As for most hated clans, maybe Exodus.

Crimson Raiders. We were good friends with you guys for a while, maybe due to a shared hatred for Exodus.

I liked LPT. I don’t think we fought you guys very much at all and you seemed to stay out of a lot of the clan world drama. You never had the huge pulls that LF could sometimes get, but I always remember you having much better quality than they had. There were always thoughts and plans to become more EST but none of them would work without removing a huge number of valued members. We also never had more than 30% EST members from 2009 onward (yes, this number was tracked), which I wouldn’t call a large EST unit. As for Jeff’s calling, his actual calling skills were fine. If you had a problem with his voice or his accent, that’s on you. WL and TCL. It was interesting considering the hatred those two clans had for each other. We got along really well with TCL and always enjoyed our fights with you guys. Regardless of how well either clan was doing, it always felt like we could come up with some sort of time compromise to set up a fight in order to make things fair. I have never attended a Runefest and my only OSRS goal is to continue not playing the game 🙃

Things were getting so heated between TR and EH at that point that it would have taken a lot for us to not finish that fight off. That aspect, in combination with how evident it was during the last couple hours that you guys were on your last legs, and how tired a lot of TR members were of being outlasted by EST clans, meant that we were not going to end just because it was getting late. If the tides were starting to shift at some point and EH was taking the upper hand, maybe we would have ended. But it was not going to happen otherwise.

Wow, this is some high praise. Thank you for the kind words 😊 My impressions of you in TR… you were an interesting combination of maturity and naïveté. You were well intentioned and calm (alarmingly calm…), but I always wondered if one day you would crack and just be an immature little shit like the rest of the people your age. I was secretly hoping you would. I knew of TR while I was in EH, but my first real exposure to TR was when Sooz joined. At the time she and I were good friends and although I had no intentions of joining another clan due to college starting, I figured I could hang around and be supportive. Once I started hanging around TR’s community, people were so friendly and welcoming (Elipsix, Tuesday, and Nebharperr come to mind as some of the first to welcome me) that I couldn’t stay away. Would it be worth it to have pushed more towards EST? Maybe, I guess it depends on what your priorities are. It’s easy to say that we could have been more successful as a clan if we had done that, and it’s quite likely to be true in some sense, but how much does that matter? When I look back now I don’t care about #1 GMT and I wouldn’t care about #1 EST either. What mattered most to me - and what still matters most - is the people that were there. People like you, @Icedragon D, @Steikas, @Woot, and so many others made TR what it was. I would not have wanted to sacrifice that for the chance to achieve greater RuneScape glory. I also think our timezone helped us in some ways, namely that GMT clans had a much easier time staying out of clan world drama than EST clans did. I always assumed “onwards and upwards” came from Dan. It sounds very Dan-esque, doesn’t it? I don’t regret playing RS for as long as I did, but I wish I hadn’t been quite so addicted. I spent way too much of my time in high school and college on this game. Erin is doing great 😊 Thanks for asking! Hope all is well with you.

Hi Tim! It was definitely sometime around 2010, although I don’t remember when exactly or how I ended up on your Teamspeak. I thoroughly enjoyed hanging out with you guys until one morning I woke up to see two Downfall members had quit and applied for TR. I remember apologizing to Amateurnoob and telling him that it was never my intention to recruit off of you guys. I don’t think he was too bothered by it, but to me it was an important and unfortunate reminder that I had to be careful when hanging around other clans. At that time I really loved Downfall, but over the years my opinion of you guys became very negative as you started crashing and engaging in other… let’s call them “undesirable activities”. My favorite RuneScape fight was probably beating EH uncapped. Tensions between us and EH were so high at that point, and having joined TR from EH I felt like a loss would have been devastating. Favorite RS achievement? Quitting the game 🤷‍♂️ Least favorite fight was probably some of the TR vs LDK fights. Or maybe TR vs TMC where they tried to outlast us and then we outlasted their outlasting attempt. It was great to win but it was a miserable experience overall. When I first started clanning in Rune Raiders I really looked up to Sic Mick. He was a great official - always calm and understanding. Looking back, I was an obnoxious little shit, but he never held it against me (or maybe he did, but he didn’t treat me differently). As for people I disliked, there aren’t many of those in or out of RS. The closest I came to disliking someone in TR was probably Fire Sk8er. He was ranked in TR for a while early on and then left. He later came back to the clan world and made a new clan (with Tukuruk I think) that was supposed to kill us. It was almost comical except that he was so incredibly fixated on us. He would randomly show up in IRC every once in a while to spout off some bullshit. There were other people with similar obsessions, but his always felt more serious. Like if The Rising had been a workplace, he would have shown up with a rifle.

This was always a goal, but it’s much easier said than done. While we didn’t have the hard cutoff like TRWF did, our numbers did drop precipitously as 10 GMT passed. We would sometimes have capped fights going to 11 or 12 GMT or uncapped fights going even later, but our European members made it very clear that it was not an ideal situation for them. So every time we tried to branch out into EST, we’d have a lot of frustrated Europeans and then we’d struggle to get EST recruits because the GMT fights didn’t work out for them due to school/work. It was hard to keep those EST members around because they’d get bored of the 1-2 events per week that they could attend. If we had pushed harder towards EST, it’s possible we could have been successful, but it would have been at the expense of a large number of valued members who wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Basically, it would’ve been more like starting a new clan rather than just shifting our strategy.

The easy answer is that Genesis didn’t compare to TR, nor did the second iteration of TR (which was pre-hotgun/crest, for the record). Genesis to me was kind of bland. There were some people I liked there, but there was nothing that made it special for me. The warring aspect was pretty unbearable given that Genesis was in a crash war for basically its entire existence. Ultimately I think Genesis can be defined by its failure to get off the ground, which I attribute to its leadership’s inability to navigate the crash war (either by winning it or ending it).

I understand that Fools was not a crashing clan for most of its existence, but that was actually one of the more annoying things about their decision to crash us. It wasn’t like Fools went around crashing everyone, or even other GMT clans who declined their fight offers. It was more like “Well we’re bored, let’s just go crash TR”. There was never any justifiable reason for the escalation, nor any pattern of similar behavior from Fools. I think a lot of people, including me, felt a bit betrayed when you guys left. I’m sure you had your reasons but I don’t remember them ever coming to light, so naturally people were upset when you guys left for one of our biggest rivals. Of course, in hindsight you had every right to leave for any reason or no reason at all. But in the moment people were certainly upset.

The only Håkan I ever knew in TR was Flummbullen. I am not in touch with him and didn’t know he moved. As an individual I don’t really care how my time on RS is remembered. I hope that I acted in such a way that those who knew me can remember me in a positive light. I know that won’t be possible for everyone, since I sometimes let the stress get to me and ended up saying some things that I deeply regret to this day. To those people (hi @Yorick) I am truly sorry. As a clan, I hope we can be remembered for our unwavering commitment for leaving everything on the battlefield (and maybe the RSC topic once in a while). We had some great success without involving ourselves in a lot of the toxicity that was growing more common in the clan world. Is your question whether RDC was #1 GMT the whole time from 2006-2009? I’m sure you reached that point for a while, but I don’t think it was the whole time. The award for best country clan would either go to you guys or Fools and it’s hard to know who would win since your periods of dominance didn’t overlap. Fools at some points was pulling 300 options and they probably could have given RDC a run for their money (or won outright). Thanks for digging up those member lists! Best mages - Wnt was pretty good, so I’ll just give him the credit since I don’t remember who else used to mage. Best tanks - This one is tough since I mostly remember the people who sucked at tanking. I remember our Polish unit (Zahus and Piotrek) being pretty good tanks. Ok, so let me preface this by saying I don’t hold grudges for what happened all those years ago and I’m trying to answer this objectively, as you requested. FOOLS and CU were clearly great clans, but it would have been a lot easier to respect them if they hadn’t been so insistent on crashing us. And I’m pretty sure that imperative came from you. You would tell me that you guys were only crashing us because we wouldn’t fight you, which in my opinion was a very poor attempt at justifying your actions. It seemed petty to me, like you had some sort of bone to pick with us and got some sort of amusement from crashing us. I understand that RuneScape is just a game that can be played however you want. But my opinion has always been that if your idea of having fun in a game is going out of your way to make sure other people don’t have fun, you’re kind of a dick. And that’s not directed solely at you - that’s how I feel about everyone who goes out of their way to crash, ddos (this one doesn’t apply to fools/CU), or whatever else people are doing these days. I didn’t think very highly of you as a person for these reasons, but your ability as a leader manifested itself through the success of Fools/CU.

Hi 3lite! I don’t have anything that comes to mind regarding a time Sooz tried to leverage her popularity against leadership. By the time I was promoted, she was already council, so I would have been completely in the dark about anything that happened. I did have a lot of experience leading alongside her, which was certainly difficult, but for other reasons. Even when we both had the title of “leader”, it never felt like she viewed me as an equal. If I did something she didn’t like - no matter how small - I was chewed out for it endlessly. On the other hand, if I disagreed with her, she’d tell me that she had lots of people agreeing with her privately and I should just drop it. This happened all the time and ultimately led me to step down from leader to be second in command, which probably should have been the plan anyway. She had a very specific idea of how things should be done, and there wasn’t much room for dissent. But I don’t want it to seem like she was a detriment to the clan. Her loyalty to The Rising was unquestionable and she was the lifeblood of the clan for the last few years. For all the complaining I did about her stubbornness, that was also what kept us going when everyone else was ready to give up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was a mixed bag - she was difficult and often frustrating to work with, but she kept the clan going well so clearly there was a method to her madness. Anyway, on to your other questions… I agree that TR was created too late, although I’m not sure how much difference a year would have made. There would have been more wilderness opportunities, which would have worked in TR’s favor. But it’s not like absurdly long fights weren’t happening in 2006, so that still would have made it hard to break into the top clans. Our greatest strength in PK run-ins… I’m not sure. I always felt like we were good in all areas but not the best in anything. I can tell you that our weakest area, at least for a few years, was snipers. We did not have a great sniper unit (to put it lightly) in 2009-2010 or so. I don’t remember if we improved it or just stopped bothering to send snipers. Our relationship with CL was pretty good, but we didn’t fight them much. I remember fighting AA more than CL, but maybe that’s recency bias. The RDC rivalry was interesting. I remember them hating us a lot. I don’t remember why exactly, but I’m sure they had their reasons. But I always felt like it was a bit one sided in that we didn’t feel quite so strongly about them, but they absolutely could not stand us. I recall 2m and RDC hating each other as well, and a lot of 2m joined TR when they closed, while RDC mostly went to TRWF after their closure. This, of course, added fuel to the TR/TRWF hatred.

A lot of clans took great pride in their community, which in many cases meant the number of people talking in TS all day. But the problem (in my opinion, at least) was that once you started listening to those conversations, they were not particularly inclusive and were downright negative at times. Respect within TR’s community was a requirement and disputes between members were dealt with seriously by leadership. Anyone who felt denigrated could come to us and we would handle it. This isn’t to say that we babysat everyone, but basically that going out of your way to antagonize or belittle someone was not tolerated at any rank within the clan. This doesn’t mean everyone loved each other all the time. It means you were expected to ignore the people you didn’t get along with and not antagonize them. For some people this was a strange concept and not something they wanted to deal with, but it worked for us to create an environment where everyone was treated with respect.

Terrible. In all seriousness he was the kind of member that made TR great and that would contribute positively to any clan. He’s a great guy and I’m never saying anything nice about him again.

Followers of Malkav in like 2004. I always wanted to join a cult

Sooz created a lot of ranks that were probably unnecessary. Couldn’t really tell you why. Best - Zafia, Toxic, Finny… basically all of them. Worst - that time we got Hohto to call at like 2 AM after he had been drinking all night. Our community was pretty different from a lot of other clans and I think some new recruits were caught off guard by that. We did not have 40 people hanging out on TS at all times, but basically the entire clan was extraordinarily welcoming and friendly. Sure there was drama occasionally, but not nearly to the extent that you see in other clans. I really wanted to kick everyone who had “dragon” in their name. Unfortunately I couldn’t get enough support from the other officials. Some of those fights against LDK were absolutely brutal. They had like 100 people to our 30 and I’m not sure why we even bothered. TRWF was the most enjoyable rivalry. Forsaken was probably the most annoying to set up fights with. They declined almost all of our offers, while still insisting they were better than us. Castle Wars!

Thrilled 🙄

Demanboy274, AKA Jared, was a long time member of The Rising Clan of RuneScape. Jared was known for flirting with anything that had a pulse. Along came some random intro who said their name was Michelle or something, and after a few months they started e-dating. After another few months, “Michelle” told a few of us to come on Teamspeak (or Ventrilo or whatever we used at the time) to tell us something important. This was pretty unusual, since “Michelle” had never talked before. I forget what exactly they said, but they admitted to being a guy and then left the clan. We gave Jared lots of shit for this, but to his credit he was a good sport about it. He always said his biggest regret was the 50m he gave “Michelle”.

I’ve never been a fan of ROT. Basically felt like their plan was always just to bully everyone into submission. No idea who the best main clan is or even what clans are still around. Higher pull and better quality members There really is nothing that would bring me back. If warring became fun again I might consider it, but probably still wouldn’t come back. I guess if I had to pick a clan to join it would be Tempest. RoT - I don’t have anything nice to say here. Their success was impressive but I am not a fan of their methods, and I’ll leave it at that. AF - Think we had a few decent scraps with AF in f2p, but I really don’t remember much. Downfall - I was a big fan of Downfall during the Amateurnoob days. I hung out with them a lot and had some good times. Later on things went downhill and it basically felt like they were PH 2.0 DF - In the early days of DF (like 2005/2006) I was a big fan. That faded over the years, but I never hated them. VR - Similar to my thoughts on DF except I never really liked VR to begin with. Di - I had a lot of respect for the original DI, and their rivalry with DS was incredible. Brut - similar to my thoughts on AF. I know we fought brutality a few times but I really don’t have much of an opinion on them. The clan world kind of killed itself so it’s hard to blame the game. Removing the wilderness and then later on forcing everyone to start over from level 3 didn’t help by any means, but things were already going to shit without the help from Jagex. I don’t wish we had involved TR in the p2p clan world any more than we did. We had some small trips for fun, but the p2p clan world was even worse than f2p with regard to the things we stood against (crashing, ddosing, etc). TRWF. It was a great rivalry and got heated at times, but the furthest things were ever taken was flaming on RSC - and even that was usually stopped pretty quickly. TR, TRWF, FOOLS, NG, CU Not in any particular order. Had a lot of fun fighting all of those clans and all of them had pretty impressive peaks at one time or another. Shoutout to TRWF for being the only one on that list who didn’t crash us though! Favorite callers… I don’t really remember. I’ll just say Nicksta because he said so many stupid things while calling. 1. Not sure what exactly constitutes a porking scandal, but one of our old members e-dated someone in the clan who turned out to be a guy. 2. I agree that the real TR died in 2012. I don’t think you can accurately compare clans that were around in different eras. Any clan from 2010 would get crushed these days because they’re not using absurd RS clients that do half the work for you. Clans these days have put so much effort into getting every single advantage in wars that I think they’ve basically sucked the fun out of it, at least for people like me. Our quality was great early on, then resistance to CWA caused a pretty major dip. In 2011 and 2012 we made a concerted effort to improve our quality, and it definitely made a big difference. As for the EH comment, we did beat EH in an uncapped fight (the only planned uncapped fight we ever had with EH, to my knowledge). 3. I was not involved in that, so can’t answer the question. @Icedragon D! But in all seriousness probably Sergei Vi (in terms of annoyingness) or munoslayer (in terms of trouble)

For the most part, no. We put some spies in a few clans, 2m being one for sure, but most clans just didn’t have PK trips, so spies were pointless. We weren’t going to crash anyone’s fights or leak forums, so there was not much to gain from having spies. Except for the one time I felt like BK was talking too much shit for some odd reason (they had like 20 members…), so I put a spare into the clan and then hit them like twice.

This is the one question that I knew for sure was going to be asked. No one can deny her influence within the clan or the fact that she was essentially the beating heart of the clan (at least in the era after Dan and Claire). She was excellent at making people feel welcomed and like their voice was being heard within the clan - at least for regular members. Within leadership it was more complicated. As for weaknesses, I think my opinion will be pretty different from everyone else’s in TR just from having been in leadership with her for so long. It often felt like she wanted things done in a very specific way and there was no room for debate or interpretation. When we were both leaders there were many many times where we butted heads. I have not spoken to her in the last few years, but I don’t hold anything against her and I hope she’s doing well. Timezone was the biggest barrier. Our GMT/+1/+2 members didn’t want to stay up all night for fights and we quickly realized that we couldn’t force them to. So we could have great pulls for capped fights, but even if we won, no one really cared or considered it a legitimate win because it was a 90 minute or 2 hour fight.