RSD Leadership AMA - LivinLarge21, Icedrop, Bowhunter65

[Icedrop 8]

23 hours ago, True 2k8 said:

@Bow / @Icedrop

 

What can you tell me about Godsmoke? As someone who didn't join RSD this guy is like an enigma to me. Also, I remember him getting Leader with Bow but quickly stepped down to member and then did the Trial PK Leader -> PK Leader thing again. What can you tell us about that?

Not a great deal.  He was quite quiet and we did not speak much.  He was a great caller on the battlefield, but perhaps he was not made out to be a Co Leader/Leader.  Perhaps that explains his return down that route later on.

==ice==

[Icedrop 8]

21 hours ago, True 2k8 said:

How good was @Rccrazy165 as a caller and PK Leader?

Solid/dependable, from what I can remember.

==ice==

[^_^ 2]

As a Cor member for numerous years mainly during the time period where both clans were reasonably good and should have fought each other a lot more, but didn't for some reason (I mainly get @JayJay's opinions of the reasons why we didn't have a significant rivalry/numerous fights)

In your opinion why do you  feel that COR and RSD did not fight more then we did and why do you feel that a rivalry did not ever develop over time between the two clans?

(What I am trying to say is out of all the clans that were active and we seemed to fight and have rivalry with, I can barely remember fighting RSD at all and you seem to be the only clan that I have this opinion with - hell all i can remember really of RSD in my period of clanning was that I used to leach Dungeoneering off your maxed players when was like 1700/1800 total ? )

[Mar 61]

2 hours ago, Icedrop said:

This was never particularly an issue.  At the end of the day we managed to get a steady flow of fights with our rivals, and where rival officials were being ridiculous about rules (e.g. proposing fights starting at silly times on a school day, 5 sniper caps, etc) then we would simply look elsewhere to set something up or during the appropriate eras we would look to hit those clans on a PK trip.  Of course, in setting up fights there always had to be a bit of give and take on things like days, times and rules of fights.  I would make reasonable and appropriate concessions, but I was never up for caving in and accepting fights with ridiculous rules just to appease the likes of EoS/VR officials.  A lot of the time their idea of discussing details for a fight was "my way or the highway" and I wasn't going to set a precedent of letting them entirely dictate all the terms.

There was sometimes some hot steam from the likes of EoS/VR (and others) on forums, but it was usually just that.  There may have been EoS/VR members crying "RSD refusing to fight us omg" on forums, but it was pretty easy for our members to see through that.  If I turned down a fight I would do so for good reason and I would be happy to let the members know the rationale as to why.  Our members were generally on the same page with the decisions and knew what our opponents were up to.  Of course the odd individual would disagree from time to time, but there was never any wide-scale backlash.

==ice==

This is such an excellent point as EOS was specifically known for wanting strict arbitrary rules regarding fights so its understandable RSD wouldn't want to fight us under those conditions

Edited September 22, 2020 by mar

[Icedrop 8]

15 hours ago, True 2k8 said:

Could each of you tell us a funny behind the scenes story that really isn't out there publicly 

Some random memories:

- Mr 800, Co Leader at the time, set up a whole forum section for a series of "Best Movie of All Time" polls that went on for months.  It was never explained and may never have been finished.  The same thing appeared on Twitter during the COVID lockdown.  I have a strong suspicion that it was also his doing.

- Ahead of large weekend fights we would put up a banner drawing attention to the fight in the Shoutbox at the top of forums.  I'm not sure how it started, but for a while there was a period where it would always feature a MS Paint drawn cartoon of a frog that was named "Terry" and who ended up being considered our mascot.  If you saw Terry at the top of our forums then you knew a big event was upcoming.

- Me and a couple of officials realised that we could get words to automatically change when posted on the forums (e.g. if you type "DI" it would change to "DF").  I think we worked out how to turn it on/off easily and we might have been able to make it only apply to certain members of our choosing.  We made some very subtle changes here and there which went undetected for a good while before people sussed it out.  Easily entertained.

- At one point we started tracking activity very seriously.  We would log which members attended every event.  For longer PKRIs we would give additional points for those there at the end.  We made our poor junior clan officials add up all the points and we published top activity tables.  I think people below a certain threshold got kicked (unless they provided us with a good reason for their inactivity!).  That might have been quite normal, but it seems like quite a meticulous approach looking back.

==ice==

[Beckham69 1]

19 hours ago, LivinLarge21 said:

I am adding to this since I saw a 2007 Member list to bring back some memories.

Prinze Joe, Dj Mochasins, Hlprap, F1r3o, H A 12 D, Skeletorus09, Beckham69, Godstruewill, Timebeast, Bclayj2.

Honestly, so many more I could add, if only I could remember the members from the earlier days.

 

So many great people. Its almost impossible remembering them all without going through a memberlist. Loved Hardy (HA12D)'s pk videos which were pretty good for the time. I also forgot about Joker until you mentioned him.

On 9/22/2020 at 4:19 AM, Icedrop said:

If you could name 3 of your top non-officials members that come to mind during your eras who would they be?

Tough question.  Generally the better members did get noticed and ended up holding a rank of sorts.  I have had a quick click through some of our old Runehead memberlists on the Way Back Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20070801000000*/http://runehead.com/clans/ml.php?clan=rsdinasty in case anybody wants to take a look themself) to quickly find/throw up some names.  Dj Mochasins probably did hold one rank or another at some point during his time in the clan, but he was a good and longstanding member who could have perhaps been a PK Leader or even Co Leader.  H A 12 D was a bit of a maverick but a very good PKer and an asset on the battlefield in the earlier days.  Similar to Dj Mochasins, Beckham69 did hold ranks but spent a good amount of time unranked and was a very solid all round member and one of few Aussies in the clan.

==ice==

 

Thanks for the love Chris. Think I was FA Manager for awhile, but I was always going to have problems having any kind of rank due to my activity which wasn't too bad in the first few years. Waking up at 4-5am every Sunday/Monday slowly started to get in the way of my life. I would have given anything to be in the same timezone as everyone else! I brushed my now wife a few times for pkri's lol. In the middle and towards the end I tried to make up for my inactivity by keeping forums active as much as possible.

 

Best memories were I think 2005 with the mage bank fights with Di. Remember multiple times taking out one di member then next minute 20-30 members log in. I had a bit of history with bibbleboy from the axe hut training days so I would always go after him cos being completely honest he was a dickhead lol. 

Edited September 22, 2020 by Beckham69

[Icedrop 8]

8 hours ago, JayJay said:

Why/how did you start the whole 1 year prep trip?

Why did people call you grandads/grandmas - was your average age actually that much older?

Why did your clan have such a "holier than thou" attitude. I hated fighting RSD because it was hard to get motivated to. If so much as one of my members dropped any kind of flame your officials were always straight into my pms complaining. 

Why/how did you start the whole 1 year prep trip?

I think some of our rivals alleged that we would only fight if we had weeks/months' worth of notice.  We decided to go along with it and prepare for a year.  I think it was just as a bit of a joke when it was posted, but as we got nearer the time we figured why not go ahead with the event!

Why did people call you grandads/grandmas - was your average age actually that much older?

We had a handful of older members, but most of us were in our teens, or early 20s.  We had a bit more of a mature/less childish culture as a clan, which was not always so much about age but more about the type of member we attracted.

Why did your clan have such a "holier than thou" attitude. I hated fighting RSD because it was hard to get motivated to. If so much as one of my members dropped any kind of flame your officials were always straight into my pms complaining.

Our members took pride in the values we held as a clan and felt that was one of the things that set us apart from our opponents.  I can see how that might have resulted in people thinking that we had a "holier than thou" attitude.  I never really got how that meant that our rivals wouldn't get motivated to fight us.  I'd have though for some that beating the clan with the "holier than thou" attitude would have been more of an inspiration than somebody talking rubbish ingame or on forums.

==ice==

 

[Icedrop 8]

34 minutes ago, ^_^ said:

As a Cor member for numerous years mainly during the time period where both clans were reasonably good and should have fought each other a lot more, but didn't for some reason (I mainly get @JayJay's opinions of the reasons why we didn't have a significant rivalry/numerous fights)

In your opinion why do you  feel that COR and RSD did not fight more then we did and why do you feel that a rivalry did not ever develop over time between the two clans?

(What I am trying to say is out of all the clans that were active and we seemed to fight and have rivalry with, I can barely remember fighting RSD at all and you seem to be the only clan that I have this opinion with - hell all i can remember really of RSD in my period of clanning was that I used to leach Dungeoneering off your maxed players when was like 1700/1800 total ? )

In your opinion why do you  feel that COR and RSD did not fight more then we did and why do you feel that a rivalry did not ever develop over time between the two clans?

Off the top of my head, I recall that COR's peak was in the second half of 2006 or the first half of 2007.  That coincided with the time that RSD was at its weakest.  There would have been some degree of crossover whilst either clan was on its way up and down, but there was probably a narrow window during which the clans were of equal strength back then.

==ice==

[Lavigne 901]

4 hours ago, Icedrop said:

 

Who were RSD's best Mage Bank PKers post-Desert Treasure and why?

To be totally honest I don't remember how Desert Treasure changed Mage Bank PKing.  Peak Mage Bank era (I'd say 2004/5) is a long time ago!

==ice==

 

 

 

Pre-DT was more tank heavy, TB tribrid and pure melee were pretty common since the normal spell book was complete trash. There were a few people who were fairly decent god mage hybrids though. Zammy flames scaled with mage level and could hit hard in an era where everyone didn't carry a fuckload of brews to MB. Full TBs in no-brew era MB lasted an eternity and with most MBers not praying 1v1 and many clans strictly forbidding logging and xlogging, was hard to get out when your only option was to run and try to buy time in axe hut or the other place near the bats, think it was like a pirate hut or something. HA12D was probably one of the better MBers from RSD in both pre and post Ancients.

Also yeah DS were strong, but they were also severely overrated, most of what made them look good came from being predominantly OCE, in a lot of PKRIs they held a significant advantage as the later it got, the better chance DS would come out on top by an increasing margin.

Edited September 22, 2020 by Lavigne

[Bow 15]

13 hours ago, Fire said:

@Bow

What was yours/RSD opinion on the whole Holy alliance vs Slave alliance crashwar?

I think both sides ended up being slaves to the other, nothing existed without them all being involved.  

[Bow 15]

10 hours ago, JayJay said:

Why/how did you start the whole 1 year prep trip?

Why did people call you grandads/grandmas - was your average age actually that much older?

Why did your clan have such a "holier than thou" attitude. I hated fighting RSD because it was hard to get motivated to. If so much as one of my members dropped any kind of flame your officials were always straight into my pms complaining. 

I believe it was DF bantered after losing a fight a few days before Christmas, and said our pull was because of a year prep or some nonsense.  It became a joke topic in our spam forum about a year prep and who would be there.. as dates got closer and the clan world was tied up in a crash war per usual, we just went with having a pk trip on that same day for the luls of it.  I don't believe anyone came out to fight. 

Mostly Grandmas and Grandpas because we had a few members who were older, but more so our average age was probably 5-6 years older than most other clans like EoS, VR, DF.  Easy banter that just stuck for the clan world.  Funny enough it never offended any of us, we embraced it.  Imagine losing to old people, such losers.  

I'm sure there were some officials that would PM, I don't recall any time where I went to any opposing clan and asked for banter to stop.  It was entertaining to me.  As far as a holier than thou, I think the elitism that was instilled just rubbed people that way.  We had the highest reqs to get in, we had the highest activity requirements, and rigorous trial process.  If our people wanted to be the best they'd strive for it and join and hit those bench marks.  I don't think anyone was ever told to be that way or put off that perception, just turned out we weren't phased or caught up in the petty crap.  So in the end it maybe it wasn't so much an attitude, we just were better and that annoyed people.  

Edited September 22, 2020 by Bow

[King_Obina 78]

@LivinLarge21 7 years as the leader of RSD, have you noticed any major changes to the clan as a whole after you stepped down?

[LivinLarge21 4]

1 hour ago, King_Obina said:

@LivinLarge21 7 years as the leader of RSD, have you noticed any major changes to the clan as a whole after you stepped down?

I would say not as strict, but that is probably a good thing, there were times I will admit that I went over board.  After I handed the leadership to Ice, I didn't pay a lot of attention, #1 I knew he would do a good job, since he did more than people realize in the co-leader position, #2 my life was just too busy at the time to really pay that close attention and even was quite busy in 2007 which I think affected the clan, because I wasn't as active as I really wanted to be(I personally think RSD could have been better if this thing called RL didn't get in the way lol :), or I had stepped away sooner and gave the clan to a more active individual, but you know ego and all). Unfortunately, I cannot really comment during Bow's leadership, at this point I had written off RuneScape, maybe occasionally logging in to just see what the game was about, but never stuck around for a long period.

Edited September 23, 2020 by LivinLarge21

[Shenanigans 5]

Some of these things are so spot on it hurts remembering them. Always a good laugh to read about some things. The legend pt37 himself though. 

[Shenanigans 5]

On 9/19/2020 at 5:21 PM, Bow said:

I don't follow the clan world much at all, I haven't gone pking in years now and I don't have any ambition to.  From people I've talked to vaguely about it it sounds like it plateaued on OSRS years ago and is even a shell of what it was then.  If it exists out of nostalgia and people going out and having fun once in a while, all the power to people that want to do that. 

I never stopped playing the game and I have no plans to.  I enjoy my passive approach and the community of the pvm clan I'm a part of now.  As I've said before RSD is not in the cards.  People have moved on and that is the best thing for everyone.  

I'm not aware of what RoT is doing these days to all of those points.  Sounds like the same things that haunted them in years past if any of it were true.  

Quoted for emphasis. That is all.