The History of International 1 (Part 1)

The text below is by Dillon Cail, not Cyberstorm. You can find the full post here.
Part 2

"Hello GGE players  My name is Dillon Cail and I played in the International 1 server as DillonCail from late December, 2011 to late February, 2013 (a little over a year). I led the Sparta alliance for much of my time in the game and most importantly, I got to know many great people from my experiences in the game. A player asked if I could write about the history of Sparta, and I said if I ever got a free minute I would. I am going to do the best I can to describe everything I can remember from when I first joined to a couple of months after I left. Some information will be incomplete or missing, but at least it should be accurate for any who are interested. If you have any questions or any information to add, go ahead and e-mail me at DillonCail@hotmail.com. Some of this history here will pertain to Sparta, but I plan to write my experiences in the game and including Sparta in a separate article. Anyway, here goes…

When I first joined this game, the maximum level was 39. Many players had already reached this level and their castles were completed. Outposts already existed when I joined the game and the most powerful alliance in the game seemed to be Royalty, though Invictus Prime and Die Orkbande were also very powerful (though Die Orkbande was on the decline). I would like to go through what I know of the history of each alliance one by one.

Let’s begin with Royalty (later STEEL)… I never actually knew the founder of Royalty (though Dinkidi knows the name I believe). When I had joined, Arthuria was the queen and Royalty was a much feared alliance. Soon enough, the leader of Royalty Elite, sreelrain, was promoted as leader alongside Arthuria. Eventually Arthuria would step down, leaving sreelrain at the top. He was known for his swift, decisive actions and memory. Both he and Arthuria were well-respected by the Royalty members and under their rule, Royalty flourished with numbers, power, and execution. At one point, Invictus and Royalty went to war against each other. Somehow, a player inside Invictus was accused of hacking a Royalty player’s account and using the time in the account to do much damage to one of Royalty’s strongest divisions and waste rubies. If I remember correctly, several accounts were hack during this same time, and they sent out all of their defenders while sending attacks on them from supposedly friendly accounts. It is strongly believed a player inside Invictus had an inside connection with an employee from GGE and was given access to multiple passwords. There was substantial proof to back up this claim and Royalty was considering involving lawyers until GGE had replaced some of the damage done. Despite all the damage from this fiasco, Royalty still was victorious over Invictus and Invictus never recovered to their former power and glory from that war.

In the summer or late summer of 2012, Royalty was the biggest and alliance in the game without question, but they were largely hated. While the leadership had good intentions and were anti-bullying, many alliances paid no regard to the leadership and acted on their own, doing whatever they pleased. Leadership eventually grew tired of this and wanted to start again with a clean slate. They took the core divisions and some others and recreated Royalty (now called STEEL), leaving behind the other divisions. There divisions would soon scatter and find new alliances to join. STEEL was a quite powerful alliance for a few months, though not initially the largest. When the largest and perhaps most powerful alliance of that time (Sparta) suddenly collapsed, many of the divisions joined STEEL and STEEL once again became the largest and definitely the most powerful alliance in the game. By this time, sreelrain had very recently retired and with the addition of some of the Sparta divisions, STEEL now was maybe the biggest alliance in the history of the game in any server (I believe it was 56 divisions?). Habdo, Dinkidi and Sir Lionheart (who seemed to step down very quickly) took over the leaders or STEEL. Capitals had also now been introduced into the game and while Sparta was making the transition into other alliances, there was a dispute over a capital belonging to a Bad Boys division that ended up in STEEL. There are two stories: The first given to me by the leader of Bad Boys Piratz (the division that the capital belonged to) that they captured the capital and then Bad Boys main attacked them to take it from them so they fled to STEEL. The second given to me by the leadership of BB (and I tend to believe this one) is that they had agreed to give them the capital in exchange that Bad Boys would let this division (only originally meant to be temporary) stay on as a permanent division of Bad Boys. But then when the agreed upon attacks came in, this division had gone to STEEL for support and successfully defended the Capital attacks from Bad Boys, with STEEL’s help. I was told later on by a reliable source that STEEL had made them a better offer and that is why they came over in the manner they did. Regardless of which is the truth, Bad Boys declared war on STEEL over this capital and a 3-month long war followed. Initially, it seemed STEEL had a slight advantage and then it became more apparent STEEL was winning the war as time progressed. Then, a couple weeks in, Hells Warriors and Musketiere also joined in the war against STEEL to form a new and now highly recognized coalition named Hells Boys. After 3 months, all sides had lost many rubies, players, hours of sleep- the cost was great- but it was STEEL that clearly suffered the most. After this war, STEEL was never able to recover to their former power and within a couple of months STEEL disappeared altogether."