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The History Behind the New Team of Weapons and Tactics
The Beginning
Our story begins in August of 2008, shortly following the release of the game Grand Theft Auto IV on the PlayStation® 3, when a group of just a few friends who began truly enjoying the game decided to provide emergency services to other players in the game's multiplayer free mode. Among the group, one of them (Christopher) agreed to begin a website to establish and advertise their free services. This is where our story begins: and since the no one in the group could think of a super-creative name, they chose to run with the generic name of Liberty City Emergency Services. Within a week, we had a very basic website with a generic logo and a couple of pictures. Since even the oldest of our group was only 15-years old at the time, it was difficult for any of us to easily acquire any professional level webshoting and domain for free, so we used the free Google Page Creator service.
Not even a few weeks passed before the group gathered the idea to also offer non-emergency services to the public, such as security and transit services. We immediately began supporting security and transit services to the public, which many players seemed to enjoy. We quickly realized that we needed a more fitting name, and after a few days of a lot of thinking, we almost settled with United Divisions of Liberty City before deciding to re-arrange it slightly and use Liberty City United Divisions as our new name. It was a splended moment indeed when we settled on this name, as it perfectly described the nature of our services, and would easily enable us to offer more services in the future if we chose to do so. Christopher decided that he wanted to help us plant our roots, so-to-speak, and finally sprung on purchasing a dedicated domain for our website, www.LibertyCityUnitedDivisions.com. While we were not necessarily pleased with how long the domain was, at the time, it was the only domain available for purchase that suited us.
Things continued to go well in our multiplayer ventures, and we gained a fair presence on the PlayStation® Network. So well, that in-fact, another group of players unknown to us, decided to start their own group under the same name as us, though with a focus on roleplay rather than serving the public. They housed their site at lcudclan.com. We thankfully had obtained a much shorter domain, for free, at lcud.co.cc for some time, until the free domain registrar went defunct a few years later. At that point we searched around and finally got a shorter permanent domain, lcud.net. The co-existance of these two gaming entities caused much frustration, as many players in the community became confused due to the presence of two separate entities that shared the same name while practicing very different play styles. Though we attempted to get in-touch with the other group, our professional and friendly attempts to contact them were met with extremely sarcastic, angry, unprofessional, and suggestive remarks. They refused to admit that they blatantly stole our name, and insisted that they were the first ones to come up with the name (despite us existing for over an entire year before they began). Eventually, despite our numerous attempts at asking them to kindly change their name, we decided it was a waste of our time to try and get them to do the right thing. They always talked highly of themselves and appeared to be quite narcissistic. Despite them laughing and scoffing at us for our continued professionalism, we ended up leaving them alone and even referring players that ended up being interested in role-play over to them.
Despite the co-existance of the two distinct gaming entities, things continued to go fairly well both in-game and on our website. Our website was split into two parts— our main site that was migrated to Google Sites (as the Google Page Creator was phased-out), and our forums which were proudly powered by phpBB3 forum software. Following the announcement of Grand Theft Auto V and its future release, we even began setup of a new entity, Los Santos United Divisions over at lsud.net.
Team of Weapons and Tactics
Fast forward to late 2012, when the oldest of the group, Christopher, was having fun playing a game of Battlefield 3 on the PlayStation® 3. At somepoint during the game, a player verbally invited him to join their "small clan". Although Christopher was initially had his doubts, due to poor experiences in past clans, the recruiter didn't back down and insisted that Christopher's concern over his past experiences would not be a problem with them, and assured that they were "nothing serious, just a relaxed group of friends looking for other players to play with". Christopher took the leap and decided to accept invitation. They called themselves the "3rd Infantry Division". Things were seemingly fine for the first couple of months of off-and-on gaming with the bunch. Unfortunately, things did not remain this way, and after a few months, things started to go downhill.
The clan started getting more serious, and things began taking a turn for the worse. Clan leaders began expecting others to play the game that they wanted it to be played, rather than allowing members the freedom to play with their own style. Clan leaders also began enforcing stricter schedules and minimum weekly hours, requiring members to be present a minimum of 20 hours per week while recommending 25-30 hours of weekly participation for best results. In addition, at least one of the leaders went rogue, caused problems, and proceeded to frame other members for their own selfish actions. As if all this wasn't enough of an excuse for Christopher to leave, he officially resigned from the 3rd Infantry Division in December of 2012, after being threatened to be kicked out of the clan for not wearing their official clan tags.
Following Christopher's resignation from the 3rd Infantry Division, he proceeded on his own again and began to think of starting his own gaming community for Battlefield, similar to Liberty City United Divisions. To Christopher's surprise, less than 24 hours after his resignation from the 3rd Infantry Division, three other members of theirs also resigned. As we all were on each others friends list at the time, we all couldn't help but talk about the angst and disgust that the clan had began to turn into. Christopher presented his idea of starting his own community, and the others agreed to all join and be the owners of the new gaming group, which we all agreed to call TWAT (short for Team of Weapons and Tactics. This conveniently marked the beginning of the Team of Weapons and Tactics in January of 2013.
Christopher began setting up our initial website, by utilizing a subdomain on the Liberty City United Divisions domain, twat.lcud.net. We rented our first Battlefield 3 server on the PlayStation® 3 shortly after, and within weeks our server began to flourish. We had a dedicated group of admins consistently monitoring and playing on our server, which in-turn helped to keep it populated and gain its popularity. Within just a few months, we even heard players on other servers talking about our overy own server, with tons of players commenting on how they enjoyed the environment and culture of the server. Throughout this time, even more people left the 3rd Infantry Division and came to join our team. Leaders at the 3rd Infantry Division couldn't help but make condescending comments to members of ours, saying things such as "thank the TWATs for taking our sloppy seconds" and so forth.
Despite their childish condescending remarks, we held our position— and statistics said it all. Despite the 3rd Infantry Division having their own server for longer than we had ours, their traffic had quickly dwindled down to nothing, while traffic to ours was steadily active and frequently at-capacity. There were many occassions even we as admins could not join our server as it was full! It was clear that we were doing the right thing. We had the numbers and the members to prove it, and we prided ourselves in having a stable environment that everyone enjoyed. As we grew steadily, Christopher decided it best that we get our own separate website, and registered the domain teamofweaponsandtactics.com in May of 2013 for our official website.
Merge of Liberty City United Divisions and the Team of Weapons And Tactics
Things continued to flourish with both Liberty City United Divisions and the Team of Weapons And Tactics. Setup was also coming along well with our newly started Los Santos United Divisions. But it became increasingly tedious and needlessly more expensive to maintain LCUD, LSUD, and TWAT as separate entities. We even received a couple of suggestions from our members that our acronym (TWAT) was perceived as somewhat-offensive by some of our female members. Later on, we even ran into some issues when getting new servers, as we were unable to use our clan tag ([TWAT]) within the names of the servers, in order to easily identify servers due to the other meanings of the acronym.
After some careful thinking and consideration, the decision was finally made in July of 2013 to merge Liberty City United Divisions (which only played Grand Theft Auto IV), the Team of Weapons and Tactics (which only played Battlefield 3), and Los Santos United Divisions (which would have only played Grand Theft Auto V) into a single entity, the New Team of Weapons and Tactics, which would not only support all three games (and potentially future releases), but also a variety of other popular games. Since the Team of Weapons And Tactics began in January 2013 and Liberty City United Divisions was founded in August of 2008, we have considered ourselves in whole to be founded in 2008.
As a result of the merge, our domains lcud.net and lsud.net were consequently let go later that same year. Due to technical limitations in some backend services that we utilized however, we kept the domain name teamofweaponsandtactics.com and continued to use it as our official website.
New Team of Weapons and Tactics
Things continued to flourish in our community. We had acquired a number of Battlefield 3 servers and had expanded our roots from the PlayStation® 3 and PlayStation® 4 to also support the PC platform. We had acquired several Battlefield 3 servers on the PC platform, and even pre-ordered our first Battlefield 4 server for PC and had it deployed by launch day, Octboer 29, 2013. server By 2014, an existing clan by the name of United Special Forces (USF) teamed up with the New Team of Weapons and Tactics. Later that year, a new member from Canada had joined our team, and was initially very excited to help us recruit new members. Unfortunately neither the newly teamed-up USF clan nor the new recruit ended up working out, and before the end of 2014, USF had disbanded from the New Team of Weapons and Tactics, and the Canadian recruit (who went rogue seemingly due to some personal issues) ended up getting himself terminated from the team.
A few months following the release of Grand Theft Auto V on PC in 2015, and many of our members were having loads of fun playing Grand Theft Auto Online. Following a heavy presence of griefers maliciously modding and causing havoc and crashing of other players' games, Christopher (one of the founders of the New Team of Weapons and Tactics) released his very own companion software, Extender Information Security 2015 to help protect against malicious modders. Although it was far from perfect, many versions and several releases followed the original release, with each one offering improved protection as well as new security features. The software was downloaded over 5,000 times collectively across all its releases, until it was discontinued shortly before January 1st, 2018, as Take-Two and Rockstar Games began to strictly enforce rules forbidding the use of modifications in GTA Online.
Today
Fast-forward to today, and it is now 2023— approximately 15 years since we began our journey in 2008. Although we had our share of ups and downs, we always promised that we would do our best to stay, to help provide a professional medium for players to socialize, play, and have fun.
Throughout our journey, despite getting made fun of, scoffed at, or ridiculed by other gaming clans and entities who thought they were better than us, we are here, and we're still going strong!
Ultimately, we pride ourselves in remaining strong and active all these years. Properly operating and running an organization takes a consistent amount of work including logical thinking, persistence, dedication, and passion. Even the clan that tried to copy us didn't stand any chances. Nevertheless, even though these clans treated us with as much disrespect as one could imagine, we don't feel the need to stoop down to their levels and insult them or rub their noses in it. After all, why beat a dead horse? The fact that we have been able to remain tough and stay standing even after all these years should be enough evidence in its own right. We certainly don't claim to be perfect, but we must be doing something right!
Trivia
- In 2016, the New Team of Weapons and Tactics acquired a new domain, ntwt.us and migrated our site to use it in lieu of our original domain teamofweaponsandtactics.com.
- Despite teamofweaponsandtactics.com being our old domain, the New Team of Weapons and Tactics continues to withold rights to it due to technical limitations in some legacy backend services that we utilize that do not allow domain name changes. Like all other secondary domains that we withold rights to, visiting the website merely redirects visitors to our live site.
- In 2021, the New Team of Weapons and Tactics re-acquired its old, previously abandoned domains for historical reasons. These acquired domains are considered secondary domains that merely redirect visitors that navigate to them over to our live site. These include:
- The narcissistic clan that copied our name and scoffed at us, the LCUD Clan (lcudclan.com), ceased operations on December 2nd 2013, per an official announcement on their website.
- In April 2021, the New Team of Weapons and Tactics snatched up and purchased their domain in efforts to prevent any possible future repetitive incidents relating to the nature of mimicking or copying our property. Our acquisition of the domain further symbolizes our strength, perseverance, and agility. The domain https://www.lcudclan.com/ redirects to our live site.
- The disorganized and rogue clan ran by a then 40-year-old manager Sergeant-Crunch, the 3rd Infantry Division (3rdinfantrydivision.enjin.com), died off less than a year after the Team of Weapons And Tactics was formed. They desperately tried to keep their website alive, though the last donation was made in June 11, 2015. From there, their site has remained inactive since July of 2015.
- The Canadian recruit bvet4dog had some personal issues that was believed to be caused by his excessive use of drugs, which he did not make any attempt to hide. After he went rogue one night, banning everyone on one of our Battlefield 3 servers on PC, he was terminated, and moved on to start his own clan that he named [KS] Killing Squad. He took some of the members he brought to us with him, and created a number of fake tournaments/matches featuring non-existant fights between Killing Squad and the New Team of Weapons and Tactics, with Killing Squad taking all the wins. Despite all of this, his newly-formed clan didn't last long, and died after just a few short months. Following their demise, some of his members even returned to play as visitors on our servers.
