MAIN » ARTICLESTON Clan - From Dust to Dust2
1. Introduction
The "TON Clan" first appeared in the LANs and WANs of early 2002. Online, the early members of the group frequented servers such as EE (Eastenders Clan) where current member of the B-Team and Decoy favourite Lazy played. We quickly became known to some of the regulars on the server, and still play them to this date (DPC - Shotgun Ned, Megatron, Flak, Fragment etc) and for a long time it stayed this way with online stats proving quite addictive. Whilst Lazy was a regular on the best M4 performer, I was more concerned with killing the most hostages. That summed us up quite a lot at the time. Online we were:
[TON] Buzz Lightyear
[TON] yaj
[TON] Hendrix
[TON] B3v4N
[TON] randy
This group is now known as "the core" - the original 5 players who formed the ton clan, and remain to this day the starting 5 for any official matches. The second existence running parallel with the online activity was at local LANs. From the Barry White Memorial Mansion to Randall's Palace and even one trip to Bev's house, TON was getting good representation and bringing in others such as Grant, Rusty, Rawson, Pandy and even Groundsman Kent at least once. Some of them would not play for us properly for a long time, and others never to date, but at a LAN anyone and everyone (except Hulley) was welcome to tag up and get down to business. Alan preferred to keep his official tag during all clan games, which I think at the time was DPC - Deviant PC. When DPC moved to their own server, and interest from the core in playing died down, so did the clan. The rise and fall of the LAN was a mirror to the microcosm that [TON] existed within.
2. Re-Introduction
A long time later, in a time not so far behind us now, the clan was to become active again. The flame of counter-strike was relit with the 1.6 release based on a few new weapons, a shield and the same addictive gameplay. [DPC] was now Decoy and Lazy was still exersizing his wrist in competative matches over at the now infamous EnemyDown website. Discussion quickly came about that led to TON joining ED.
The initial interest was surprisingly high for a normally apathetic group and even more surprising was the follow though that really got everybody tingling. I updated the tag to the stylish vertical line - | - rather than the outdated square brackets and got Rusty working on the clan site once more. A few players on the site and we were ready for our first match since the Wheeler's Mum fiasco at BevLAN 2002:
ton|hash_
ton|Buzz Lightyear
ton|hendrix
ton|b3v4n
ton|dave
ton|rusty
3. Decline
Decline started with our first match. We played Decoy in what was really a bad choice for starting out. We played Inferno, which we later discovered was their best map and got slaughtered 24 - 0 despite achieving objective #1: kill Alan. It became apparent that we'd need to set more real targets and get ourselves into shape quickly. We did this and then proceeded to lose 22 - 2 to #fffuk in our next game. This was the first ladder match in Divison 3 (the lowest division) and was also on inferno, so things were not looking bright. However, I drew what positives I could from the game and realised were exponentially increasing the amount of rounds we won in each consecutive match.
Amazingly this trend continued to our third match - our best yet - a 16-8 loss to =[NI]= on Dust2. The next 3 games were sad times for all concerned and we lost them all picking up a cumulative total of only 6 rounds out of a possible 72. Even the offer of cake for victory produced a 21 - 3 loss. We even played Lazy in one of the games and this achieved very little. The date was now the 6th of January 2004 and the new year had begun even worse than it ended.
4. Growth
Morale was low, tears had flowed, been wiped away and come down again. We all took a 7-day break from playing another match on ED and took this time to pull ourselves together and re-evaluate. I realised we needed more players to give us increased options and availability. I searched the local community for good CS players that would lead us to victory but I couldn't find any so I asked some people I knew instead. Over the next couple of weeks the team would swell to include some of the strangest people you could imagine:
ton|blue
ton|F/2antic
ton|rawson
ton|pandeh
ton|statto
We now had a B-team. The break proved a winner and with some good tactics we romped to victory on Dust2 with help from Alan and Flak from Decoy. Hendy, myself and Greeny were there for the first win and it was a nice moment. Our real first victory as a core group wouldn't come until 5 days later however against bf.zen on Inferno. I lasted the second half of the match being constantly heckled by Tom and Dave about recieving cake once we'd won. I began to regret ever mentioning the bloody cake. Apart from one spur-of-the-moment friendly, we'd been winning more rounds in every match and things were promising even in our losses. Bringing ourselves right up to date with our last match being a victory against m4$H3d on Aztec. We are yet to win twice on one map, but times have never been this good for the clan and this Sunday gives us 2 chances to get that second win and our fourth in total. To the batmobile!
Written by Jay
The "TON Clan" first appeared in the LANs and WANs of early 2002. Online, the early members of the group frequented servers such as EE (Eastenders Clan) where current member of the B-Team and Decoy favourite Lazy played. We quickly became known to some of the regulars on the server, and still play them to this date (DPC - Shotgun Ned, Megatron, Flak, Fragment etc) and for a long time it stayed this way with online stats proving quite addictive. Whilst Lazy was a regular on the best M4 performer, I was more concerned with killing the most hostages. That summed us up quite a lot at the time. Online we were:
[TON] Buzz Lightyear
[TON] yaj
[TON] Hendrix
[TON] B3v4N
[TON] randy
This group is now known as "the core" - the original 5 players who formed the ton clan, and remain to this day the starting 5 for any official matches. The second existence running parallel with the online activity was at local LANs. From the Barry White Memorial Mansion to Randall's Palace and even one trip to Bev's house, TON was getting good representation and bringing in others such as Grant, Rusty, Rawson, Pandy and even Groundsman Kent at least once. Some of them would not play for us properly for a long time, and others never to date, but at a LAN anyone and everyone (except Hulley) was welcome to tag up and get down to business. Alan preferred to keep his official tag during all clan games, which I think at the time was DPC - Deviant PC. When DPC moved to their own server, and interest from the core in playing died down, so did the clan. The rise and fall of the LAN was a mirror to the microcosm that [TON] existed within.
2. Re-Introduction
A long time later, in a time not so far behind us now, the clan was to become active again. The flame of counter-strike was relit with the 1.6 release based on a few new weapons, a shield and the same addictive gameplay. [DPC] was now Decoy and Lazy was still exersizing his wrist in competative matches over at the now infamous EnemyDown website. Discussion quickly came about that led to TON joining ED.
The initial interest was surprisingly high for a normally apathetic group and even more surprising was the follow though that really got everybody tingling. I updated the tag to the stylish vertical line - | - rather than the outdated square brackets and got Rusty working on the clan site once more. A few players on the site and we were ready for our first match since the Wheeler's Mum fiasco at BevLAN 2002:
ton|hash_
ton|Buzz Lightyear
ton|hendrix
ton|b3v4n
ton|dave
ton|rusty
3. Decline
Decline started with our first match. We played Decoy in what was really a bad choice for starting out. We played Inferno, which we later discovered was their best map and got slaughtered 24 - 0 despite achieving objective #1: kill Alan. It became apparent that we'd need to set more real targets and get ourselves into shape quickly. We did this and then proceeded to lose 22 - 2 to #fffuk in our next game. This was the first ladder match in Divison 3 (the lowest division) and was also on inferno, so things were not looking bright. However, I drew what positives I could from the game and realised were exponentially increasing the amount of rounds we won in each consecutive match.
Amazingly this trend continued to our third match - our best yet - a 16-8 loss to =[NI]= on Dust2. The next 3 games were sad times for all concerned and we lost them all picking up a cumulative total of only 6 rounds out of a possible 72. Even the offer of cake for victory produced a 21 - 3 loss. We even played Lazy in one of the games and this achieved very little. The date was now the 6th of January 2004 and the new year had begun even worse than it ended.
4. Growth
Morale was low, tears had flowed, been wiped away and come down again. We all took a 7-day break from playing another match on ED and took this time to pull ourselves together and re-evaluate. I realised we needed more players to give us increased options and availability. I searched the local community for good CS players that would lead us to victory but I couldn't find any so I asked some people I knew instead. Over the next couple of weeks the team would swell to include some of the strangest people you could imagine:
ton|blue
ton|F/2antic
ton|rawson
ton|pandeh
ton|statto
We now had a B-team. The break proved a winner and with some good tactics we romped to victory on Dust2 with help from Alan and Flak from Decoy. Hendy, myself and Greeny were there for the first win and it was a nice moment. Our real first victory as a core group wouldn't come until 5 days later however against bf.zen on Inferno. I lasted the second half of the match being constantly heckled by Tom and Dave about recieving cake once we'd won. I began to regret ever mentioning the bloody cake. Apart from one spur-of-the-moment friendly, we'd been winning more rounds in every match and things were promising even in our losses. Bringing ourselves right up to date with our last match being a victory against m4$H3d on Aztec. We are yet to win twice on one map, but times have never been this good for the clan and this Sunday gives us 2 chances to get that second win and our fourth in total. To the batmobile!
Written by Jay