The History of OT in Tribal Wars

Amended History of the OTB
by JFSOCC

Prelude:
The History of the Off-Topic brotherhood actually begins before any founding member made his way to Tribal Wars. You see there is another online game called
World War II Online(linkie), and it is from this game that our first tribemembers came.

The select group of crazed individuals, freshly escaped from an asylum, and probably still on the run today, were very active on the World War II Online internet forum, more specifically the “Off-Topic” section of that forum. This is where the Off-Topic Brotherhood gets its name from.

Now these “crazed individuals” didn’t exactly decided from one day on another that they wanted to play Tribal Wars. (well actually they did, but bear with me)
You see, there is a history of “invading games” someone would find a new online game, more often than not free or cheap to play, and the challenge was to Invade the game en-masse, and try as quickly as possible to wreak as much havoc as possible. To break all the unwritten rules, and to make known that an organised group of troublemakers could indeed make a lot of trouble.

And it had various results, Off-Topic invaded games like Second Life(linkie), or Nukezone.(Linkie)
And always was there inpact. Either there were mass bannings, or rules were changed to stiffle the exploits of the OTB.

In Second life the inpact of the OTB was so great, that Wired Magazine (linkie) made an article about us, and a proffesor of Princeton University used the OTB as an example in his thesis on conflict resolution, as part of the social contracts theory(wikilink)(linkie)

It was just a matter of time before one of the Off-Topic Members stumbled on Tribal Wars, and that is where for most of us it began. World 3 had just been Created, and that was the obvious choice for the “Criminally insane” to join in mass.
-

Inception:

The first two tribes of the Off-Topic Brotherhood, OT and SOT, were respectively the OT’ers still player WWIIOL and the OT’s merely part of the “asylum break-out” the secret members of OFF-Topic. Hence SOT.

Now, when they just began, believe it or not, the members of the newly formed OTB, did not in fact know much abou the game, and for not timing their joining World 3 to coincide, became scattered across the continents. Some of you might know that in this game you are a lot stronger if you are grouped together, so that was when one of the more drastic choices was made, turning a group of lunatics in to responsible leaders organising themselves: non-OT’ers had to join, to fill in the large gaps in distance between OTB members.

Off course, there is a problem with mass joinings on World 3: there is a membership limit per tribe, and with already 2 tribes (OT and SOT) filled with lunatics, we were running out of space.
So more tribes were created, and that led to the second drastic event of the OTB: the creation of the Off-site forums you are on now.
The leaders had noticed that good communication and coordination are pretty much the most important elements for success in the game, and having everybody together greatly helped. The OTB success soared, and quickly became very well known and a force to be reckoned with on World 3.

There still was one thing that finalized the OTB formula: the Creation of Companies.(forumlinkie) you see, having everybody together helps communication, but if somone on the other side of a growing world needs help, that call could go unheeded except by those too far away to do any good. Some misadventures gave the leaders, who by now had gained some experience, and like the geeks they are started calculation, well, everything,(everything calculator linkie) the idea that our tribe needed to be organised by geographical location.
Quicly the decision was made to devide the world, still not very large, into 8 companies, each of which relatively self-sufficent, but still in contact with the rest.

And that is the basic shape and form of the Off-Topic Brotherhood till date.

Early times:
Now that the OTB was organised properly, expansion exploded. It was in these early days that another up and coming family Cult of the Blood Moon, had also started to become a dominant force. While some of our founding members becamse personal allies with some of Cult’s founding members, it was only natural that when we started to organise our diplomacy, largely neglected until then, Cult and OT would become close personal allies. Over the course of time, both Cult and OT helped eachother in various conflicts, we even had a cultural exchange of members, some of our members today originally part of cult, and some of theirs originally OT.
This Close relation with Cult eventually led to the point where we no-longer desired to be “just allies” and we upgraded our alliance to a Mutual Defence Pact. Hurting one of us was hurting one of them, and vice versa.
And for a very long time (begin October) we have been thick as thieves.

Naturally, there were wars, we fought against various other tribes vying for world domination
[previous enemies tribelist-short timeline of war, and terms of surrender]
but with our superb organisation, our dedicated nutters, and the help of strong allies, both Cult and the OTB defeated them all. Today we remain to be one of the world powers while most of you, new players, probably never even heard of these tribes we defeated.

Conglomeration& organisation, the OT Identity
As we took on new members, and defeated various tribes, again our membership started to swell to numbers where the amount of tribes we had were not sufficient to hold them all. Some tribes mergerd with us, either as a last chance of survival, or because they gladly put down their own banner to fly our colours instead, sharing in the glory.
It must have been a shock, tribal dukes no longer had much to say, instead leadership was decided on these forums. But it was definitely a shock of revelation.

The following tribes have laid down their own banner to become part of the OTB, none of them have ever expressed disapointment in their choice to do so

[tribelist OTB merged tribes –previous tribenames- merged after war yes/no- testimonials satisfaction]

No longer did an OTB’er consider himself WWIIOL-OT’er first and TW-OT’er second. The OTB had gotten an Identity of its own. With banners proclaiming war experience or other services rendered, a company identity to be proud of, even if others would redicule it (to this day, we call accidentily or “accidentily” Nobling or attacking a tribemember by another tribe member in an “organised” action “Hotelling someone”), and a reputation of silence.

The Off-Topic Brotherhood has a rule against posting in the Tribal Wars forum (except of course the Off-Topic section) so whenever we went to war, whenever we did Anything it came as a huge surprise. We still are the talk of the day on those forums, although some able propaganda machines think they have succeeded in making us look weak, everybody still always is curious on what the OTB will do next.

When we did do something, often it was such a surprise that victory had been decided before war had begun. Some tribes have learned from this however, and now use any means they can, foul and dirty as some are, to even try to get an inkling of what we are to do next. It matters not, with our organisation.

Fresh blood, wars and streamlining recruitment:
Good times, proliferation, and too much success can have a bad effect on the quality of an organisation, much like a living organism thrives and evolves only under challenging conditions. The long line of successes of the OTB swelled our membership to a great extent. And unfortunately, that meant trouble

New members could get away with poor skill, hiding under the name of the OTB, others stopped following orders, simply not appearing on our forums.
Yet others still were such a liability that they caused our diplomats much headaches, attacking allies, breaking our no posting policy, or even spying for the enemy, still keen on knowing what OT’s next move would be.

And then of course there were the veterans, content with what they had already achieved, either lost interest and stopped playing, or stopped growing and particpating.

The OTB was growing fat, and with that, we were growing weak.
And the Solution we came up with you are seeing now, all around you: The Academy.

Check out the Forum althou it is closed for the public.