ClanBase is no more – we are sorry | Hacker News Reader

ClanBase is no more – we are sorry

clanbase.org

133 pointsJRambo45 comments

Unfortunately, this is what happens to online communities. Particularly those run by teenagers. I've been a member of a number of communities that have suffered deaths in very similar ways -- choked by the people who own the rights at the expense of the volunteers and the community.

It's unfortunate, because I find that often volunteer teenagers are the ones that truly have a passion for doing what they are doing, but they get held up by corporations or by people who want to monetize. When that doesn't work, the people in charge ignore the community until it dies.

It's sad to see it happen to another community.

> * have a passion for doing what they are doing, but they get held up by corporations or by people who want to monetize. *

Could those "passionate teenagers" have kept it running instead of selling the site in 2004 (why didn't they?), or would it have died much earlier if some "greedy" corporation hadn't picked it up and paid the bills all these years? It's great to have the passion to build something cool, but it's a little cooler if it's sustainable.

I don't know the history of this site, but it seems unlikely that most of the 'passionate teenagers' volunteers of the site throughout it's history didn't see any of the money that exchanged hands in 2004. It's usually got nothing to do with whether it was sustainable without a sale or not, it's just minority that owns 'the rights' deciding they can cash in, right?

Incorrect - the 3 founders that received money actually did spread the money around a bit to those who were working on the site for a while and/or had contributed in some major way. They had a lot of volunteers, so the percentage that got money I heard was small but it was that small group that did the large percentage of contributions.

"Since our sysadmin was not getting paid, he refused to perform this, essentially holding the site hostage for a while."

You don't pay the man and you expect him to do work for you, and then you blame him for holding the site hostage?

Sorry, what?

3 parties in that statement.

1) the people writing this, who did all the hard work

2) the system admin, hired by party 3 -

3) the people that should do the paying.

1 Has the right to whine at the expense of 3 not paying 2. To me, in that statement, that's what they're doing. They aren't saying 2 is the guilty party, just saying that the method is not one they appreciate, since the people suffering from party 2's actions are party 1.

I agree with you, but the specific language used could have been better. "Essentially holding the site hostage" implies that the ex-employee had a responsibility to do some work, which he did not.

Oh, I guess we disagree on that part then. To me it's pretty clear that they mean there's no way for their beloved baby (the site) to be returned because the person holding the power to return it is unwilling to do so. A bit like a school with kids locked inside and the janitor won't open the doors because the school didn't pay him.

Hah. Analogies.

(Yeah, I stretched it there.)

Now even I understood it.

I think the word "hostage" was just a statement of fact, and not a value judgement. I don't think the author blamed the sysadmin for doing so.

Sad state of affairs in gaming. My memories of a number of high profile "pro-gaming" organisations is almost entirely tainted by broken promises of paying out prize money to the winners of their competitions (delays, partial payouts, not paying out at all). With the GGL buying ClanBase in 2004 it was - unfortunately - only a matter of time before something like this happened.

I've often wondered why so many big name organizers have gone bust - why they end up with such bad reputations - why it's so hard to build a sustainable business out it. Of course with so many naive kids participating it must be very tempting for even remotely crooked people to take the money and run.

Two organisations which have been running for a while and which I still have respect for are ESWC and WCG. Would be interesting to hear from someone in the know about the economics about these operations.

So many good memories, gone. RIP CB.

-- Source: ex Quake3 player

I worked for a few of these organizations (CPL, WSVG) and have always been sad to see what's happened to esports/gaming.

As you mentioned, GGL was a particularly sketchy organization.

To be honest I'm happy to even see a fellow former Q3 player here :) Most of my gaming buddies and clan mates moved on to other fields. Who did you play for?

I'm sure there are many ex gamers lurking around on HN! I played clan games in the early days for a euro team called GZD.

What happened to the CPL was interesting to watch from a distance. Before I became good enough to compete at any level, I remember wanting to compete at CPL events. That, and legendary Doom tournaments, were a driving force for me to practice and get good.

What was your experience like working there? I can imagine it was awesome <sarcasm>until the discussion about money came up.</sarcasm>

There are definitely plenty of ex-gamers lurking on HN. I played under the nickname Daler in the United States. Mostly played Quake and Doom tournaments, but have competed on a variety of other games.

Unfortunately during the time I competed, there were many companies that would spring up and run tournaments with prizes that they ultimately could not pay out on. Or at best, the money would eventually get paid out months/years later. It was very hard for companies to make return on investment when running these gaming sites and tournaments. Overall, it was the work done by volunteers and "teenagers" that made the best events/sites/tournaments...

I always found it very unfortunate that the gaming scene was full of exploitation for these companies. What happened to the GGL (similarly the CPL), comes at no surprise.

Seems like the only ones who built a really sustainable business out of it is Turtle Entertainment (ESL). The Intel Extreme Masters stuff is huge!

It's a tough business. I'm sure things might be different today, but 10 years back it was very hard for companies and sponsors to run a sustainable (and growable) business in professional gaming. People like Angel Munoz and Ted Owen tried to make it more mainstream, and they had some great ideas on how to accomplish it... but ultimately badly timed and wrongly executed on the whole thing.

Fond memories of Clanbase though and sad it worked out like this.

I read this a "Coinbase is no more - we are sorry" and panicked for a second.

Yeah, you aren't the only one.

Me too. Suffered a mild heart attack :-)

Just shows how risky putting your money into coinbase is; no safety net if they decide to pull the plug. Not until bitcoin is considered legal tender and coinbase gets a bank audit and becomes part of insurance policies to recompensate people if they did end up going bankrupt.

The end of an era, sad. I remember playing ClanBase tournaments back in my Counter-Strike days.

Same here! ClanBase was one of the first systems out there to be matched compete against other big clans. We used it for a while in the EU CS scene, still remember how much we got our ass kicked one day by the 4kings clan on de_nuke.

OMG de_nuke... Those maps (de_nuke, de_dust2, de_aztec, de_inferno, etc...) sometimes appear in my dreams. I feel like I know them better than my own house!

Wow, sad. More than a decade ago Clanbase was all the rage. Their Eurocup tournaments were among the biggest and most prestigious in Quake3 and i loved to watch the big teams fighting for the crown each time. In 2002 i even went from Germany to the Quake Pub in Rotterdam to watch the Eurocup 3 Finals live. A few years later their best times were over though and the gaming community was different, they have been on a decline ever since.

Good times...sad to see them go :/

That's sad indeed.

I'm not blaming staff, but I think there's something they could have done indeed. Esport[1] is doing quite well nowadays, especially around blizzard games.

Blizzard has a lot of money to invest in this, seeing a big return value in turning a game into a sport, but it may not be possible without sponsors. If you want to organize tournaments with prizes, you have to have sponsors. In big esl events, those are intel, acer, nvidia, etc. Esport events are extremely well targeted events for them, the only better option would be to add ads directly in games.

Crowdfunding prizes is also an option. This week-end, a bitcoin starcraft challenge[2] was organized, mainly funded (to the words of organizer during stream) by reddit users giving bitcoins, and a few other sponsor - mainly bitcoin trading websites. Don't try to hide this into some kind of premium account. People don't want that, they want to see events.

You can't just rely on a company you seem to have no contact with to just give away big money (even if they are indeed the ones to blame, if that's article is true, because they were no right to their word).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_sports

[2] http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Bitcoin_StarCraft_Chal...

(edited links formatting)

Used to play UT Classic there a ton.

UT99 is still alive and well! Check out www.globalunreal.com!

It's kind of amazing that game still runs without any issues on new OSes/with new drivers/new hardware. Except now at a gajillion frames per second.

This is mostly thanks to volunteers creating mods/renderers/etc, which in turn is only possible thanks to Epic's focus on user-generated content through the Unreal editor. 15 years later, and people are still adding to the game[1][2].

[1] http://www.globalunreal.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1511 [2] http://www.ut99.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5347&p=58359#p58359

played a lot of Urban Terror in clanbase, but clanbase was already pretty much dead as of a year or so ago.

Me too. I believe somewhere between 2003-2005. I have even browsed the archived match reports from cups on ClanBase a few months ago to see what I have been up to in the past :) Good times.

RIP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV5OiaPtxTA

It was a beautiful time.

I'm sad to see this. I can't say I've been using it even in the last 5-6 years, but I used to follow the NationsCup tournaments and we used to play on the ladder a lot back in the day.

It truly is like seeing the pub you and your friends used to go to close up shop and wondering why you ever stopped going there.

Wow, what a thing to wake up and see on HN. I never thought I would see something from my past on this site.

I officially worked for the GGL from '04 to '09 as one of their initial developers, then as pretty much their only guy to take care of their web infrastructure (Architecture to Ops and everything in between) and I gotta say I'm not surprised this happened this way. So, I can probably add and address a few things here...

@Stealth- & lazyjones: The server setup that ClanBase was residing on was well past its prime and was pretty much overwhelmed every day between 2pm and 7pm ET. I can't really speak for the CB founders (Tal, Wob, and Godsmurf), but I'm pretty sure their was that the site would be well taken care for and pushed into better success by the GGL (we had the money after all). At the time the GGL bought CB, the GGL were seen as a rising star organization in the gaming communities and there were no black spots on their name at that time (and no belief their would be as a lot of big names were associated with it)

Re: "ClanBase Crew": The ClanBase crew were/are tops in my mind. I've been a gamer for a longtime now and have run or have helped run some highly visible tournaments and the CB Crew were the most organized group I ever saw. I'm still in awe with how they ran it. They had a full system from bringing in new people, training and growing them and ensuring they retain only the best talent. It was quite impressive and I still consider some of them as good friends. I hated resigning as I feared this could happen to their community. So to see a message from their side saying they are done is completely understandable and possibly overdue.

The GGL also had a few other "business incidents" (as I liked to call them) that occurred before RackSpace that I really didn't like seeing, as it affected good, gaming friendly companies and people (namely Speakeasy and Game-Hosting). From my point of view, the issues they had can all be traced back to their exec level and their lack of focus and understanding of what they were doing (especially with the competitive gaming community). This ultimately led to them giving themselves black eyes over and over and burning through VC money like crazy. (ie> GGL China and the olympics... did we really need to expand to China? ie2> Massive server infrastructure in US, but very little in Europe, really???)

I gained two big things from my experience at the GGL: 1. Understanding of how _not_ to run a Gaming Startup or possibly any startup (so if I do it, I know how I will do it... and it will look nothing like this disorganized mess) 2. A lot of great friends from the GGL employees, ClanBase crew, Speakeasy and Game-Hosting.

I can say the GGL was at least not like the CyberXGames was, but ultimately, I think the way the GGL went was just disappointing to everyone involved. So much potential just wasted. And worse, all that gaming history lost. (Although I do have most of the Quake related history archived away!)

-Joe aka Syn (from Darkside)

Anyone wants to guess when the first spam runs start on the e-mail addresses from users? Don't know if the current owner is shady enough for it. But money is tight and the data is the only valuable thing they got out of it plus there are still debts to be paid.

I get the impression the debts will remain unpaid.

Seem a few startup here fail because of payment to amazon.It realy worth to host application on cloud platform or much better host server yourself method.

If you can afford it, AWS is nice, especially with the ability to spin up capacity only when you need it, which can make the economics work in your favour. If you're not sure if you can afford it, then stay off it. It's easy, but that convenience doesn't come cheap.

Tip of my hat to Godsmurf and Tal. Clanbase had a nice run and I had the privilege to attend several of their LAN events. Thanks for everything.

Don't forget Amsterdam Rob (Wob?), he was one of the original founders as well I believe.

Wow, it is over 12 years ago that I used that website with Unreal Tournament clans! Seems like it was yesterday! Good times...

Never say sorry.

What?

  I will never apologize ... — I don't care what the facts are...
  I'm not an apologize ... kind of guy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush

Reply on news.ycombinator.com