2000

Mighty Mystics Born

Early in 2000 I decided to make a web site, because at the time the world wide web was becoming very popular and there were a lot of HTML and web page editors around. I decided to call my site Mystic Briton and to make a joke site calling myself the best player in the world. It really was quite funny, it was a Mystic Briton "Fan Site" and "come here to worship Mystic Briton". After a while the site got quite busy and some people wanted to call themselves Mystic_ after the "great" Mystic Briton, so they did. It was then that I decided to reserve all the civ names for a clan.

I created something like 15 Mystic names of all the civs in Age of Kings. Mystic Celt, Mystic Byzantin, Mystic Teuton, Mystic Japanese, Mystic Turk, Mystic Persian, Mystic Chinese, etc, they were all created by me and reserved. When people joined I gave them out the password for the name which I had reserved and they had to swear on the Mystic Law that they would not give the password to anyone, nor change it. They were good, they never let me down.

So I called the clan the Mighty Mystics and started to recruit people... mainly because I was meeting so many people online who wanted to hang around with me. So I created the clan in April 2000 and left my PC on all day with a zone room and game hosted saying "No Game here, but join our clan, visit www.age2.whatever and signup. It wasnt long before long standing members would start to join, however, 90% of the membership came and went.

I used to have a category of member called "follower" - they were not actually members, but they were admirers of Mystic Briton and called themselves MB_ followed by their name, and by using this name they got invited into games with us - usually to fill vacant spots. It worked quite well.

During September of 2000 the Conquerors expansion was released for Age of Kings and this increased the surge of membership of Mighty Mystics, but more importantly it meant that Hun could call herself Mystic Hun! This was because four more civilisations were added and one of these was the Huns!

In our first year we had some great fun on the Zone and had members like Mystic Saracen, Mystic Turk, Mystic Mongol, Mystic Mayan,. Mystic Viking, Mystic Japanese, Mystic Gato, Tikki the King (Later Mystic AToM), MB King182, Mystic Mole, Mystic Byzantin, Mystic WarEagle, all of whom stayed a long time. Indeed Saracen is still with us today.

Towards the end of the year the "fan site" was more of a clan site and we had some great battles with a clan called Myll. They were good players and we needed our best to be able to compete with them. There was a lot of bragging going on by both of us and our forums started to become full of insults as to who was best and in the end it caused friction in the clan, so we decided to stop contact with them.