Our Heritage, The History Of The BlackHand

August 1999, a decade ago, we were formed. It started on a small server known as Saryrn on Everquest 1. The Internet had only just become mainstream and free within most of the western world, cable modem was being introduced and everyone thought Tony Blair was a good politician. Initially we were nothing more than a small group of players who created the guild for a channel to communicate with each other. None of us could have imagined that a decade on this community would become a digital home for players who've created lifetime friendships earned through years of gaming.

The first years of our creation the term "Order" was not adopted but having suffered guilds mimicking our name over the years we felt it best to once again attain a level of individuality by adopting a unique title. While there are many Black Hand guilds around there will only ever be one TBH.

June 2001, the TBH community begins to take full root where we made our appearance on Anarchy Online. This game, whilst not having the numbers, definitely set the standard for which most MMO games strive to achieve and in most cases still haven't surpassed. It truly was an experience, and every TBH member holds very fond memories of this period. Anarchy Online was arguably our "Golden Age" having our name printed repeatedly in various AO media sites, "The BlackHand" was one of the few guilds that shaped the story-arc of Anarchy Online, sealing our legacy.

June 2003, Star Wars Galaxies is released, officially turning TBH into a multi-game community as many of the original memberbase flocked to play sith and bounty hunters. At this stage the MMO market had begun to take full root and many promising new products were coming into creation.

November 2004, The TBH community branches out further to play on the sequel to our genesis game, Everquest 2. Both Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest 2 were run by Sony Online Entertainment who, while maintained Everquest 2 to a fairly standard degree, ruined their reputation with the MMO playerbase after a critical update to SWG in 2005 literally destroying the subscriber-base causing the non-game media to draw reports on this massive failure in the process. The game may still be alive to date, but with less than 10,000 subscribers the failure was epic.

February 2005, World Of Warcraft is released with sales rocketing over 4.5 million. Naturally a TBH presence was established and both our EQ2 and WOW branches were long, our main two branches internal dispute lead to the TBH:WOW branch splintering off in September 2006 due to site traffic.

After the splintering, the two main branches lived each in their own world, while keeping a line of communication up, we started planning our next move. We needed to get these two branches back together but it could not be done with our current web-page solution. We were using LDU which wasn't good at directing information. LDU served us well enough, when we were primarily focused round one game. However we wanted a system where a member could login and read what was important to him and his branch, while also actively participating in the general community.

The work on the new web-page started in May 2007 and three months later we had our first alpha release of Acolyte. May also saw the dawn of the EVE branch which had been established by a group of members who were tired of EQ2, WOW and of waiting for another game to be released.

2008 would learn to be an eventful year, resulting in our Eve Branch to temporarily fall into disarray with the rest of TBH, combined with the mainstream playerbase glued into Funcom's sequel MMO, Age Of Conan, we saw a skeleton TBH:WOW sell out our core principles in exchange for masse recruiting the holes AOC's imminent launch had created. With great sadness we were forced to terminate support for World Of Warcraft. Everyone learned an important lesson that year. While it is important to maintain a wide-ranging community, our Code Of Conduct must be preserved.

After the AOC branch launched we quickly established ourselves as the dominant PVP guild on the Fury server. The product failed though, after maximizing our level, which took 3-4 weeks for dedicated players, we discovered that the end content was either buggy or lacking. In short. AOC failed.

September 2008 we went to WAR...