History

This section tells the story of the community in a global manner, starting with the earliest beta days, and moving on to today's latest developments. This section exists to give you, in detail, an overview of everything that made Allegiance what it is today.

1998

Oblivion (pre-ALPHA)

Oblivion was the code name for Allegiance. During E3 1998 Microsoft scheduled the shipping for end of 1998.

MS Press release: Oblivion, Asheron's Call and Fighter Ace Upgrade Among Other Premium Titles To Be Showcased at 1998 Electronics Entertainment Expo

1999

The BETA

Often seen as some of the brightest days of Allegiance, the beta started in December 1999. A lot of hype was created around this game, which was known as the first game merging the concepts of Real Time Strategy and First Person Shooter. It is interesting to note that new games today, such as Savage, have received the same title by uninformed reviewers. The hype behind Allegiance was fairly massive, and you can still read about it in most gaming websites. Even Time magazine, in a special technology issue, published an article about the game.

A great deal of players were included. Multiple squads, detailed in the 'Squads' section, participated. They were quite massive, the biggest having 150 players (The Collective). Battles were already epic. The dominant squad towards the end of the beta was Jihaad, with a perfect record.

2000

Public Release

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AZ Features

The Allegiance Zone had a statistics system which compiled records in two ways. First, your total kills, base kills, deaths, etc. (the stats that you see at the end of a game), were compiled in your player screen. These statistics gave you a rank, from 1 to 14 (14 being extremely difficult to achieve, and only a few select players actually got that high). Second, you had faction specific statistics, which means that for each faction, you had a certain rank based on the amount of kills, base kills, etc. that you had done while playing for that particular faction, thus reinforcing the concept of "Allegiance" to a faction.

There were also weekly events on the AZ, where each game affected the outcome of a continuing storyline. The results of those games were announced on the DataNet (in Allegiance's History, the DataNet is The Belters' information network which spreads confidential information to the widest audience), displaying the names of the players who played, and highlighting the best of them. The DataNet was displayed in what is known as the Message Of The Day (MOTD), the screen where messages scroll before you connect to the lobby. All this made the AZ feel like the "main" part of Allegiance, where the real game was going on, with the FZ being for a few newbies. Of course, FZ'ers also had their pride and sometimes squads from the two zones challenged each other, although the AZ'ers, being much more hardcore players, generally had the upper hand.

The Slow Downfall

A few patches were released to improve servers and games, a little bit at a time. However, in late May, the community was told that a new patch would soon make them all very happy. Released around the end of June, what is now known as the *evil* patch would make available the Rixians, add smoke effects to missiles, and add blue stars around ships either ripcording or passing through an aleph, and other game features. However, this patch caused heavy lag and rendered Allegiance unplayable. This pushed Microsoft into taking a second bad decision.

In July, still of year 1, in an effort to make the game more popular despite the huge problems, the Allegiance Zone was opened to everyone. All the players from the FZ obviously went and played on the AZ. This caused heavier lag. All those new players that were introduced to AZ believed that it was always that bad on AZ, and quickly returned to FZ. Many AZ'ers did the same, and the FZ numbers were higher than those of AZ. In addition, the combined problems of lag created by the patch and by the great influx of players made the game ridiculously unplayable. A new error started plaguing the game. Many players who had never DPlayed once started DPlaying every 5 minutes (this error kicks the player out of the game and to the lobby). Having Rixian scouts ripcord to other scouts didn't help either, and caused heavier problems in games where the Rixians were used. Approximately half of all the players left the game immediately.

The Community nonetheless Survives

These problems were later fixed by a patch, the AZ was back to its original pay-to-play and the community went on, and was getting increasingly competitive. The Jihaad still had a perfect record, but eventually lost to a fine, fresh squad called XenoTech, and disbanded, apparently for reasons other than the loss. A player named Joshua_won created the Allegiance Wars, a new type of tournament that would last much longer than expected. The tournament was based on the five existing factions. Everyone would pledge Allegiance to a faction and play for that faction for the duration of the tournament. A leader was also elected for each faction. At the end, one faction would be declared winner. However, as any experienced player could expect, stacking took place. The Iron Coalition had 80 pilots, while the GigaCorp only had 25. Squads would also stick together, and so Steel Fury and Fatal Shadow joined the Iron Coalition, while XenoTech joined the Belters and FBI went with the Rixian Unity. Because there was a maximal imbalance of 2, and some factions had a lot more players than others, many players were unable to play because some sides had a lot more players than others. The games were fun, but ended after Iron Coalition and Belters allied and forced the Bios and Rixians to resign massively, after GigaCorp had been quickly eliminated.

The second Allegiance Wars started only a few months later, in December, and was more or less uneventful.

The Second Great Threat: Cheaters

In the mean time, Your-Persona (YP), the founder of the My Allegiance group, a small organization consisting mainly of student programmers, released his first patch. It allowed for players to use new quickchats. There was one huge downside: anyone without that patch would be instantly disconnected from the game when one of these new quickchats was used. When crashing, players were sent to the Crash Guard screen, a screen displayed in your browser when Allegiance crashes and where you are supposed to write what happened so that Microsoft can look into it and fix the possible bug. This is where the expression Crash Guard, or CG, is from. To CG someone is to crash his game. YP quickly removed this patch and made a second one that wouldn't crash others, but the damage was done. Players like Black created patches like YP's first one, and used it to disconnect other players, sometimes whole games. A friend of his, Virus, started doing the same thing. Game owners were now required to ban Black and Virus when they could, but it was difficult. Black had 3 subscriptions to the AZ, and CG'ing a whole game only takes seconds. The only way people could play was to quickly form a small game, and lock it up. After a long time of harassing Microsoft to ban them, the two were finally banned for a month. Since these two were not the only ones crashing people (but the only ones crashing whole games), many players left. On the FZ, a player named Guns22 suddenly started CG'ing as well. Since getting an account was free, people had trouble identifying who was who, who had CG'ed who, and everyone was scared of everyone. This led to a second wave of departures from the Allegiance Community.

Finally, SOVGuard came along to end this nightmare. Its predecessor, SOVShowCG, only announced through the chatbox that a QuickChat had CG'ed you, thus allowing players to discern between a legitimate CG and one caused by another player. SOVGuard, on the other hand, not only blocked attempts to crash, but also indicated who had attempted to crash you. Of course, this led to accusations, to the use of forged pictures of the chat where it indicated who had attempted to crash players, etc. My Allegiance and the cheaters would sometimes communicate, one side threatening to kill Allegiance as if they were powerful evil, and the other telling them to stop being morons. This was all put to an end when Microsoft announced they were leaving the Community to itself by the end of 2000. All SOV programs were written by Vencain.

2001

Microsoft Drops the Community

The last Microsoft patch, known as the 1.25, put an end to Quickchat Crash Guarding altogether (rendering SOVGuard obsolete), destroyed the Allegiance Zone and its features, allowed FZ players to make use of the Belters and Rixians (although hackers already had made them available), and allowed FZ servers to have 64-player games rather than a maximum of 32. The two communities were merged instantly, and you could even see some AZ vs FZ games in the first months. Note that the loss of AZ means that players need to play on existing servers, as they cannot create their own game like they can on Battle.net, for example (as they could on the AZ). Also, player authentication was removed, so a player simply wrote any name, preferably his, before connecting to the lobby. Obviously, players framing others became more and more common. Luckily, Microsoft kept the lobby and a few servers online for the community to play into.

The Post-Microsoft Period

Certain players also had their own servers connected to Microsoft's lobby to allow players to play in. However, Microsoft's service was poor. Both the lobby and MS' servers would go down for up to a week at a time. A new program, SOVRoute, was created. It allowed players to connect directly to a server's IP through the LAN option in Allegiance, thus not requiring the lobby, much like Quake players did back in the earliest days of multiplayer gaming. Players would obtain a server's IP and connect directly to a server made available by a member of the community. Sadly, only a few hundred players remained by that time. The player base was getting smaller and smaller, with only a handful of dedicated players left to ensure Allegiance's continuation. SOVLog, Vencain's latest creation, permitted the logging of all game messages, strip colors from the names and messages of players (who could use color codes in their names, as no character restrictions in names applied anymore now that Microsoft had removed authentication), and to take JPG screenshots in-game.

2002

The Community Puts Itself on the Breather

As Microsoft's service was obviously insufficient, a mostly unknown player, Thalgor, decided to take it upon himself to use some of his company's unused bandwidth and his own hardware to host both a lobby and a few servers. The community could rely on high-speed and high-quality servers with excellent service, requiring only a change in a registry key to connect to the right lobby. There were no more problems with unavailability or having to connect through LAN. As the lack of authentication became more of a problem, and framing a common occurrence, Vencain wrote SOVLogin. Players were now required to register a callsign and password on the community's Alleg.net, and framing became impossible again. This was a fairly calm period, and things started becoming normal again, except for one thing: how can you get new players now?

You're in your own lobby, have your own registration program, and Microsoft no longer sells nor announces the game anywhere. Not only did the game no longer work out of the box, but it was also no longer sold. For the first issue, Thalgor and Spunkmeyer created little 2-player servers connected to Microsoft's lobby that would make announcements to visit the Allegiance HQ to play. This, coupled with posting on message boards, trying to get friends to play, and selling what's left of Allegiance's retail version via the Internet, were the only efforts that could be deployed then, but they were insufficient. Very little influx of new players joined the few hundred remaining Allegiance fans that were now isolated in their special lobby with their special software requirements to play the game.

In the mean time, Allegiance Wars 3 started, but with a different mechanism. Instead of having players pledge to a faction, squads would directly pledge to a faction. And so six squads battled on a map that was available on Allegiancewars.com, with a persistent-universe aspect, and where confrontations were played out in Allegiance games. However, as Allegiance was slowly dying for lack of players, some squads left the tournament, and it was eventually put to an end for lack of interest, as games started to become more and more spaced out, squad matches then occurring once every two or three weeks. Since Allegiance Wars always was a persistent universe with a developing history, it was simply explained that the alephs closed down and combat was no longer possible.

As if it was needed, crashing players became a problem once more. This time, a quick response was made, and a new version of SOVLogin put an end to all kinds of voluntary crashing forever, while also providing a comprehensive interface that allowed debugging players who had trouble using it. Of course, all this led to complex problems with players using routers, or certain computer configurations, and massive individual debugging occurred on the Community's forums as players had all sorts of complex issues.

Stability ensues, maybe excessively

Things remained fine for a fairly long time. The community remained very stable, having a first squad tournament since it was on its own, won by the Z Fighters, but remaining low on numbers. As the community's main website was hosted on the new Allegiance HQ, making its own new factions, balancing the game by itself by making its own cores, it became clear that Allegiance was now fully under the community's control, providing both high quality service to members and continuing development of the game without any support, thus having to produce hacking tools and then distribute their results to the community.

There was a single problem left: the players. With its steep learning curve, its lack of official support, its complex twists and turns just to get it working, and its unavailability in stores, new players were beyond rare. It was practically impossible for an outsider to even hear of Allegiance, and even if s/he had heard of it, understanding that Microsoft is now out of the picture, that the community lives, that it has developed this and that tool, were just too improbable, and so there was no such thing as a newbie in Allegiance.

And as usual, to spice things up, cheating was back, but under another form. Instead of having Black & friends crash people, they were flying around with modified ships, for example mounting anti-base missiles on a scout, flying their bombers at 250 MPS, etc., all this by modifying the game core (the set of properties for each object in the game). Although the community was able to ban those names and IPs who did this, the cheaters were able to mask their IPs, simply create another account, and get back to cheating.

Since Vencain, the creator of all the SOV programs, was no longer available, and no one could know how to put a stop to this, it was eventually decided to cease the creation of new accounts to put an end to cheating once and for all. Knowing that new players were desperately needed and were already very rare, a very small door was left opened for new players to use. That door is known as PayPal. New players were free to create a new account, but PayPal was used to know their real address so that if any cheating would occur, the real person was banned. Thus, a 1$ fee was required so that the player's address could be found (of course, a motivated cheater could use a friend's credit card, etc., but it was assumed that that would be overdoing things). Another way of joining was to have a sponsor. A player already part of the community would be allowed to sponsor another player, vouching for him that s/he is no cheater. This measure was placed to allow players to continue getting friends to play. In order to make sure that players would not sponsor left and right, a rule was put in place, where any new player caught cheating would result in him and his sponsor being banned from the community. Of course, needless to say that the influx of new players was at a minimum, as it was added to the previously mentioned issues the requirement to have either a US banking account or a credit card, putting a definite stop to player influx. The only alternative was Pook's Open Server, later hosted by Aarmstrong as Pook used his to test ASGS. The Open Server ran a regular lobby and a server without any need for authentication so that some new players could still get something out of Allegiance. The Community's desire to get players was posted and supported by the community. The topic was that maybe private training sessions should be held more and more. This ultimately led to the @Cadet program, discussed below.

2003

Bare Survival

The community soon had to move out. The Allegiance HQ had to be moved and changed to its third version, since Noir could not host it anymore. Also, Thalgor had posted a message: "Make a backup of all records NOW! Servers going down!" Someone had reported Thalgor's activities to his company as illegal, and Thalgor's company ordered him to take his servers down, so Allegiance could not remain there. Pook took it upon himself to host the lobby, and a few generous individuals decided to host some servers. The community had barely escaped complete annihilation once more, but still struggled with the same old problem: the lack of players.

As the PayPal measure was put in place, it was said that it was a temporary measure, and that a new security system was on the way. However, the truth seemed to be that no one was actually working on that system, and for months the PayPal system was in place, completely blocking off new players. Luckily, after a few months, Pook completed the Allegiance Secure Gameplay System, or ASGS. It was released as an open beta on July 17th 2003. Requiring the .NET Framework to be installed on computers, this new system caused quite a lot of new trouble for players, while being another of the most positive things the community has seen. Players now had yet one more thing required to play with before getting to play, and with it tremendous amounts of debugging were required to get players through this one. However, with the ASGS running, which also required SOVLogin to launch itself, the community was finally at peace again. In addition, a lot of new players started joining, thanks to the multiple postings by Allegiance community members on all kinds of message boards, and the facilitated accessibility to Allegiance. Pook also continued support of ASGS, providing frequent updates, adding not only updates to correct issues, but also to add great features to improve its usability and make ASGS high-quality software.

ASGS causes major influxes

The only problem was the fact that with so many new players joining such a small community, games often resulted in having a few veterans, who had years of experience, and newbies, who had only hours of experience of a particularly complex game. Veterans felt more than ever that the competitive days of yore were long gone. Indeed, even with only a handful of players, everyone could rely on anyone else. With the influx of new players, however, your last two interceptors to take out the HTT could be players who barely knew which button is used to fire the afterburner. The Allegiance Academy only partially solved this problem, giving new players a lot of information, but not a lot of practice nor a very deep understanding of Allegiance. Nonetheless, new players was the last problem the community had been having to face. The community being well aware that players were much needed, extreme but unwritten measures of respect were put in place to make the game as newbie-friendly as one can imagine, in the hopes that eventually, all those players will become talented pilots and commanders, and competition can finally be like it once was.

Since ASGS, however, there have been no negative events in the community. Developers have developed to their liking, core balancers balanced, Admins Admin'd, the Senate ruled, and players augmented.

2004

Disappointment of the Highest Hopes; Fulfillment of the Greatest Ones

In September 2004 ASGS was still a fairly new asset, still in open beta, and two players, aarmstrong and Jalindo (returning founder of The Collective), took it upon themselves to try and recreate the Allegiance Zone, which had been removed by Microsoft a long time ago. With AZ reinstated statistics, events, squad games, support, etc. would be at hand again! This seemed like the last missing piece, having the possibility to draw a lot of the ancient players back into the game; thus having a larger experienced player base to play with and to train new players. Attempts to bring back the AZ, or even just a stats tracking system, had been made before but had never been completed. Although they often reported being quite close to their goal, the skeptics unfortunately ended up being right in that the code could never be fully restored with the tools at hand, and the AZ was not brought back by the optimistic programmers.

Disappointment ensued once more and jokes about stats being ready in two weeks (an old joke started when Your_Persona initially and repeatedly reported that he was two weeks away from cracking AZ before going MIA) were spreading. Then everyone was taken by surprise when the biggest, unhoped-for dream of all seasoned Allegiance players came to truth. It happened when Solap, a game's producer and lead designer, casually asked Vlymoxyd, an Allegiance player, why he was having trouble posting on Alleg.net - he had something to announce. So Vly generously offered that he could post it for him and this Solap proceeded to convey his message to Vly. He just wanted to say that the Allegiance source code was now released. This was Thursday, February 5th, 2004.

How would one describe the community reaction? You can picture someone with his jaw dropped all the way down for several days, shaking as thoughts of potential improvements ride his neurons as if he were on Speed. This one got the record for amount of publicity Allegiance obtained for a single event, and so was extremely positive for Allegiance that Solap even managed to get Microsoft Research Games to place a link to the community's Alleg.net website on the Microsoft Research newslink. Players didn't know how to balance their feelings between their long-lived hatred for Microsoft and their newfound love with the release of the source, settling on hatred for Microsoft and love for Microsoft Research. An unfortunate coincidence came the very next day when Thalgor was again asked by his company to remove the servers that were hosting ASGS, MOTD, and AutoUpdate, forcing players to play with a backup system that had no authentication or cheat protection whatsoever. Fortunately the servers came back online eventually, restoring peace.

After amazement, the community very quickly arranged to setup source download sections on the Alleg.net sire and a big debugging network. All the developers that had been hard at work improving Allegiance, developing new software and bringing stats back immediately got a new priority assignment. Discussions about Allegiance 2, which had already been going on for some time, became more valid than ever. Along with those came discussions about improving countless game features that required changes in the source code and were thus inaccessible before the source was released.

The community nonetheless never deviated from its primary objective. Second only to improving the game itself, developers wanted to bring AZ and all its features back, and so KGJV, Pook, Imago and many others took it upon themselves to work on various aspects of the source to realize this. The Free Allegiance Zone Beta started on April 27th, 2004 but progress was halted by the games crashing a lot when they ended. Also, many players were having problems using the "Shadow Switcher", a program that allowed switching between normal Allegiance and the FAZ Allegiance (although those problems were only superficial because once the FAZ went gold the Switcher was no longer required).

The other priority is to package all authentication and anti-cheat software into Allegiance itself, to allow a much easier installation of the game than was currently available (at the time new players needed to install ASGS, .NET framework, SOVLogin, Community Patch, Allegiance.exe and possibly need to alter there router settings still. Not very newbie-friendly!) and hence attract more players.

After this, improving Allegiance by leaps and bounds, adding countless features, will be the Community's continuation of what it has already begun years ago, a process further refined by the now active cooperation of some of Allegiance's original developers.

Players at the wheel

With now full control over Allegiance's destiny, as well as renewed interest in the game by many outsiders generated by the Source Code release, the Community was getting closer to the promised land. The development groups formed and were getting the Source organized properly along with debugging systems. However, no concrete results came from this for a long time. The FAZ Beta was shut down after interest in a crashing Beta dropped, reorganized by a newly formed FAZ Dev team, and re-implemented more safely, adding one feature at a time rather than restoring the AZ at once.

Although Spunkmeyer had been the only player developing a balanced core, the Allegiance Plus core, which had relayed Microsoft's 1.25 patch in the eternal attempt to balance Allegiance and been the standard core for a very long time, new rivals came along. Noir had decided to develop his own core, Dark Nebulae, and had been doing so for a few months. Players supported one or the other, or didn't really care about the 'core wars'. Both cores had different philosophies about balancing, and the biggest reprimand that the Dark Nebulae core supporters made toward the Allegiance Plus core was that everything was just being nerfed and becoming the same. In reality, the majority of players didn't see much difference between the cores beside obvious differences (such as which factions or ships are present/absent).

As for the newbies, they were being cuddled like babies. Not only did the Academy go through two successive revamps to a very professional state, but they also had two newbie servers (one on each core, please) guarded by the resuscitated @Alleg team from vet player presence. Newbies had a tag after their name, indicating how much they played. They would graduate after a time determined by the Senate, or be promoted if an authorized player felt it was deserved. In addition, the @Cadet program, founded by Romeo & BlackViper, provided a program lasting a few weeks that trained newbies and then offered them off to the Allegiance squads that were recruiting in high numbers. It was basically a success where the Cheyenne Squad, Spunkmeyer's creation, had failed a few months earlier.

Speaking of Squads, weekly squad matches became a reality again. After the Shifters (a.k.a. The Belters, Jihaad) refounded and new squads appeared, along with the newbie influx from the recent public exposure Allegiance obtained and the intensive newbie training, between fifty and eighty players were online at many times during the day. Pook's ASGS system allowing tracking of all kinds of attendance statistics (along with tons of other great features like a ban listing with explanations for each!). In this environment, squads were meeting with increasing attendance each time, leading to better matches and tightening of the Community which had recently lost one of its highly valued members, Titty_Baby, known best for his great character by those who played with him using TeamSpeak, a voice communication software that the Community had started using a few months back.

Recent times

2006

After over 2 years of hard work since the release of the source code, FAZ R1 was released on March 1st. Although there was little visible change to the average user, this release managed to transform the source code released by Microsoft and the various hacks/workarounds created by the community into one release. It also incorporated SOV Login with ASGS, and changing the net code so players behind routers could connect. The first change made it much simpler for new players to get the game working, and the second allowed College and University students to play. Additionally, collating all this code paved the way for many future releases bringing new functionality to the game as well as making it easier for new people to start playing. The happy results of this release were more people playing, and also later in the year, both FAZ R2 and subsequently FAZ R3 were released.

Black Friday

On Friday 13th October, 2006, Allegiance saw Drama(tm) like it had not seen in a long time. The exact details of contention are unclear, but several players took it upon themselves to kick up a stink. Things quickly escalated out of control and Pook decided to leave the community: "I'm leaving this sandpit and I'm taking my ball with me".

In a pique of anger Pook had removed ASGS, which meant no one could connect to the servers and play Allegiance. Thankfully he came to his senses (after some heartfelt persuasion by other members of the community) less than 24 hours afterwards and reinstated ASGS. He did not rescind on his decision to leave though, and to this day maintains a semi-retired state.

The original band of troublemakers were issued indefinte bans for their actions until the Senate could decide on appropriate punishment. The Senate decision was:

• Greyvulpine: No furthur punishment (someone confirm this?).
• Virulence: One year ban.
• Mastametz: Permanent ban.

2007 - A Restructuring

After the events of October 13th a major rethink of the administration structure was done, especially with Pook (ex-Head Admin) in semi-retirement. Initially efforts were made to get the Senate more proactive and involved, but these proved unsuccessful and in April 2007 it was decided to dissolve the Senate and institute the Zone Lead system in its place. Thalgor announced this on the forums.

2006 to 2008 - Meanwhile

The increase in players stimulated other areas of the community. The Cadet program, already running two separate streams, was rebuilt as a 2 stage interweb-based course. ACS was reinvigorated by Clay_Pigeon, this Wiki was finally brought online and Zone Games were reintroduced for the first time since Microsoft dropped Allegiance.

See Also

• The Development page has a timeline of development related events