Squads

Squads in Allegiance are community recognised groups of players who play regular "Squad Games" against each other. They are similar in many ways to "Clans" in other games. A list of members in squads is here.

What is a Squad?

In Allegiance, a squad is group of players who have organised themselves into a unit for a higher level of competitive play. Each squad has a unique tag which it's members can have after their nicks. This tag takes the form of an @ followed by a short version of the squad name. So players in the Palidor's Knights squad have @PK after their nick.

Squad Games or SGs are games played between two squads or teams of multiple squads facing off against each other. Only players from those squads get to play in these games. Squad Games usually take place on Sundays at 15:00 Eastern Time.

While Allegiance squads are essentially the same thing as clans or guilds in other online games, they differ in three important aspects:

Allegiance is a relatively old game, and so are its squads. Squads generally have a long history behind them. *Players in a squad have often known each other for years.
Allegiance emphasizes teamwork like no other game we know of. Squad cohesion and trust are essential attributes, if a squad plans to avoid getting butchered at every SG. These things take a lot of very hard work to build.
Squads are recognized institutions in the FreeAllegiance Organization. Recognized squads get the squad-tag mentioned above and a private forum on freeallegiance.org.

Given these differences, players who wish to start their own squad are often met with words of caution (and often skepticism) when they announce their plans on the boards, especially if they are new to the game. This community has seen many failed attempts at starting up a new squad, even by veteran players. The perks mentioned above involve the FAO volunteer staff, and they are, quite understandably, not willing to spend their time on every spur-of-the-moment startup that may crop up.

Rules on forming a squad

The squad must have at least 15 members who are not also a member of another squad.
The squad must have at least 15 members who have lost their 'newbie' status.
The squad must have played at least 3 games against a recognized squad, in which at least 10 players on each side participated.

Players that wish to start a new squad should heed the following advice:

If you are new, stop thinking about forming a new squad for a while. Focus on learning to play and getting to know people. Gathering people is more important than thinking up a name, making websites, and designing squad banners, logo's, etc... Wasting your energy on those things, while you have yet to find people to form your squad with, merely demonstrates impatience.
Don't recruit until you already have some players. If this seems like a chicken and egg-problem to you, you are going about starting up your squad the wrong way. You see, it's not 'your' squad. It belongs to the people you play with. You start it up together, as a team. Think about it: which sounds better: 'hi, i want to start a new squad, who wants to join me?' or: 'hi, Bob, Peter, Mary and I have decided to start a new squad together. Who wants to join us?'.
You and your friends might decide to become visible in-game to the community, to help your recruiting. If you do not meet the criteria for an official @TAG, you can create an alternative callsign on the ASGS pages to go with your chosen squad name. There are plenty of separators on your keyboard, e.g: "callsign_TAG", "callsign-TAG", etc. After all, this is how clan tags work in most other online games.
Start thinking about official recognition only after it looks like you will meet the criteria for said recognition. Until then, just play together and concentrate on having fun as a group.

A squad that wishes to be officially recognized as such, must meet the 3 criteria above.