Jihaad/Shifters
"Back in the early days of Allegiance, there was one squad, and that squad was Orion Faction. You were either in it, or you were fodder. A small group of folks decided they were tired of being fodder, and we played anti-Orion Faction whenever we could. This small group included Bombarta (Leader), Ahaneon (Public Relations), and davidsa3 (Ass Kicker/Lackey). Eventually we started picking up others who played against Orion Faction, and donned the name "The Belters" after a rumored fourth Allegiance faction.
The Belters cut their teeth against the best competition Allegiance had to offer during the beta period, compiling a record of 14-5. As the beta wore on and drew to a close, our membership had changed dramatically enough that we needed to don a new name to illustrate the amount of change we'd gone through since we became the Belters. After a bit of debate, we settled on the name Jihaad. The word Jihaad, meaning literally in Arabic "the struggle", signified how we had come from being the underdogs to being a power in our own right.
Once shop opened up during retail, Jihaad wasted no time taking care of business, playing over twenty squad games in a month. While in Allegiance terms the amount of activity was remarkable, it was the amount of success that made Jihaad stand out. We won all 20 games, most in under fifteen minutes. Completely unapologetic, Jihaad was a brash, cocky, and arrogant group that was held together by great communication and the high skill of its pilots.
Most of Jihaad's members filtered into other squads in the Allegiance universe, such as Palidor's Knights or the short lived Bombarta's Wrecking Crew. Eventually most of the members moved onto other games, but always kept in contact with each other. After the events of September 11th, and in a further illustration of how far we had come, Jihaad died, and Shifters was born. Many Shifters had joined other Allegiance squads, but laid inactive until Microsoft released the source code for Allegiance, creating a new wave of interest. This caused some Shifters members to form a squad in Allegiance, and begin anew what they had left off many years prior."
After most of its members as well as leaders disappeared, what remained of the Shifters was absorbed into XT, but currently all former Shifters who were in Jihaad are (once again) inactive.
| The Allegiance Squad System |
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