ClanBase

» see clanbase.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I played Counter-Strike in internet cafes in Ankara between roughly 2002 and 2005, which was cafe Counter-Strike and not ClanBase Counter-Strike. You paid by the hour and played whoever was in the room, and the scoreboard died when you stood up.

ClanBase was the other thing, the one where a match left a record behind. It began in October 1998 as a Dutch site for Quake II clans to arrange wars against each other, which at that point meant a page and a ladder. Within a few years it was the ranking system for competitive PC gaming across Europe, holding around 1.8 million registered players and 180,000 clans across more than fifty games.

The two names people still say out loud are EuroCup and NationsCup. EuroCup ran per game with LAN finals at the end of a season, and NationsCup put national teams against each other, which for a lot of European players in the early 2000s was the nearest thing to representing your country at anything. The games ran from Quake and Unreal Tournament through Counter-Strike and the Call of Duty line.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

What ClanBase really provided was bookkeeping, and that turned out to be the scarce thing. Anyone could organize a match. What nobody could do alone was keep a record both teams would accept, attached to a ladder position that meant something, adjudicated by admins who would actually sit down and rule on a disputed demo file. Over fifteen years more than a thousand volunteer admins did that work unpaid, for a European teenage population that had no other referee.

~ the fall ~

Global Gaming League, an American company, bought ClanBase in December 2004. Activity had already been sliding since around 2002 and the new ownership did not reverse it. By 2007 the prizes for that year's EuroCup were simply never paid, which for a competition ladder is the injury it does not walk off, and around 24,000 euros of promised money stayed owed from then on. In 2010 a Swedish game server host sued GGL over 40,000 dollars of unpaid hosting.

~ the actual end ~

The site went down on 1 December 2013 because the hosting had not been paid, and it stayed down. The volunteer crew still running the place asked GGL to either cover the bills or hand the site over to the people doing the work. GGL did neither. Three weeks later the crew published a statement at clanbase.org explaining what had happened and closing with the line that ClanBase was no more, and that page is still the last word on it.

~ what it became ~

The competitive infrastructure did not disappear, it relocated. ESL absorbed most of what ClanBase had been doing in Europe, and prize money that never arrived for a 2007 EuroCup winner is now routine for a second-tier tournament nobody writes about. What did disappear is the archive. Fifteen years of clan pages and ladder history sat on one set of servers owned by a company that had stopped caring, and when they went there was no export.

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