Love them or not, we all know who they are. It is coded in every fellow pvper, that when they see that guild tag in a warzone, then it probably won’t end well for their team. But besides the common reaction “It’s RC, we’re screwed”, what do we actually know about them? To be honest with you all, I didn’t know much, so the interview with the guild’s GM, Rummel, and the Co-GM, Anthis was very illuminating, if I can say that. I’m certain you crave the information I have, so to not keep you in the dark any longer, let me present you the dramatic history of Reality Check!
Let’s go back to the roots first. Founders of RC come from a guild called Victory which was a PvP guild on the Bao Dur server. The original GM got tired of the game, and when he left, he gave the title to the PvE raidleader, before that happened Rummel was promoted to be a PvP officer – a suggestion made by Anthis, who was the first pick. The problem started when the new GM expected people who had been the longest in the guild to have an automatic spot in the PvP teams, players who actually never really did PvP. Figures. So it created conflict between the GM and Rummel, and they unfortunately couldn’t see eye to eye. Rummel ended up telling Mercer and Kiss how annoyed he was, and the outcome was, that Kiss decided to leave the guild, and the others followed, along with all the PvP players, safe for Anthis actually, who only made the decision a few days later. So in autumn 2012 Reality Check was founded by Rummel. The name was thought of by the first person to leave Victory – Kiss. The name was a stab at our former guild members and the new Victory GM for being irrational in their arguments. They made a guild in response called Insanity.
As they said, their goal was “to get a bunch of like-minded people together to do PvP on our own terms. That was all. To play with whoever we wanted without anyone else dictating who we PvPed with”. So at the beginning RC wasn’t an elitist guild at all.
They started to do ranked the first day RC was founded, when Rummel recruited Vesuvius, Kage and Gona, two of whom were still on the ranked team the day the guild died. They were mostly playing against SSB, The Warlords, ND, Space Cats and DevNor. Their biggest competition was still ND, who for a long time they couldn’t defeat. They said a part of the reason behind this was their policy of giving every member a chance in the PvP team, meaning they didn’t have a steady team but a rotating one. The result was that they made no real progress. They had some close ranked games against ND but they were always “not quite there yet”. RC eventually moved to TRE in accordance with the server merges. Here they really managed to establish themselves as a PvP guild to take seriously when they finally won against Nostrum Dolus and won a bounty in the process. “It was a defining moment for us because people didn’t really know who we were. There were no good PvP guild on imp side at the moment and all of a sudden, everyone wanted to have their imperial characters in our guild”, Rummel explains.
At this point RC became more serious and recruited officers Glory and Snave.
“The guild was too messy at the time and we needed more structure”, Anthis tells us. “We started taking ranked really seriously after that with actual theorycrafting and coordination. That was mostly because of Glory’s leadership skills. That move really solidified our place as the second best team on the server, but it also had the effect of us slowly becoming more elitist, which lead to a lot of drama in the future. ”
It seems the biggest issue was how to balance the first and second team. Like I mentioned before, they had 4 ranked groups, and naturally people from the second team wanted to be on the first one. Let’s face it, who wants to be second best? It just sounds wrong, doesn’t it? Later they called the first team Glory’s team, second Gab’s team, etc, etc. This to at least give an illusion of equality in skill. Alas it didn’t work out. Gab was complaining that he didn’t have enough good players at his disposal, they didn’t show up, and they didn’t follow tactics. This drama of the second team shortly triggered a defining event for the guild. And because I know you all love drama, I’m going to tell you more about this.
“Gab as we called him was very charismatic and a really nice guy, he was good at the game and mastered many of the different classes and specs. He was also active on TS and always fun to be around” Rummel said.
Gab was the leader of the RC’s 2nd team, but later he got a spot on RC 1st team because someone left the game.
“There he could shine not only with his skill, but also with his leadership skills and insight with tactics etc. Glory was still very much in charge of the team, but Gab was a valuable member”, Rummel tells us.
Then on a dreadful day, he committed his hubris by cheating in CW along with Neige. They were kicked out of the guild, for breaking its rules, a while later they realized it was a bit harsh and invited them back. However, they never made Gab an officer again. Though he never told anyone, he felt betrayed. Later it turned out he swore revenge and put together a plan to destroy RC. He operated in the shadows, rallied members against the guild. When another not related drama happened, he left RC, and quickly made his own guild, Centurion. He offered cookies to people if they would come to the dark side, aka a spot on their ranked team, which resulted in 15 or so members leaving RC.
“I think RC got stronger over this, it united us and the core people even more, the people that had been in the guild for a long time and it created a same faction rivalry which was also nice in a sense”, Rummel concludes. “We learnt a lot from it in terms of how we handle things before it gets to that point and recruitment in general. It also decreased the amount of future drama significantly I’d say. I think all of the officers of RC at the time still holds a grudge towards Gab even today. We considered him a very good friend, someone we trusted and enjoyed playing with and we were all very much surprised by the way he acted. It had become clear that even before this day happened he’d been rallying people to his side in the shadows. It’s not a quality I appreciate in anyone but even less so in someone I consider a friend. We did have a grudge towards the guild in general at the time, though I think a lot of their members I’d say were innocent in all of this and just wanted to play with their friends. That said, after all that happened I can’t deny that we did take satisfaction in beating them in ranked. Now years later I’m still friends with several of the Centurion guys and there are no hard feelings except those towards Gab specifically.”
They moved to ToFN, where we all know they were at their best.
Sadly for RC, this was the point at which the ranked 8v8 was converted to the 4v4 ranked arenas. The guild became inactive shortly after that. Both Anthis and Rummel quit. Along with many others.
Some time later a few players came back. Snave came back to TRE because he hated ToFN and soon many followed. They founded the guild Casuality Check since they wanted it to be a more casual guild than RC. Rummel gave the GM title to Snave because his 7 days sub timed out. But of course as human beings we are rarely content. They wanted the guild to be more serious again and not invite just anyone. So now we are coming to the end of the story. The old RC had decided to come back and take the game seriously. Why didn’t they? Instead Rummel made a drastic move and kicked everyone from the guild safe for Mercer and Anthis, and so it still exists now. When explaining why Rummel made this choice he tells us:
“Well CC was going fine but people wanted us to be more serious cause we were like very casual and invited people in the RC days wouldn’t fit the standards. Some people wanted us to remake RC and be more picky about who joins. I told Snave that I don’t really care if we remade RC, but I was only ok with it if either me or Anthis would be GM. I never want anyone else to be GM of RC than me or Anthis, I feel like it’s our brand. Our name and our guild. I feel strongly about that. So I would never let Snave be GM of RC, and he agreed. He made me GM of CC and we renamed it to RC. Because of more drama however I quit the game again. I had made it perfectly clear that yeah I can be GM and remake RC but I have no desire of drama… So RC still exists now, but yes I kicked almost everyone. The worst thing I see these days are ND. It hurts me to see what a great guild like ND can become in the absence of it’s original core and leaders. It’s a shadow of what it used to be. Random people being invited and kicked again. Half of the people who sometimes play in the guild were not originally in it back in ND’s glory days. And of course that causes the rest of the community to look down on the guild. They are salty about loosing to them so many times in the past and are glad to have a reason to speak ill of the guild as the quality of the players in it is diminishing. It was one of the best guilds in the game, and now it has become this dead guild with like two good people in it. I don’t want that for RC.”
To end our little journey in the life of Reality Check, I would like to quote what Anthis answered to the question below.
What was the best thing about being a part of RC as GM and officer and what was the worst?
“For me personally the best part was the ranked when we played, theory crafting and all. Yeah, the ranked was the best part. The worst part was the human interaction.”
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