eGO has become like a family for me. I initially stumbled upon the servers by virtue of my low ping to their servers and quickly came to appreciate the professional, no-nonsense attitude with which eGO administered their servers. It was an immense joy to find a place to play where I wouldn't have to worry about punks, hackers, griefers, and whatever other labels you may want to apply towards those players who are generally immature and who make the game experience less enjoyable for others.
After playing on the servers for a while, a member -- and I can't remember who -- tried to recruit me. I think I said that I'd check it out, but I really wasn't that interested. My past experience with clans had shown that they could be an immense drain on your time, and I just didn't want to make that level of commitment to another organization; another hobby.
You see, I started playing TF2 solely as a diversion to consume some of my free time. I built my computer shortly after the holidays, when most of my friends were still trying to recover from the holidays. Or their checking accounts were anyway, so we weren't going out to bars as much. Add to that the fact that it was too cold outside for some of my other hobbies and that some of my other routine commitments had been put on temporary hiatus, and suddenly I found myself with a surplus of discretionary time and the need for something to fill it with. Although I was a huge fan of TFC, my more recent experiences with online gaming had been overall negative, and I rarely stuck with a multiplayer FPS for more than a few weeks here and there. But I never thought I'd find a clan like eGO.
eGO has made my TF2 gaming experience so much more enjoyable than my experience with any other online multiplayer game. And since I have been playing online multiplayer games for over a decade now, that means a lot. In eGO, I have found a mature, professional gaming community that I am proud to be a part of. After the second attempt to recruit me, I finally relented and decided to visit eGO's website. It was then that I started to read the forums and found out just what eGO stood for. I expected eGO to be a competitive clan and I already knew that for several reasons, TF2 competition was something I didn't want to get involved in. Turned out, I was wrong. I discovered that eGO was pretty much everything I was looking for in a gaming community. I discovered that the clan presented a mature attitude, managed their servers in a highly professional manner, and that the community exhibited a high level of camaraderie. And we still do.
The combination of each of those attributes along with so very, very much more was enough to convince me to join, and is still enough to keep me coming back. What started out as a temporary diversion to help me kill some time, has turned into a full blown... addiction? I hate to use that word as it implies some negative attributes that one really cannot apply to eGO. Perhaps, infatuation is a better term to use. I now try to find time to play almost every night. In eGO I have found a community that I really care about. I've found a community that I'm happy to dedicate some of my time and effort towards. While eGO's entire existence is merely virtual, when I think about this community what I feel is a sense of family and a sense of belonging. We may not all like everybody else. We may not always be happy with the decisions made by others, but in the end, we are all here because we chose to be. And we keep coming back because we like what we have found. With eGO I find myself associated with a great group of people, all of whom I am proud to call friends.
