Visited my rl buddy Hideyoshi once (we used to live in the same neighborhood as kiddos) to play some Risk (board game) and drink a bit, he showed me "that awesome turkish medieval game" and when I saw it I was like "yeeeh, looks like shit, not gonna look into that"
But lateron, his buddies which I knew a bit aswell (Taimic and Schmackofatz) got the game aswell to play online and they convinced me to get it aswell. We 4 first ran around on PW and Mount and Musket to do some random shit. About 1-2 weeks later Hideyoshi started to talk about some crpg mod (which I thought at first was retarded since I imagined it with orcs and stuff...cause, you know, rpg). Since he started playing crpg more than PW, we decided to switch to it aswell. Hideyoshi had already joined a clan called "Shogunate" but he warned us that there's going to be a skill test for it, according to our performance we'd also get ranked differently (yeah that was a thing back then, Shogunate was even divided into 4 subclans, which was kinda cool. There was some kind of discipline and competition within the clan). So for the next 1-2 weeks we regulary met online and trained on the old Nditions Duel Server, hideyoshi as the "grand master" and us as the three recruits. It felt kind of like a bootcamp and it was great since we learned a LOT of stuff within a short time.
When we were tested on the duel server we were accepted, got our ranks and were teamkilled by Captain_Georges, as it was tradition. And everything else what followed is history.
At first I stood because I had quite some fun with the people of my clan, lateron when Byz died down, I already knew the regular players and had fun talking and playing with them. Also, playing crossbow kinda felt like fishing for me, it's both exciting yet relaxing. Funny how my ranged character at first started off as a parody to ranged cancer and then turned me into one of them. I used to play 2h/lance cav hybrid for 1 1/2 years before I even touched ranged.
after 4 or 5 years on multiplayer, I tried the singleplayer game for the first time