- - - La Famiglia - - -
The Founding of La Famiglia and Early History
LaF was formed by El Paco and Daniel, two revolutionary strategists and renowned players. First starting as a small alliance in game B, LaF was established as a tight, elite group of players intent on ruling the top 25 spots in the game.
LaF had two major groups that comprised, one was known as "the Dons" the other was "SHIELD", which formed into the core of what LaF became. Part of their early dominance was that they were one of the only alliances (along with RoCK) that used specialized strategies (aka casher, techer, indy, etc.) while most ppl at the time played some rainbow strat. Another factor was due the fact that La Famiglia was comprised of primarily Swedish people (RoCK (Rise of Chinese Kingdoms was mainly Chinese, and HAN (Huge Alliance of Nations) was made up of Koreans). Another factor of this is that LaF was one of the few that had an alliance website, hosted by LaF co-founder Daniel on everywhere.se
-
The Emergence of La Famiglia in 1A (Summer 1998 Reset aka Reset 1 of La Famiglia)
LaF first came to be a real power when, known as the Dons, they solidly defeated RoCK in the summer of 1998, ending with a virtual stranglehold on the top positions.
-
November 1998 Reset
LaF came under the leadership of Gramberto, who had come to the alliance after winning game B. Due to his tyrannical diplomacy and aggressive policies, LaF quickly became despised by many alliances, eventually leading to the Coalition vs. LaF war and ending in the sound defeat of LaF.
-
February 1999 Reset
Viper and El Paco started off as the leaders of La Famiglia. Gramberto resigned from political pressure from the previous reset (made a lot of enemies during the previous reset), and shortly afterwards after disputes and a nasty email between Gramberto and El Paco, Gramberto was booted from LaF. Gramberto bitterly left with a few LaF members and joined EoS (Enforcers of Scarface). Shortly after this happened, El Paco resigned from real life constraints, leaving Viper as the de facto leader with the aid of Patience. Another problem LaF ran into was the alliance website, which was falling behind from the more advanced website of our archrival RoCK. Viper somehow got us on RoCK's secondary server (earth.rockcorps.com) which was basically like their main server (
http://www.rockfamily.com) but with less features (this evolved into Gamerstown as we know today).
Needless to say, this website was one the reason for RoCK's virtual dominance of 1A during this time due to the site's database. Although RoCK said bb/brian took the admin thing seriously, we always wondered why the site crashed so conveniently when RoCK and LaF were at war, but anyways that might just be LaF propaganda to silly members like me at the time (although the site did crash when we warred RoCK I remember) :P This was still before Mehul Patel implemented tags in the game (yes Mehul did things back then), so we had to put the alliance numbers of member and pacted alliance manually from country lists onto the database.
Viper was attempting to rebuild the public perception of LaF which was a disaster from the previous reset under Gramberto. LaF aided its ally TIE in their war against HAN, and later assisted MD in fighting RoCK. While fighting RoCK, LaF was targetted by the RoCK Family, specifically by TGA and Omega, who inflicted substantial damage to LaF. This was a world war reset, with the only major alliance not in war SG (Solarian Guard) occupying a lot of the top 100 spots, along with HAN. LaF had some controversies regarding to them this reset, one was the delay of our assistant to our ally MD, the second was the Gaurdian program, which was a program which an LaF all-jetter would go and grab an alliance and our netgainers would farm him off (which kinda pissed ppl off heh).
-
May 1999 Reset
This is probably one of LaF's best resets ever, and we were ranked #1 by many at this time. It wasn't so peachy in the beginning however due to the less than dominant showings the previous resets and what was viewed as unstable leadership. The unstable leadership part was because Viper and Patience, our leaders from the past reset left for TIE. Ronnie and Lassemaja took over this reset as the main leaders, however and shaped an extremely successful reset.
Mehul Patel incorporated a major change this reset with the use of alliance tags. We started off strong, with many people in the top 100. We had a landgrab dispute with Ragnarok, which ended up with us FSing Ragnarok, with them surrendering the next day. We suffered a loss of only one country, and our netgaining reset was intact, so our hopes were still high. Ronnie tooled our pacts (plus no one wanted to be our FDP because we kinda were bad allies from last reset), into what is now known as the "isolationist" approach, where we just a bunch of NAPs and no DPs.
Later on RAGE and Ragnarok started a war which ingnited into World War III, eventually bringing in the rest of earth into another RoCK coaltion vs the anti-coalition war, with LaF sitting out this time (as opposed to being the leader of the anti-coalition side in previous resets). The only problems LaF faced was multi suiciders (which was dealt with quickly, it took only 90-120 attacks to kill ppl with 25C/GS as opposed to 5C/GS today), but otherwise it was a netgaining reset, which ended up with LaF taking 8 of top 10 (record broken more recently by LaF in summer 2002 with 9), 53 of top 100 (still a record), and the TNW/ANW titles. The only threat to our spots was China, which was later found out to be run by bb and top RoCKers, who at the end of the reset tagged up RoCK.
-
July 1999 Reset
This was another dominating reset for LaF although it ended on a sour note. We had 120 members, which marked us as one of the largest alliances in the game at the time (alliances were smaller that time in general). Our leader was still Ronnie, with the aid of a few others such as Blubb, Trotskiy, Lassemaja, Papafunk, Oden, Haldor, ACCI, etc. which was good, because we actually kept the same leader for two resets in a row for once :P I remembered the old joke that some old earth vet sat on AT (forgot who it was exactly) said LaF changed its Don more often than he changed underwear.
Anyways, LaF followed basically the same isolationist approach as the previous reset which worked well for us. We were dominating the top spots and everything was okay at first. We even had a "secret" (didn't know how secret it was supposed to be heh) LDP with RoCK. There were a few problems that surfaced, the first was the RoCK training tag ETU (Earth Training University) which was protected by RoCK. The problem was RoCK never notified us that they were protected by RoCK and many LaFfers grabbed ETU, which resulted in huge retals by RoCK from puny grabs by us. This peeved many LaFfers off, but Ronnie and Papafunk reminded that "RoCK was jealous of our netgaining dominance and wanted us to war them to ruin it by making us war them", and thus we netgained on.
The second major problem of the reset (and actually it was one of the major turning points of earth) was a new "FDP" of RoCK, called Tiger. Omega, being the "we must eradicate all cheaters" they are, started investigating Tiger and RoCK and there was a damning evidence that Tiger was a bot run by members of RoCK leadership. Omega posted this board, and a few days later Tiger FSed Omega. With all of this, LaF and RoCK cancelled their LDP and LaF assisted Omega, among many other alliances, helped eradicate Tiger.
Omega was outraged by this of course, and many of its members wanted to declare war on RoCK directly, but they were split on whether to wait for more evidence or attack now. This caused an internal conflict with many leaving under a Omega Division Leader (known as Helmet) and forming a new alliance called SoF. Eventually Omega went and declared war on RoCK, and another round of anti-coalition vs. RoCKfamily coalition ensued. We stayed out again because we followed our isolationist approach and didn't sign any FDPs. We had a problem of multies being run and killing and ABing many of our top rankers (later also tied to RoCK), but because of the rest of 1A being in a state of war, we eventually won TNW/ANW and took 48 of top 100 spots (still the second best record, behind the reset before this), although our rank 1 (Corleone) was later found out to be abusing a bug.
Near the end of one of the craziest reset until the recent TIL vs anti-TIL reset last reset, something (a former member of RoCK) exposed RoCK's cheating publically (of the multi hits on LaF and Omega), which eventually led to the collapse of RoCK as we know it after this reset. We were thought by many to take the throne as the sole top alliance from RoCK after this reset, except there was one problem, a few LaF members ran multies on Gramberto's "top 5" MD country, causing Gramberto to be infuriated and promising a three reset "death sentence" of bot running on LaF.
Along with the downfall of Omega (who were the other top tier alliance), it marked the downfall of the top alliances of the game at this time (especially the dominant RoCK and LaF), paving the way for MD's dominance for the next few resets (actually I rememeber talking to Samoan that reset about how MD got #2 TNW after us in this reset (with RoCK at #3) which was the first time that RoCK didn't take #1 or #2 in TNW (it was traditionally LaF and RoCK's domain).
-
August 2 Week Test Reset
This was the reset when Oil and Theocracy was introduced and it wasn't a real reset. But I just posted it here because Mehul was actually doing something in earth at the time =) Not all of LaF played, and some of us played for fun (being a 2 week reset, most of us went commie indies because it was a short reset), and we had a fun little war with an alliance called Dragon.
-
October 1999 Reset
Ronnie "retired" (later found to be in TIE with ACCI, with them two taking #1 and #2 ranks this reset under the TIE tag). Many leaders and members left because of Gramberto's 3-reset bot sentence, and we were only 90 members. As promised, Gramberto ABed the crapola out of most of our countries, and it was devastating. We weren't doing so well this reset because of this =( There was also the infamous P&Q hacking incident where you can decode the pws of ppl's logins with a piece of code, and many of our countries were hacked and deleted from it. Many LaFfers had to restart as many as 6 times.
A new alliance called Aramada (which was named among the top because it was formed of a merger of two decent alliances at the time FBI and BoA) with their top 100 countries (while we had none from our problems earlier) started to grab us like crazy. We were pretty ticked already considering what our reset was turning out to be, and declared war on Armada. We utterly destroyed them, which led them to disband later on this reset. We nearly placed a few countries in top 100 but we ended up with none in the end.
-
January 2000 Reset
Most of LaF's top netgainers fled this reset (hao2, Ichitaka, among others) to an new alliance Cryptic Monks (which was led by ACCI and Chump and Marty) due to this being reset 2 of 3 of Gramberto's sentence. Papafunk stepped down as leader (again the rotating leadership ;P) with Blubb and Town Drunk taking place as Co-Dons.
This reset was the FoG reset, where old RoCKfamily alliances (and the new incarnation of RoCK, Legion) forming one fatty FoG tag. Anyways, because most of us knew we were going to smacked by bots, we played a low CS indy start, and after gramberto ABed us, we proceeded to rebuild CS and did our switch (hehe hurray for LaF strategists). We weren't hurt as bad as last reset because of this, and was looking at another impressive netgaining reset. Due to real life constraints however, Blubb and TD stepped down with Haldor eventually taking their place.
We had a dispute with TGA who were retaling off the news (and news was constantly broken at the time) causing TGA to retal one of our retals. We got into a dispute with TGA because of this, with one of our members retalling for a TGA hit that wasn't shown in the news and promptly 2:1ed for it (TGA practiced a 2:1 policy at the time on everyone). We showed TGA's FR Mello the html news saved by our member indicating the hit on him, but Mello said to us "If it doesn't show up in the ingame news, it doesn't exist".
Well we weren't the only alliance that were offended by TGA's way of retalling, and LaF and RAGE declared war on TGA. Well, we withdrew after a week of war from to ceasefire, which was basically from DigTek from TGA telling us "Gramberto is only 1 person, think of what 60 people can do". Well anyways, we left the war leaving RAGE and TGA fighting, and were labeled as wussies and treehuggers by the 1A community, which kinda stuck for a while heh. TGA was losing this war however, and they eventualy dragged in all of FoG. This led MD into kicking all of their asses (heheh go MD :P) and being the de-facto #1 alliance of the game at this time.
This was a world-war reset again, and the only major alliances that weren't warring in the end was Avengers and us, and despite the bots running on us, we dominated most of the top 10 and top 100 (37 spots) and was #2 in ANW behind the Protest tag of Avengers who dropped all put 11 of their members because of Mehul's deletion of Rauch. A "new member" named Samson from the Lynbrook division won this reset, but he was later found out to be Ronnie.
-
March 2000 Reset
Papafunk was our symbolic leader in a way this reset, but the brunt of the work was done by Duque (who emerged as one of our main leaders last reset) and Haldor. We signed a FDP with Avengers (our first FDP in a long while) this reset. Avengers eventually became one of our closest friends for a long time. This was reset 3 of 3 of Gramberto's sentence, except with the help of many alliances we were hiding in many alliances (one division per alliance).
Anyways, this was one of the funnest war resets ever for LaF, and old SoF and Avengers can testify to this ;P What basically happened was SoF and Avengers were embroiled in war, and being our FDPs and outnumbered, we jumped in to help them). We had joined warchats with Avengers (and those were hella fun *waves hi to old avengers* :P) SoF called in Armageddon to hit LaF and RAGE to hit Avengers, but despite this it was a very close war, although SoF won it in the end.
-
June 2000 Reset
Duque became our Don (with help of Haldor leading also) and without Gramberto's bots (yay!) and at a good size of 120 (most of our old members came back because of the end of the bot sentence). It was a traditional netgaining reset for LaF and relatively quiet (i think we fought a minor war with Syndicate (?)) and also SOL was starting to farm us for no reason. When we retaled, they retaled on retaled and things got ugly =( We eventually solved this problem between our leaders and continued to netgain.
This reset had another major war stemming from SOL getting into a major conflict vs. RAGE and ARROW which resulted in a TSA vs TF showdown (reminiscent of RoCKfamily, FoG, and TIL wars). While everyone was at war, we dominated top 100 with people not at war, primarily SoF (yes SoF netgained back then lol) and SL. We got #2 in ANW (losing to SL) and #1 in TNW (barely edging out SoF) and got the majority of the top 100 spots (35+ again) and a few top 10ers.
-
August 2000 Reset
Well, Duque was our Don again, and being a warmonger he said "this will be our war reset". Well one of my rl friends from my hs (named Lynbrook HS hence Lynbrook division hehe) Jin, farmed some DA country because he was quitting, let Physco (another rl friend from Lynbrook) farm him, and then told other Lynbrook members to GS Physco in DR so DA couldn't get their land back. Well Beltzshumeltz of DA was talking to our FR Neal (also from my HS hehe) about this situation, and Neal kinda blew him off and told him to contact Duque (since he was the Don).
This didn't go so well with DA and they declared war and FSed us. DA called in Pirates to assist them after a few days of warring us. We killed 100+ of their 125 members and eventually reached a ceasefire. We had 3 FDPs (Avengers, Elitez, and SoF) this reset and with not much of a netgaining reset left (although we still had some top ranking countries), and with Elitez FSing SOL and SOL calling in every single one of their allies (like 6-7 of them), we joined SoF into assisting Elitez on SOL. SoF/LaF combined warchats (damn those were fun *hugs old-timer SoFties* killed off SOL, and LaF finished finished the reset with one top 10er (hao2) and 6 top 100s (blubb, hanlong, joe among them). Well, we climbed back to one of the powerhouses of the game after this reset, which we haven't enjoyed for a long time =)
-
October 2000 Reset
Duque led us again (last reset for him though), and it was more of less a netgaining reset. We had a minor setback in a small war with FBI, but standing at only 30-40 members, we annihilated them quickly and continued to netgain. There wasn't much problems afterwards and we rolled onto a second place tnw and anw showing (behind Elitez, who clinched #1 in both categories). However, we placed a decent amount (~30) in top 100 and it was a relatively good reset, a typical LaF netgaining reset.
-
January 2001 Reset
Duque left us to IX =( (he promised a short break and he'll be back, but that wanker never did), and left ACCI to become the Don of LaF. To make up the holes in head positions, h4x0r and hanlong became heads in LaF by the end of this reset, both being the key shapers of the next dominant LaF reset (in sept 2001). Well other than a little skirmish on this crap clan called HARDCORE, it was peaceful for us and we placed another decent netgaining showing at #3 in TNW (we were only 89 members, so we were behind 215 member UCN and 119 member Elitez) and #2 in ANW (behind Elitez). This was a quiet treehugging reset for us basically =)
-
March 2001 Reset
Blubb was placed as our Don again this reset, but he didn't do that much, so the other heads (namely h4x0r and me) took the brunt of the work. It was a reset long warring reset for us, with us "controversially" FSing SOL with our FDP Genesis (carried from Avengers who merged with SL to form Genesis). Well reasons are still disclosed (because Norcal is still bitter about this hehehe ;P) Well all I can say, is that we got to join warchat again with our good buddies in Avengers (since they merged to form Genesis). That aspect was fun, but after SOL called in Arrow on Genesis and TGA on us it obviously tipped the scales towards SOL, and we lost the war eventually but put up a decent showing.
This was the "Titans" reset, which they dominated the rankings, and being in a reset long war with SOL (and yes, SOL are good fighters) they kept us from any top spots (although we kept them from any, but not like they cared, since SOL doesn't partcularly care about those things hehe). We ended up with one top 100, a tagjumper from Avalon (fishy) which TGA promptly killed, even though we signed a ceasefire with them.
-
June 2001 Reset
The Super Genius aka Oafijev took over as Don this reset, with Heads Mischief, me, and h4x0r helping him out. It was a netgaining reset again for us (most of us were tired from the long and brutal reset long war with SOL the previous reset). We won TNW and placed #2 in ANW (behind a "mysterious" alliance named CoA). In the end though, UCN was pissed at us however, because a couple of TKS tagged up to LaF in the last minute, stealing UCN's "TNW win". Anyways we took the majority of the top 100 (30+ again) and achieved what is becoming a classic LaF tradition =)
-
September 2001 Reset
I became more active again this reset as a head and with h4x0r as our Don we led LaF to a very impressive netgaining showing. This was the big 6 gangbang reset, and with Elitez as our main ANW/TNW competition for the past few resets, we had the TNW/ANW crown pretty easily, with Chump winning 1A and us dominating 6 of top 10, and 41 out of top 100 spots. I was trying to break our old top 100 record, but the DJustice top 100 people I recruited earlier *waves to Son Goku* and SOLers who came with Chump went back to their alliances by the end of the reset. Although we dominated ANW/TNW and the rankings, people barely put us as a top 5 alliance due to us having a mediocre showing in our last war (the SOL one) and having netgained for the past two resets, we were too "pansy" to do anything =)
-
November 2001 Reset
Welps, this was LaF's worst reset. This was due to me and h4x0r being inactive, and as the two major figureheads of LaF, that wasn't good news. With h4x0r virtually ignoring what is su