User:Chainlight/Purity of Essence
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Purity of Essence, or [PoE], is a Online Gaming Team which was founded in Texas in 1998 for the original Tribes video game. [PoE] continues to compete online, now with membership throughout the USA and Canada. Having grown through Tribes, its sucessors Tribes2 and Tribes:Vengeance, and on to Battlefield:1942, Battlefield:Vietnam, and currently, Battlefield 2, Purity of Essence remains a competitive and stable, though infrequently Top-10, competition team.
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[edit] Team Naming
The team Purity of Essence owes its name in tribute to the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove in which the recall code prefix was POE -- an acronym for the possible variants Peace on Earth or Purity of Essence. The latter in reference to Base Commander Jack Ripper's delusional belief that his own inability to "Complete the physical act of love" was in some way connected to the (real or imagined) international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
[edit] Leadership
Founded in 1998 by Wes "BigBrown" Ratliff and a handful of friends including Craig "SteroidChic" Adams and [Find Another]. While the original competition "Leadership" of PoE was handed to Chris "Strato" [Lastname], PoE's Benevolent Dictator For Life has always been Mr. Ratliff.
After Chris "Strato" [Lastname's] departure, the competition leadership returned to Ratliff with assistance from Bob "JJFlash" Boyland as XO, and under their leadership PoE continued competition within the OGL and Teamwarfare. XO responsibilities have changed hands three of times, from Boyland to Kevin "Anthem" Guillaume, and finally Jean-Yves "Granit" Cajelais and Ken "Pillbug" Goodman, the current XOs.
[edit] Internal Events
Historically, TribalWar has had a fairly lax moderation policy, allowing users to speak their mind freely. Due to some incidents with trolling and spam, the moderation has increased much more than before, with trolling, posting of not work safe material, and the like, usually being caught and dealt with very quickly when required. In an effort to curb potentially annoying posts by new members, anyone registering has to wait a specific amount of time before they are allowed to post, in order for new users to read and aclimate themselves with how the forum works. This waiting period has changed numerous times in the last few years, anywhere from 3 months, to 14 days in length. Many of TW's momentous threads are being gathered in an effort to comprehensively chronicle the community's enduring memories at the tribalwar.com Forums Hall of Fame.
Chairgate
In 2004 then-administrator of Tribalwar.com "Colosus" elected to sit his portly self upon a chair, which thereafter broke in front of many members of the Tribes community who had elected to watch Colosus and others sit via an internet video link. The incident was instantly, and somewhat ironically dubbed "Chairgate" in the convention of suffixing embarrassing scandals with "gate" since President Nixon's involvement with Watergate, despite a self-evident lack of conspiracy about the incident on Colosus' part. The events were widely broadcast and intermittently recounted several times across TW IRC and message boards. Some of TW's members expressed pleasure at the incident, which was in their view just deserts for Colosus' alleged fraudulent conduct involving a "Labtop".
Labtop incident
Few, if any persons at all would be able to disclose information as to the design or function of a "Labtop". However the precious information on it has been widely propagated: it is most certainly valuable, and was purchased by "Colosus" with money that may or may not have been fraudulently extracted from philanthropic members of TW upon contended pretences of supporting server maintenance. Some of this money may or may not have also been spent on airplane tickets, champagne cocktails and furry costumes for WorldCon. Years later, in 2005, Colosus began repaying this debt in hopes of eliminating a lifetime of shame. This event later led to the Church of Mountain Dew in which, Colosus, after receiving threatening letters from a lawyer regarding taking donation money from a nonprofit and buying a "labtop" declared Tribalwar a church dedicated to Mountain Dew and became Cardinal DeWald.
