We are a large, friendly, and non competitive gaming clan that focuses on the PC and the PlayStation 3 and play a variety of games from those systems. 

 

 

 

 

We were founded on April 23, 2009 by our clan leader Spino Prime.  Spino Prime came up with the clan name "The Destroyrs"  because he was once on a school sports team that named themselves "The Destroyers"  and to reference his online alias "VehicleDestroyr" which he uses as for many of his online profiles (especially on consoles) because that was his nickname from back when he played Unreal Tournament 2004.  he got this nick name from other players because of his skill and deadliness with a rocket launcher (especially against enemy vehicles hence the name Vehicle Destroyer) and he replaced the er with an r because er went over the max number of characters for the Online Gamertag name.

 

Along with this weekly report came our avatar Spino Prime had designed for the clan.  The avatar is made up of images from 2 games those two being Half Life 2 (on the left) and Resistance 2 (on the right).  This was done to easily communicate that this clan's main games were Resistance 2 and Half Life 2 (and its related games).  On the right is the Chimera which is the enemy alien race from Resistance 2.  The featured Chimera are the Chimeran Steel Head (the alien with the metal mask) and a Chimeran Goliath (the awesome alien walker).  On the left is the Combine which is the evil alien oppressors in Half Life 2.  The featured Combine are a metrocop (the one with the machine gun), and a stalker (the other awesome alien walker).  The avatar was made to have symmetrical balance.  Other then communicating our main games the avatar was also done this way because it looked totally awesome and Spino Prime thought that it would be an avatar that would catch some one's eye and attract them to our group.  

 

After being delayed twice, (once due to issues with the cropping program being used and second because of some issues with uploading hosts) we had released our very first group project.  The Official Spray Pack was released about a month after out group's creation on May 23rd.  It featured 6 image sprays (each with the size 256 X 256, the maximum size accepted by the source engine) to be used on any source game (such as Garry's Mod and Counter Strike Source).  It was also a large success getting good reviews from many of our members and gained us loyalty from many of our users.  It also had its criticisms though such as not having enough content, and being slightly repetitive. 

 

Around the same time our second in command Scorch 117 had announced 2 projects that were in the making.  These were "World In Crysis" which was a modification for the single player campaign that would take place in an alternate reality in which events were modified and the game was harder, and "Wanted: Weapons of Fate" a machinima that would be an unofficial sequel to the popular action movie "Wanted".  The name was highly criticized because it was the exact same name as the official Wanted video game "Wanted Weapons of Fate".  A preview of the video can be viewed here.  At the time of announcement Scorch had put up a weekly report on the group that usually went online before the actual report and was only focused on Scorch's projects.  This only lasted for 3 weeks however because he ran out of things to talk about on them (the third week was just some random video game and movie reviews written by him) and a few other reasons.  As of this date neither have been completed and both are rumoured to have been canceled due to production issues.  Spino Prime would remind you that he is not in control of these fan projects or their quality so if you don't like them do not complain to him, and the opinions and views in these projects are not necessarily my views, the views of The Destroyrs or any of its members. 

 

We had also declared war on an older group that Spino Prime created that refused to die and become part of The Destroyrs.  This group was Test Group 9 and another person in the group had decided to take control of it as an independent group.  This of course was unacceptable so war was declared.  This war mostly consisted of flame wars, spamming each other, and persuading members to leave the clan for the enemy clan.  It was very successful for us at the start as their member list went down from 18 to a measly 7 with almost no casualties on our side.  After that though the battle became long and hard because those last 7 members would not leave the group.  The war is still going on at the time of writing.

 

So the first few months were a few hits (such as the weekly report and the spray pack) and a few misses (such as the unreleased Scorch projects and the only partially successful war) but in the end the group only became stronger because of this.  But after a few months of low member counts (under 20 members) and a very small online presence for itself (two locations) one thing became very clear.  It was time to expand.

 

 

The first way we had to expand was members.  Spino Prime had planed out a few ways to do this.  One of them was a beta program.  If you could get 5 of your friends into the group you were given beta access.  His second scheme was to invite some people to the group himself.  His third scheme was to promise people he would trust to help run the group that they would get admin status for recruiting lots of members for the group.  These eventually netted the group some members.  But as our popularity grew we started to see that we needed to expand to some new areas.  The first new area The Destroyrs expanded into was Google Groups.  Google Groups gave us a place to upload our files such as the Spray Pack and gave us forums for our members to communicate.  

 

At the same time as this expansion some of our members had started saying that they wanted to see clan news in between weekly reports, thus the news bit system was born.  News bits were a short comment on the website home page or the Steam profile that begins with News bit: and then contains a short news headline.  These are short 100 or so character messages sent to inform members of news in between weekly reports.  Kind of like Twitter.  The news bit system was accompanied by the Milestone achieved system.  This was exactly the same except next to Milestone achieved: it would feature an important milestone to pass such as 200 members joined or 500 hits to the website. 

 

To make sure the new members knew what was and wasn't acceptable Spino Prime published rules on the group profile.  There are 5 rules and breaking them would get you demoted or banned from the group.  The 5 rules are:

1. No Flaming
2. You can not be a member of TG9
3. No dumb comments
4. No PS3 hatting
5. No promoting of other groups in comments or announcements

These rules helped make sure that the group always stayed under control and maintained a friendly attitude across our web pages. 

 

June 23rd, 2009 was our second major project release.  It was the Spray Pack 1.5 which was an updated version of the spray pack.  It added a descriptive change log, a how to install document, and 5 new sprays.  This update was a bit of a minor one but it would lay the ground work for later spray pack releases which made it an important release.  It was also a large success with even better reviews then the one previous but a new complaint had come out which mostly came from our newer members.  Installing the pack to the games are too much work.  This quickly rose to be the number one complaint.  This did not stop the spray pack from being even better liked then the one previous to it.

 

Also on June 23rd the most significant announcement so far was made.  A website had been set up for the clan.  This website now was the central hub for all Destroyr activity.  Not the steam page.  This website is the single largest source dedicated to Destroyrs news and content on the entirety of the Internet.  The website was small to start with featuring only our home page, all of our weekly reports, all of our project files (such as the spray pack), and a member list.  Over the next few months Spino Prime would develop the website into what you are looking at now.  It has seen massive improvement done to it since its original announcement.

 

To help market ourselves to others a change of opening was in order.  Our opening had used to be "We are awesome at everything we play. We do not forgive we do not forget. We are The Destroyrs" then we had changed it to "We are awesome at all the games we play so do not resist us because you are only prolonging your inevitable defeat at our hands."  This new opening sounded cooler and sounded less like a placeholder line.

 

To help organize our members we set up ranks to decide who should have what power in the group. Here is the list of available Ranks in order of highest to lowest on the chain of command with the privileges each rank gets:

Destroyr Leader:                          All rights in group, there will only be one Destroyr Leader at any one time.

Omega Destroyr:                         All Godlike rights, plus the ability to manage group images and videos.

Godlike:                                      All General rights, plus the ability to administer the forums.

General:                                      All Colonel rights, plus the ability to manage members of a lower rank.

Colonel:                                      All Lieutenant rights, plus the ability to organise and edit events.

Lieutenant:                                  All Officer rights, plus the ability to plan events.

Officer:                                        All Private rights, plus the ability to post news.

Private:                                       All Recruit rights, plus the ability to request to be on the elite website viewer list. 

Recruit:                                       The right to comment in the group, plus the ability to recruit other members, default rank.

Epic Failure:                                No group rights, you get this rank from being demoted.

Banned:                                      Banned from the group.  This member is kicked out and can not return.

 

During those website development months the group expanded to other areas such as Xfire (which would replace Google Groups as our primary forums), Warhawk, Trackmania United Forever, YouTube, Folding@Home, and Galcon.  As our presence expanded so did our following.  The Destroyrs then had over 200 members.  All of a sudden this wasn't some small gaming clan that no one was a part of, it was now a large force to be reckoned with.  With that new large size in both member following and information sources came the responsibility of unifying them under the one name.  It was time for the Clan to undergo some unification.

 

 

First thing that needed to be unified is news.  There were many different sources within the clan with different news to share.  The Google group notified you when new topics were made on the forums, the website had both weekly reports and unique pages, our steam page notified you of upcoming events and was the best destination for news bits.  It was simply to hard for new people to keep track of what was going on.  To counter this Spino Prime introduced "The Destroyrs Mandatory Bundle" which was a series of RSS feeds handpicked to keep you up to date on everything going on in the group from one unified source.  It made checking for weekly reports and new events or releases that much simpler.

 

Not exactly part of the unification objective but important to the period was the release of Spray Pack 2.2 on August 14th, 2009.  This release included for the first time 3 animated sprays, and another 3 image sprays.  The animated sprays made the package more interesting to download but it didn't solve the install complaints.  It was still well received by many Destroyrs that could tolerate some manual moving of files.

 

Second was the members of the group.  They did not interact with each other, or even the group very much.  To unify the members Spino Prime released group achievements.  This would give members a common goal to try to achieve and encouraged participation in the clan.  The initial release was on August 21st and consisted of 21 achievements for 1000 Group Points (GP).  This helped encourage many of our members to participate and join us at other locations.  Getting all the achievements brought the ultimate award of being a Destroyrs Platinum member.  This is a high goal requiring that you join the clan at virtually all of our locations and downloading all of our content. To help the launch of Achievements the Spray Pack got a minor update to 2.5 which included an achievement code that the member that downloaded it could send to Spino Prime in order to unlock an achievement.  The Achievements were another great success that would help unify the group in a few different ways.  

 

These different initiatives greatly helped heal our growing pains after our very quick growth and unified our group.  Now however the now settled members wanted some new content to get their keyboard and mouses on.  It was time for The Destroyrs to begin a content rush.

 

 

To keep members interested in the clan it needs some unique content.  The Destroyrs delivered this the day after the launch of the achievements.  The Creation of The Destroyrs (aka The Destroyrs Chronicles 1) was released.  This was a mini novel about 30 pages long that was a fictionalized and exaggerated version of the group's creation that took place from the perspective of his online character.  All of the different admins got a part in this story such as Scorch 117 and Jupdown.  The mini novel was also well received and caught the interest of many a downloader.

 

At the same time as these projects many improvements were being made to the website.  The weekly reports page was redesigned, an alliances and foes page was put up, a project list was created, and the forms were added among several other things.  This made the site much more informative and more convenient for its users. This effort to improve the website had payed off because it had just hit over half a thousand views, which while not being that much in today's Internet was still a good milestone to pass.

 

At this point in time The Destroyrs did not have many allies so to try to increase the number of groups linking to his he decided to open up the ability for any group and not just ones that we had worked with for several months or had Spino Prime in them.  This had opened doors up to some other clans such as Ghost Operatives, and Deranged Brothers Productions.

 

On September 20th, 2009 the Spray Pack 3.0 was released.  It had almost double the content as 2.5.  It included 14 new image sprays, 2 new animated sprays, and a big new feature, an installation program.  This eliminated the number one complaint that most had with the spray pack of it being to hard to install the sprays.  Now it came with a program that could do it for you.  It also featured some of the highest quality sprays made so far and featured a few very different ones to address the problem of repetitiveness.  The Pack was the best received one so far with pretty much all comments about it very positive.  In particular Animated Spray 5 was loved by many downloaders, Scorch 117 and Jupdown both called it "the best spray ever".  All in all it was another highly successful release for the group. To celebrate its release Spino Prime finally developed a page for the pack on the website.

 

Leaderboards were added on the website to show who had the most Achievements.  This pushed many to start achieving within the group.  This pushed one of our members so much that on September 26th the 21st achievement which is awarded for getting all the other achievements was finally obtained.  Scorch117 completed his collection that day by joining our Xfire clan and earning him the last achievement he needed before he had all he needed for platinum.  He was the very first person in The Destroyrs to complete this task.  That means he has 21 achievements and 1000 GP.

 

On the evening of October 9th, 2009 a new piece of content was released.  This was The Destroyrs Community Toolbar.  It was a toolbar addon for Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Safari that allowed members to take many of the site's features with them on the Internet such as search, downloads, and news.  The toolbar included a bar to search our website, a chat room to talk with other members, a news ticker, an RSS reader tuned up to The Destroyrs Mandatory Bundle, and buttons that will download many of our files.  It is a handy tool.  It also did very well getting praise from a few downloaders.

 

In order to help orient new users a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page was set up on the website with all the most asked questions in the clan especialy for newer people.  The clan uses a lot of memes acronyms and Internet terms that the average person may not know so Spino Prime also set up a Terminology page with these memes, achronyms, and Internet terms matched up with their meanings.  Questions sent to Spino Prime wen't way down after the release of those two pages.

 

On Sunday the 1st of November, 2009, Spino Prime decided it would be a good idea to archive the group's entire history on the website.  You are reading from this archive now.

 

On November 18th the official website home page had managed to get over 1000 hits.