Hello NA Warbanders.
I'm here to give you the rundown on what actually happened over the years with the legendary POM server. Our history is lengthy, so there is much that will not be addressed here.
Why am I doing this? Because its 3 AM, I cant sleep and I'm bored, looking back on all this with some nostalgia (even the haters, we love you). And do keep in mind that I do not have all the timelines, its simply been too long and there aren't clear records of all events. This is a generalized summary.
1. So to begin; the POM clan was created in the earliest days of the Warband Beta, by a guy called SPQR. At some point, DoomCraft joined the clan and created the server USA_Central_POM for both public use, and for clan use.
2. Warband officially launched, and the POM server was already up and running at this point and quickly became a go-to for the majority of the community. Why? Possibly due to the settings, possibly due to a lot of the better players frequenting there, possibly due to the overall quality of the server, or possibly a combination of all these things. Furthermore, we had 2 other servers at this time, USA_East_POM which became our tournament and practice server, and there was also USA_West_POM which we used to run mods like invasion mod and other random events.
3. In 2010, the first year of Warband being officially released, POM hosted the first ever scrim tournament. We hosted this several times throughout this first year. If memory serves, all the active clans attended and it was overall a great time for the competitive community, there was a lot of interest and overall the clan sizes were much larger back then due to a larger overall NA population. Note that these scrims were all held on Fastest combat speed, as was the norm then. (As was 12v12 or larger scrim matches)
4. At some point, SPQR, the founder of POM, had quit the clan due to a plethora of reasons I won't go into in this post, which resulted in a lot of drama and the beginning of a lot of hatred towards the POM group. On top of that, a few other clans had died off (nK, ATS, Hobos, I think to name a few) and the competitive scene took a hit. POM stopped hosting the scrim tournaments, and we played more and more casually as time went on in 2011. By this point, DoomCraft, Constantine and Kharel were the leadership of POM, and we had also dealt with some trolls within our own clan that ended up being banned for various reasons including sabotaging our server and clan by various means including blatant admin abuse. This was all largely just due to various drama both within POM and within the warband community in general.
5. Fast forward to around 2012 or 2013. POM had largely stopped playing Warband by this point, not because we were a dead clan but because we had moved on to other games. By this point, we were a much smaller clan and were more of a family than just a clan. Eventually, DoomCraft stopped financially supporting the server, and POM member Auscifer took over.
6. With Auscifer now running the show, and most core POM members pretty much out of the scene, the quality and oversight of the server took a big hit (Not Auscifer's fault, thank you for all you did). At some point, the actual server host (and location) also changed and the quality of the server itself in terms of connection had also taken a severe hit. (DoomCraft had originally gotten a sweet and lucky deal on the first iteration of our server, which had extremely high quality performance and was simply amazing to play on.)
7. The server quality continued to drop due to the core POM group no longer having interest in Warband, and lack of administration became a big issue. Eventually, someone reached out to us directly and let us know what was going on since we were out of the loop. We decided to give admin access to a few members of the community as well as other clans. Eventually this backfired when someone was given admin access that shouldn't have gotten it and that individual purposely sabotaged our server by banning everyone they could. This was done for no reason other than a hatred for POM and old drama.
8. Eventually, Auscifer also stopped supporting the server and (I believe ex-Hoboknight) Alden took over. While this is in no way meant negatively towards Alden, it's important to note that the core POM group did not really know Alden very well at all as he had never frequented our TS or played any games with POM members. I'm not certain of the events that lead to him taking over, but we are still thankful. POM has always wanted to support this community as much as we could, at some point we even hosted about 5 or 6 clans on our TS so that they could communicate and coordinate.
9. At this point, with another owner change, the original POM experience was further diminished. This also came at a time where the majority of the competitive scene had swapped from Fastest to Medium speed, something which POM never supported due to our belief in hosting the most difficult and challenging settings for this skill-based game. Furthermore, due to the change in ownership, pretty much all of the community admins had lost their access due to password change. It also wasn't largely known who was running the show since POM was just completely out of the scene by this time. I believe, and I'm not 100% on this one, that a repeat of previous events had occurred where yet another individual was given admin access in error, who went on to yet again ban as many people as they could, further sabotaging the server and the POM name. (Our core group was pretty much always unaware of these abusive happenings, because you plebs were posting on this forum instead of reaching out directly to us, just for the record)
10. With the new POM server having few admins, and the community desperately needing a Medium-speed server to practice their competitive play, things looked worse and worse for the server. POM received even more hatred for this, even though our actual core group had no hand in any of the dealings at this time. I think it was sometime in 2015 or 2016 where Alden also stopped supporting the server financially, and there was simply no interest from anyone else to take over. And so came the end of our server.
And there's a little history for you. We thank everyone that has supported us throughout the years, even the haters! You all fueled us, as well as this community, and I have many great memories that I cherish. Thank you.
We plan to return in full force should Bannerlord ever see the light of day, and we look forward to continuing the legend that was USA_Central_POM!
<3
