Aces Club?

Dragon1

Rear Admiral
Ok, just for the record, I am still fairly new to the WC fan community. Please pardon my ignorance.


I have seen now in my over one year of posting to the forums here a large number of topics that mention a Wing Commander Aces Club. Most of what has been written about it hasn't been too positive. What exactly is/was the Aces Club and why is there so much disregard?

Thanks guys
 
Arguably this might work better in the Fan Fiction Chat or Fan Projects forums, as the Aces could be considered both. It's here, though, so I'll address it here.

Or I will after the disclaimer: I am a member of the WC Aces Club, so I make no claims to impartiality.

Short form of "what is the Aces Club" is a bunch of WC fan fiction enthusiasts who write strories (among other things) set in the WC universe, but in areas not covered (or only briefly touched upon) by the games, novels, and movie. The "other things" includes creating technologies that aren't found in the games (more on that below)

As with any group, there have been rough patches of time, for various reasons, much of it revolving around the fact that more than a few of the more prominent members hold strong opinions, and don't usually hesitate to share them. A lot of what makes these rough spots more noticeable is that WCAC is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla of WC online fanfic-dom, and probably one of the bigger general WC groups outside the CIC readership (which overlaps with Aces membership in a lot of cases, including mine). Not only does that result in rough times being more widely known, but on occasion can attract individuals whose maturity leaves something to be desired (to put it mildly, in a few cases) since it's no fun being an attention whore if no one's around to pay attention.

Some of the more memorable rough spots, off the top of my head:

Taking Blair's character (and the WC universe in general) and going rather silly with it, after the release of WC3, when there was the common (if short-sighted, in retrospect) opinion at the time that the end of the kat war was the end of WC.

Assorted ridiculousness regarding the new tech mentioned above, including ridiculously munchkin equipment that does everything short of giving you the best oral sex you'll ever have, and stuff that takes real-world tech and ships and converts them straight to WC (including a carrier that looks an awful lot like a Nimitz-class carrier, and a "space submarine" which Psych [another WC Aces member, if somewhat less active than before due to his job taking up much of his time] goes on about every now and again). Such iniquities aren't as often seen nowadays, between the relatively low WCAC traffic (not counting HTL) and a review board made up of generally trusted and respected individuals that go through proposals for new ships/gear and apply the giggle test to it.

Bad writing (notoriously so in a few cases) that inadvertently demonstrates much of what makes fanfic in general get treated like the Black Plague by the literary public at large, though a fair bit of that can be attributed to inexperienced writers who have gotten beyond that, for the most part.

(And, no, I'm not excluding my own writing from the realm of "bad Aces writing"... I know I have a few clunkers out there.)

The above isn't an all-inclusive list, by any means, but it does provide a bit of a general overview.

That being said, though, with an exception or two, I still think the Aces is the best WC fanfic group out there. But, like I said at the beginning, I make no claims to impartiality. :D
 
Thanks Death!

I think that just about answered all of my questions. With some of the things you have mentioned relating to WC3, it sounds like the Aces Club has been around for a long time.
 
Just out of curiosity, how does the Aces Club deal with all the past stupidity? I mean, as I understand it, there is such a thing as an "official" Aces timeline... does this timeline include everything the Aces have written, or have you guys actually made the effort to de-stupidify it after all that post-WC3 stuff?
 
Dragon, the club was founded in early(ish) 1995, though I don't know the exact date as I wasn't around. As I've heard, it was before WC4 was even rumored to be in production, contributing to the "WC games ended with the finish of the kat war" notion.

As for the stupidity, for the most part (with an exception discussed below) it's been worked back towards the official universe by later works, with more of a concern about not going off the reservation, so to speak, from the official WC universe. HTL, for example, is in part to knock out a lot of the UBW hardware that was made when the club members went and made the UBW into what was effectively a mini-Confed (from an e-mail sent to the HTL writers by Raptor, the HTL coordinator), following a wrap up of the Cynium campaign (one of those silly things I mentioned above, basically Confed, UBW, and a renewed Kilrathi Empire fighting over a planet that's a super-powerful energy source) that includes knocking the kats out and making the UBW and Confed "kiss and make up", to get them in line with the official universe as of WCP.

The exception is the whole "Evil Blair takes over Gemini Sector" storyline, which involves all kinds of silliness with Steltek-changed Blair basically becoming a megalomaniac, to be eventually taken out by a Confed/kat temporary alliance. There was one story that was an attempt at reconning away EB, but for the most part that bit of the timeline is generally left forgotten in the murky depths of the past.

The above, for the record, is all my personal opinion and understanding. I make no claim to speak for the club as a whole.
 
I remember looking at the Aces' site back in 2001 or 2003, getting confused over quite a lot of data that didn't seem to fit into what I knew about the games and books - and getting even more confused by looking at some of the projects (does Tannock ring a bell somewhere?).
It made - correction, still makes - me feel sorry about so much effort and history (even if it's not alltogether Happy Days) just sitting there, quite inaccessible for the newcomers.

Is there any intent to revive it, or anyone who would be interested in updating and consolidating everything that's there?
 
There are plans to revive the old Aces Lounge, where some stories were made available to all, but beyond that my hazy memory is being its usual (un)supportive self, so I can't recall details or anything like that.
 
The Aces Club was a neat community, and a great many long time Wing Commander online veterans were at one time or another members.

It was unfortunately very incestous, though.

When a former Aces insists the 'evil Blair' story is somehow a result of not believing Origin would develop a sequel to the best selling game of all time, they're lying -- in actuality it's because the fellow who 'role played' Blair in their old club was hated (to their defense or possibly their discredit, he was indeed a silly teenage boy with all the ability to understand balanced fiction that that title brings to mind). A large amount of the early Aces fiction exists solely as petty vengance and fanboy fantasy -- super fighters flown by tuckerizations of the club's original members fighting their evil internet enemies from previous arguments. There was also a strong and somehow wholly supported by the club effort to borrow copiously from Mechwarrior to "invent" their version of a robot-flying Marine Corps (right down to taking proper nouns).

I'm actually at a loss, in retrospect, to figure out how any of this happened -- since objectively the club existed well after the novels were published and well after it was clear a sequel to Wing Commander III was in development.

By the time I did anything with the Aces, a lot of this had fallen into the past... but there was still a rather silly cult of personality about the "founders" and these original stories. Mustang and Yan and whoever were "professional writers" whose decisions about the Wing Commander universe were not to be questioned.

I believe they cleaned up their act quite a bit since 1997 or so -- I stopped following the actual fiction around then, though. The "active" aces around that time were all great people -- Psych, Raptor and such had pretty much taken over the club (well, NeoDevilBane too, but lets not hold that against anyone). The still-running (I assume) WC RPG and Holding the Line PBM both spun off from the Aces Club.
 
Nitpick: HTL isn't a spin-off of the Aces, but an integral part of it, much like SO1/2 weren't spin-offs of WC2.

I would argue the past tense of some verbs, but it's not that big a deal.
 
Death said:
There are plans to revive the old Aces Lounge, where some stories were made available to all, but beyond that my hazy memory is being its usual (un)supportive self, so I can't recall details or anything like that.

Heh. My (still tenous) plans after finishing HTL are to devote my time in the Club to getting the web presence up to date. Holding The Line Dot Net and the Aces Lounge will be a big part of that, and I'm hoping to incorporate a lot of the material from Acenet Central over the next couple of years. Hopefully it'll be accessible to Aces vets and newcomers alike.

As someone who's been involved with both the Aces and the alt.games.wingcommander/CIC scene for a number of years, I'm a firm believer in the idea that the Aces can be part of the general Wing Commander community rather than shutting ourselves off from it. That was one of the big reasons behind publishing HTL here at the CIC. Sure, what we do isn't to everyone's taste, but that's the case with most fan activity. If even a small percentage of the people who visit the the CIC read and enjoy our writing, it's worth it,

Best, Raptor
 
Death said:
Nitpick: HTL isn't a spin-off of the Aces, but an integral part of it, much like SO1/2 weren't spin-offs of WC2.

I would argue the past tense of some verbs, but it's not that big a deal.

I'd refer to HTL as its own entity, if only because there really is no Aces Club right now for HTL to be a part of. If HTL and the Aces Clubs were completely integrated, someone would have updated Acenet Central within the last several years. HTL might have began as the primary Aces thing, and it might be written entirely by people who exist on the Aces member list, but as it's a self-contained project now that goes through the motions established by its Acenet origins.
 
Just a suggestion:
While much of the background wasn't entirely new to me, I still had a lot of white spots on the map of WC fandom. I tried to patch it together, but it takes time and patience - and still you get the feeling that there are sore patches left.

Coming from there, I don't wonder anymore about new people coming in here, and starting the old continuity jig over and over and over again, arguing with material gathered from sources whose origin is not really visible. Having done that myself unknowingly, I can tell you that those unintended but unnerving arguments don't do a lot for moving forward together in a common direction.

I know that's not the only reason that people fall apart - but getting WC fandom history straight would cause some avoidance of misunderstanding.

So my suggestion would be to draw up some kind of explanatory document stating points like those made in this post, with the agreement of all active participants, and posting it in plain and friendly letters on some part of the website(s) in question.

I know, that may not be a popular idea - it means to dig up corpses and to bury hatchets almost forgotten, and to think about wording and facts and what's good for anyone to know - but I think it would give the community some peace, longevity, prosperity and what have ya.
Or at least create some place to point to and shout: "Read The Disclaimer, Moron!"
 
Presuming to write ones own history is a supreme arrogance, as is presuming your history matters.

The Aces Club were a group of people who liked Wing Commander and wrote fan fiction about it. There's nothing more to it than that. As with any group of people there were mistakes and successes and cliques and conflicts both beautiful and idiotic.

Yes, the idea that I can dredge up decade old fights I had with people when I was a teenager and prove that I was right is very appealing to me... but it isn't interesting or pleasant. It's just petty.
 
criticalmass said:
I know, that may not be a popular idea - it means to dig up corpses and to bury hatchets almost forgotten, and to think about wording and facts and what's good for anyone to know - but I think it would give the community some peace, longevity, prosperity and what have ya.
I don't know about that. I mean, yeah, on more than a few occasions I did find myself wondering about this or that bit of this community's history... but really, would I be a more dedicated fan if I knew all the reasons why people hate Akkbar? Probably the opposite. I mean, most of us who joined this community in the 1990s were fairly young, fairly stupid, and fairly immature. I know I certainly was - and even though I'm sure nobody would judge me or anyone else based on what we posted years ago (...or even care about it), I still find it kind of a relief that one of the few actual damages caused by Y2K was the loss of all the pre-2000 forum posts... and I probably wouldn't have minded had there been another Y2K a year or two later :p.

In any case, the idea of giving this community peace, longevity and prosperity is a somewhat puzzling one. Really, which of these three things don't we currently have? It's been seven years since the last Wing Commander game, and yet we're still here, talking about WC, making WC mods, producing WC fiction and fan art... in terms of peace, longevity and prosperity, what more could you ask for?
 
There's actually a tangible reason for why people hate Akkbar, hidden deep below the many, many years of demonization.

So, I'm going to make you a worse Wing Commander fan by telling the story.

I wouldn't take it as the gospel truth of anything... it's one side talking about the other years after a bitter internet fight, so it's clearly very biased... but the fact that you know who Akkbar is probably means the story should be out there, otherwise the annual April Fools update just isn't going to make sense to people.

It's still mildly interesting because it literally did create the CIC and how a lot of us think today -- but it's not history.

First, the intro:

Akkbar was a pleasant enough guy in that he possessed a user car salesman's personality... but at the same time he was someone who was always more interested using Wing Commander to promote himself as a web designer than he was in being a Wing Commander fan.

For instance, when a company offered him money to make a WCHS-style website for a proto-MMP space combat game, his response was to do it and try to get as many Wing Commander fans to 'switch' as possible. (I forget what the game was called -- Star something?)

As we all got older, the distinction became a lot more clear -- Chris, Bearcat, ace and I all wanted to run a "no-nonsense" Wing Commander news site... and Akkbar wanted to turn WCHS into something that could make money with advertising, cover other video games and all sorts of similar things (this was 1997, when banner ads were just as ugly and offensive as they are now, but seemed also like they'd be profitable).

It's because of this that the CIC today has a rather fanatical bent against some of these things -- we didn't cover StarLancer and FreeLancer because Akkbar would have, we don't have advertising because Akkbar would have... we have silly April Fools updates every year because Akkbar thought it was funny to announce that a new game was coming out and make it look real. That is to say, credit Akkbar for the mish-mash of philosophy upon which I think resulted in a pretty fantastic community in the end.

Anyway, the specific incident that has so demonized Akkbar inovlved a 3Dfx card. Back in 1997 the first thing relating to Prophecy released was the 3Dfx Test Mission.

Now, I cannot express to you in words how frustrating this was -- because no one had a 3DFX card! They were a crazy new thing... and yes, most of us (sixteen, seventeen year old kids at the time) were hoping for them for Christmas.

Specifically, Bearcat, ace and I were all getting a 3Dfx card in the near future. Chris was very sad that he wasn't going to be able to. Akkbar, smarmy to the last, had long insisted he'd had one of the first 3Dfx cards.

So, the 3Dfx test came out and it was a weird and amazing experience. There were a few fans in the old #Wing-Commander (Skyfox, especially!) group who had them, and with some very elaborate tinkering they figured to get screenshots. So, you had people competing for the most kills in a mission and you also had people who'd bring in giant piles of pictures of the beautiful new 3D engine at night. We'd never seen anything like it.

Akkbar assured us amidst all this that *he* was enjoying the 3dfx test (and that he had the highest gauntlet score of the small group of players!)... but somehow he couldn't figure out the screenshot system. That seemed reasonable - the screenshot process was confusing, and Akkbar was never especially smart (take that, storytelling bias!).

So, then towards the end of the testing cycle Mark Day came on IRC and he said "hey, guys, we're wrapping up testing and we've got an extra 3dfx card. You guys have been so dedicated in promoting our game, you can have it."

Now, not to rag on Akkbar, but he wasn't doing any work in WCHS at this point. He was trying to start "Introspection Magazine" or somesuch, his brilliant commercial concept. Chris and I did all the news coverage - I'm certainly not mad at Akkbar for that. Racing around finding articles and calling graphics guys and cataloging screenshots and doing interviews for a full scale Wing Commander was one of the most fun things I ever did. You can look at old WCHS archives for the leadup to Prophecy and it's just a giant block of [LOAF]s and [ChrisReid]s.

So, we're all on IRC and we realize this is great. The other guys are getting 3dfx cards soon, Akkbar already has one... we can have Mark send the extra one to Chris! It's perfect -- Chris can't get a 3dfx card, and now an extra one has appeared out of nowhere!

Oh, but not so fast, says Akkbar. My old card "melted down", so I need this one. Gee, it melted down and you didn't mention it? Oh, well, LOAF, just between you and me I never had one. Duh, Akkbar, duh, you were about as subtle as Action Stations.

So, the twenty-something professional web guy got the extra 3Dfx card instead of the high school kid old who did all the work.

And that is when we all basically accepted that we loved working with Wing Commander... but boy, did we hate Akkbar.
 
Hehe, I love old stories. There's a few other general memories I have. LOAF mentioned the April Fools thing. I'll go into slightly more detail on that, because that really depressed a lot of Wing Commander fans.

April 1, 1997 came around, and Akkbar tells everyone to hurry and check WCHS! We didn't realize there was any significance to the date. The world wide web was only a couple years old, and April Fools on the Internet was a new concept. So the big bold headline was WING COMMANDER PROPHECY MULTIPLAYER ALPHA RELEASED! So were ecstatic. Armada was something we'd all played, but not very many of us had been able to experience it with other people because it came out ahead of its time and had no internet support. So we all scrolled down/clicked on the download link and there's a cruel message from Akkbar telling us how we were big suckers. Boo, how depressing. And he rubbed it in on IRC, and he kept baiting and crushing people all day long with that. Really bad karma. A few weeks/months later, Origin removed the multiplayer component from the game.

So we learned at an early age not to joke about certain things on April 1. Other community hubs still make this mistake in 2005 and never seem to learn from the backlash.

There were lots of general administrative things that Akkbar did that were pretty cruddy. He had the staff irc channel bolted up in such a way that it'd randomly kick us out. It was annoying to the point that it was unusable. He also insisted the official name of our site be Introspection's Wing Commander Home Sector, because Introspection was the name of his faux web design company.

He was also very stingy with the keys to the site. We had to send news to him to approve and post. And then he'd go and disappear for days or weeks and then come back with some sob story about how he was supposedly in the hospital or whatever. This wasn't working, so LOAF and I both started on own small news pages (one was called the LOAF's Combat Information Center, and the other was ChrisReid's WCNews Page). Akkbar disappeared big time in May of 1998, and in June we all had time off from school. Origin was looking for a big fan hub they could link to from the Secret Ops event, and so LOAF, ace and I got with people like Hades and founded the CIC that August. And the rest after that is history.

At the time I remember feeling that 1998 was such a late time to start a Wing Commander website. WCHS and other places had already been in operation a few years and I was worried we'd seem too new or inexperienced. But we'd all individually been involved in this stuff since 1995 or so, and now "Since 1998" doesn't sound so bad.
 
Hehehe, although, we can't go a few months without someone e-mailing us to ask if there's really going to be a Freelancer 2 that needs no input whatsoever.
 
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