A Gaming Community Founded by Veterans
BWC a veteran founded, military-style, international, multi-game outfit founded in 2003. We are a multi-national gaming community that provides training, teamwork, and the best possible gaming experience to our members and those we fight alongside. While roughly half of our members are active duty military, prior service, retired, and/or combat veterans, a military background is not a requirement to join BWC. Anyone who is serious about having fun and winning is welcome. We are highly competitive; but we temper that competitive posture with a focus on fun, winning and being the best. We take our gaming seriously, but not to the point of allowing angst and nerdrage.
BWC is a highly structured and competitive gaming outfit. We are not a clan, or a guild, but a close-knit community that maintains a standard of excellence across the multiple gaming properties we engage in. Due to that, we do have minimum expectations for recruitment and not all who apply are accepted. Recruitment into BWC will require a commitment on the part of potential members. You do not join BWC for a single game, you join BWC to participate in and experience excellence in gaming.
A Community that grows beyond being a Guild, Outfit, or Clan
We’ve been successful for over 17 years, primarily in first person shooters and MMOs. In that time, we have built a solid reputation in online gaming that believes in integrity, fair play, dedication and teamwork. That reputation has carried over to great relationships among the larger gaming community but also with gaming developers such as Riot Games, Sony Online Entertainment, Piranha Games, and Cloud Imperium Games.We've designed our community to be able to encompass games of all genres, types, and themes while always moving in the direction that the Black Widow Company moves for: having fun in the games that we enjoy, and being able to put our game faces on when things get serious when we want to crush the competition, dominate the AI, or top the leaderboards.
A Community Focused Ranking Structure
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BWC maintains a Rank and Promotion System that echoes US Army’s, but not to the point of emulating that environment - we're not a Milsim community. There are no yes sirs, or no ma'ams - we're all gamers here. Our ranks are a reflection of the time spent in the community, and the level of responsibility that you can choose to hold in our community, nothing more. You're able to gain all the Enlisted and NCO ranks in our community just by being an active member, leading groups, and being a positive presence in our community.
If you are the kind of person who likes to contribute to the organizations that you are a part of to a greater level, then we have a structural system in place that allow you to temporarily be assigned to a particular task or part of the community through billets. Billets are the only way to obtain officer ranks in our community, and they are always temporary. After you've committed a mandatory initial period of your billet, you are free to hold it until you would like to leave the position. These billeted positions are available across all facets of the community including administration, art, video editing, technical support, as well as leading within one of the games that Black Widow Company supports with a billeted ranking structure.
A Community of Mature, Coordinated Gamers
We expect all of our members to embrace what we call “BWC Bearing” and conduct their gaming business as the quiet professionals we’ve established ourselves as. Our age range tends to skew older than the average gaming group - our members are mostly fathers, professionals in their field, active military, or retired military veterans. Our community is built for purpose driven, team oriented individuals to work together to accomplish in-game goals. We continuously practice our teamwork, communication, and coordination to excel in every game mechanic presented. We apply our “ONE TEAM, ONE FIGHT” mentality in every game we play, and to everything we do, without risking or compromising our desire or our ability to have a lot of fun at the same time. Those are never mutually exclusive endeavors for us. We invite you to discover what makes us different for yourself.
BWC's Opserv and our Old School Approach to Gaming
The Black Widow Company uses a custom piece of software called "Opserv" to facilitate our way of playing games - the BWC Meta Game. Each member has a jacket that's hosted on our server that allows you to collect fancy pieces of internet bling such as awards like medals ribbons and badges, service pips for the amount of years that you are an upstanding member of the community, your rank, the games that you play, and other information. This is collectively known as your "Fruit Salad", after the nickname for the part of the military uniform where service members have their medals displayed. Opserv as well serves as the hub of activity in the community, and is our way of keeping track of what you do in game as well. We structure our time playing with other BWC members in the games that we support through 'Operations' - time slots where we're active in a game accomplishing a goal. Anyone who has been trained on how to use the system can run operations, it is not restricted by rank. These operations form the basis of our tracking in Opserv and is the foundation for many of the awards that you have the possibility of earning in our community. How much you interact with Opserv and the BWC Meta Game is up to you, you can focus on obtaining awards or just take them passively as you go. It's up to you how much you want to engage with the system.
We're one of the last communities in cyber space right now that not only maintains an active forum and teamspeak server, but use them as our primary methods of communication. While we have dabbled in the 'next greatest thing!' in many instances, nothing beats the simplicity and ease of use of the old way to do it. Really - the only thing that BWC is missing is an IRC server then we'd be fully immersed in the early 2000's.