"Strength in Unity"

We are The BSB Network, welcome to our website! The BSB Network is a social community of online gamers that was established in May 2002. We pride our selves on our sense of fair play and teamwork and aim to be as organised and efficient as possible. This page should give you some more information and a general background knowledge on our clan.

History

Initially know simply as the 'Better Stronger Better' Clan (Abbreviated to BSB), our clan was founded in 2002 supporting the First Person Shooter Rainbow Six:Rogue Spear. The clan was founded by three friends going by the aliases of Box, BOFH & Hulk. The inception of BSB was to provide a mature & friendly clan that put good people first, and not necessarily good players!  The idea was to have no restrictions on age, skill, regional location so that everyone was welcome to take part in the fun. The name  'Better Stronger Better' (using the tags  [BSB] still used by us today!) was intended as an ironic and humours jibe at so-called "elite" gaming clans and players that can often be found supporting online games.

The term "Better, Stronger, Better..."  was a derived from a dry-witted private joke between the clan founders that was originally adapted from  the TV series The Six million dollar man and applied to these "elite" gamers. When abbreviated it was also a cheeky nod of acknowledgement towards the common practice of online gaming clans use of real military unit's abbreviations, such as S.A.S or S.B.S. 

Our first year of gaming was very successful, recruiting in excess of two hundred members including many of our current senior members. During this time we were awarded the 'Silver Clan Award' by the independent reviewers at The Global Clan Directory  now the Central Outpost www.CentralOutpost.com. In 2004 the clan expanded the clan's support beyond Rogue Spear on to it's follow up game Raven Shield.  As this signified a move to support two separate gaming titles we adjusted our name to "BSB: Rainbow Six Network" to reflect our new status.

Having proved successful supporting The Rainbow Six Series of games  between 2002 and 2004, the clan then went on to expanded into Ghost Recon in early 2004. As this was a not directly a Rainbow Six series title we decided to modify our clan title to simply "The BSB Network". This name was felt to be much more appropriate as it reflected our status as a multi-gaming clan and our intentions to create a gaming network community. Later in the year we also moved into support for newly released and massively popular Counter Strike:Source. This campaign proved to be one of our most successful and lead to the clan expanding into several other game titles including the Battlefield & Company of Heroes series and our first Free-2Play game Combat Arms.  For a full and more in-depth history discussion, please refer to our forum!

The Games We Play

Traditionally we have primarily specialised in relaxed realism or 'tactical ' First Person Shooter games (FPS), having supported successful campaigns on various popular game series', such as Rainbow Six, Counter Strike, Battlefield and Combat Arms. However we do support game campaigns for other types of games such as Real Time Strategy, Turn Based, Racing  and Massive Multiplayer Online games. These days we are willing to support any and all games our members are keen to be involved in.  Our current and recently supported game campaigns can be viewed on on our "Campaigns" page on our website with some further details. We generally are open to supporting any games our members wish to play providing there is sufficient interest in a title and we have the resources to provide support. 
 

Rules & Procedures

In order for us to maintain our high standards and to ensure our community is a safe and friendly place for everyone, we do have to have some rules. These rules and codes of conduct can be found on our Rules page. These rules are applied to all members and in some instances our community members (friends and users of our resources). These rules  may seem strict or stern at first glance but in reality most of them are just common sense and are there as a reference guide for members, friends and users.

It is not often that we need to enforce these rules as most of our members are adult gamers, or at least mature and sensible enough to abide by them. If however these rules are broken we may take disciplinary actions. These action range from a minor "friendly" warning right up to expulsion or banning from the clan. The latter and more serve discipline procedures are only ever applied in extreme cases and normally after exhausting all other alternatives. If you need further guidance or information on our rules & disciplinary procedures feel free to contact a senior member or refer to our forum.

Joining & Recruitment

The BSB Network is always recruiting new members! We place no restrictions on age, sex, race, location or skill - we will never turn good people away!

The only thing we do ask is that you abide by our rules, which revolve around fair play, respect and common sense. We are a very relaxed and are looking for members who are interested in becoming involved, long-term members. We aren't suitable for anti-social, elitist, fly-by-night gamers or "clan hoppers". Our membership structure is geared towards time-served, maturity and responsibility .Generally the longer time period a member has served with us, the more influence they have over the clan and the higher their standing is, however this is NOT the only factor we consider and our ranking structure is based on many aspects (see the Ranks page).

Adult and mature gamers do tend to fare very well within BSB and tend to stay for life!  However many mature and responsible younger gamers are often successful within BSB and many of our current senior members have been with us since their teenage years and have "grown up" with us.

In order to protect our members and our reputation we insist on all new applicants serving a trial period or "Probation" membership as it's known.  This probation membership lasts at least 3 weeks and giver our recruitment team time to ensure you are capable of abiding by our rules and are of  mature character and fairly active. This term also allows the  new member to get to know our members, get involved within the community and familiarise themselves with the BSB ways! Any assistance needed is provided by our recruitment team and members.

If you are interested in joining our clan you should refer to the "Join Us" page and complete the application form there.

Membership Benefits

Being a member of BSB offers many benefits;-

• Friendship & socialisng
  The obvious benefit of being part of BSB is the activity and friendships that are available as being a part of our large and stable community. We have members from all over the world, of various ages and  genders! Being in such a large and  mixed clan inevitably leads to many social opportunities and has established many genuine friendships among members.
   
• Activity
  Having such a  large member base means there is usually someone online no matter what time of day or night it is!
   
• Experience
  Most of our senior members are adults having served with BSB for at least 5 years, this naturally distinguishes us from some clans that are lead by teenagers with limited game and life experience. Our experienced members are always taken seriously and given the opportunity to use that experience! In addition to this we have gamers from all backgrounds - they have a wide and varied experience of gaming styles and approaches.
  
  
• Communications
  This is a fundamental part of BSB! Our clan prides it's self on it's communication between members and sees it as being essential for a social clan! To provide good communication channels we offer various methods of communications such as a Team speak server, a backup TS server, a community forum,  an excellent website with  up-to-date news sectional, online chat channel  and up-to-date membership roster with contact details for members. In addition to this we provide various community application rosters such as Xfire, Steam, Facebook and Youtube
  
  
  
• Co-operation
  Be it in-game or just generally, BSB members are a team and work as such!
   
• Competitive Gaming
  We offer various forms of competitive gaming for our members that are interested. Most game campaigns we support offer a Gold Team, a team exclusively picked for competitive matches.
   
• Regular Events
  Whether you are competitive or not everyone enjoys taking part in tournaments and gaming events! We have several annual tournaments that run on various games as well as having ad-hoc tournaments every month. Many of these tournaments do include prizes. In addition to the online events we also offer UK based members the opportunity to take part in regular meet-up events such as Archery, Clay pigeon shooting, Paintball, airsoft, BBQ's , camping trips and just good old fashioned pub crawls!
   
• Awards
  We have several awards available to members.  Our members have the chance to earn regular service related awards that are displayed in their profile page! There are also monthly awards & commendations as well as annual awards. For more details refer to the "Awards" page of the website. 
   
• Support
  Our social and friendly community mean that no matter what you need, there's someone here who can help you! Whether it be a technical problem, a game related issue or even a personal problem chances are we our guys will be able to help and support you!
   
• Stability & Reliability - We have been here since 2002! We are always developing and always looking to expand into new areas of gaming, we will be here still after many other clans have shut down!

The BSB Network is always looking to the future and is always taking steps to ensure our long-term members will always be accommodated for. We will be looking into expanding our Network further still with increased activities with other online communities and other, similar clans. In the immidiate future we plan to expand our gaming campaigns further and plan to support Age of Empires Online , Battlefield Play4Free and Battlefield 3 in the 2011 calendar.

Looking further ahead we are confident that the future of PC Online gaming is bright and we intend to be at the forefront of all advances within it. One particular area we are focusing heavily on for future development is Cloud Gaming. We are already monitoring and planning trial expansions into the OnLive (Click) gaming system upon it's release in Europe.