Name: Shane Ynclan
Alias: ransum
Age: 20
Location: Sacramento, CA
Team: epiC

For starters, tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm a 20 year old junior at Sacramento State University, and I started playing AA since roughly 2006, during my freshmen year in college. I've always been a fairly competitive person, and hate to lose, and I'd been doing some light gaming pretty much my entire life. I started gaming at a young age, I used to play Dark Forces on my old 386 for hours, wearing some stupid radio AM/FM headset, and pretending I was Kyle Katarn. I wasn't very good with computers at that time, so I played through the entire game with no sound multiple times, but I didn't care. I loved every second. Once I started college, I was eager to get into the online community more heavily, due to the fact that I never had cable when I was growing up, only 56k. I played some CSS, and Call of Duty but neither title really held my interest, but both were a good distraction for a time. I had known about America's Army for a very long time, and I downloaded the game and though I'd give it a try, and see what it was like. Now I'm here.

That reminds me of my days of gaming with a 56k connection. You've been playing AA for a while. What all teams have you been apart of and how did get get into the game competitively?

I started in a clan called HaTe, literally within hours of installing the game. I was always interested in playing competitively, but wasn't really sure how to break into it. HaTe was a great clan, but I couldn't really organize them into becoming more competitive, which is what I wanted. Myself, and Twitch, aka nrg from dTp, and Felt from epiC moved on to start our own competitive team named Carbon 8. We started in ladders, and did decent, but we really had no idea what the whole competition side of the game was about. We moved on to various leagues, like CEVO, and HTGL, but not CAL since Twitch was banned for like a year for impersonating CAL|Louis in a pub. We took a landslide of shit from the competitive community in the beginning, and I still hear jokes about Carbon to this day. We picked up Kinny aka Longdongs, and Prostyle and Apple Cider from fd. We had a bunch of other great guys as well, who came and went. We moved to various multigaming organizations over the next year or so, Mainline Gaming, Nefarious Gaming, and of course Disturbing the Peace. After that, I decided that I wanted to move on at that , as I was tired of running a team, and wanted to focus more on improving as a player, which led me apping for epiC. I still keep in touch with that core group of guys, to this day, and they have moved on, and done well in their own teams.


How were your experiences with large multi-gaming organizations?

They were decent for the most part. We had some issues with a few of them agreeing to send us merch, and then they would never follow through, or would constantly make excuses as to why they couldn't send what they owed. Other than that, a majority of them was a good experience, and I met some cool people there as well. These organizations seem to be a dime a dozen these days, and there did seem to be a slight AA trend where certain teams moved to them for a bit, and I guess we just jumped on the bandwagon. I'm not gonna sit here and say that these organizations are a joke, because there are a few out there that are very reputable, well backed and honest. You just have to be careful because there are a lot of organizations out there, who are simply waiting to take advantage of a team who wants to be part of something bigger. If I could give other teams advice in regards to multigaming organizations, I'd say don't join them just because you want a free vent, and do your research, don't just dive in head first. They should be providing you with something that you wouldn't ordinarily be providing for yourselves, but sometimes that can be as simple as being part of a larger gaming community. It doesn't have to be all hardware, or T-Shirts.