The year is coming to an end. 2016 will become 2017 and with that I unofficially celebrate the birth of what is now known among us as FK.

The Birth Of Something Special:

About a year ago, a strange funny man started streaming Arma 3. Having bought this game once during a steam sale I thought to myself "what the heck, let's join this faggot's stream and make sure the money I spent on this game was actually worth it". Little did I know I would pour around 900 hours into Arma, and that in just a year's time. To make this figure a bit more impressive, that's about 2.5 hours I spent daily on this game (thank god for being unemployed for a few months).

So anyway, I started playing with some of the ZF-guys and I felt like a small dream was coming true. No, not because i'm a fanboy, but I always wanted to play a 'real' military game with tactics and command structures. Heck, during my first few games I became the squad leader because no one was willing and I nearly creamed my pants. I was in command of a squad in a game that simulated real warfare. It was just amazing... well until I met this fucking new guy called Katla.

Special Needs, Special Friends:

Meeting Katla was both a blessing and a curse altogether. Here was this special guy, sounding like an adult, someone who has been through shit, jaded before his time with the wisdom of a thousand men... and suddenly I found out he was 15, abused his guinea pigs and yelled profanities at friendlies while charging the enemy through an open field screaming like a little girl. Needless to say my Belgian pedo side was immediately in love with him.

And as I kept playing with the ZF guys I met so many wonderful people. The idiot Ace, autistic Anden, crazy SM, deathmachine Callistano, relaxed Radio, australian Leslie (WE MISS YOU MATE)... I can't name all of you fucks, but it was great. We played with about 20 people and we had a blast. unfortunately ZF stopped playing and this meant we scrambled to keep our little gamesquad together. We local hosted, got our own TS... but we slowly faded out. It seemed that this was a short but successful story, not meant to last forever. But ZF eventually came back, started streaming and this is when the magic happened!

What Are We Doing? Fuck Knows:

The guys from ZF started playing and streaming again and we got the old guard back together. Arma was starting to kick off and combined with the bullshittery videos from Womble we got a decent amount of new guys. We played missions with 25-30 people! that's three full squads, something I could never dream of! But once again interested started to wane, it seemed that again we would lose our fun community. But in october two wonderful people stepped in: Mavy and Greybeard. they saw the potential we had. They saw how me, Katla and others tried to keep this community together and we all knew this was the beginning of something special. Suddenly we found ourselves with a forum,  our own teamspeak and Arma server. We even got a dedicated modlist/repo so people could join more easily! FuckKnows was here and was here to stay.

Dreams, Potential And Growing Pains

We were all optimistic. We played with the mods of our choosing, with people we knew and liked, and new guys kept joining. We went from playing a game with 10 people in january this year, to playing games with 50-60 people these last two months! It's still in a way unrealistic to me. I remember the moment we decided to have an actual Platoonlead and someone thought it was a good idea to let me do it. i sat on a hill, overlooking the battlefield and it was just incredible. I saw four full squads moving to their objective, engaging enemies. I saw tracers flying and explosions going off. A friendly tank was rolling down the road providing support while littlebirds flew over my head on their way to a CAS-run. All of these soldiers, assets... all controlled by real people I interacted with. It kinda makes you think how incredibly well put together this game is, and how this community managed to become this big. Clearly we were doing things right.

And yes, we are doing things right. The fact that we have people in this community that have known each other for a year proves we have longevity. The fact we keep getting new guys joining proves we are an open, attractive and accepting community. Sure we do some things wrong... we grew so much that discipline is not always a given. Rules were sometimes unclear. We had drama and public yelling matches, people threatening to leave and others actively trying to ruin the fun for others. But we are still here. We have improved on a lot of aspects, and we aren't perfect yet, but we are heading in the right direction. And it is my hope and dream that in 2017 we will keep improving on our values. That we will remain an open and fun community, where people come to relax and not only play a game, but hang out with the people they met on this virtual battlefield.

I want to thank each and every single one of you for being a part of this community. What we went though this year to become 'FuckKnows' is incredible. And I really hope that this time next year I can write a new post on this forum. Thanking old friends and new members alike for their continued support of this community. I wish you all a happy new year and I'll see you in 2017!