The fact that Ken and I became friends, as with all such things, was very much a matter of happenstance.
My shift at work had been cancelled that morning, and I had seen that someone was looking for a game of Star Wars: Armada on my ‘local’ gaming store’s Facebook group. I hemmed and hawed; debating whether I would be better off spending my day lying around the house. In the end I fatefully hopped on the hour long (one way) bus ride with my entire collection.
I introduced Ken to the brutality of a Wave 1 Rhymer Ball attacking a Neb-B’s side arc, we talked endlessly about what he should run at the upcoming inaugural 2015 Australian Nationals, he drove me home, and like that we became friends.
We met Nick a week or so later at what would eventually become our FLGS, the Games Cube in Parramatta. From the instant we met him, we both agreed:
Nick was a complete dick.
Fortunately, we started to come around on Nick pretty quickly, and we would soon find that our first impression couldn’t be further from the truth.
A group started to coalesce around the Games Cube. The Parramatta Attack Wing. We started playing every week, we started travelling for tournaments. It’s a pretty familiar story to anyone that has gotten seriously into a game.
2016 was a huge year. I remember at the start of the year my goal for competitive Armada was to win a Store Championship.
Then when I won that I wanted to win more than one. Then I wanted to win a Regional, and so on.
Every time we climbed the peak we set for ourselves, we found that another height lay beyond it.
At one point Nick and I took it upon ourselves to make the 1,000km journey to Melbourne over a weekend to make it to a Regional. Because we were poor and were trying to do it last minute, we decided to catch a 14 hour overnight train. It’s exactly as fun an experience as it sounds.
I will never forget that train trip though, because it was when I realised how good a person my friend was.
Being an idiot I had forgotten to bring a pillow of any kind. Nick, being a smarter man than me, had brought one. In the middle of the night, seeing me struggling with my seat, he woke me up to hand me the pillow for a few hours so I could get some decent sleep.
That’s Nick though. He’s a ruthless, talented competitor who wants to grind you into dust on, and only on, the Armada table, and who would literally give you the pillow off his back outside of it.
Ken on the other hand, while he always wants to play to a high standard, has never shown the same over-competitiveness that marks Nick and me. Maybe its because he’s older than the both of us, but Ken has always been the Obi Wan of the group. The sage council, the guiding hand.
It’s unsurprising then that Ken was the one who really thought about and put in the hard work to create what would become Master of the Fleet. Nick and I always like to joke that all we do is ‘turn up and talk shit on camera’, but honestly its not that far from the truth. We worked out early on that Ken is easily the best cameraman out of all of us – so Ken does that. Ken is also the only one of us with any talent for video editing – so Ken does that. Ken is also apparently the most innovative of the three of us, seeing as he developed the Captain’s Clinics, the Battle Blogs, and the Nerf Herding segments. Pretty much the rule is, anything you can think of that’s done off-screen? Ken does it.
Much like he has a tendency to guide and support the channel though, Ken also has a tendency to guide and support both Nick and I.
About six months prior to 2016 Australian Nationals, Ken changed our group name to ‘1st and 2nd Place Australian Nationals’. It might come off as an incredibly arrogant thing to do, but the intent was anything but. Ken was simultaneously poking fun at us and laying out the challenge, ‘Come on then, if you’re both so competitive, walk the walk‘.
So we did.
I ended up the Australian National Champion in 2016, Ken the runner-up. Meanwhile Nick was the runner-up last year after he went on an absolute tear and won six store champs with six different lists.
Both Nick and I attended Worlds 2016, I managed to snag 3rd Day 1A, Nick would end up 12th Day 1B.
When we started Master of the Fleet though we didn’t want to put people off from the channel by exclusively running competitive fleets. So the fleets on Master of the Fleet, or at least the ones we run, are almost always something we’re running for the first time, and generally they’re meant to try and test a concept. The irony of this is that it now sometimes leads to the assumption that we’re fairly casual players.
You might be wondering why I’ve spent a considerable amount of time, in what is ostensibly a retrospective on the Master of the Fleet, talking about Nick, Ken, and our journey through competitive Armada. For me though, they’re inseparable, as they all feed into, and off of, each other.
Master of the Fleet was something that we started and devoted time and effort to because of how much we, together as a group, loved Armada. We saw a space that we thought was lacking quality content and, eventually, we got around to trying our hands at it.
Our first bat-rep took me and Ken nearly seven hours to film.
I wish I was kidding.
I don’t even want to think about how long it took Ken to edit into something serviceable.
We got better though – once we started to develop a process it became easier and easier to repeat. Nowadays we usually film a batrep in about two hours, and generally speaking most of what you see in our videos is the ‘first take’.
At the start of 2017, I set the goal that by the end of the year we would have 500 subscribers (back then we were on 320 odd). By the end of the year we had nearly 1500.
Right this very moment we have 1,993. It’s also been 18 months and some change since we released our first bat rep. So I guess either I’m slightly early for our 2,000th subscriber, or slightly late for our channel’s 1.5 year celebration.
Armada fans around the world have watched our channel for a total of 1,963,729 minutes (approximately 3 years, 257 days). Collectively, more time has been spent watching us goof around than Armada has actually been available.
Taken linearly, an incredible amount of life happens in 3 years, 257 days. In that interval Ken got married, I finished my law degree and now work full-time, Nick and I travelled to America, Nick moved all around Sydney, I returned to America, everyone except Nick got fatter, I had surgery, and countless other events occurred in our lives.
3 years, 257 days ago, I had never played Armada, and I had never met Ken Nguyen or Nick Ward. None of us had considered making and pouring countless hours into a YouTube channel.
Looking at it now though, our journey together is something I know we are all incredibly proud of. Our experiences together, the people we have met, and the reactions we have received have all been a phenomenal validation of the content we have produced.
This is not a eulogy though, simply a self-reflection. We plan to continue producing quality content for well into the foreseeable future.
To that end, what can we do for you, the Armada fan? What content would you like to see, and how can we improve ours? What do we do right, and what do we get wrong?
Though if you ask me to stop swearing, I can’t promise much.
– Intel Officer Luke
Intel Sweep 