The Crimson Alliance
Before the game actually started there was alot of posturing among guilds. Guilds declaring war and suing for peace on chatzones and emails. Its pretty funny to look back on it and see how much people actually cared about those things that really meant absolutely nothing.

During that time, The Syndicate formed an alliance with a series of guilds (none of which still exist) to support each other when the final game came out. IRC was used once a week to hold meetings and the vote had to be unanimous to approve anything.

It was called the Crimson Alliance and like all "posturing" moves of those days it was countered by a number of "evil" group alliances. Those evil alliances would form and recruit guilds to them based on the motto "Join us to defeat the CA!! Pkill them all!" and things like that.

The CA lasted about 3 months before we gave it up and it faded away. The biggest problem to it was that some of its members were going to go "pk" in the final and that presented a moral dilema for the good aligned guilds (everyone was "good" when they joined) and hence fights broke out and then the beta started and everyone saw the alliance really wasnt needed in this kind of game.

For a time though it numbered 1100 members strong in 7 member and several "want to be a member" guilds and was the most feared alliance in the pre-game days. All evil guilds feared being in combat with all those people and drastic attempts were taken to counter it.