Over the last year a lot has been written about EC Crew, iNAVY, Shipwreck Cove and the wider Naval EC community – some of it by me, some of it by others. I’ve told my side of the story in long posts and videos, and I know that in the heat of all that I sometimes made things sound more black-and-white than they really were. With EC Crew and EC Crew Co-op now closed and me stepping away from community leadership, I want to leave one last, calmer version of how I see it.
EC Crew did not begin as a rival clan trying to tear anything down. It started inside iNAVY, which at the time was the main home for organised Naval Enduring Confrontation. While I was there I asked the admins for a dedicated EC space on the server so we could keep Naval EC discussion and planning together. When that proved useful, I asked for a second squadron focused on EC. Those steps were done in conversation with iNAVY leadership at the time, not behind anyone’s back. From those early experiments the “EC Crew” name grew as a way to describe the group of players who were obsessed with Naval EC – nothing more mystical than that. Later I expanded on that story in the “Brief History of the EC Crew” article that some of you have seen on r/WarThunderNaval.Reddit+1
Over time that little EC-focused corner spread beyond one server and one tag. It became WT-EC Crew, EC Crew Alliance, EC Crew Co-op, Shipwreck Cove and a handful of squadrons that built their identity around EC nights. Looking back, it’s obvious that a lot of different people and groups helped build what players now think of as “the EC scene”. iNAVY and its leadership hosted early EC events, wrote some of the first guides and helped get Naval EC taken seriously at all. Other organisers in WT-EC Crew and the later Co-op put in serious work running servers, moderating, hosting events and writing proposals. Squadrons like Sea Wolves and others stepped up as flagship groups and kept lobbies full. Shipwreck Cove grew into its own relaxed harbour for Naval EC, running games night after night and collaborating with whoever was willing. On top of that, many individual contributors from all tags turned up to round-tables, offering ideas on SP, convoys, missiles and maps, and moderators on Reddit and the official forum kept key EC threads visible and tried to stop every disagreement turning into a permanent flame war. None of that was just me.
There were real disagreements along the way. Some of them were about leadership style centralised “navy” structures versus more decentralised, council-style servers. That’s a normal split in online communities. For me, the final break was less about style and more about behaviour. I saw things, in more than one camp, that I felt crossed non-negotiable lines: rule-breaking that clashed with what we had written down as community standards and, in some cases, behaviour I felt was too close to what Gaijin’s terms of service are meant to prevent. As someone running servers under my name I enforced the rules I had promised people I would enforce. That accelerated a split that probably would have come anyway. I’m not going to relitigate specific incidents or name names here; too much time has already been spent on that.
What I will own is my part in the way those conflicts were framed. In some of my posts and documents I wrote with too much heat. I leaned into “analysis” that, in places, shaded into propaganda painting other groups as purely authoritarian or failed, and EC Crew as the sole heir to the “true” spirit of Naval EC. I sometimes talked as if everything led back to me, when in reality the history is much more shared. That doesn’t mean what I wrote was completely false, but it does mean it was incomplete and coloured by the position I was in and the stress I was under.
By late 2025 I was simply burned out. Between trying to organise events, write guides, mediate disputes and push feedback about the mode itself, I hit a point where continuing to run EC Crew branded communities was not compatible with my own health or enjoyment of the game. That is why EC Crew and EC Crew Co-op have been closed. There is no hidden reboot and I am not quietly running another faction under a different name. I still enjoy Naval EC as a mode, but I no longer want to be at the centre of its politics.
If people look back on this period later, I hope they don’t remember just one caricature – either “heroic founder” or “divisive partisan”. I would rather be remembered as one of several people who cared enough to build things for Naval EC: sometimes usefully, sometimes clumsily, and eventually to the point of exhaustion. I would also like it recognised that iNAVY, EC Crew, Shipwreck Cove, allied squadrons and many individual organisers all contributed pieces to what made EC fun and alive for a while. That is more honest than pretending any single person or server owned the whole story. This is my last word on the subject. Others will have their own memories and their own versions; this one is mine.