IRC to Gather in 6 easy steps

[Dizzy So 1337]

Welcome to the next installment of Dizzy's award-winning 'Soldat for Newbs™' series.  This simple illustrated guide will take you straight through from having just installed mIRC (I'm not going to help you with that part.  Hint: Use your Google) to your first Soldat gather.  Another point of this tutorial is merely to show you how EASY it is to get started and WHY you would want to.

First off, a couple of warnings. 
Number One, IRC is NOT as warm and fuzzy and safe as say, MSN or AIM.  People can send you viruses and bad stuff through it.  Obviously, you should be running some protections anyway if you are on teh Internetz.  Another really simple protection is just DON'T CLICK ON ANYTHING ANYONE GIVES YOU.

Number Two, gathers are generally not for the timid.  It's where the Big Boys play and many of them are stone-cold killers who can be shockingly rude to people that can't keep up at their level of play.  You probably shouldn't even consider it until you are regularly pwning pubs and wanting to get into the 'next level' of challenge.  Still, playing at least one gather a day is really good hard training and gives you the opportunity to push your limits while seeing how the pros do it.

Oh, and one more thing.  Uh, pay for mIRC obviously, if you can afford to.  But if you can't, don't worry.  Besides pestering you every once in a while, you won't ever be FORCED to pay for it.  If you're ready for the plunge, here we go:

Upon opening IRC for the first time the Options dialog should appear.  Under Category: Connect, fill in the information as shown.  I don't THINK you need to provide a valid email address, I could be wrong there.



Under Category: Connect > Servers, locate Quakenet in the list of IRC Servers.  Pop that folder open and select an appropriate server.  Dizzy lives in the US so Dizzy selects Random US server.  Click OK and the Options dialog will close.



Up in the upper right, thats the Connect/Disconnect button let's all click it.... now.




Joining a channel can be performed either from the menu or as a command /j #sna.gather in this example:


Aight, now that we are in a gather let's just bust out some simple commands.  Here, I do !status (which shows me that there are 3 people waiting for someone to join), !add (which puts me in the queue) and !del (which removes me from the queue.  Other commands may vary from gather to gather but these are pretty standard.



And, there we go.  6 people !added, so the gather starts.  The bot spits out the server info and randomizes the teams, and the 6 of you go and kill each other.



You can do a lot of other cool Soldat-related things on IRC like making a channel for your own clan, staying in touch with other clans, finding clanwars, etc.  Gathers just happen to be the MAIN attraction, the main reason for getting on IRC.  Further resources for exploring the world of IRC and gathers:

http://wiki.soldat.nl/IRC_Tutorial#Setting_up_mIRC
(yeah i duplicated a lot of this but i wanted a tight streamlined guide)

http://nagather.u13.net/
(the site for sna.gather, which is where North America mostly hangs out)

http://gather.soldat.nl/
(the site for soldat.gather, which is more European-based)

http://forums.soldat.pl/index.php?topic=6.0
(list of soldat channels)

[FliesLikeABrick]

Awesome, thanks for this.  Perhaps show people how to use something like chatzilla  (firefox plugin) instead?  It is 100% free instead of mIRC, which nags you for registration every time you start it.

[PQ]

You forgot about registering to Quakenet
Since you do need to be authed to join #soldat.gather, I don't think need to be authed to join #sna.gather (not sure). The main gather channels in my opinion.
Others are:
#european.gather
#Soldat.Gather.Fr
#soldat.gather.de
etc..

/j #channelname to join

First off, a couple of warnings. 
Number One, IRC is NOT as warm and fuzzy and safe as say, MSN or AIM.  People can send you viruses and bad stuff through it.  Obviously, you should be running some protections anyway if you are on teh Internetz.  Another really simple protection is just DON'T CLICK ON ANYTHING ANYONE GIVES YOU.

IRC is not unsafe, it's just as safe as surfing through the internet, don't click on links, don't download files and don't install script, unless you are sure it's not a virus or anything bad. (so don't be scared, no one can send you spyware without your permission)

Awesome, thanks for this.  Perhaps show people how to use something like chatzilla  (firefox plugin) instead?  It is 100% free instead of mIRC, which nags you for registration every time you start it.

mIRC is free as well, it nags you for registration, just like soldat does (when you didn't registrate)
And since we have a noob friendly guide on the soldat wiki, just use mIRC.

[BombSki]

also you do not need to provide a real email or name or anything.

[Geoffrey]

You need to /join #sna.gather or whatever as well.

[Ride]

nice tutorial diz

[NinjaGimp369]

This'll be very helpful for those who do not know how to operate mIRC..

Very nicely written guide Dizz.

[Dizzy So 1337]

You need to /join #sna.gather or whatever as well.

Haha the first couple times I read this I just assumed you were mistaken.  Fixed now.

[ElGato]

It's too bad that people can be rude to others who aren't as good. People of all skill levels should play gathers to get better and just ignore the elitist assholes that play, even though in my experience there really aren't as many as people think.

[Dizzy So 1337]

It's too bad that people can be rude to others who aren't as good. People of all skill levels should play gathers to get better and just ignore the elitist assholes that play, even though in my experience there really aren't as many as people think.

Yeah, well 'King of the Hill' is a social head-game that all boys play in some form or another.  Us males are predisposed to creating little 'war bands' from a surprisingly young age.  Picking on the weak within our own community is some kind of general species survival skill, something we evolved to ensure that our tribe wouldn't be 'weak' and fall prey to more aggessive tribes.  Someday I hope to write down all my thoughts on how this is played out in the Soldat miniverse.