How I mobilized 30 friends in Conan Exiles to go to war against neo-Nazis

Online games are the forge of weird and wonderful gaming stories. I have heard of people who have full-time jobs in Roblox. I have heard of people who have been in raging nightclubs in Final Fantasy XIV. Today I want to tell a gaming story of my own, about the time when I and about 30 of my closest friends sat in front of the TV for two months. Conan Exiles Fight against neo-Nazis.

Yes you’ve read correctly.

To paint the bigger picture, take yourself back to late 2019 – before COVID was even a whisper on people’s lips, before the PS5 launched and promptly disappeared into the ether. You’re yearning for a new game that you’ll become heavily addicted to, and you find Overwatch within my social gaming circle, we started looking at survival games and decided on Conan Exiles. It had everything: crafting, dungeons to explore, a dong size slider, multiplayer servers, and raids.

About nine others and I jumped up to begin our journey, working our way up the food chain at breakneck speed. Since many of us were still studying or living away from home at the time, most of us didn’t have jobs in the morning. This meant we could play until the early hours of the morning every day.

It was a simpler time. We raided other clans on the server and were raided in return, built a fortress in the Conan Exiles Highlands worthy of any Nordic king. But one day, everything changed. After logging in and checking the player and clan lists for the server, we noticed a certain clan with some very specific neo-Nazi dog whistles in their names.

Were these just nervous kids or had we stumbled upon something more sinister? In the age of the internet, it is often difficult to say. However, after Googling their usernames and the broader clan name, it became quite clear that these niche references were a little to Niche as a coincidence. Reporting them to Funcom didn’t seem to do anything. We waited a while to see if they would get tired of the game and leave. They didn’t.

When we leveled up and were ready to find a new clan to fight with, we realized that a new task lay ahead of us: we had to fight the neo-Nazis.

In Conan Exiles.

Shit is going on

Originally, we just wanted to annoy the Nazis enough to get them to leave and take their crappy usernames and clans somewhere else, but they just wouldn’t leave. What started with us assuring them they could get scammed in server chat quickly escalated into guerrilla bombings of any of their bases we could find. The Nazis caught on, and the conflict quickly escalated as they armed themselves to the teeth and fought back.

As the battle continued, Conan A clan of ten members was struggling to keep morale down. We needed more members. So we started encouraging other friends to join in and form their own clans to support us. A few particularly spirited friends even bought their own PlayStations just to join in, so tempting was it to piss off a clan of neo-Nazis. It wasn’t long before we had nearly thirty people ready to give those neo-Nazis hell at any time of the day or night.

Our online war lasted for nearly two months, and tensions continued to escalate. We enlisted other active players on the server and made diplomatic efforts to ensure a strong, united front (and maintain our resources) as the battle raged. We told anyone who would listen about our mission and called on all interested parties to join our cause.

People started taking days off to guard the base. Those of us who were a little less busy just sat on the couch and glued to our screens, up to 16 hours a day. Waking up, eating, fighting neo-Nazis in Conansleep, repeat. Some would say it had become an unhealthy addiction – and you’d probably be right. But we had found something bigger than ourselves to fight for, something more important than touching the turf. When we met in person, we talked strategy and regaled each other with our exploits.

War Stories

To demonstrate our commitment to our Conan Exiles In the Neo-Nazi War, we began changing our clan name to increasingly aggressive anti-Nazi terms and phrases. For a while, we were the Night Witches – the female pilots who bombed Nazis under the cover of darkness. Unfortunately, vaguely threatening names didn’t do much to change the tide of war. Getting about thirty players to throw a carefully placed combination of explosive arrows at the Nazi base seemed to do the trick, though.

The memory gets a little hazy as the war effort moved ever closer to the onset of COVID in early 2020. At some point, the neo-Nazis finally trotted off the server, either bored with Conan Exiles or finally fed up with the endless fighting. Either way, we considered it a total and unique victory and celebrated as such. I vaguely remember one player brewing mead in the game and inviting us to his wizard tower to drink it, after which we had a virtual dance party to celebrate the victory. Deeply chronic online stuff from all of us. But, god, it felt Good.

It wasn’t long before we found our base bombed to the ground by another clan and finally put down the controllers to touch some grass. While Conan Exiles was dormant for a few months after that, we all quickly switched to PC during the lockdown and eventually picked it up again. Although there were significantly fewer neo-Nazis on our server this time, we became just as addicted again.

Even today, almost five years later, my friends still talk about the Conan Exiles The Nazi war was recounted in hushed tones around campfires or glass tables at parties. It’s become a kind of mythical narrative, an urban legend set in a time of heroes long gone. I never again achieved that feeling that we were playing for a higher purpose, even if we basically spent every waking moment pissing off some shitheads in a video game.

Image: Funcom