Haha, that's awesome man. I was a purist, though, I just couldn't get Q2 at the time b/c by the time Q2 REALLY picked up, I'd invested SO much time into Q1 that I couldn't make the jump. You might be able to beat me in Q2, probably Q3, too, but try me in DM2 in Quake and I WILL pwn! :DD
I remember the first time I played Quake on a cable modem, it was heaven!! Where my family lived at the time, we were too far away from the DSL switchbox and they hadn't converted the cable lines to broadband, so I was stuck with my crappy 28.8k, then my crappy 56k, HPB to the fullest, until I convinced my dad to go with...ISDN!! Hahaha, man, that was cool for FFA's and pick-up matches, but as far as clan matches went it was a real bitch, b/c ISDN worked out to about 100-200ping, which basically put me right inbetween LPB and HPB, so I got shit on by the jealous HPBs that I destroyed, while at the same time the 20-pingers would just lay waste, absolutely destroy me, and I couldn't compete in the LPB-only matches if they were official, b/c it was too much of a risk. So I had to stick to the mixed matches, basically. There was a certain point in the curve that I couldn't top, though, I was probably in the top 5-10% of all the players, but then there was the top 5%, and they were on a totally different level. I played as Lagos, was an IRC-rat on Undernet for a while, a long while.
Eventually that whole scene died out, though, people jumped ship to Q2, then Q3, or they just left altogether. All the chans became rooms w/ empty names on 'em. But for 4 years, man there were some really good times. I traveled to all the local LAN parties, won the Half-Life 1 tourney at one of them right when it came out, people actually came over to check out my screen to see if I was cheating or not, lol! I was such a purist that it was a struggle just to get onto the Quakeworld network when iD put it up, though eventually I saw the light on that one. Only thing that sucked was that I was going thru some awful stuff outside of gaming in my life at that time, otherwise I'd go back and relive it in a minute if I could. I ALWAYS wanted to go to QuakeCon in Dallas, too, but that never happened!
I stopped playing regularly in 2000, then by the end of that year there were only a few Quake1 servers still populated regularly and they were all Team Arena matches, no one was even playing Threewave CTF, which was the best shit. I played that from when it first was released in late 96, before they called it Threewave they just did this barebones modification to the game to create the capture the flag game, I'm guessing it was the first CTF death-match in any FPS, right? Eventually they put out custom textures and some killer, killer maps, the team that did that gave such a gift to everyone w/ that mod. Then in late 2003/early 2004 I started playing Half-Life 1 again online and wound up with a bunch of regulars playing nightly for several hours between around 11 and 3 AM, eventually switched over to CS 1.6 for a couple of months and realized I was just mediocre at that game, and everyone playing it had like, a three or four year head-start on me. CS is fun, but it kinda sucks to die pretty much 1 minute into the match, even if it's a righteous death, and then have to sit there for 10 minutes while some @#$hole with the bomb hides in a corner.
Clans I was in, lemme think, there was FoM like I mentioned, that was the first, then I was in a joke clan called "Clan ASS", where we each used fake names to match up with the clan name (Kiss ASS, Kick ASS, etc). One of the kids in that clan, Soulnet, he was so damn good, he wound up going to the final round of the 1vs1 Mplayer tourney where the prize was John Carmack's Ferrari!! No one used Mplayer ever b/c it cost money and it lagged, but they held that contest and everyone signed up. For the final round they flew the last 8 people from the brackets to somewhere, Dallas or California I think, and they all squared off, my friend finished 8th, haha, man he was pissed about that. Dennis "Thresh" Wong won that match, which pretty much propelled him into the spotlight as the first real professional gamer (aside from the kids who dominated the arcades in the 70s and 80s), he got endorsements from that for joysticks, some gamer mouse, I think he made $600,000 that next year and that's when everything just blew up, got totally out of control, that's when the gamer leagues started up, I think one of them is still around and is pretty big, but it was chaos for about a year b/c everyone started to split up and side with any league that offered them a sponsorship. Shit-talking ensued and the community kinda lost its charm after that.
I was in, shamefully, Clan Wanker for a little while, then I joined Silver Surfers and we were actually pretty good, I was basically an honorary member of Dark Requiem, but most of those guys were friends from their Doom days and I wasn't elite enough to hold the tag, I guess. Last Quake clan I was in was LG, which was for a while, but I can't remember for the life of me what the acronym stood for.
Wait a minute, 1shot, LORD as in LORDS/LORDZ clan?? The old one that went back to the Quake1 days? If I remember correctly, that clan was sick, kind of a super-clan a few of the really dominant players from other clans put together. Best clans in that day were Unholy Alliance, Dark Requiem, Thresh's clan--I can't believe I don't remember the name of his clan, but they all lived near each other and had their own place w/ a LAN and t1 line and they were literally unbeatable. Other clans were lucky if someone on the team made it out of the match without negative kills, lol. God, I probably played the DM3 map (The Abandoned Base) a million times. Let's see, Clan 311 was pretty good, especially when the older, better clans fell off. There actually weren't that many at first, it seemed like a lot then, but that's b/c it was all new. Now every game and everyone has a clan. When I started playing Half-Life 1 again one of the guys on the server I played on started up his old clan, LPC, we played in a couple of small tourneys and did well, the game was pretty old at that point and most of the people still playing were the highest caliber, I held my own pretty damn well for someone with several years of rust.
I also remember when Killcreek, a down-to-earth gamer who ran Impulse 9, they were f'n awesome, w/ Entropy, climbed her way up the ladder into a job at Ion Storm by getting a pair of fake tits, some tight leather, and screwing first ParadoX at whatever developer it was that put out the first Quake expansion pack, and then John Romero, THE John Romero. Man, all the stuff up there is just background information compared to the real stories and dirt I witnessed and participated in at the time.
But I remember LORDS, if that's the same clan, I can't place who was in it exactly, but I remember they were real good.
The title of this thread made me think of "wall hacks", which every good player was accused of using (some of them, it turned out, rightfully accused)--wall hacks essentially made the walls see-thru for anyone who's wondering and were considered pretty much the worst kind of cheat around.
Timing the Quad damage, holding that position and the rocket launcher position in DM3, intense gaming.
To bring it all back around to AS, though, the economy games are a totally different beast, but they are connecting people in a way that I feel hasn't been done since then, which is awesome, but at the same time the companies couldn't be further removed from iD Software, and that's bad. iD was probably the most open developer back then and for a while they were constantly involved in the community, all the way down to IRC. Everyone who worked their had a .plan that was basically a developer log/pulpit that anyone could, and did, read, they put out what was essentially a perfect game and then made it better with Quakeworld, a completely free network upgrade that was a labor of love for Carmack.
These games--and let me just make it clear that I would take Quake over AS any day of the week, here--are good, they are bare-bones in so many ways, but they are a brand new genre, also, that doesn't even really have a name yet, and therefore it's a new type of gameplay, albeit one that borrows heavily from RPGs and RTS games, which is, I would venture, what makes them SO addictive and honestly pretty fun to play. But the developer support is just not there at all. iD software was supporting the Quake community in every way possible, and they were doing it for free in their spare time while developing Quake2. I'm not sure what the hell AS or S8 does, but there ain't much community support going on, we all know that too well. After all that I've experienced, it's particularly insulting to be treated this way by a company.
Normally my really long posts don't actually take that long to write, but this one took a bit longer than usual, haha.
