Bunny
Dave Wilson
posts : 148
| when quake1 came out everyone basically had the same connections; bad modems and then groups of students in colleges who had incredibly low pings. it was about a year before the scottish rapture event (held in '99) that everything started to slide, everyone on the continent was getting isdn, lowpingers were starting to outnumber highpingers on servers and there were now 24/7 gamers; people who played every single night and specialised at certain things, e.g. duelling, wars. we got our little shock in france when they thrashed us in the 4v4 qw wars, but this seemed alright, we didn't notice anything, they just seemed to be really good, we'd totally underestimated them. around this time there were a good few lans going on here, but online play didnt really exist except for qw clan arena, no wars, few duels. i wasn't able to use the computers in college anymore, so sporadically i'd get to play quake online, once or twice every couple of weeks or so, this is when i started to notice that if i got on somewhere at 4am at night, i'd see a bunch of brits playing wars or whatever, then 2 weeks later, at 2pm, join the servers again and notice the same bunch of people, all lowpingers, beavering away playing war after war, any time of day or night i seemed to go on, they were there, playing away. they boxed the shit out of me in ffa's or whatever i tried to play them in. this was just before we heard about rapture. there was no team picking involved, just myself beast, ser, koopa and von organised a weekend or so down in limerick university, i don't think von was able to make it, but we sat down, played, got a few shocks, got thrashed sometimes and sometimes we played freakishly well and beat some teams, but really by the end of the weekend, all of us, with the exception of koopa believed we were gonna get beaten alot worse by the british teams than we were by the french. as it turned out by some fluke we won the thing, we even beat the european team once.
so everybody is grand after this, hardly any practice and we beat those 24/7 players, not a bother, we were full of confidence, however after the tournament me or beast still didnt have machines, ser koopa and von were still highpingers and this was around the time quake3 was taking off. in quake1 we'd played since it first came out and continued to play it, at lans, on the college lan, online with low pings, we'd only trailed off that just less than a year before rapture, but quake3...we were well well behind in that. ireland v france in quake1 was one of the first international games ever played, on lan, and these kinda games had really started taking off, the whole patriotism thing. so we heard about a barrysworld thing, a big european competition and of course, we were going to try and enter. it was nearly an impossible situation, anyone good enough to be on an irish quake3 team either didn't have a computer or didn't have a connection, at first i said fuckit, we'll use the rapture team (myself koopa beast and ser) we knew each other well and we were able to play together well, but that wasn't going to happen, we were gonna have trials, in cybercafes. the panel was setup to pick the team, there was driving and meeting in pubs and posts going up on the internet, but very very little quake3 being played and even less wars, which was what we needed. picking the team ended up being very hard, what do you do when you have 3 equally good players, you really have to pick the one who is most on form. we drove up and down to limerick, trying to please everyone, still the final team had so little practice together, they seemed to gain most of their experience from the few trials we had. we got through our lagged mickey mouse group and were off to the finals in london.
it was about 8 oclock in the morning and we had to play finland. ser was sitting down pupils hangin out his eyes from whatever he'd done the night before, i'd say he'd played between 25 and 30 hours of quake3 total in his life at this stage. beast was beside him, so little sleep, still drunk, played a little more than ser had and actually watched demos of good european clans, out of all of us he knew most what to do, he also knew how shit of a team we were. since koopa couldn't make it, jay occupied his place, very on form at the time, played a good amount of quake3, albeit on lan against his friends which was little substitute to solid internet play, jay knew little about the tactics. beside him was el-pres, the modemer, he was consistant in the trials, but i don't think he'd ever played against freaks like these, the fucking finnish team. being the coach i didnt really have a clue what to do, at least we started off the coaching trend there, we were inventing it as we went along. sometimes i timed stuff, sometimes i mistimed stuff, other times i just told them how many enemies had just killed whoever. the fins fucking ripped us apart. they had better aim than us, they had the standard tactics they still have today (dm7, dm6 and dm14tmp) they were much faster, their coach timed so much stuff, they had vastly more experience in every situtation. then we had to play russia, the overall champions, much better than the fins, however we had gained so much experience from the first 3 games, played so erractically and had clearer minds that we did a little better, they were about triple our score.
then came the english, put it this way, we decided to pick dm14tmp as our map, some of the reasons being that it was small and tight very much like some quake1 maps and that it hadn't been around for as long as dm6 and dm7. now, not a single one of the english rapture q1 team was on the english q3 team, these were a special breed of lads who took it up early, had fast connections, and played alot of wars. right now i dont know the spawns for dm14tmp, except two opposite the rocket launcher and i still get confused where the jumppads lead, but back then i knew nothing and likewise the lads playing couldn't have known much more than me, but somehow, by some unbelieveable event..we beat the english on that level.
whats my point? we are pretty good at computer games, but we'll always be fucked by connections. ironically enough we were very good at q1 clan arena, we had a server up early, everyone seemed to play on it every night, so...we didn't have that many lpbs or a huge amount of players, we were better than everyone else, especially the english, and thats all that matters.
god bless us.
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