Special thanks to ~Tora~, thumb$, Evil~Manowar, mousetopher, fat~buds, flea, )(Polaris)(, (all for being super awesome), the comp stomp crew (Quaaka, Sandman00 and others), several gower's for teaching me or badgering me to become a better player or were enjoyable to play with, ([RH]ino, swaz, ~Deathknight, SilentBlazze, SilentFarts, jessu001 and others) for being friendly, mentors and making the w2 community enjoyable.
This may come as a surprise, but I am officially quitting Warcraft 2 (again) probably for good. If I come back it will be because ~Tora~ hosts a tournament that my skills can relate to and/or a game or two once in a blue moon with good friends OR someone does something about hosting and player population problems. Some of you may be happy that I'm leaving, but I hope that I made a positive footprint in the game overall and to players while on my short stint back.
The reason I'm leaving:
1. The community overall is too inactive and there are too many strong personalities and egos. xxxSmeagolxxx, Kerby (or whatever his name is, the guy with a white poodle on his fb), Arrow (though recently has become more likable), dellam and others for different reasons give off poor vibes in our small community. What I mean by that is, I get harassed on facebook, in-game chat and content on the forums that is very off-putting. Seeing "I'm the best ever and I'm like 923423892398-1 against you" despite [you] having a losing overall record against me (in a custom game whoopee!!!) is super aggravating. This may seem like a crybaby fest, but I'm not the first to leave for reason(s) stated above. Dellam actively hacks - nothing done about it. Some people suck in real life and attempt to bully people like me on the server because they're lifelong criminals and have shitty at-home lives or depressed because they're on the verge of diabetes and suicide. The game is small as it is, why make our experience worse? I suppose it's impossible "to fix" personalities and I certainly don't want to push anyone from our small player pool out, but this game sucks because of people.
2. There is no proper integration for new players. I brought in over a dozen new players in 2 months and all of them quit. The game has enough components to keep people entertained, so we can't blame the game. Hosting issues, cliquey top tier players with passworded games and no proper greeting ceremony for new comers will only continue to degrade the server until were down to just bots and admin.
3. Admin overall are too idle. They pulled valuable players from East server so many years ago (like 2006) when it was still active and had hundreds/thousands of players and never had a proper server ready for we the people. iL is a one man team that doesn't even play the game or have the resources/time to properly fix the server. Moreover, people (myself included) have come up with plans yet none of us have taken action. This game is dead in the water (I apologize on the flip from my previous optimism and support of the game in previous forum posts) and it's because we are lazy or don't have the time. If we all value this nostalgia, why are we okay with status quo?
4. There are literally only 3 types of games. #1 gow ef (same old strats, same people owning), #2 chop (boring unless you have perfect timing with a generic versus neighbor strat, same people winning, same people losing), a few sprinkled in comp stomp and custom games that are less than ~10% of all games - which is a category I personally identify with - because they are less stressful and more fun. All of the potential custom new players are pushed out within minutes to days because of lack of said players or an egotistical top tier player that guffaws at newbs.
Thanks if you read this and appreciate my comments. We're all thinking it. Bye for now, hope to see some of you soon, but I'm uninstalling the game after this post. Thanks again to the folks who made this game memorable like times past!
