Sears wrote:Alright, so I'm old as ****, but I'd figured I'd chime in as well. It's strange, but reading through this has reminded me of just how old I am, in that it's made me remember that I had actually "retired" from DoD before I even went up to Vancoucer, BC for fragmart in August of 2003. Fragmart was supposed to the "swan song" of my 3 year DoD career, as my team (devil^) had died and I was getting ready to leave for college in September. While I've always followed the community and stayed involved in some capacity, I never played with the same competitive mindset as I did before I started college (2003), but yet here I am, over a decade later, still on the interwebs with all you nerds.
So, I got my first shitty hp pc for Christmas in 1999, during my freshman year of high school. My older brother and I had always grown up playing video games, but I was a total noob when it came to PC gaming, as we had only had Apple computers growing up (I was a pro at Space Quest), and Nintendo/Playstation.
The first game that I had a nerd boner for was the original
Rainbow Six, and that's really all that I played for the first few months. I loved how realistic the game was, and how immersive the experience was. My brother introduced me to
TFC, which was the first game in which I got involved with the competitive community. I was mostly a pubber, but my team played in the first season of CAL. One of the best TFC players went by the name of
Blitzkrieg, who I believe played for one of the top TFC clans,
Eradication (not sure if my memory is serving me right on the clan name). He was the one who turned me on to DoD (more on him in a bit).
The alpha of DoD was released in April of 2000 (I was 16 years old), and I immediately fell in love with it. I started a pubclan (4th Infantry Division) with a high school friend of mine (devil^fortislupus). 4thID was our thing for the first year or so. My team was wayyyyy into the publan thing, but I got involved with STA as an admin early on, and eventually got my team to join. I had a hard time convincing the rest of my team to start playing in leagues, but I became so enamored with the competitive community that I split off from 4thID and started a new team called
The Descendants, which at the time was conglomerate of people who played in the
KWI pub. The KWI guys were insanely cool, and did a lot of work for the early competitive community. It was also at this time that I introduced a young Adam August to DoD, later to be known as hb- invast, sorry about that everyone, my bad.
DCS was short lived, and we only played the one season in STA. After that, I moved my way up through backup spots on various main and invite level clans, joining them as they were dying, or moving on to a better opportunity with more playing time (cXt, blacksheep, 45th, a0tp, 63rd), before finally landing on devil^, where I spent the rest of my time as a competitive invite level player.
Anyway, here is my list of nerds. Mine is a little bit different because I learned the game not by emulating people that I didn't know, but from the people that I actually got to play and enjoy the community with. So this isn't so much a list of "top-tier" players as it is a cast of characters from the early days of DoD that were really influential in one way or another in my evolution from a realism pubber to invite level player.
NUDE|SpartaN
Remember that guy Blitzkrieg I was talking about?? Well, he later became NUDE|SpartaN, and since I likely wouldn't have heard about DoD as early as I did if I hadn't followed him in TFC, I owe him for ruining the last ten years of my life with my incurable DoD community addiction. He was also a dominant player, both in TFC and DoD, and watching him play his way up into the invite ranks of DoD was inspiring to me at the time because I had followed him and his team in TFC.
[KWI]Gen.Warbuff
Warbuff was the first shoutcaster for DoD. This was long before twitch or any kind of video streaming, so all streaming was done via winamp radio stations like gamesnet radio. I used to pub in the KWI server when I was still running my pubclan, and Warbuff was awesome about explaining the competitive nuances of the game, the nades spots, and config tips and tricks that I would have never discovered as just a pubclan idiot. So I owe a lot to him and KWI for opening my eyes to the competitive community and playing as a competitive player as opposed to a pubber in general.
sac|h0p
The fatalt1y of early beta DoD. SAC was a Quake clan, but they were virtually unstoppable the first two seasons of STA. h0p was their leader, and was absolutely dominant as a "Light" in the early alphas and betas of DoD. It's also worth mentioning that early DoD was ABSOLUTELY nothing like DoD today. It was basically stick figures running around super fast like it was Quake with instagib rifles. Jump shooting, instaproning, bunnyhopping. It was crazy. Imagine 8v8 battles in the middle of an incredibly dark and pixelated dod_caen. It was basically like that dogfight scene from topgun. The only problem with SAC is that they were total assholes, and they were responsible for 95% of the **** on the STA forums in the early days. But, they were incredibly good, and I definitely looked up to them in how they played DoD in the early days, coming from a competitive Quake background. SAC actually came to Fragmart 2k3, but they were long done with DoD by then, and only played quake. I did get a chance to talk to them though, and they were really cool guys in person. I tried to convince them to come back to DoD, but h0p said retail was terrible and that the game was dead (lolz jokes on him).
|45th|Eisen
Eisen was huge in my development from a pubber to competitive player. He took me on as a backup sniper on 45th, and let me scrim with them all the time. He probably wasn't the top tier player at the time, but he we really great at helping me to learn and not get rolled when I tried to try out for other teams. He also helped me pick a new alias, since "Shifty" was already taken, so I switched to |45th|Outlaw` after this very early
viral video.
lgn|Darkrabbi and 101st|-DeadlySniper
I spent thousands of hours in late night pubs with Ron and Sean in the early days, and they were definitely the kind of players that I tried to emulate. I wish DS would have kept playing longer, but I hear he's a pro streamer these days. After 45th died I was an lgn groupie, and hoping that they would let me join, so I spent a lot of time learning the game just from pubbing with the lgn guys. Ron was great about not being a dick to a relatively unknown player, I remember one night in particular in which an avalanche pub died, and he spent almost 3 hours showing me all the glitches and nade spots that I had no idea existed. When lgn died, Ron and dingphodong left to join devil^, I tried to follow them, but ended up backing up on 63rd until DR and Ding left devil, leaving room for me to join. Thanks for that, bros. It was great getting to meet those guys at Fragmart, along with sparz, stuart, daner, all the others, and hb's configs.
devil^crazygirl
LOLz!! Seriously though, Shelly gets a ton of shit in this community, but you gotta hand it to her for sticking with this community for as long as she has. It's no mystery why dgf has been such a consistent team for so long. She really does care about all of the people on her team, and knows her role as a player. It was really tough trying to make your way up in the community as a relatively unknown player in beta days, especially if you weren't a shit talker (I was a super sweet nice guy). I had been a perennial back up when I joined devil, but Shelly and the rest of the team didn't give a shit. So, you can poke fun of her all you want (as I do plenty), but the butterfly effect is very real, and it's likely that I would have quit DoD and never been an invite player, CAL admin, or ever brought back 1911 if not for Shelly just being nice. So, props, fa sho.
devil^prayformojo and devil^pre|ude
Mikey and Mike were **** awesome. They were great teammates during the devil dyas, and in my opinion, two of the most underrated rifles of the late beta era. I can't put into words how much I learned about the game from playing with and watching these two dudes. Wish they still played.
mTs - Ghostrider
The best heavy I've ever seen (even better than Profiction). He somehow found a way to play post-retail heavy like it was early beta, and watching him roll everyone in person at fragmart was incredibly impressive, especially because he ended up being such a nice a personable guy, unlike the rest of mTs which was mostly quiet azn kids and that Unsurreal dude who looked kinda like that
Orin guy from Parks and Rec, but a little chubbier and way more insecure.
Hn
Last but certainly not least. Most of your guys lists are really good, and mine would have been much the same if I was going just by the best players that I looked up to. But like many of you have stated, I still feel like Hn was the best player I've ever seen, and I still watch his final chapter movie fairly often. It's really representative of a different era of DoD, and the type of skill that was required to play at that level. Of all the other elite players that we've had over the last decade, I don't know that any of them eclipse Hn in my eyes as the best DoD nerd ever.
9,896 characters later, gg nerds.
[youtube]ASnVVlFmwXc[/youtube]
. Ninjuh always blew my mind, I still think one of the best players ever, amazing online and even more so on LAN. Also royAMAZING because he could just run around and pick up any gun and dump on you.
The funny thing is, I was going to edit your post and add myself! It would have been a little different from what you wrote. lol. 