Thou shalt move on, apparently

People tend to compare the “good old days” with the situation today, taking into account a wide range of topics: They talk about tournaments, leagues, the different clients, rocket jumping, bunnyhopping, weapon scripts, fakeshaft and so on.

People have also spent hours talking and writing about the players that were around back then, but only very little research has been published about who the players were that left, why they left, where they went and whose fault it was that they left in the first place. I will answer all of those questions.

Let’s start off with some very important facts. Facts that my scientific research is entirely based on: In 1998, clans were never called Slackers, they weren’t called Core and they weren’t called New Wave either. No, they weren’t. They had super-cool names like Shadow Warriors, Twilight Warriors or Warriors of the Realm. Notice a pattern yet? Damn right! There were warriors, brotherhoods, orders, even kingdoms!

Let me continue: Take a boring clan like Slackers for example. They were “founded in 2001 by Goljat and ParadokS“. Period. Boring. Then compare this to mighty oldschool German clan Monasteria: The clan was founded by 3 monks that lived in a monastery somewhere in the woods. Little was known about the inhabitants of this monastery since they only left it in order to protect the peaceful villagers from “robbers and other threats”. Then one day, after it had been sunny all day long and the birds had been singing, there was a huge thunderstorm which left the skies black for 300 years. Evil was to return, so the monks decided to form a clan and spread peace. Pretty noble if you ask me. Anywho: All of this is based on historical facts by the way; I read it in the history section of their website! (And you should really check out that site. The background music, the cheesy lightning, the 1554 words history essay. priceless.)

Why did all these funky RPG-clans break up? Where did all those people go that woke up one day and decided they lived in a Zelda-like world? I can tell you where they went: They went to play Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft. And who is to blame? That’s right: The ezQuake team.

Where were they when QuakeWorld needed a bit of pimping? Why didn’t they act sooner? Why turn ezQuake into what it is right now instead of something more like this:

That’s right: We could have had funky new items, new characters, less fighting, a currency, missions, dragons, princesses and so on. And what did we get? A radar function, something called “team overlay” and a handful of options that 99% of the people don’t care about. Thank you! I could also live with the fact that my aim sucked if at least I could teach my ranger something cool like witchcraft or how to bake bread. Bah.

So let me conclude: hadn’t it been for the boring, conservative ezQuake team, people like DarkWarrior or Belgarath would probably still play QuakeWorld. And we could have even charged them like… 15 bucks a month.