zaterdag, april 17, 2004

CR goes multiplayer: Part 6 - over All opponents

It was December 2002 when I joined "over All opponents". In those days oAo consisted of 2 Walloons (bode and Max), 1 Frenchman (Yeah), 1 American living in Germany (Zeus), 1 Slovenian (Crappy) and me ofcourse...we were quite the international bunch. We started out practicing once a week against a UK clan called Going Nowhere Very Quickly (later referred to as Going Noob Very Quickly). From the beginning on it turned out they were no match for us and after some weeks when they ran out of lame excuses they just refused to play us again.

We felt the time was right to move on and play clans that were more in our league. As we were trying to play more games we felt the need to expand our line-up. We had some trial members who left rather soon and we could only add Lt. Speirs who renamed himself into Zwan (the Billy Corgan band, not the sausage) to our team. Unfortunately after a while Zwan decided to leave our clan for no apparent reason...little did he or we know that he'd later (after renaming to a more casual nickname like John) end up in the squad of TWR ("The White Rose").
Despite these minor problems we managed to find two new players: Radje and Death_Lord. They fitted quite nicely into the clan as Radje was a vague acquaintance of me being involved in one of the long gone dod.be projects and Death_Lord was a neighbour kid of Crappy.

To be able to play more games we talked things over and decided to rent a clanserver. Me being a Telenet server admin at the time, was chosen to be our server admin. From that time on (February 2003) we had our own clanserver and were able to play wars at a more regular base. During this period inK and gOUz joined our ranks.
Once again both of them were old time acquaintances: inK had been around for a long time in the Belgian DoD scene and was a feared machinegunner. He was one of the key players in the former V3X line-up and also managed to play some official wars with Team Belgium although he wasn't quite enthousiastic about shooting walls. Our other member gOUz was a long time friend of Yeah and turned out to be a skilled kar whore.

At this time we felt our line-up was complete enough and it was time to build up our squad. Playing quite some hard practice games against opponents such as TWR, Xth, aS1 and Saintz we steadily improved our tactics and teamplay. Our reputation grew as we gave some skilled clans quite a hard time...we even managed to win against Saintz who took the loss quite badly by disbanding their clan. Unfortunately we weren't able to win versus the upcoming Belgian clan SoG ("Standing our Ground") which we regarded as being about the same level as us. In my opinion it's still the most exciting game with oAo I ever played as standings were quite close before going into the last game.

Things were looking good for oAo but all of that changed when Valve got into Day of Defeat and messed up the whole game by issuing Day of Defeat 1.0, though it wasn't even worthy to wear the title of Beta 4.0. The change of gameplay and balancing, together with a various number of bugs and general fuck ups by the development team, made most of us lose interest to play the game on a competitive level.

Due to several reasons which I'll elaborate in the next episode of my multiplayer chronicles my mind was set on leaving the DoD scene. My decision to stop catalyzed the decision of some other clan members, thus resulting in the clan taking a summer break. During that break several members went on playing with a fun clan by the name of -lover- that later turned out to be a real clan (and a quite good one if I may add).
The loss of Yeah and gOuz to -lover-, combined with some others leaving the game left the clan quite inactive after the summer break. In a last effort to get things going again bode attracted pHk and Garga to revive the clan but it was already too late.

What remains of oAo is a bunch of crazy friends. Some of us are still playing the game (pHk joined SoG), others made a shift to another game (remember inK, Enemy Territory will always be gay) but no matter what we're still keeping contact with each other. At this moment we're also still quite concerned with gOUz who has been undergoing several heart operations the last months and is still hospitalized. We wish you the best of luck, gOUz...hope you pull through to join us once again. We miss you!

Greetings from oAo

To be continued...

Alles over de Multiplayer Chronicles

P.S.
1. De Nederlandstalige versie volgt later/Une version francaise suivra dans quelques jours
2. Currently there's no translation of the other parts so far...so learn Dutch, Crappy :p

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