Monday, 12 September 2001 0545Z
... -PainKilleR

I can't think of a lot to say here, but I feel the need to say something. I think a lot of people feel the same way, and that's evident in most of the forums I've seen so far. What happened today (or yesterday in most of the world) on the east coast of the US is obviously something that most of us will not have a full grasp on for some time.

The US has not seen this level of destruction and loss of life inflicted on our own soil since our Civil War, and it's made all the worse by the fact that it only took possibly a handful of people to carry it out, and maybe fewer still to plan and fund it. People will debate it's historical significance until it becomes historically insignificant (probably by some cataclysm that removes most of humanity, or just whipes the US off the face of the planet).

I tend to be the kind of person that makes jokes to deal with adversity, even if I don't find the jokes funny myself. I also tend to follow tangents wherever they may arise. The combination makes me, possibly, one of the worst people to write about this. Such a combination of rage and loss as I can never have possibly felt in my lifetime lives within me now, and I live on the other side of the country, with no relatives or close friends near the particular areas stricken. Of course, I'm sure there will be members of the TFC community, perhaps even people I felt close to, as close as I could be to someone in this community anyway, lost in this tragedy. But that will be something we can only find out with time, and is sometimes easier to handle because our relationships can be so far abstracted online.

Whatever the purpose of these attacks was, the only way in which they succeeded was in the destruction of property and human life that they brought. Where they may have sought terror and chaos, they were met only with an orderly response, and this calm, cool rage that must burn within every one of us now; along with the sorrow that must be felt by any rational person when this many lives are taken.

The only thing I ask, is that our response to this remain orderly, calm, and rational. Letting the rage inside us overtake rational thought leads down the same path as the terror and chaos they initially sought. Rage is only good when channelled into rational actions and controller by rational thoughts. To respond in any other way makes us no better than them.

Monday, 10 September 2001 1345Z
Still not dead yet ... -Teatime

Okay, once again several weeks have passed without an update to The Fort :-(

As far as I'm concerned I admit that I'm a little burned out at the moment. I am tired of the game and the community. Well, actually not tired of TFC, just of the kind of game you find when playing on the pubs. There's so much crap and idiocy going on, complaining, whining and bickering. No sportsmanship, not much fairplay and - in a way most sadly - no proper gameplay. Playing on the pubs always gives me the impression that one half of the players have no clue of the game while the other half don't care.

Lately I have started to play a bit CS again, which is at least a bit more honest about itself than TFC. CS can be played as a deathmatch with teams (but without any teamwork worth to mention) and most pubgames are exactly that. But IMO TFC don't work as a deathmatch game. Unlike CS you can't win a round of TFC by deathmatching. And while CS works on some extent without teamwork (though teamwork increases the quality of the game tenfold) TFC does not. Yet too many TFC players don't even try, or care. I suspect that those who do care no longer bother with pubgames and rather reserve their time for clanmatches or games on those few servers with more quality.

Maybe TFC has grown old in a way and players have become bored with the usual gameplay (/Teatime nods to H-Town) and now rather fool around with crowbar-wars or the like, or have surrendered to lamer-like behaviour like respawn camping. Others decide that pubbing - in opposition to clan matches - is a free-for-all and play only for 'shit and giggles' (kudos to whoever came up with that phrase).

Looking back I'm unable to spot any improvement in gameplay. Sure, I can see the skill of the single players, but the overall gameplay and teamwork is just as bad as two years ago (maybe even worse). Isn't it sad that after 2 years (!) there is no significant difference between a pubgame today than compared to one back in 1999? And that's not the fault of the newbies or lamers, it's the fault of the regular players, of people with experience, knowledge and skill. And that's the point I'm tired of ...

As far as the community is concerned it has become tiresome as well. Way too much ego, too much stress on personal skill and personal success. To much bickering about issues which should never be issues in the first place. Too much justification for poor tactics, poor sportsmanship and poor conduct. And with each new generation of players coming into the game it starts all over again. The same debates every few weeks. The same battles to bring a simple point across. After a few months people still miss the point why BH is wrong. Too many people play with the wrong mindset. And that mindset disgusts me at the moment to a point that I'd rather stay away from discussions.

Don't get your hopes too high. I'm not quitting, nor will I stay quiet. But watching the game and the community there's not much hope that the situation will improve any time soon. I have lost any illusion one could encourage sportsmanship and conduct. The only way to make it work would be to enforce it. To hold people accountable for their actions and their behaviour.

But we lack the tools, and sadly we even lack the common acknowledgment of conduct and behaviour. Admins can do their part on their servers, but players are too spoiled and too egocentric even to abide to the rules of a server.

Maybe the time's over to tell people nicely to stop to ruin the games for others, or even to affect it negatively. Maybe the time has come to call somebody a selfish asshole who does that. Maybe it's time to make clear that your rights end where my rights begin, that my wish to play a game without camping, chasing or bunnyhopping is just as valid as yours to do so. Maybe it's time to make clear that people are not playing for themselves on a server, and that playing with other people sometimes call for a compromise, or even a sacrifice. Not to mention that in the spirit of democracy the demands of the majority weighs more than the demands of the few. So when the majority of the players on a server asks you to stop BH then stick any arguments about validity up your ass and comply.

It's about time we make people realize that ...