It's sad to see another honourable Warrior to lay down his weapons and to retire from the active duties on the Fort, but I understand the reasons for his decision just too well.
Tot, you did a great job during your watch and it will be a long way before I can say that I'd done as much for the game and the community as you did. Both, you and Bundy have always been proud representatives of all the Fort stands for.
I can only try to follow your example and do my best, together with PainKilleR (as much as his tight schedule allows) and hopefully soon with another great warrior. Might one day my rants are as sharp as yours :-).
Farewell, my friend. Your chamber might be empty, but it will always be held ready for you.

And while I'm at honouring fellow warriors, let me add a salute to the man who started it all and who fought the good fight before us. Bundy, you will always be remembered. To me (and I guess the same goes for Tot) this place will always be 'Fort Bundy'. The name may have changed, but the spirit still lives on in these walls.

Sunday, 29 April 2001 2215Z
A change of command... -Totentanz

All things must come to an end - usually by circumstances beyond one's control - and it looks like it's that time for me, now. As of late, my work schedule, which wasn't exactly relaxing and liesurely in the past, became a slice of Hell. We're at 40% manning, and are no longer a 24-7 shop. I've gone from my comfortable graveyard shift, to one that runs 6am to 2pm, Eastern time. As you might guess, going to bed at 10pm, to wake up at 4:45am puts a serious cramp in my social life - even one online. Add to that, my marked decline in interest in playing TFC, or being involved with it, brought me to make some hard choices.

1. I've completely dropped any and all involvement in the TFC Reform Project. I've given control to it in total to Warthog. A combination of the lack of time and a complete lack of interest in the game has brought me to this point. My disgust with several glaring loopholes being exploited to hell that completely DESTROY the spirit and intent of the game and it's design - by what I thought at one time were fine, outstanding members of this community. For those of you who can't read between the lines, I'm referring to the "BunnyHopping" techniques that allow a HWGuy to outrun a Scout, and still fire his Chaingun. And if you want to argue semantics as say I don't know what I'm talking about by using that particular term AGAIN, frankly you can blow me. See that motto up there, the one that says "Dedicated to Honour, Sportsmanship and Team Play"? Use of that exploit violates the first two completely - there is NO grey area in that call, folks. If you say otherwise, you're lying to yourself and your fellow players. Add to this the last patch, which Valve led us here to believe was slated to fix many of the recurrant and annoying bugs - instead only offered the new models. Oh, yes - and a couple of minor bugfixes - oh joy. Some of the models I do like, some I don't. That's not the point. I started the TFC Reform Project as an effort to get Valve to fix, and continue to maintain a mod which at that time was SERIOUSLY broken. I managed to achieve most of the former, but since Counter-Strike has become their Golden Goose, I doubt we'll see much action on maintaining TFC any time soon.

2. I've handed command of The Fort to my valiant comrade in arms, Teatime. Like my mentor, comrade and personal idol in things TF before me, Bundy - I will be retiring into a capacity where I reserve the right to pop in and add my own blend of madness to this place - but expect it to be a rare thing, indeed. Perhaps it's good that my appearances will be rare indeed, because my few posts on the forums as of late seem to have brought up some bad feelings, as to the content of them. Oh well, as the French would say, "C'est la guerre". Teatime has my full confidence that he will be able to continue his sterling job of trying to beat some semblence of manners and intelligence to the uncultured ones that plague the game that is TF. I'm hoping that you continue to give him support and insightful feedback to this game that has captured the minds and spirits of so many of us for so long.

3. I've decided to discontinue ANYTHING to have to do with TFC, or any other Half-Life engine related mod. Last week I deleted Half-Life off my hard drive, and I haven't felt so good about doing something in a long time. John, Robin and the other guys that came up via the QTF/QWTF community - I have all the respect in the world for you guys in particular. You people gave me a game that literally took control of my free time, and gave me countless hours of enjoyment. In particular, I offer a heartfelt salute to David Sawyer, the genius mapmaker that brought us what I consider to be the best damned TF map EVER made, CanalZone. Some of my most fondly remembered playing time was me hunting Ramirez thru his own map, on the legendary CTSNET 24/7 CZ server (bows head in a moment of silence for it). He made me earn every frag I managed to get on him, and usually was the one ending up respawning. But I managed to learn that map completely as a result of those great times. Thank you, Ramirez - I will treasure those memories for a LONG time.

However, in this modern age, when you do move to the model of having to make games for a living, rather than making them as a labour of love - some things must by necessity be sacrificed. TFC started off as a great idea, and one that excited me - as something to hold us over while the legendary TF2 was being made. But time has passed, and passed - and still nothing. I still remember hearing TF2 would be out for Quake2 - and I bought that for the express reason. I played less than 20 hours of Quake2 online, because I only bought it for TF2. I played the single player game to kill time while I waited - but it never popped up. Then Half-Life came out, and it was said TF2 would be made for that. I'll be truthful and admit I bought HL for it's own merits as much as for being able to play TF2 with it, and in the beginning HL, and then TeamPlay HLDM, and finally TFC was good - but them it was announced, TF2 will be it's own game. So we wait more. And then They scrap the old engine, and start again - so we wait more. Then they start using TF2 technology in TFC, and TFC get's turned into a guinea pig. That wasn't so bad, and I agreed with the idea, initially - until they made two decisions which started my slow decline into hatred for this game. First, they put in the netcode which penalizes you for having a good connection. Getting lag-sniped, and infected or backstabbed by HPB's who were literally across the room from me - if it was reality, imagine being knifed from over 6 metres away - started to made me get disgusted. Then the decision was made to make it "easier for someone to get right into the game" - which I term changing it into AOL-Fortress. Couple that with the decline of the Moral Fibre of the so-called "community", and it caused me to no longer want to be involved in this game. At least the TFC players are head and shoulders above the cesspool that is the vast majority of the CounterStrike community - that's a really good mod, ruined by it's players. I only enjoyed it when I played either at LAN sessions, or on passworded servers with friends I knew would NOT be arseholes.

I've always held the opinion that if you usually do something to have fun, and it's no longer fun for you - don't do it anymore. So, finally having freed myself from my self-imposed obligations to the community, I've taken my own advice and left it behind. GG Valve, but in my opinion, not only are you no longer the only TF game out there, you're not even close to being the best of them. When I need my TF fix, I'll continue to play Quake3Fortress or Unreal Fortress, but presently my game of choice, when I get the time to actually play, is Tribes2. As for my thoughts on TF2 - I'll sum it up like this: "I'll get excited over it when I see a demo or the finished product. Until then, I could care less." Only so many times you can jerk people's chains, before they start to not care anymore - and I've hit my threshold.

It's been real, it's been fun - and occasionally it was really fun. But not in my recent recollection. If you want to get hold of me, my email will be there. You can find me playing usually on East Coast Tribes2 servers, and sometimes on a Q3F one. But usually I'm just working. To all the true believers out still there - keep fighting the good fight, while the flame still burns. Just don't let get to the point where it starts to take you down - learn when to walk away before you become bitter and spiteful.

Totentanz out. *salute*

Thursday, 12 April 2001 1430Z
Player Accountability... -Teatime

The biggest problems for online games are not bugs or lag. The biggest problem for online games are people displaying poor and inconsiderate behaviour on public servers.

It is very annoying to be confronted with lamers, who blocks passages or teamkills, or cheaters abusing bugs or using external means to gain an unfair advantage. But even more annoying, because far more common, are people acting like asses by using foul language, by insulting fellow players or simply by acting like spoiled little children. We all witness all kinds of poor behaviour far too many times when playing the pubs. The general lack of teamwork and proper approach is bad enough, but having people spamming nonsense or insults on mm1, doing their worst to piss off other players and to - deliberately or not - ruin the game for others.

People feel encouraged or even entitled to such behaviour because they feel not to be accountable for their actions. The worst thing that can happen to them is being banned from that particular server for their behaviour, which on top requires an admin to be present. On unmonitored servers a player can get away with all kind of behaviour without any repercussions.

In real life a group of people would apply social pressure to people misbehaving. If social pressure would fail people would still have other means to uphold an appropriate code of behaviour (either by talk, by exclusion or different kinds of punishment). Yet most of these means don't exist in online games or don't apply to the world of online games. What makes things worse is the anonymity of the player. People can act poorly rather anonymously by playing under different names.

With the increasing size of the online playing community the problem gets worse every day. The fact that there's a large percentage of young people playing who have not yet learned to act responsibly in real life or deliberately enjoying the freedom of acting against such rules isn't exactly helping (note: I do not accuse young people in general of showing poor behaviour, I merely point out that young people more likely display such behaviour). Repercussions are very limited, as mentioned. Being banned on one server still leave a couple of hundred other servers to pester. And those large commercial servers will sadly always be safe territory of lame behaviour of any kind.

This has to change, for the sake of the future of online games. IMO we need to held people accountable for the behaviour they show when playing with other people.

The question at hand is how to accomplish that ...

The means are there.

People showing poor behaviour can be gagged, kicked or banned. Bans can range from minutes to lifetime. Creating a single WON-ID prior to the last patch was very helpful as well.
Kicking or banning a player is a - granted: poor - method of holding a person accountable for his actions. Now as mentioned banning does not teach much of a lesson when this particular player can just join the next server and continue his lame behaviour.

But imagine - just speaking theoretically for a moment - being banned on one server would deny a person to play at any server for... let's say ... 24 hours! Don't you think people would think twice before they teamkill, before they spam profanity or insults? And let's assume being banned a second time would deny access to any server for 48 hours. It would be so easy to teach people to act more friendly and responsible.

Yet this is at most part just a sweet dream for a number of reasons.

1) The game companies could not pull off such a system gameside. Legally they would have no right to deny people playing the game they'd paid for.

2) We will have to acknowledge that mentioned commercial servers will never do anything else than running a game by default values. They don't admin or even monitor the servers. Such servers would never be actively part of such a system, and likely not passively as well.

3) The standards of which behaviour would be poor or lame will always differ between people. Profanity is a big issue to one, but no issue at all to another. Respawn camping is lame to some, but valid to others. On top of that admins are not free of personal prejudice and character flaws. An admin might ban a person for personal reasons regardless of that person's general behaviour.

Yet I think many admins could create a common ground on which to act. Cheating is an easy issue. Many kinds of lame behaviour, like teamkill, hiding with flags or blocking passages should be easy as well. And I would hope that many admins would support such annoying behaviour as message spams or profanity as well. Remember that in my example I spoke of a limited ban. We are not talking of severe punishment, more of a friendly clap on the fingers, as a reminder.

I'm sure there are already admins exchanging ban lists to keep the worse lamers and cheaters off each other's server. Yet of course this is a rather clumsy method and achieves nothing on the banned players (with some very few exceptions).

Any system working with bans more efficiently and along the idea of enforcing accountability would require a database to work with and a tool importing/exporting updates on a regular basis. Actually I'd assume this to be fairly easy to create. The database would b required to keep records of bans (how often has a player been banned, on which server and for what reasons) and to handle the duration/expiration of bans. And it would create a central place for players to ask for being removed from a ban list.

The biggest challenge would not be to establish the technical means but to convince admins to participate on such a problem (the more if it would involve having a 3rd party tool running on the server). The biggest problem on the other hand would be to determine if an admin was trustworthy and responsible enough to participate on such a project. It would provide a powerful position and could easily be abused.

In fact a similar utility does already exist. HLACS was created for CounterStrike, but according to the website can be used on any HL-MOD. What I dislike on HLACS - at least based on the limited information from the website - is that it basically just creates a more efficient way to share bans. I don't see any approach to teach people to act more cooperatively. I also think it puts too much power into the hand of the admins ("only the Admin who banned someone can edit/remove the ban"). Yet it is a step into the right direction. I have contacted the creator of HLACS for an interview, but I'm still waiting for his answers.

In the future I would wish game developers would consider to provide tools - or at least the interfaces - to help the respective communities to enforce players accountability.

Just providing a game and then leave the trouble with assholes and lamers to the gamers is no longer a reasonable attitude. A game might be ever so cool, but with people continuously and increasingly being unpleasant and irresponsible the pleasure dies fast.

Monday, 02 April 2001 1730Z
Why do we play this game... -PainKilleR

This question has been plaguing me lately, and I've noticed that a good amount of the community has been as well. Perhaps it's the game's age getting to some of us. Perhaps it's the game undergoing changes to gameplay and to the way it looks. Perhaps it's the bugs that continue to live on in the game after all of these revisions.

While writing this up, I changed direction a bit. Therefore, things at the beginning may seem unrelated to things at the end. However, I feel that it all intertwines somewhere along the way, and at the least gives you all a bit of an introduction to where I'm coming from, and some of the things I believe in. It's probably one of the worst samples of my writing you'll ever see, but it all needed to be said eventually. May as well get it out of the way now.

I played TF in many of it's revisions for NetQuake and QuakeWorld, taking occasional breaks to play other games that caught my eye. Still, I couldn't let go of TF completely, even with Quake2 CTF, Diablo, and numerous other games pulling for my time. While I was waiting for TFC, which promised a much needed visual update to the game I spent so much time playing, I continued with TF, staying mostly to a particular Canalzon server that lives only in our memories now.

TFC brought something else that really drew my attention, something other than the visual updates. It brought a much-needed end to the cheating that plagued QuakeWorld after 2-3 years of it's existance. It also brought a fresh community that seemed mostly untainted by the arrogance that existed among many in the TF clan scene.

I'm beginning to think that perhaps that arrogance is a part of a game's age, something that grows within a community as the newbies that were dealt harsh blows by their elders become elders themselves, and the elders that believed in helping others and spreading honour in the community decide that it's no longer worth their effort, usually leaving the game behind for something else.

As I've played this game, I've gone from a veteran of the TF pubs to a player just on the virge of completely giving up on the TFC pubs. When that happened, though, there was a group that caught my eye. I had been opposed to playing in clans in TF because the bad side of that particular community was very evident when I started looking. TF had gone through some nasty cheating scandals, and some of the arrogant few were winning matches, feeding their arrogance even more. However, when I started looking at TFC clans, the vast majority (with one noted exception) were upholding honour in the game and showing that you could play a straight up game and get the wins. The TFC clan scene was, at that time, the pillars of the community.

Somehow, for reasons barely known even to myself, I managed to make my way into the best clan in the game at that time. Their beliefs were the same as my own, that the game was to be played for fun, that cheating was not to be tolerated, and that although winning was not the sole purpose of playing, it was something worth working for.

Somewhere along the way, my clanmates started to grow tired of the harsh regimine of practice that we held, and of the game itself. Many of them had been playing the game equally as long as I had, however most of them had never had the occasional breaks that I had taken as a pub player. New mods came along for Half-life that had playing styles that, while rehashed to someone like myself that had spent time with various Quake 2 mods, were new to people that had not spent much time with that particular game. Needless to say, I didn't agree with my clanmates, though I needed a break as well.

I took a month off, barely even touching TFC for 2-3 weeks of that time. The TF1.5 patch came out during my time off, and pushed me a little further from the game, making it easier to spend that time away. Still, eventually, something called me back. The game was different, but it still held the same call. It wasn't long before I found a new group of people that held similar beliefs, and was back to playing clan matches again. It also wasn't very long before I started noticing that, with 2 or 3 of the major forces in the clan scene gone in a short time period, the scene had started to change.

I guess, to some extent, this shift had started much earlier, it was just hidden to an extent. There were numerous flame wars between various clans regarding the tactics people chose to play. Some clans play the game to win, and some play for fun. Unfortunately, on occasion the tactics used to win don't leave a lot of room for a fun game on the parts of the clans being played against. This leaves a clan that came to have fun feeling cheated, even if they won.

What does this mean to everyone out there that isn't in a clan? Well, think about why you play this game. Think about how your actions effect the other players in the game. Are you in the game to have fun, or to win? Is your idea of fun or winning causing problems for other players on the server that may be trying to have fun? Respawn campers are usually having fun, so are the cheaters, but the people being camped aren't having fun, and in many cases neither are the people being cheated. It may be fun to ask for an all-crowbars game every once in a while, but what about the people that came to play a real game of TFC? The players that wish to play offense are often discouraged in a pub game by the incredibly heavy defense. The players that are highly skilled at defense are often discouraged by the near total lack of offense.

People have lost site of why they play the game. When people stop having fun, even if their reason for playing is to have fun, they never just leave the game. It doesn't work that way for most people. We drag it out, we try to find the fun again, we ask for other people to change things to make it fun again. I went and joined another clan, with which I had a great deal of fun, but slowly certain things started wearing on me again. It wasn't the fault of the clan I was with, the game just stopped being fun again.

Still, I'm here, ranting about bunnyhopping and running a league that mandates use of Punkbuster to detect cheaters and expose them, effectively keeping them out. From time to time I've also been known to rant about chasing, turtling, respawn camping, and a few other choice issues. In the last week I spent an hour spectating TFC matches, one hour actually playing TFC, 8 hours playing Black & White, and 4 hours playing Tribes 2. I've also spent 4 hours working on a program that some people might find useful, should I ever manage to finish it (it's certainly not the first time I've started work on a similar project).

Why am I still here? As much as I hate the state this game is in, the changes are possible. Maybe if I shout loud enough, pound on the walls hard enough, people will start to listen, and the changes will happen.

Punkbuster mandated in every league and playing on more of the public servers is just a start in the right direction. It's time to start removing the dark seeds that have tainted this community. The end does not justify the means. There is no substitute for honour and a game well played. Dishonour should not be met with flames and angry villagers, it should be met with a brick wall and solid refusal to accept it as part of the game or the community that has formed around the game.

(for more information on Punkbuster, visit Punkbuster, for more information on Black & White and Tribes 2, visit PlanetBlackandWhite and PlanetTribes , respectively).

Monday, 02 April 2001 1730Z
A new Warrior joins the Fort... -Teatime