Welcome to the story of my time on Jedi Knight 2. It's a rather long one too, like very long. Suspiciously long...
My older brother had rented a couple of games for the Gamecube back when I was in seventh grade, one of them was a game called Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It was such a long time ago, like 2003-2004. The very instant that my brother had gotten off of the Gamecube, I put that game in and played it. At first, I had tried to play the single-player campaign, but I kept on dying, so I decided to see what other modes there were to play. I found out that you could play multiplayer with bots, and so I did. That was when I first experienced the Lightsaber combat and the force mechanics, and it was great. After that session, I had looked up cheats so that I could get through that nintendo-hard Single-player campaign. I still remember the passwords for them. Sadly as the game was a rental, it had to go back eventually, but it would never be forgotten...
Fast forward to around mid-2010. I had gotten the game again, but this time for the PC. Once again, I had attempted to play through the campaign, and it was quite a slog. Though I had looked up console commands, I only used them to turn my saber yellow.
The Nar Shadda stuff was the worst, with the Rodian Snipers wielding their Omniscient Sniper Rifles of +1337 to Insta-Killing. Oh yes, and those Trandoshan Grenadiers with their +9001 range to lock-on (You can use a cheat to get a level 4 mind trick that allows you to control enemies. Controlling an enemy armed with thermal detonators and throwing a few grenades reveals that they are ALWAYS locked on to the player). Still, once I got past that, I had a lot of fun fighting all of those Reborn and Shadowtroopers. The final boss fight against Barney the Chistori was also pretty fun.
After playing around in the campaign a few more times, messing with console commands to create ridiculous scenarios, I decided to mess around on Multiplayer. I'd went on a couple servers, but eventually made my way to the ATS server. Unlike the previous servers, people actually made attempts to communicate with me. It was on this day that I met Outcast and GodGrowMore. I was even given a few pointers. This was when I decided that playing multiplayer on this game could be interesting. I pretty much stuck to the ATS server, and one day I met m0ph, who was an admin at that time. I remember him challenging the whole server to get past squads of the aforementioned Rodian Snipers and touch him with your lightsaber. I watched people enter that temple and drop like flies. I decided to crouch walk and block the shots with my saber, which worked. Keeping my back to the wall, I had made it past the devious challenge. Eventually during my times there, I had gotten encouragement to join ATS from various people. It seemed interesting enough, the members seemed friendly enough as well, and I'd seen plenty of their members by that point. I'd met a lot of them indeed: BlueNinja, BattleDroidLover, Herny-JK, Sebb, CommanderBacara, Vort, Mereel, NickDeClaw, and possibly Ajunta. I've probably met others back then who are among us now, but I've met so very many people since I've started playing, but I digress. I eventually found their forum and had applied to join, and was accepted into ATS. This marked my first time being in a JK2 clan.
It had been quite a fun experience. I'd begun to work on honing my skills, because at that point, I couldn't duel my way out of a paper sack. I'd learned a lot in the few months that I had spent in ATS so far. But one thing was amiss. I was still a recruit, at about two and a half months in. I had been asking around, even asking Outcast and other knowledgable members about how I could go to the next rank. I hadn't gotten any definitive answers. I had begun to grow frustrated at that point. Then one day, I was on the server when these two people showed up and started mercilessly killing everyone, they teamed everyone on the server, picking off people. I'd stepped in and well, died a good amount of times. After a while, they'd stopped their killing and talked with me.
They had invited me to join their little group, describing its rules and methods. I was exceedingly hesitant to join, and I held off until they had invited me to their server. It took a while, but I had finally accepted. These two, claiming to have been leaders of an old-school clan called RJM had formed TLG, and I was part of it. The clan itself had but a handful of people in it. The two leaders, myself, and a couple of others they managed to recruit. The leaders would then teach us for the next few weeks, until they randomly vanished without a word. It was quite an interesting experience either way, and I'd came out of it way stronger than I was prior (despite their...lack of a knack for teaching). So here I was, without a clan again. It was an interesting time period.
There had been a figure that would occasionally appear on the ATS server and would kill indiscriminately using a Dark Rage/Speed combo. His name was Wt!//Pacer. He would occasionally stop and talk on some of his visits. One of those times was after TLG had dissolved. He had extended an invitation to his organization. I was always one who disliked laming, but I decided to accept. Besides, I had wanted to see what it was like on the other end. What these "lamers" were like when they weren't "on the job". I still played like I usually did, I never lamed others, but my outlook on it had changed. By getting to know WT (who took the name Voss after a while), I had learned that not every person who lames is necessarily a bad person. I also became more tolerant of people laming me. It was around this time that I had started teaching. People would ask how to do something, and I would teach them it if I knew it. Through this, I learned things as well, since my experimental side would take over during lessons and I would find myself devising rather unorthodox moves. I was also asking for lessons from people.
After a while, I eventually became friends with a lot of people in ATS, there were several new people there at this point which if I recall correctly, was around a couple to a few months after TLG had dissolved. I had been spending time on the ATS server, when I was not with Voss on the pacer server. This was around the time where I had been hearing things about ATS banning more people than usual. Voss had started making maps, and had unveiled his creation to me and the other pacers. The map was pretty cool, but not without its flaws. There was quite an anomaly with one of the walls. It looked like there was a doorway you could pass through, but in reality, it was actually a small window which had everything below it without a texture. This was dubbed "The wall of Confusion". Hilarity ensued as a bot named GaspumP would be given empowerment and teleported into this wall, as other bots would be teleported in there as well. When Gaspump attacked, the other bots would die, and fly out in a rather hilarious fashion. Definitely was a fun night. Over the next few days Voss had given people tours of the map.
Then came the strangest event to me in my history of playing the game. I got onto the ATS server and got called out by Outcast, so I went to the temple to speak with him. He had gotten angry that one of the bots the pacer server was named after him. He also started attacking me in ways that went against the rules of the server...before banning me. I had collected video footage of it and put it on my youtube. I then made a link to it on the forum to show the others in ATS. The next however many weeks was me dodging bans. I used an alternate name a couple of times. But at some point, he either got over it, or got tired of re-banning me, because I was able to be on the server for a more than two minutes without being banned again. Sometime later the event that changed ATS forever had occurred, the server hack incident. I remember being there on that day, we were all just sitting there on bespin streets reminiscing, though I had a lot less to reminisce about than others., mostly just teaching and having crazy term wars and such. I remember Blademaster being my partner-in-crime during these term wars.
ATS didn't die though, it reformed. I wanted to help however I could, and eventually applied again. I was accepted. This is when things were really great. There was a lot of activity, and we did all sorts of cool stuff, like field trips to other maps, or had term wars. I had spent quite a lot of time in the clan, this time I got past recruit, I had worked my way up to a yellow flame. I had trained two official apprentices, my first being SolidSnake, and my second being LordSindwinder/Lucifer/LordSandwich/Lucy/Cindy Lou Who. Though I had been teaching SolidSnake since before I was in SoL. I also had a hand in many of the other members teaching. I've taught many people new tricks. Eventually I was elected HC for a term as well. Quite an interesting experience. I set up teleports in Bespin_streets.
At some point, when I was hanging around with Voss we met as an old-school CTF player who was tearing people up in FFAs. We eventually got him onto our ventrilo server and played some more with him. After a while of FFAing, he brought up CTF and how he was disappointed in the lack of old-school CTF servers, and decided to bring Voss, Myself, Wowie, and a couple of others to a server that he was in charge of, and we would play lots of CTF. We'd all be on ventrilo, while playing CTF and learning the ins and outs of it. Several of the people in the group formed into IDBS. Voss and I elected not to be part of it, as it ended up growing into a rather notorious group of players who were generally not being nice. Though Voss and I did help one of the more...talkative ones drop trash-talking habits, so that was a good time.
But then my activity had started to drop due to me losing interest in the game. I started to feel that the clan was going in a direction that I did not entirely agree with. To me it had felt like the clan was drifting more towards debate and politics. I had seen activity on the server starting to dwindle while the forum activity was growing. To me something was way off, and I spoke up about things at every turn. I felt like no one was really listening, but I didn't care. What mattered to me was that I had expressed my sentiments towards certain aspects of the clan. To state one specific thing, the medal system is something I found quite ridiculous. The notion of how out of every three that should earn it, only one gets the medal through a popular vote was just utterly ridiculous to me. It still is too. I think everyone who gets nominated should get the medal, because they obviously have what it takes to get it if they are included in a poll. After a while, I had grown tired of debating things over and over. I was unwilling to yield any ground, nor were any of the people I frequently got into debates with. That and I was hurt quite a bit when I didn't get the medal of teaching, because I had spent most of my JK2 career teaching people. There was also the rank scandal, where my response was to wear a pink flame(after wearing a black one for bit). Shortly after, I had left SoL and I had no intention to play JK2 again, at least for a while.
But then about a month or so after I left SoL, an old friend, Blademaster had contacted me about playing. I had not seen him in a while, so I decided to play with him for a bit. I was then extended an offer to join UG by Mick. I had joined, hoping it was going to be like the old days of SoL. It was fun, but didn't have the same feel. And once again, I had drifted off into inactivity.
Now, a couple of months ago, I had been playing Terraria with a person named Johnny that I met while playing JK2, when he invited me onto the CE terraria server. I had played on the server with them for a good while, until BakedNinja stopped hosting it. I was also forced into a tournament in JK2. I was only going to watch it, but then they assumed I was going to participate... Being as out-of-practice as I was, the match did not go well for me. So I had played for a bit after, and after a bit of warming up, I was making some of the better duelers squirm. Though at that point, I was not playing very often.
Then came the activity surge in SoL. The time away from the game and the clan has helped me see things better and gotten rid of most of the animosity towards the clan. It also helps when you have people you didn't get along well with wanting to bury the hatchet. That renewed my interest in the game so far, and now I am here today playing more JK2. I am here to teach once more. To this day, I still stand by my beliefs of playing legit and not intentionally making the game suck for others. I may have associated with others who have a different way of playing, and have been offered a KickScript on a couple occasions. But I've always turned them down. No need to fix what isn't broken after all.
As for what the future holds, who knows?
Fri 03 May 2013, 12:01 am
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