Sheep Tag Community

What an amazing historical record. I'm humbled to be regarded highly, and I do remember you drew; I hope you are well.

I saw a post on reddit showcasing a ST tournament and I couldn't believe there was still an active community, and google led me here.

I don't remember how I managed to connect with Arxon_Havenloft, but I do remember doing the map edits based on all of the input gathered from the pro community. Some of the smoothing out was purposeful as I'd spend a lot of time alone messing around with placing farms. I just wanted to ensure consistent build behaviour.

I'm flattered to be regarded as such a great player, but I've always envied the skill of players that were able to run tag or as I recall it "freestyling." Being host also helped a lot with run tag, ping was king in this game; back then we didn't have Gbit internet. 7.1R3 really revolutionized the game and brought forth a lot of new blood with players that were very dynamic; something I wasn't great at (I'm more of a thinker). Anti's saber was a nice addition to the game, oftentimes if you got to the endgame and the map was filled with farms, the wolves really had no play. The 3 hit was deliberate, as it made two sheps with sabers an actual threat. Sometimes all it took was killing one sheep to cascade into a freefall wolf victory. As you said, map editing was a big deal back then. Source maps were fiercely protected by running scripts to "scramble" them and make it difficult to reverse engineer map triggers. To be given a raw version to edit terrain was a big deal and entailed a lot of trust not to leak it at large; we were dealing with the main meta map after all (at least in the East).

I do remember shortly after that, the meta fractured into multiple popular versions. There was a lot of discussion on how to keep the game competitive for the pros, yet forgiving enough for the noobs. It was at that point that I asked for permission to edit Gosu/Arxon's maps and I made my own mod. I can't remember if it was Sheep Tag Revolution, or Evolution, or Ultimate. But I do remember I was the first one to code a "switch." This took a lot of testing, as I had to learn how to set all of the triggers for teams and such. Although it was a bit upsetting to see the "switch" in other mods within a week with no credit to me, it was nice to see it carry-on in subsequent maps. My true intent to "switch" was for a few reasons: at that point in the meta, everybody wanted to be sheep to the point that it would ruin lobbies, so this was my way to give everybody a turn to play fairly; the second reason was to make sheep tag score towards an overall player, since people liked to specialize in sheep or wolf only, this "switching" along with the new scoring system would help to find the best overall sheep/wolf player.

Alas that didn't really catch on, but at that point ST was beginning to fracture. It was a supernova for a hot minute there in the early aughts. I think the spiral was egos and pro-culture getting in the way about what sheep tag really was - a fun light-hearted game where you enjoyed goofing around with your friends. If we had Discord then, you would've heard me crying from frapp's antics. I still remember him hiding behind the hard farm model. This was very effective against decent to good players until they figured out how to rotate the camera.

I don't remember why I never came back. I may have moved on to DoTA or CS at that point. I did try and come back a few years after that, but there were very little ST lobbies; and the game had transformed so much at that point I hardly recognized it. There was a certain purity to 7.1/7.5 that lent itself to a high-level game.

Thank you for writing this drewisfat. If you hadn't, I would've forgotten about Akraea, 2nd, pigger, raptox, alex, and frapp, along with all the rival clans, both East and West.

It looks like you came into your own and became one of the best. I'm sure the others would be proud, but you'd know as well as anyone it was a team effort. We got better because played together and taught each other moves and tricks. Remember to pass it on!