Sheep Tag Community

After playing many years now, and many different ST games, on different maps, different people, different bots, etc. I have come to see some interesting things, but these are just some of my personal opinions / thoughts and observations.

Firstly, it seems that east players and Europe players inherently seems to have quite different styles of game play, and the games generally play out in different ways than if you had a game full of east players, versus a game full of European. It's hard to tell exactly what's different, besides the massing paths and particular moves a player will use as sheep. Wolfing is generally similar for obvious reasons. This seems like almost a unconscious philosophy difference between euro/east seem to have.

Having played with both sides, it makes you wonder which side you personally play more like, but that's very hard to tell. Personality ties into game style as well, with some players being much more obvious with this. For example someone like Zak, who gets bored easily and wants the thrills, will go for more dangerous and exciting moves with runtag, while someone like madhatters who is very calm and generally almost exclusively masses and runtags very limited. It could be those outlets of game play come from the culture of the game they come from, with Zak originally playing games that would encourage runtag like the sheep tag grr map. Or mad playing the old chill east revo games.

East players these days are also like remnants of a old people that were scattered and separated, while euro was once a flourishing city has dwindled to a small village. East players for years have had this weird cycle of disappearing and showing up, all at the same time might I add, with a few different people either being lost or joining. Some years it doesn't happen at all, others we suddenly have a full game of easties all reminiscing with each other. Certain people, like wanna-be-sheep, grim.shadow, magoo, etc. are seemingly on a longer loop, showing up once every few cycles. Wanna-be-sheep showed up and was very active a few years ago when we made clan EAST, but has since disappeared. The same could be said about grim.shadow who showed up a cycle after that for only about a day or two. Also, in most gaming communities a player who is 4+ years of being in said community would be viewed as very old, and rare. In the STC, almost everyone left is on average 8+ years so everyone is so old everyone except the ancient titans of 15+ years are viewed as actually old, which is amusing and a tribute to the longevity and grasp of the players of this community. 

On the corrupting factor of the community: it seems that the longer one is in the STC, the more it influences and corrupts you, and the mark of a true champion is someone who stayed true to their own personality while also enhancing it with the community. This is what people generally call the "legends" of the community, and people who sold out, to ANY degree, are viewed as the followers or lesser. There are some people in the community who have been around for long, and have not been influenced despite that, and that is often due to lack of exposure to the entire community, and all its sides. They're also players with also a will to dominate that is unbreakable. The word "licker" etc. is generally used by people against anyone they don't like, and many are hypocrites that act in the same way towards someone else. It's also just something thrown around for no good reason then to stir drama. Of course most of this doesn't matter today, since the community is bare bones, and mainly describes the community a good while ago, albeit still referenced much.