Sheep Tag Community
General Category => Community Discussion => Topic started by: drewisfat on July 15, 2017, 07:17:30 am
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Good history! No mention of Clan aFc in west.. after Lc went down, they rose and beat WuDi, I believe .. anywho. I used to be Poo-Man / LifeToLifeLess.. Alpha, I stupidly can't remember your AKA .. statted with a D? Didn't you and some chick basically create run tag? iirc?
On a side note, Drew, I believe your time line is a little off.. EPiC-SHEEP had quit ST way, way before the time you claimed him to be there, also..
No mention of iLLuSiVe-SHeeP! No mention of a lot of West players lol, guess this is technically the history from East's perspective, though
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First @IAMMyOWNSTONE (Is this SwedishChef.LC? Because you're nobody under that name, and did the usual good value post mate).
Not that Drew will ever read this, due to this forum being dead I have corrected things he saw differently, or was too new to USEast, or had taken a break during the times he stated.
Chapter 2 -- East.
I did not travel to the east server at this stage. Had heard about these players through others like YDoc and Raptos. Never saw Alex, but for some reason when I first showed up, people were claiming I was "Alex" on a smurf, whoever the hell that guy was.
Chapter 4 -- East -- Late 2003(I remember I was 15 years old at this stage)
I came to East, the first Westy to come at this point. At first I was just trying to play with you guys, maybe start a clan over there. I was fresh from leading Genosis Capital, regarded as the Clan Love/Rebel of USWest ROC in European terms, in East terms Maybe the Donkey Crew(which contained a Euro in it?). Clan HCS was actually hugely popular in terms of people in the channel. Not as popular as maybe clan Lc/Jedi/cAa/Behh/StH in their days, but pretty popular. When I arrived I was extremely surprised to see Diamonding, Grid, Run ST, Line Tag all not established in USEast (As per the contrary information that Drew had outlined by Chapter 4, all kids in USEast knew diamonding for example, not the case, not even sure they knew how to golem jump). Instead they had something called "Freestyler", which is the term Mitnek highlighted earlier, however when you see this it looks like "Sidey Grid" It does not look anything like run st, or Line tag or even grid. They are deliberately just placing the farms wherever they want, with no real strategy, as fast as they can, and going "SEE IM GOOD!"
I entered the channel Hcs for the first time, stating that I'm from the USWest server, I have played in a few of your games as wolf, and noticed that you don't know some sheep tag basics, can I teach you? Frappachino, PiggerthePiglet and 2nd_a-k-a_Sheep all fed off each other in clan HCS, and had big heads, they did, they thought they knew everything.
After getting a little annoyed I stated the truth and said you don't even know the basics of Run ST, and diamonding (At this stage, farms were 6 hits to die without claws, so was the main strat). They insulted me, kicked me several times out of their channel. I joined their games for a few hours playing only wolf. Eventually I get worked up because they were complaining about me wolfing in 290 ping, saying I'm a scrub because I was wolfing against 8 by myself didn't win the game, despite the 10 kills. Frappa stated there is nothing I could possibly teach them in a private game. Banned me from their channel. It was around 5am in the morning for me , as I'm Australian, and I am on specifically to start a fresh somewhere as I had done previously in USWest. Mitnek and Akraea were in that game, and after I was banned from their channel those two said "look your skills aren't that great, you're not making any progress here." I explained the delay, where I'm from and if they would join my game they would see, but obviously they were more interested in playing with their clan.
I went back to USWest a few hours later, thinking I had failed, and thought well I'll come back with some decent kids and battle them, then they'll see they can improve. So I went to to.ct)RbR leader of RbR at this stage, I asked him if I could join, I burnt my clan GC down and Frozen.Pri3st of Clan Fr0z didn't respect me, due to me smurfing, he disliked smurfers. I explained to to.ct)RbR that we could go to UsEast and vs them. East have a lot of active Sheep Taggers, not as many as USWest(At this stage, for atleast a year before this the community in USWest was split in two, Two thirds of St'ers were Reign of Chaos, while the other third was Frozen Throne, with Clan Lc being the main place for Frozen Throne and Fr0z being the best clan for ROC). As described by Drew, it is the golden era for Sheep Tag. It was the most played game in WC3, more played than even Ladder. It was played 24/7 on USWest due to the default server for Aussies being USWest, and after we go to bed Americans jump on.
I logged off for the day, as at this stage I had been up for 40 hours playing ST, and trying to get things to work with different attempts at clans. I woke up 5 hours later to to.ct)RbR logged off of USWest, Several hours later I go over to USEast again, as they are active at a stupid time for me. To discover to.ct)RbR had taken my information, and wanted to do it himself. He took Shoefactory, GosuSheep(As SoRT disbanded due to losing to clan Fr0z a month earlier and those two from the clan joined RbR for some reason.), Baby_Precious was there under her RBR aka, with Terminator)RbR etc... They wanted to war HCS, in USEast I smurfed under the guise of "Supra-Sheep", so he didn't know who I was. I confronted to.ct)RbR and asked WTF? We were supposed to do this together, he stated I wasn't good enough and continued to battle HCS without me. Smashing them of course. That day Baby_precious left clan RbR to join my venture, as she was witness to the whole thing to.ct)RbR and I had worked out.
At this stage of USEast I never saw PureX, obviously he wasn't around the 3 days max I spent there. Drew wasn't about either. Maybe he came just after this altercation, or maybe he was just a scrub, who knows. The maps being played at this time in USEast was 7.5SE (A revised version, as the 7.5 version had a huge bug in it, I think wolves had at their disposal mass infernals at the shop for free for some reason, that wrecked the game due to a wc3 patch) You could Run ST if you were decent, not as well as what you later could in 7.1 Revised III PE etc, but decently.
Chapter 4 - West (Post East encounter)
I left USEast only to return there later in Drew's Chapter 6, I created a clan in USWest with Policia(Not that I knew it was him at the time), 12iot(I did know it was him at the time), Swillen, baby_Precious, and EPlC (Also known as Epic-Sheep at one stage, before someone from useast made that aka). At this stage I had gotten huge in stealthbot and had several wc3 keys. So I created the clan with 3 of my smurfs, and those players.
Clan Fr0z was the power house clan in USWest Reign of Chaos. To join Fr0z you had to pass a series of tests with Pri3st, + 2 shamans like Arxon and Gagazet in the game, and really impress them. Upon acceptance, you were then required to abandon your main account and take up their tag. For a while Anti-Drug and SilverWolfy were in Clan Fr0z without having to tag up, that changed later, and were forced to tag up like the rest of them.
The clan I created after returning from USEast was named OuTsider AKA OuT (As I, 12iot and Swillen were regarded really good players, but not allowed to join a good clans waring 4, and I personally wasn't allowed to join Fr0z due to my smurfing) I then challenged clan Fr0z. They had just lost to clan Lc (They played as sheep in Clan Lc's delay for some reason, so wasn't a real win, as Frozen.Pri3st was Australian, and was regarded as one of their best players, he also didn't have his best 4, (Frozen.Arxon, Frozen.Gagazet and SilverWolfy) instead they played without Arxon and Gagazet, I think he might have used "Sheepa", who was really good, just not as good as those two, I'd need to confirm with Gagazet, as he was more inside than I was. I vsed clan Fr0z, they didn't take OuT seriously and got smashed. When Pri3st found out that one of them was 12iot, he was like, "ahhhh, I should have waited for my best 4". He disbanded Fr0z that day, not due to me. He just wanted to quit Sheep Tag, it took too much of his time. He had inherrited that clan from somebody else, and had made it the Sheep Tag power house, he didn't want his Shamans left with it, rather them to create a different clan.
Clan Jedi was then made by the forming of Fr0z shamans/grunts. It had a really good line up, Had even tougher restrictions, however everyone that was once tagged up to join Fr0z went back to their original names never to tag up again. So Gagazet, Peaz, Anti-Drug, Wolfy, SilverWolfy (I don't think Sheepa joined yet, at this stage he was involved in another clan with 12iot, as 12iot left OuT a few weeks after to make a clan with ELITE-SHEEP, Sheepa, Fep and EPlC. This is when Arxon_Havenloft had decided to start making maps. He collaborated with UberSheep, who made minor terrain adjustments, while Arxon did all trigger work and balancing. I went to Europe during this stage and found that Shiri was there, she was the leader of clan Love on reign of chaos in Europe, they had a better time to play, it was 10pm --> 4am whereas East starts at 5am--> mid morning. and had heaps of converts because Shiri was a girl. Little teenage boys love the idea of flirting with a girl while playing. After getting 350 ping minimum for over a month, I left staying up late with Europe. I disbanded OuT, as my only recruits left were Swillen, xJessicax and LethalMofo. Policia was in like 5 other clans, one of them being Jedi). I then started a fresh with cAa, it was just meant to be cA, but it was that tag was taken. I also had a trial period for potential new recruits, but we could not compete vs Jedi yet, Clan Lc was now a memory, they were there, but they did not play Sheep Tag. Clan WuDi was the active ST clan for Frozen Throne, with Kamakazi-Sheep and Wudi, it was really dieing on Frozen Throne.
Chapter 6 -- East
I had heard that Jedi went East for some reason and battled, this would have been Mid 2004, as by the 23rd of November 2004 cAa was now the best clan in USWest due to two important events occurring, the release of World of Warcraft, which pulled every single Jedi member(besides UberSheep AKA to.ct)RbR) to that game. I had one casualty xJessicax, she left to that game because her boyfriend in real life was playing it with her, she did come back every now and then (Tuesdays was patch day wasn't it?). However by this stage, I had Policia, 12iot, Swillen, EPlC, LethalMofo, StandTall(the first aussie I trained up and he was really good) and SUPER-KENNY, 3rd-Shot-Plzz, MrJones I had a huge A list of players, . We were actually ready to war Jedi, but they were hugely inactive. So, we went USEast and Europe instead. I challenged, and battled many clans in USWest/USEast/Europe and never lost a clan war. Euro I did not vs the best they had though, I vsed two scrub clans which TraxxWOLF was part of one before he knew how to play properly. I played a few games with SwedishChef.Lc and Deadfly, we never actually warred. Pretty sure challenges from both parties were made, but no follow through, due to the time differences. I didn't even play clan Behh at this stage either, I didn't really have any contact with them though. I warred clan love (not that it's any real challenge, they were horrid, they ran away from mid and just corner massed), after that war, Shiri was pissed with me, I had forgot that back in the day we both knew each others passwords, she went onto my account and booted everyone from my clan except my shamans. I raged, didn't know who was it, after banning someone from my channel for days, I decided to investigate and found that shiri had been on my account. Whoops. I did war Ydoc's clan regularly at one stage(Maybe it was Tac0, but I don't think so, I think it was separate from any clan mentioned from Drew's post). One of the times vsing Ydoc's clan they had one of my starting 4 smurfing for them (Policia), found out after they lost, Policia was raging because I waited until SUPER-KENNY was on to war. I warred PureX's clan once, won. Eventually it got to a point, no clan in USEast or USWest would vs cAa, and I had to go find other teams to vs. Instead of going to Europe to vs SwedishChef.Lc, I decided to quit ST for a while and start playing Ladder. I took James with me(StandTall), I kept cAa up and would play pubs/privates during the day, but James and I now concentrated on getting good at ladder. This was mid 2005.
Chapter 6/7/8/9 - West 2006
I came back, properly, Standtall was lost to ladder forever, he never emerged to play ST again. At this point cAa was dead. I had let it dwindle to the point where it died because the account SheepGod hadn't been on in ages and Blizzard disbanded it. I met Adam(TwilightSniper) playing ladder. He started playing ST with me, I tried to get him to fill the spot James once filled, he will play ladder with me at times, and ST with me at other times(Didn't work out, our synergy in ladder was horrid and he would insist on map hacking lol).
StH exists, I have come back and all of a sudden MaverickSheep has created a forum, is in USEast and on Frozen Throne?
Clan LSS is recreated without Lss-Hellsing, and with ZeroShadow1(AKA MrJones) leading it. Cowardlyshoe a Shaman in LSS east, was elevated from him being a grunt in Clan Las, who lost against cAa at least 10 times before rejecting further challenges. The world is spinning out of control. Shroomy had grown hugely in skill too, he was mediocre in my games. Maverick had grown in skill too, as I remember when he was in clan eSa (Elite Sheep Assassins) made by eSa.General(who was horrid and ended up being chief of 13a5, a clan Drew mentioned earlier). Pooman.LC was playing with Mav, GosuSheep was back(This kid quit and came back to ST as many times as I did), Shoefactory(AKA: LeetSheep) was back. A lot of players are telling me, (MIKE, OMFG, GOOD THAT YOU'VE ARRIVED CLAN LSS IS SAYING THEY ARE SOOO GOOD, YOU NEED TO GET YOUR CLAN BACK AND VS THEM!)
So, I start playing, but I've got no one, Super-kenny is gone, etc, and I prefer Reign of Chaos not Frozen Throne. So I go to Clan StH, start chatting with Drew. We end up being on a team together, I think we challenge Gosus clan, and I FAIL, I insist on hosting, so Drewisfat is playing in lag, and I fail big time. I die very quickly to pc issues, Gosu types to Drew saying "Ok, you played very well considering the lag, you and your clan are good, but King he's horrid (I'm king btw, Genosis.King was the first aka gosu remembers me on, he doesn't know my previous smurfs from previous encounters), then leaves.
This is embarrassing as ****, I slow down and ease back into sheep tag, and wait until I purchase a new pc, as this pc at the time was known to do this 20 times a day, my screen would freeze for a few seconds, and then when it returns it has a floating mouse until I reset the pc. Floating mouse: When you tell your mouse to go somewhere, it goes there in delay, slowly, floating along, instead of precise movements.
I could write forever detailing my many years of on and off, and early west days from Reign of chaos in 2002, to frozen throne in 2003, back to reign of chaos in 2003. My encounter against clan oSa 2008 I believe? (After Gosu said, naa we can't win), We win, Chakra/Gosu/Shroomy/OC and I. Gosu picked Shroomy up from his house, and they played at the same house, everyone died that game, except me, I lasted full time(this time I was in American host, so I was cautious as all hell). After that match, Shoop raged at his team and disbanded oSa. (Which is good, because I am the person who in the middle of a STWC on a team with Drew again(frigan hell I've failed Drew in some important matches, and I believe I was host YET AGAIN LOL) had died to Amir, who was afk in mid. I thought he was a frigan illusion. I didn't use stacks or anything, just went in and saved, and died to afk wolf. I raged at myself screaming "WHO THE F**** WOULD AFK IN THE MIDDLE OF A STWC?")
So I'll leave it at that for now.
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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!
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This is lacking a loooot of West info.. :D Jedi was the #1 clan on west at one point? Literally never. :D
That being said, good history / good story
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Don't pull an R. R. Martin keep the chapters flowing!
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Chapter 9 -- Clan ESS
Although I did have fun playing Snipers, I still missed Sheep Tag. It was a great game and I didn't want it to end like this. So I spoke with the last SGOD.
Pure, X_Pure_X, egPURE, ngPURE, had many accounts. I've mentioned him before but I would like to elaborate more on him. He was my mentor and someone I had always respected. He was also probably my most memorable and closest long-term friend on wc. I really regret losing contact with him. He was a terrific wolf player and I learned much from him. But he was a very smart player in general, and in all games he played, dota, ladder, he had insane game IQ. His sheep as I said was somewhat mocked because he built randomly, but he turned what others would consider trolling into a very difficult to kill sheep. By building randomly he made it difficult for wolves to truly cut him off. He was ahead of his time, and I wish he would have played ST in the later days. I think he would have enjoyed it.
But perhaps the most important thing about Pure at this point in history, is he was the last of the SGODs. If there was going to be continuity with the east that was, he was the necessary leader. He had very little interest in this though. He didn't like leading clans, or even clans in general. And while he still liked sheep tag, he wasn't losing sleep over its demise. I impressed upon him the importance for him to take an active role in bringing back the game, and after a week of debate, he agreed on one condition: that I would be co-chief and that we would share duties so he would not be required to play sheep tag full-time. With that Clan ESS: Elite Sheep Sensei was born.
We were pretty much the only pro sheep taggers remaining at this point, and we had a hard road ahead of us. The main clan, ESS, would consist of the best players, which at this time meant pretty much anyone who had ever played the game before. We would have revolving chief/shaman accounts. I, however, would spend most of my time leading the training clan tESS, or maybe ESSt, don't really remember. But I was the one who actually wanted more people to play this game and I was going to do the brunt of the recruiting and training. Pure would be in charge of the war team and handle 'foreign policy' as it were. We both knew that was mostly a joke though, as there were no other clans at this point.
It was remarkably easy to find new members. The game was still very active and there was clearly a high demand for an organized clan for people to join. Ultimate ST was becoming a real issue though and there was a struggle to get members to focus on the pro maps. As part of that struggle, we finally accepted 7.5 was dead and that 7.1 Rev III would be the main map. It was more popular for new members, (i.e. everyone) and the bigger concern was with ultimate. TheWinner, maker of ulti, had some contact with the pro community and I spoke with him several times. He was not good himself though, and had no interest in joining the mainstream community. He was happy with his map being noob, and did not accept any suggestions that anyone gave him. Thus, Ulti was viewed with some hostility.
~~~Westy Contact~~~
We did in fact have the occasional contact with westies. It's hard to remember with who exactly and when. In modern times westies were thought of as nice, almost naively nice. This was not the case back then. Westies were an absurdly arrogant bunch and most of those that visited east were giant A$$holes. The most notorious jerk was the OC, aka Ubersheep. Pure really, really hated that kid and had told me about his evilness since I started playing. So when westies did arrive, pure was extremely cautious and suspicious about them. He also, I later came to realize, was embarrassed at the state of east and didn't really want them to see how weak and dead it had become. We were challenged to a clan war and debated about what we would do. I wanted to play. He told me bluntly that our defeat was a foregone conclusion. We would be humiliated, they would gloat, and we may even lose members to them. So his policy was mostly to avoid westies and limit their access to players.
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That said, it wasn't lonely for long. Our clans grew and grew. Eventually tESS came to outnumber ESS as we handled the influx of players. 5+ new members would walk in every day, and most of them would be sent to the training clan to learn the basics of how we played. I had no idea who these people were, most of them just walking into the channel saying X told me to join, and half the time I didn't even know who X was. This overwhelmed pure, and for the latter half of ESS I had become in practice the main chief making all decisions for the clan, while pure became more and more bored with ST. This confused me, and with all the new members I didn't really understand why pure was getting bored and didn't put enough effort into keeping him involved.
At its peak tESS had grown to 100 members, and this actually forced me to start "graduating" kids early to shuffle them into open slots in ESS. The clan(s) had grown to 150 active players total. In 2 short months we had gone from nothing to the largest clan perhaps in ST history.
Why then, has no one ever heard of ESS??? That's A LOT of people. That's like the size of the whole modern day STC! I will tell you why. One day I had a really dumb idea.
It was time for a clan meeting! Why? Dunno. I had a list of things I wanted to address and needed to discuss with the n00bs, get them all on the same page, inform them of clan policy, etc. But mostly..... I just wanted to see how many kids I could get in the channel at the same time, not gonna lie. The answer was 56. So yeah we had to have this meeting in two channels, lol. And this is before modern bots were really a thing, so that didn't end up working well. Eventually it consolidated to 40, just from people being left out and playing a game instead.
So what did we talk about? Oh the elephant in the room. We had too many people to even fit in one channel at the same time. So spyblade offered this suggestion:
"We should split up."
A lot of people agreed. Pure was unwilling to clan war westies because we were too bad. But here I was teaching kids to be "good enough to war", with no targets. Many people echoed spyblade's complaint. In a desperate effort to retain control, I came up with a compromise saying we'd make different teams, an ESS A team, an ESS B team, a C team, etc. I knew this was still a flawed approach, but at this point I just wanted this discussion and the meeting to end. They wouldn't be organized enough to act on this on their own. I could ride out the storm. So that was that. I said "I'm bored, let's play some games" knowing that would be echoed by many, and the meeting ended.
Pure was present throughout the meeting but was eerily quiet. Later that night, after everyone went to sleep, he came back online. He logged onto the shared account and disbanded ESS. Then he logged onto a shaman account in tESS and kicked everyone out.
I did not handle that well. Seriously, young drewy rage moded and burst quite a few blood vessels. I suppose rational drewy would have just remade the clan and got as many to rejoin as possible. But that's not what I did. For starters, I didn't even know most of their names. And secondly, I had been backstabbed by Pure, my best friend in the game. I was done with this sh*t. I told Pure and spyblade to go **** themselves, removed them from f list, made another account and joined a snipers clan.
Many reading this might agree with Spyblade and I get that. And that may be right. But from my perspective I had just put in a TON of effort for months to essentially build my mega clan, and just when it was starting to get good, it was over and a friend had backstabbed me. And what ever did end up happening to all those members? There was no organization, no leadership. No one made a single clan after it disbanded. They all just disbursed. People weren't around each other long enough to form enough friendships or connections, and without the clan channels where would they go to meet each other to form new clans? And most of them were probably like 10 years old anyways. So that was it, even quicker than it came, it was gone.
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Wow all of this so far and we've only gone 2 years?! This is going to be a long story.
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Good read Drew!
Add it to the http://sheeptag.wikia.com/wiki/Sheep_Tag_Wiki ?
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Chapter 8 -- The Dark Ages
:o :o :o :o :o :o
The Date: December, 2004 +/- 3 months.
This is not for the faint at heart or the emotionally unstable to read. Please send your children off to bed. It all happened so fast. One day the world was normal, the next there were riots in the streets, abandoned buildings burning to the ground. Frappa, Pigger and 2nd quit and disbanded hcst. tac0 didn't die immediately, but Ydoc was largely inactive. Pure was picking up ladder. Like 90% of the pro ST community quit within a month. People quitting accelerated more people quitting. Some of the remnants fled to west. Up until this point, it was common to see 5-10 sheep tag games in the custom games list during prime hours. Overnight this dropped to 2-5. That breakdown was more like:
70% Ultimate
20% Rev III
5% 7.5
5% Perfect/10.1
Barely recognizable from just a month or two earlier. There were no clans or clan channels left to rally to. Those of us who remained had to just make our own public channels to organize games. And most of the time we weren't even playing ST at that point. I started playing mini games with Beth, Pure and Smot instead, like Murder in the Mansion, pictionary or Uther party. I even joined a snipers clan for a while and played that and a little dota. East Pro ST it seemed had collapsed completely.
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Chapter 7 -- The Phoenix Rises! HCST
Good news! They did come back! Frappa, pigger, 2nd, Ydoc all came back. Upon their return I immediately instructed my clanmates to rejoin hcst, now branded with a "t", b.c we decided sheep taggers was two words I guess. After all I was never in SGOD and therefore didn't have the legitimacy to lead a pro clan anyways :D
For my efforts and continue loyalty I was immediately made Shaman. Pigger pulled a dramatic 180, treated me with insane respect, considered me part of 'the core' of hcs. Feels good bruh. I had also improved dramatically. At this time period the best players were likely me/2nd/frappa/ydoc followed a bit by pure and pigger.
Ydoc came back a little bit later and then settled on making clan tac0 along with Pure. Clan tac0 also had some notable grunts:
- Miss: Real name Beth, was just an awesome, fun person to hang around. She was never known as being a great player, but was a solid player and good at a variety of games.
- Smot: Smot emerges on the scene. Similar to Beth, he was not a terrific player, but a very chill dude. He mostly joined tac0 because they were 'nicer' than hcs.
- Bansaw: Another average player who played for a quite a while. He's most notable to me as being a super 7.5 fan. Later he would learn how to host games, and he was perhaps the last player hosting public 7.5 games.
Also in hcst:
- My-World. I'll start by saying this is contested by My-World, and I'd be pretty arrogant to say I know better when he started than he does, read my addendum earlier on name dropping. But in my mind this when I associate him having started playing, essentially in the "3rd generation" let's call it. And some people actually did try to label things by generation, with SGOD being gen 1, and old hcsers being gen 2.
tac0 and hcst players were still rivals, but were a lot less hostile than they were the prior year. Maybe we just matured, or maybe it was just the influx of super friendly players that lead to a detente as it were. But there was lots of fun to be had. Unfortunately 7.5, the map I respect the most, had lost its plurality lead in pub games being hosted. If I had to estimate the breakdown of pub games hosted on east it would be:
30% 7.1 Rev III,
30% Ultimate
25% 7.5
10% Perfect
5% 10.1
The gameplay had become slightly more team oriented. At least in the sense that it was understood to be likely if everyone on your team was good their bases would eventually merged, so at least good wolves would try to focus fire on one sheep more often to try to prevent that. Sniping was still a very big deal, but now on 7.1 at least that was much more difficult to achieve. It was still possible to tree hide in the bottom right corner of 7.1 Rev. III, something that was used as a big excuse among easty pros to avoid that map. Still the divide was growing as 7.5 was now clearly an outdated map compared to Rev III, and west played Rev III almost exclusively now. 2nd was a big proponent of playing 7.1 to stay in communion with west, but the avg easty was torn.
Unfortunately Mitnek did not return, or perhaps did but not for long, I don't recall. Sadly he did not play much after getting his name on the map that would make him a legend. He crafted nearly the exact terrain that we used in modern times and for that he gets a 3 gun salute.
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Chapter 5 - Continued (playstyle)
Backbuilding wasn't really possible. If the wolf was close enough to you that you had to backbuild in 7.5, he'd more than likely swing through that farm and kill you anyway. In other words virtually nothing you see in run tag today would work back then. Instead when sheep were taking it easy or goofing around they would have to either manipulate trees and hard farms (like Alex popularized) or...
- "Line tagging". Basically prebuilding a bunch of lines and utilizing terrain to avoid shepherds. Line tagging was actually not totally joking around and was a quite legitimate strategy up to this point. While it was known that golems could jump farms (even known that they could jump 2 farms, though not well understood), most players were not fluent with this, and the sheep in general always played far away from the shepherds. So instead they'd have to spend a whole 7 hits to kill a farm.
-Hard Farm Massing. Also a thing. A very powerful thing. Hard farms back then were a little bigger visually than they are now, and a lot stronger. Nowadays if we see a sheep nearby build a hard farm, we just attack it quickly and kill it midbuild. This was not possible then. Instead the farm would take a little damage but finish building. Thus it was quite a popular strategy for rich sheep to mass hard farms all over the map late game. Frappachino was very, very fond of this. He would often actually hide the sheep under the top of the hard farm. They were bigger back then, and most modern methods of locating sheep were either not in the game or not well understood. Thus it would be hilarious to see wolves running around literally not knowing where he was.
It also should be noted that Open(Alex) stopped playing at this point. The Godfather of sheep tag had left for good. Brown1430 actually was still on wc3, but only played ST very, very rarely. It was still impressive how quickly he built though. Raptos would also play wolf occasionally still, but he was pretty much a loner and rarely hung out or talked to people.
Chapter 6 -- Sheep Tag 7.1 Revised III
The most famous and played map in sheep tag history was created by a team of Arxon_Havencroft (lead designer) [JEDI shaman], Gagazet (theorycrafter) [JEDI Chief] and Mitnek (terrain) [Hcs shaman].
This was a very big point of pride for hcs, as despite being an easty clan, one of their members helped make the new map. Mitnek was in short, a very humble hero. In reality he mostly got rid of trees, cheap spots, and smoothed out some of the bumps. But still here he was being chosen to help JEDI make their new map.
This map revolutionized the game. It greatly reduced the range of wolves from 7.5, and increased slightly sheep and wolf speed. Short of a giant lag spike, sheep no longer died 2 farms in their mass. It was even possible to diamond aggressively next to wolves, something that was far too risky in prior maps. It was also practical to backbuild. This revolutionized the game. This threw a lot of wolves off and took major adjustments. "Angling" meaning clicking ahead of the sheep to gain ground faster became very mainstream. It was known before, but not really necessary. A new sword that gave +30 damage and cost 300g (?) called Anti's saber was added. (I thought this was named after Anti-Drug a legendary westy wolf, but Rival says it was named for the whole ANTI clan). This allowed wolves to start dealing serious damage to farms, and for the first time you saw wolves 3 hitting farms towards the end of a round. This map also would really allow run tag to be a thing. Or as Sheepgod would take some weird pleasure in pointing out, it was called "Run st" at that time. Supposedly.
Something else was added that I'm sure most of you will take pleasure in. The stack farm!!!!! A 10g farm that could be built anywhere (model looked a bit bigger than today). This farm was added in the words of Arxon "As a form of anticamp". Of course that same day I asked him why he hated Ultimate and he said "anticamp is noob". Irony not lost on him. Anywhos, stacks on this map were used primarily to force saves in the middle. Gradually they would be used outside of that, but keep in mind wolf range was still high enough in this map where if you could only backbuild a stack farm and not a normal farm, you'd almost certainly get killed through the farm.
This map, while widely praised was not without controversy. Some westies still clung to 7.5. And on East 7.5 was still king. Despite their differences, Frappa, Ydoc, Pure and most of the playerbase still preferred to play 7.5. Thus for a while both maps were accepted as the main pro maps, and despite the differences in gameplay, active pros would have played both to some extent.
Back to clans. I think I can name drop deadass here as having started playing. Although I do get him mixed up with deadoralive, so I'm hesitant. But he was an old player who had played a lot longer than most people realize. Hcs activity had peaked. Both hcs and 13a5 got pretentious and picked up influences from westy clans, particularly Jedi. Instead of recruiting whoever wanted to join, they started having tryouts, consisting of usually a combination of 1v2 or 1v3 play, a diamond 2 minute massing speed and a grid 2 minute massing speed. These were naturally made somewhat out of proportion to what the clans actually accepted. If 13a5 said they accepted a 120 2 min speed, you know hcs would say their limit was 125. So these numbers got inflated pretty quickly. Then the question is what happened if someone couldn't make your speed? The answer was training clans. Clans in west and then east all pretty quickly started having these training clans, ostensibly because their own clan was exclusive, or in some cases it was claimed that the clan was full. In practice even though some clans had reached the 100 member limit, this was due to a lot of akas/inactives and was more of an excuse to be exclusive than anything else.
All good things must come to an end though. Eventually east entered a period of decline. The senior leaders in both hcs and 13a5 started trying out other games, mostly dota, and despite having reasonably large bases, they ended up disbanding.
In an effort to keep everyone from abandoning the game I made my first clan. I actually don't remember its name right now. Fortunately I know somewhere on Alt the name is camouflaged with grass texture. This was mostly a channel. I don't believe I even made any shamans. It was more of just a stopgap, hoping that some of the former SGODers would return.
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I know screenshots / dates / name drops would be really helpful. Unfortunately I have no screenshots. Dates are also difficult. It was a LONG time ago, and what's worse is that what feels like 3 months back then may have been only 1 month. I try to be conscious of that fact when I write "several months later" but I wouldn't be surprised at all that if you try to add up my timeline it doesn't work out. There are, however, a couple of solid dates I can point to. I don't know what the date is, but it's probably Googleable when clans were enabled on WC3, and that would give you a timeline for when SGOD and Behh were created. I'm not sure of the first westy clan. The two oldies that come to my mind right now are fr0z and wudi, but I'm unsure if those were just super old or were created on the very first day. If Rival comes back I'm sure he could share A LOT of history on West.
Everything I've written to this point was before TFT came out. I'm going to attempt to drop TFT coming into play, but that's actually difficult for me to do because it had virtually 0 effect on East for a long time.
Name dropping is also inherently hard. Not only was it a very long time ago, but everyone starts out an unimportant noob who wouldn't be on my radar. By the time they were on my radar, it would be difficult to say if they started 3 months ago or 2 years ago. People also tend to have a big bias towards making themselves out to be more oldschool than they actually are. It was almost laughable how many people in 2010 talked about the game in 2004, when there was 0 chance they played before 2006. We might be able to get a date on when a couple maps came out which would be helpful. And of course, I have a solid date for when StH was created, but silly you thinking that's the next clan to get mentioned here ^_^
Some revisions (I'll clean all it up when I'm finished, but for those who already read the first posts): A notable person I forgot was LordBlueBalls. LBB was an SGODer and shaman of hcs. He was by far the most inactive of the shams, and basically quit for a while soon after I started. He did come back though, but even though he was rusty, Pigger/2nd wouldn't dare diss him due to SGOD status. I got along with LBB, but that might have been because by the time he knew me I was already decent. He's definitely of the same cloth as Pigger and 2nd are.
Also I got SGOD mixed up with XROC (the OG ladder clan) at some point. And it censored out hcs, which stood for h@rdc0re sheep.
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I'd like to share a few east night party memories:
http://imgur.com/a/EHe2V
http://imgur.com/a/0XEaO
http://imgur.com/a/WDJBQ
http://imgur.com/a/VRbSh
Bonus images!
http://prntscr.com/fw2ahy
http://prntscr.com/fw2as1
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You actually wrote this up ;*D great read! I've heard some of these stories through the grape vine, but it's great to actually see it all. It's crazy how even back in the first days of ST there was drama, betrayal, and backstabbing, I guess history always repeats itself.
Would love to see some more name drops of players who kept playing, like My-World, who was able to confirm for me that what you wrote is all true lol.
Also, add some exact years if you know them! I can speculate this was all between 02-04 before TFT. I guess up next was StH, the great divide of TFT (LSS, FSW, A2ST), Garena/GGC, STWC's, PLC/DR, the great MERGE of TFT, host bots, Shift to ROC/European Union, dark ages, last bit of light, and then the void (present).
It has been a wild ride! And share screenshots if you have them!!!
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Consider your torch passed, but there is more history to be unveiled!
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Chapter 5 - Hcs Challenged!
Hcs grew and grew. Ironically Pigger was in charge of "recruitment" despite being godawful at that, and frappa along with others did most of the recruiting in reality. Pigger mostly just told pubs look how **** good I am, come be my ****. Eventually there were pros who were not in hcs (besides Pure). Hcs doctrine usually referred to them as semi-pros or sometimes just plain noobs. One of the first alternate clans (name forgotten) was lead by MonsterGarage, a very, very chill dude. The best way to characterize Monsta is Ed if he smoked a lot of weed. One of his notable shamans was BBGS-Cutie, my first wc3 love. I truly miss her. Would totally date irl. It was a much smaller clan, but there were in fact clan wars on east for the first time. Hcs was dominant and never lost to them.
A later, more serious challenge grew from Ydoc. He had been playing on west, where the competition was much fiercer. He was part of clan 13a5 in west and eventually he moved back to East and made a 13a5 branch there. Ydoc was SGOD blood, and thus had legitimacy in making a pro ST clan, which bothered the hcs leadership to no end. They were very, very hostile to Cody (yes his name is ydoc spelled backwards, so cute). Ydoc also brought along a westy 13a5_MassDeath formatted with some weird symbols like 13a5_Massl)3ath, idr. He played a considerable amount on east and was quite good, meaning this clan had at least 2 pros on the same caliber as hcs shamans. While they perhaps never had a superior shaman crew overall, these two players made them more than just noob posers, and frappa, Pigger, 2nd HATED them. What's worse is Ydoc was perhaps the best host on East in these days, and being host gave a tremendous advantage. This made him games popular among hcs grunts, which made the leadership very upset, as Ydoc was good enough to be the best player in any game he hosted. Pure for his part didn't like Cody, but at this point was so fed up with hcs, that he preferred 13a5, or at least loved the idea of hcs having competition. He would be willing to sub in for them in clan wars, while not actually wanting to join their clan. This naturally caused all kinds of debate about the legality of such a move, as 3 top tier pros meant a serious threat in any clan war. They were still the bigger clan and had more top tier players, but there was now a clear rival, and Ydoc looked like the best player in East during his host. Not to mention coming from a west clan, Ydoc had more west allies than hcs did, which clouded the picture in West of which East clan was dominant.
The reaction from hcs leadership was censorship of 13a5 and occasional exile of members who "played too often" with them. This threat kept most of the members in line. They also started routinely visiting and playing with westies to gain more experience, especially in clan wars, vs their newfound rival. Mitnek and 2nd played the most with westies. The result was 2nd thought he was becoming better than frappa and pigger, while Mitnek was actually becoming even better than that.
I was at a special crossroads at this point in time. I had become in practice the best of the hcs grunts, on par with or perhaps even better than Akraea. I also was friends with Pure, and more and more started hanging out and learning from Cody. This drove Pigger especially crazy. More than once he called for me being kicked from the clan. Frappa and I were good buddies though, and 2nd was concerned that if I left and joined 13a5 that would shift the balance of power from hcs superiority to equality with 13a5. So as much as 2nd didn't like me, his priority was always being the best and the clan being the best. As such, I faced no consequences for associating with cody and pure. Ydoc himself saw me as an opportunity to turn the scales as well and repeatedly ask me to clan war for him if hcs wasn't going to let me. Upon hearing this Frappa decided as long as I pledged continued loyalty I would be used in some clan wars, mostly replacing Akraea. Clan wars were usually 4v4 at this time, so it was 4 out of 5 of Frappa, Pigger, Mitnek, 2nd and Akraea. Akraea had been playing less and less and was overall such a nice person and a friend that she didn't mind if I took her spot a few times.
Due to increased competition hcs started playing 7.5 Pro, a 4v4 map more often. People would practice 2v4 vs pubs or 4v4 with clanmates. Frost farms were also a little more expensive I think, and cyclones removed. Most easties still diamonded. Brown1430 when he played still gridded the normal way exclusively though. Mitnek also tended to grid in serious games. Pure had started to build sloppily all over the place, making it more difficult to cut and golem jump him although he had smaller masses.
West had grown substantially and was probably 5-8 times bigger than East, truly dwarfing it in size. A westy could much better elaborate on the big names and the big clans. Towards the end of this period clan Jedi emerged as the strongest ST clan in the world. They were seemingly unbeatable on the battlefield, and hcs got demolished in several clan wars, to the point where even Pigger admitted they were better. He actually tried out for and was very proud to have made it in clan Jedi, as they had instituted very strict tryouts to join their clan and it took him several attempts. It wasn't just mass speed but you had to 1v3 (IIRC) their shams and be impressive.
I've obviously omitted Europe. Obviously as clan behh was made the first day clans were allowed as well, there was a European community. They had virtually no contact with West-East (although Sidey had moved gateways and was playing in west at this time). The maps the Europeans played would not have been considered competitive or serious. I am not familiar with old Euro maps, but they would have likely been considered on par with other pub maps of the day.
However, a new map had emerged on the pub game landscape, "Ultimate Sheep Tag". This was based off 7.5 terrain, however it was more closed off. Instead of the one noob box 7.5 had, this one had 3, as well as a spiral. This was more conducive to pub play as most people couldn't mass well but could build a base in a corner, build savings farms and then mass stuns. Stuns were smaller, and with enough gold to support many of them, could stop an approaching shepherd cold in their tracks, even kill them. To the chagrin of the pro community, the mapmaker TheWinner didn't care about any of their input and wanted to do his own thing. Prior to ultimate coming out, the pro maps 7.5 and 7.1 were also the plurality of maps hosted publicly. Ultimate with its newb focus would eventually come to occupy a bigger and bigger share of these games. Most pros just saw ultimate as replacing 10.1 and perfect, and it was preferable to those, so they viewed this as a good thing. Eventually though ultimate would have a negative impact on recruiting new pros.
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This is my attempt at a detailed history of Sheep Tag from the perspective of east server (obviously) but occasionally touching on other servers. I will try to mention key players whose names have been lost to time. While I will try to make the information as accurate as possible, a lot of this is digging up old memories, and some information will inherently be inaccurate, and more will be missing altogether. This is for NMCDO so he may share the story of our game after I have departed this world.
Chapter 1 -- In the Beginning
Most of sheep tag's pre-history, before clans existed is speculation, but some facts can be derived from the maps that existed back then. Early on the map was 9v3. When I say map, I should really say maps. They were changed and updated quite frequently. The mainline pro map took place in a square smaller than the entire map. It's clear at this stage map developing was so new that the makers didn't even have a firm grasp of how to easily change the map's size and did so with terrain impediments. However, this map could actually be jumped of with a 7x7 farm block and the sheep could be unreachable by the shepherds. Needless to say, this was not very stable, although it was likely not known/abused at the time. Many of the farms we know of today were still on that map, but a few like magic, frost, "stun" weren't present or were in different forms. Wolf damage was quite low, somewhere in the 8-14 hits to kill a farm range depending on the version. Dolly, the legendary floating sheep was actually present way back then on these maps, before being subsequently removed soon after. Still the fact that Dolly is still famous yet was only present in maps no modern players played is quite astonishing.
This was importantly not the only map. The two main competitors were 10.1 and Perfect Sheep Tag. It's clear ST split into "noob" maps quite early on by these all sharing the same 9v3 team structure. 10.1 involved a lot of tree hiding and unit building. Perfect had less tree hiding but still was a unit building, noob base map. Wolves could buy ghouls, sheep could save wisps with "meat wagons". Indeed these maps more resembled tree tag than what we think of sheep tag, and is perhaps where the inspiration for tree tag came.
Chapter 2 -- Clan SGOD
The first ST clan on East was made on the first day that clans were enabled. The chieftain was Open(Alex). Some notable members include shamans Raptos and Brown1430; and grunts Pure, Frappachino, Ydoc, Piggerpiglet and 2nd_a-k-a_sheep.
- Alex in his role as first clan chieftain was essentially the primogeniture of East ST. He was the best sheep player at the time, and was widely respected for keeping a cool temperament and pushing the then boundaries of the game. He would go on to pioneer run tag (although it had no name at that point). He would use trees to manipulate wolves losing their locks. In this time period this was revolutionary and truly devastating as very few players knew about A-walk.
- Raptos was considered the best wolf player in east and a senior leader (shaman) in clan XROC. While there were other shamans known to me, I have since forgotten their names and didn't interact with any but Raptos personally.
- Brown1430 Brown was initially arrogant but mellowed out and was overall a good friend by the time I met him. He was known for being the fastest grid masser on East, and (contested) fastest in the world for a while.
It should be noted that the East pro community was in communion with West pros, who had also made 1-2 clans the first day they were enabled as well. The west pro community at this time dwarfed the East pro community anywhere from 2-4 times as many players. However, they did play the same maps and both supported the rise of the MD Team and the leader Star who developed 7.1 during this time period. That map served as the basis for the terrain that still exists in today's main sheep tag map, a truly remarkable feat. The most noticeable difference back then was a lot of trees and areas where the sheep could "jump" into the trees and be untouchable. Such play was obviously BM, but could be somewhat countered by orb splash damage a wolf could use attacking an image. The wolf damage was still extremely weak, 8-10 hit farm kills. As people got better, due to the nature of the game sheep became more OP than in previous maps and the teams were 8v4.
People were also starting to experiment with weirder maps. There was one map that SGOD made, mostly as a joke, where you could build "ancient SGOD warriors" (footmen) if you knew the code. What was interesting about that map though was that the pen was on a giant mostly unbuildable mountain and that wisps had pretty OP spells like slow and maybe even cyclone. It showed that the question of how the pen and wisps should be balanced was still completely up in the air.
Chapter 3 -- The Fall
SGOD did not last long unfortunately. Many of the core players got bored with sheep tag and had begun to dabble in roc Dota. After 3-6 months the clan disbanded. There were a couple remakes with most of the original crew but these died even quicker. Thus after a slow start compared to West, East then suffered a massive die-off.
Chapter 4 -- HCS or "The Golden Age of Sheep Tag"
This is the beginning of the 1-2 years that some Westies (and I concur) refer to as the Golden Age of ST, where ST had more players in the 'pro' community than at any other time.
Clan hcs or **** sheeptaggers was created by the grunts of SGOD who were not ready to give up and move onto dota.
- Frappachino: (usually called frappa) was the honored chieftain. He was one of the best of the grunts, but more importantly the nicest and the only one people would follow. He was a big pioneer of the frost farm and while not the fastest masser, was perhaps the most difficult to kill. This earned him a lot of respect.
- Piggerpiglet: was frappa's right-hand man. A tool of the nth order Pigger was widely despised but was perhaps the most influential person on East besides frappa. Though he was perhaps arrogant to think he should be chief, he on some level knew people would not follow a tool of his magnitude, and he much preferred being a jerk than trying to lead others.
- 2nd_a-k-a_sheep: If Pigger was the right hand, 2nd most certainly was the left hand, virtually equal in rank to Pigger. He was also, a giant tool. He was more condescending while Pigger would just outright hurl childish insults. I'm unsure if 2nd was his account name in SGOD to be honest. He changed accounts quite frequently, and I suspect he settled on 2nd during this time period to subconsciously put out the notion that he was 2nd in command and the 2nd best STer, not Pigger. They did have somewhat of a rivalry, but mostly united on being superior to the rest of the clan.
- Mitnek: Another shaman of hcs, Mitnek was a relative newcomer and not part of the SGOD crew. This was in some ways held over him by Pigger and 2nd. However, Mitnek would continue to improve and eventually became the clan's best player. He was relatively humble, and eventually his skill and hard work made him beyond reproach.
- Akraea: Another shaman of hcs Akraea was the first female ST player on East. However, that fact is very contested, as Pigger HATED her and did not believe for a second that she was a girl. Due to this many had doubts, and Akraea herself (or himself) did not dwell on gender and didn't do much to assuage these rumors, and only claimed to be a girl a couple of times. I'm still unsure to this day, but I believe she was in fact a she. Akraea was also my first friend in the community. Number one on my friendlist, a spot that she holds to this day, as I'm very sentimental. She wasn't exactly the person to find me in pub ST and bring me to hcs, but she was the one to convince me to join and keep me there despite Pigger/2nd's **** streaks. In many ways she was the least respected of the original Shamans, but frappa had made the decision that she was shaman and that was final, so it wasn't questioned.
- drewisfat: Yes, this is where I come into the picture. I was a grunt in the early stages of the clan.
The main map played at this time was 7.5, a map very similar to 7.1 item and balance wise, but with much more open and somewhat geometric looking terrain. Wolf damage had settled to 7 hit farm kills, which it would stay at for a long time. Frost farms, aura farms, and upgrade farms were pretty much standardized and were the same then as they were today (although frosts looked a lot bigger). Sentry farms were also big, gave high sight and were actually the strongest farm. There was also a big stun farm that was mostly useless and a clear sign of "noobness". Cyclone farms were also a thing but were very taboo as they caused people to randomly drop from the game. They were also obviously OP and not allowed in serious games. They were notably though, the first 'stack farm' in that they could be built anywhere, enabling the same sorts of tricks stacks could, but at a cost of a whopping 75 gold.
This is also the time period where diamonding became absolutely the dominant form of massing. Some of this was due to the fact that it was harder and thus a sign of being a good player. However, it did make sense at the time as a strategy. For starters, with the high delay everyone had compared to today, you could diamond nearly as fast as you could essentially grid. Also back then wolves were obviously much weaker but had INSANE range. It was very, very common to die inside a row of farms from the wolves. The fence in the middle was not safe to be near as a sheep as the wolf could easily swipe you through it. It was even possible to die one farm away from the wolf without ever having slipped out of the mass and back in. And if you were entering the mass the combination of range and high delay at this period of time meant it was quite possible for a wolf to seemingly kill you 2 farms away. This was called an "extendo(e)" and was a common thing to complain about. Due to this the best tactic as a sheep was to just gain as much ground as possible (diamonding) and stay the hell away from the wolves. Fittingly the best wolf tactic was to try to snipe the sheep. Team massing was not really done at the start. Most players had sections of the map they were known to build in that would often associate with their sheep color (hence people became known for being certain colors of sheep). Sheep were good enough at massing, and with the newly developed skill of diamonding to mass enough of the map to combine with allies and to potentially mass the whole map.
Akraea and I would usually mass the bottom left 'square' in a double diamond formation. 2nd preferred the right side of the map, Mitnek preferred top or right, frappa and pigger preferred the left or top. This was actually a thing.
It should be noted that there was an idea on East of the great import of clan SGOD. It was an issue of legitimacy. The leadership of SGOD had the right to make a clan and lead the gateway, but while Alex, Raptos and Brown would occasionally play, ST was no longer their main game. So after a few months of unstable or no clans, frappa, 2nd and pigger claimed the legitimate right to make the main clan as the remaining active members of SGOD. This was challenged by Pure, who was still an active player, but did not believe "the peons" were legitimate heirs and refused to join hcs. This was perhaps mostly prompted by Pure despised 2nd and pigger. The argument was that he, as the most senior grunt, was superior to them and would never join their clan. SGOD clearly had some sort of grunt/peon differentiation, but it is unclear what it was or how strict it was. So I know I listed them all as grunts earlier, but it was perhaps the truth that frappa was a grunt while pigger and 2nd were peons, but I cannot say for sure. The main point is that while kind of hilarious, this was a real thing they fought about. This was a real doctrinal hierarchy that many easties believed, and due to the relatively small size of SGOD and small player base at that time, it was up for much debate and historical revision.