Hey everyone, this is DeathHavoc from =S3=, =V=, and -W-. It's probably been over 15 years since I've posted anything on TW but I've always checked back every few years to see what's been going on in the community.
It's pretty amazing that there is still a core group of people trying to keep the spirit of Tribes alive and to recapture some of the thrill that we had when we played it. It's really amazing how people still remember each other and the various events that happened back then, even some 15-20 years later. Big props to the folks who have gone out of their way to document/recollect the history of things to an extent and to try to extend the life of Tribes.
I hope that if a 20th anniversary event does end up happening, that it won't get marred by bickering and pointing of fingers at each other. The past is the past. All the drama that happened has happened but doesn't need to continue to happen. At this point, why hold onto grudges? I hated the guts of 5150 back in the days but when I think back to those times, I can only think highly of them for giving me some of the most intense competitive experiences of my life. Ideally the point of any type of 20th anniversary is to have some type of celebration, fun, and/or reflection, whether it be at some LAN somewhere, some podcast chats, online scrims, etc., whatever the hell it ends up being.
In the spirit of not giving a crap about any drama that happened two decades ago, I really have no reason to hide anything about what I saw playing with and against some of the great teams from back then. Really, feel free to ask me anything about any of the things that happened with =S3=, =V=, -W-, or anything that happened that era and I will be fully transparent to the extent of my memory on anything that happened. (I'll answer whenever I get the chance to.)
Because a lot of this thread has shifted focus toward what sKILLz has (or hasn't) done, I'll be happy to tell my account of what it was like playing with him. While I can't give any insider accounts for anything that happened during his time with NuTz, what I can vouch for is the time I spent playing with him in -W-.
Like many other folks are responding here, I was actually initially quite suspicious of sKILLz' history of having played for NuTz considering all the stuff that happened with them in the past (like happy flag, and if I remember correctly, I believe some of us at =S3= had felt that a member of NuTz had joined =S3= as a recruit to be an insider for several weeks). However there was a certain measure of respect that you could still have for players that you may have suspected of cheating, simply because there are certain aspects of playing Tribes competitively at the highest levels that supersede any benefits you would get from the cheats that I knew existed back then. Furthermore, both at the time and in hindsight, it was really hard to pinpoint for certain who exactly on a team known for cheats actually used them. (As it was really easy to jump to a conclusion that everyone on NuTz used happy flag, when I really can't say for sure if that was the case.)
While I don't remember any exact specific reason I decided to play with -W-, I remember it being a combination of: (1) gaining a level of comfort playing with their players via pubs/scrims, (2) being confident of their talent level and comfortable with their personalities, and (3) seeking to play with a mixup of players that had already played at a high level. Beforehand I had tried for a few weeks to work something out playing with THB, but as the sole =S3= player on the team, I had really gotten sick of all the crap that the [IE]/5150 players were saying about =S3= versus what I saw at the time as a lot of mutual kissing of each other's asses between their two teams, when all I really cared about was playing with a solid team. (Unfortunate, because I was really looking forward to the chance to see what it was like to play with more [IE] and 5150, as I'd gotten along well with and played with some of their other players, like DaBomb, AutoMaG, Special, Bourbon, WarNipple, etc.)
In my time with -W-, I believe I played in at least 15-20 matches with them. During that time, I didn't suspect that anyone was cheating on the team. What I remember about playing with sKILLz is that the talent he demonstrated regularly in pubs was legitimate and was at a high enough level that couldn't be explained with cheats — the intangible of having an immense situational awareness of what was going on in the flow of a competition to consistently know what the most important thing to do at a given moment was — was something that you only get a real good feel of from the best players in the game. In hindsight, it's not really surprising that as a part of his leadership with NuTz, their team was one of the (if not THE) first teams to popularize the concept of clusterfucking, as succeeding at that type of play is really dependent on maintaining strong situational awareness in what essentially is a clusterfuck (thus the name).
In being in a shared chat channel with him during competitions, you also see a lot of the leadership he brought both in-game and out-of-game that really rallied a team together, though at many times from the outside, could be seen as pretty abrasive. It's really a classic case of a type of leader that you love to have on your team but hate their guts when they're on another team. Really, all it really was was a leadership style that was a ton of fucking passion to stick up for and rally your team, at times at the expense of others (and the perception of others). To use an NBA analogy, the equivalent might be like a Kevin Garnett or a Draymond Green. As much as sKILLz might not like being compared to him, I found his leadership style to be very much like Rasta's at =S3=.
I wanted to call this out because if you look at all the posts that sKILLz is making in this thread — it's really just a continuation of that. His supreme confidence in his team and backing up his team to the end as a leader. Could many of his replies be more nuanced, less controversial, less inciting, and more conducive toward making this 20th anniversary come together? Probably! But as someone who has played with him and know who he is as a leader, it's really consistent with how I understand him. He's really proud of what he helped put together as a leader of -W- — a team from all indications that I've seen, succeeded without cheating — and as him being a leader who wants to back his team all the time, in a way that from the outside might look like it's being done very irrationally/unreasonably, I see him as someone who will lose it at any accusations toward -W- because of how proud he is of his team. It was a really fun and rewarding time playing with him, yet it's understandable to see from the outside how it can be seen the wrong way.