Wow, Darkhawk mentioned House of Spankings. We were a team of misfits formed from the leftovers of a Quake 2 Weapons Factory team. The most significant thing we accomplished was what we all split off to do after the team broke up. Old_skul and UVALAN. Pubknight and TSN shoutcasting. Shade and PredictIt. BurnYaBad and lucky ass mortaring people a lot, along with random drunken posts after he got done having sex with a new hot 18-22 year old every two weeks. Truly the biggest player and natural Pickup Artist in the Tribes community. Kato and his obscurity while somehow remaining on top teams. Perhaps the first chainwhore that I knew of. He chained on his DSL before he knew how to use his jumpjets. Somehow we managed to squeak our way into the Top 10 in a tough game against *S*, which at the time they considered an embarrassment. Going into a match against COWS thinking that they were some silly noob team, only to find out they were likely the best in the game at the time: Sierra beta testers. Hey, we won Broadside, at least. After they gave the fuck up and decided to beat us on the 3rd map, DoD. FUCKING AUTOAIM!
And I can't say all this without mentioning the origin of the infamous "Core disease." SuperFlu (Flu, nice name... prophetic) and I got together and tried to organize a merge of the most serious players from both HoS and BZ. BZ had such future superstars as Muun/KineticPoet, Shallah, xAlloutwarx, JackofallTrades... just to name a few. Somewhere along the lines everything went to shit and only a few of the BZ guys ended up joining the Israeli 700 ping SuperFlu on his merger attempt with the remnants of HoS (many of our guys had bailed from Tribes for Everquest and real life pursuits and were a bit behind the curve near the end).
Not to brag, ahem, but my greatest contribution to Tribes might have to be being the most annoying player in the game with my Stonehenge mortaring, lazy D sniper bombing runs, and relentless pursuit of cheating fuckbags who ruined the game that happened to rule my life at the time, Tribes. I literally hated lazy Tribes players. Whether that meant sitting around playing duck hunt ruining pub games (that would otherwise be action-packed and exciting), or players/teams so lazy they had to cheat to win rather than put in the time and effort to master the game the proper way. I took it all so personally... the No Fog and the pingfucking. It was my life, then. Now, it's amusing to think I spent so much time on something ultimately so inconsequential. But I still miss it in a way.
Did Doctors ever cheat? I have my doubts about a couple of players during 2000, the peak of Tribes competition (5150, S3, Sticks, TF, POE, Drs, NuTz, among others...) A few of our guys may have kept it under wraps well enough. Who knows for sure about any of their teams, really? It was certainly never discussed or leader-mandated. I hate lists as I hate to miss anyone who competed at that level during that year, but those are the teams I remember the most as being fiercely competitive during that period. In our second go at it (2002?), Shade set up a web site where everyone had to upload their demos, and BYB and I meticulously watched them to refine our strategy and honestly to police our players a little bit. We were rather self-righteous then, but I think that the truth did eventually come out to show that we were right about what we claimed. We weren't #1 and have never made any claims to be. But we were pretty damn good. It's clear 5150 was the best team. They didn't need to cheat, and they never ping fucked us. That was good enough in our book to give them the credit they deserved. We'd beat them in scrims some of the time, but in matches they were tooth-and-nail to the very end. S3? Well, they used packet rate tweaking, creative routing, rules lawyering, and (apparently) cheats in order to secure their position. Can I compare them to 5150, IE, or even Sticks or my own team? No. But that's just one bitter old fuck with a grudge talking, so don't mind me. They had some awesome offense, in any case. Their defense didn't know how to do dick except chain with 10ms and interpolate. We'd joke about it about how they could never land a disk or bodyblock worth a fuck. Yet, we still never took their #2 spot on the ladder, which we challenged twice. So I'm just talking out of my bitter white hairy ass.
