Imposter's History of TribalWar
From TribalWar
Founding staff member Imposter counts the tale of TribalWar and it's journey from host to host it's first 4 years of existence.
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Quoted from a Post Dated 11-26-2002
This will probably be long, but there's some stuff you probably didn't know...this is all to the best of my recollection which I'm sure can be faulty.
The Beginning
Tribalwar started when the host of Planet-Tribes pulled the plug. At the time the site was run by a guy named Brit (who later went on to start up euro-tribesplayers.com). Rayn, Rat, and I tried to email him a lot to find out what was up, but after a month of no response we took things into our own hands.
When we started it wasn't really with Rayn in charge. He bought the domain so it sort of fell to him, but really he became "the man" because more people in the community knew him than either Rat or myself. Rayn brought over a lot of the people from OGL by hook or by crook and did what he could to raise trouble over there. Not that people needed much incentive to leave, we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Sometimes we'll jokingly refer to TW as the house that Shok built. For those of you not around at the time, Shok was the original forum whore king. He'd reply to just about every thread posted. That'd be near impossible today but in the beginning we only had a few dozen messages a day.
We also lucked into our first host, Zero-X and his "company" called Gameshack. We needed a host, he wanted a business. Months later, a bit before uva 2, he went on vacation for about a month. TW was DoSed during a number of times during this (and jokes were made about how we were up less than OGL). The staff and ZX met up at uva2 for the first time, and a few months later we were hosted by Gameloft. ZX was a good guy but he was a 16 (?) year old kid with not enough time to give to the site.
Shoutcasting
Not long after we started (I think), WSBN started up. Everyone loved it! It was new, it covered a game that was still red hot competition wise. I talked to SuicideTaxi and asked him to be hosted by TW, it would have been a great match. He declined because it would have been too much of a pain to convert the wsbn site from ASP to php, or something like that. That decision would have a huge effect on the community which continues to this day.
You see a bit later TsN started up, with Ratorasniki as one of the first staffers. The were hosted at TW, and used our server to broadcast for awhile. We posted news (back when that meant something) and really got them started (imo). I have to think that if WSBN had been at TW, TsN would have had a much, much harder start.
The Gameloft Era
Back to hosting. Gameloft, one of the .com booms that never actually made it, paid us to host us. It wasn't very much so don't think we lived off it, but it did go to pay for the video card we gave out in a "design the next tw" contest, along with some other software. Speaking of that contest, we really weren't trying to screw that guy (I forget his name). Bacchus chose the winner and had him redo a few things, which ended up looking like the other guys logo. (The tw circle). But he wasn't chosen based off the logo, so oh well.
About the same time we got hosted by Gameloft so did TsN. They were to become the main part of the GBN, the Gameloft Broadcasting Network (or something like that). Gameloft signed a deal with OGL to be the exclusive shoutcaster of all OGL matches. Most of you will recall the flame wars that ensued, they were epic.
Meanwhile, Triston and Polaris had been working on the TWL, which was originally supposed to be the Tribalwar Ladder. Unfortunately it was written in ASP (I believe because that was what Triston was familar with) and TW couldn't host ASP pages. Triston worked out a deal with RedDread to host it. The day that the GBN/OGL deal was announced we chose to announce the TWL (for obvious reasons). TWL wasn't ready yet but it was close and the timing was...nice.
Gameloft was not impressed with our timing.
Veiled threats at losing our hosting made us decide that TWL should go its own way. Luckily TRD was already there to help them. I don't really speak with Triston much anymore, and I never really knew if they were pissed at the tw admins. But anyway he can probably tell this part of the story better than me. Whats interesting is this goes back to the WSBN not being hosted by us. If they had been, and no TSN existed, than you can argue TWL would still be part of TW. Imagine having the best ladder, the only shoutcast group, and TW in one place. Ah, what might have been...
Gameloft eventually realized that hosting us wasn't very smart, and they were in the middle of a reorg, so they asked us to go. Bacchus got us hosted at OGL through his old connections, which was pretty damn ironic when you think of our history.
This takes us up to around the end of year 2 I guess.
Moving to OGL
Hosting at OGL meant we had to buy our own webserver, which cost over $4k. The 4 admins came up with the dough, bacchus ordered the server and shipped it to OGL down in texas. Tapper would be our tech support, he had a deal with speakeasy that he could colo the OGL servers in return for doing maintenance on them, so bandwidth was free.
Unfortunately whenever we had a problem (site went down, whatever) we had to contact tapper of one of the ogl guys, who of course had their own lives to worry about. We'd go down for hours at a time with no one to fix it because they were playing quake or something. Still, free bandwidth is free bandwidth.
At least, we thought it was free.
Eventually OGL also decided it was time for us to go, and we began a semi-desperate struggle to find new hosting. I say semi because there was always the old rival of Gameloft, Homelan. I'd spoken with Sockpuppet at Uva3 and he'd offered us hosting them, but at the time we were happy at gameloft. Luckily the offer still stood. We worried at the time that hosting with Gameloft meant a partnership with WSBN, but that turned out not to be the case and with our relationship souring with TsN, it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.
The Missing Server & HomeLan
BTW, at this point Bacchus had moved on with his life and was no longer an admin.
Homelan told us they couldn't take our OGL server, there was just no room and there were some kind of insurance problems. This turned out to not be a problem when we got an email from tapper:
"As for the server, I'm not sure what arrangements you have made with Bacchus, although I do remember the original deal we made. Although the server was supposed to become OGL property as a part of the deal, I imagine it might be difficult to bring the site back up elsewhere without it, so I'll let you guys work it out between you. However - Since Bacchus purchased it, and shipped it to me, I'll need to have his direct authorization and release before I can ship it anywhere, and that shipment will be COD, with crating costs paid in advance."
Bacchus had never told us about the deal Tapper mentions. At the time we thought we'd been screwed royally, since none of us had the hundreds of dollars to ship it, but mainly since Bacchus hadn't told us about the deal. Rat later talked to Bacchus about it, and he said he didn't know where Tapper had gotten that idea. So probably it was more a miscommunication than someone fucking with us, but we didn't know it at the time.
Really though I don't think we got as pissed as you might think. I mean if I were to get screwed out of a thousand bucks now I'd raise holy hell. But there was nothing we could really do about it, and we didn't need the server anymore. And tapper had done a lot of work for us for pretty much nothing in return except the flames of ungrateful forum whores. So we wrote it off without much fanfare, and moved to Homelan.
The Founders Depart
Sometime around here Rayn and Rat fell out of the picture, lured into DaoC never to really return. They're still admins, hell more than I am, they're just busy with real life. We'd been at this for 2 and a 1/2 years through a lot of bullshit. I'd quit at least 3 times by this point, but kept coming back like a moth to the flame.
Homelan was a bunch of good guys with too many things going on to really care about TW. We didn't have direct access to our box (same as at OGL, and we owned it there) aside from ftp so we couldn't get a lot done. When the site went down we couldn't do anything about it but call a homelan guy and hope they answered. We couldn't do hosting and when the demos broke, we couldn't do what we needed to fix it. But like I said before, free bandwidth is free bandwidth.
After awhile we got fed up with the problems with Homelan and started our latest search for a new home. We were lucky in that XGamer, who had offered us hosting back before we joined Homelan, was still around to help us out. We got our own servers and direct access to them. Right now I think we're in a better position hosting wise than we've ever been, and it only took 3 years to figure out.
Eventually I quit the staff and Col had (and still has) pretty much free reign to crush you all beneath his iron boot. Luckily for you all col's a pretty nice guy who still cares about tw and has time to devote to it.
Epilogue
People are saying that TW is dying, but they've been saying that since about 6 months in. We get over 300,000 page views a day, more than ever before. The flame wars aren't as intense but thats because there's less left to argue over since no one plays the damn game anymore Hopefully Tribes 3 will come out in a year or two, I think TW can make it till then.
I've known through TW pretty much every "important" tribes figure to come and go. I gotta say they're pretty much all good guys who happen to have their own interests which can conflict with others, and then the flame wars come. That doesn't mean they're assholes, they just think what they're doing is better than anyone else's. Call it ego but hell, at least they try and do something. I hate it when someone who's done shit all for the community tries to bring down someone who has. There's only one person who I really dislike in our community, but no point in saying who. (no its not you fraggle).
Anyway, this isn't all the stuff we've been through. Some of it would still get us in trouble so I'll leave that out However here are some other tidbits you may find interesting:
Highlights
- Oracle, the founder of The Soap Box which launched to much fanfare, was me. Sorry to those of you I offended. I wanted it to take off well and hell, it worked didn't it? (at least for a year or so)
- One time someone informed us that if you send a certain private message to a WSBN staffer who had their irc script installed it would remove their channel privliges and force irc to close. A staffer who will remain nameless told someone who tried it out, and it worked. Sorry WSBN.
- The T2WC was fucked up by myself, boris, and suds. Kelster and I started planning it even before T2 came out. Unfortunately when it did it sucked, and we never actually got into the game. Makes it hard to run a tourney if you can't stand the game. If you're still looking for prizes talk to boris, as he talked kelster and suds into giving tsn exclusive rights to cover the tourney in exchange for getting prizes. I say suds was part of the fuckup, because he did some weird things with the rules and apparently not everyone in europe likes him, but at least he stuck around and finished things. W/o him the tourney would still be stuck in round 2 : \
- When Dynamix got broken up we posted some emails from ex-staffers who were pissed. I promised then I wouldn't give their names and I'll keep that promise. They mostly blamed Sierra or Marweas. I mention this because I later learned from a few of them that the guys from Garage Games bear a large piece of responsibility to the failure of T2. Apparently they didn't carry their weight and were just waiting until they could jump ship to GG. Some bailed in the middle of the project. Of course take this with a grain of salt, as its what the guys left behind had to say. I guess when a company is gone there's plenty of blame to go around.
Anyway, this is pretty fucking long, and its all OFN
