haha, he did actually
something about 'being known as "that shoutcasting guy" instead of just a normal member of the community'
[So]Is there anything GreaseTaxi doesn't find hard?
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haha, he did actually
something about 'being known as "that shoutcasting guy" instead of just a normal member of the community'
streetwi$e
Veteran-5
This is about time someone should post his 2 page story about shoutcasting, the one where he made it seem like it was a real career.
Edit: Incase anybody was wondering, it comes out to 10922 words and 20 pages at size 11
Alot of people know me as the guy who runs WSBN. I've been a fairly "high profile" person for a few years now as the result of heading WSBN, and during those few years I've rolled through controversy after controversy, innovation after innovation, I've seen every change, growth, patch, event, and contest that's occurred in the T2 community and elsewhere. Along the way I've also gotten points of view from every direction imaginable, from the "casual gamer", the game developer, the hardcore competition player, older people, younger people, businessmen, and damned near everyone in between. Hell, I've even spoken to the non-gaming girlfriends, wives, moms and dads, and even a few husbands thrown in. Being "high profile" I guess invites people to talk to me in IRC and emails...
From the moment I got the idea to plug in a microphone and cast a Tribes 1 game to the public, I've been a "public figure", open to scrutiny, criticism, praise, and everything that goes along with it. What's funny to me is that I started all of this rather innocently. While I knew I was doing something in front of the public, it just seemed like something fun to do - something that would add to the competition scene and allow everyone to take part in the high-end competitive games. What I didn't expect, and what I don't think I was really prepared to handle, was being that "high profile" person and a public figure. That sounds pretty stupid I guess - here I was throwing myself at center stage but not expecting to become a "public figure" - but I really didn't expect everyone to look at me like that.
I really didn't expect the response that WSBN received either, it was amazing. People went bananas. I got so many PM's in IRC during my first cast that it crashed my mIRC. The #WSBN channel went from 4 people to over a hundred in less than 20 minutes, and it stayed that way ever since. I don't really think it was the actual cast itself that people liked so much, it was the fact that the T1 competition scene was hard core with a lot of really good gamers involved, and the concept of WSBN let everyone in on the big game. So in little under an hour, I went from being a regular gaming enthusiast to being one of the most well known people on the T1 scene, and in my naive stupidity I completely didn't expect that to happen. My intention and my focus was to put together the ability to internet cast big Tribes 1 games, and not to be some attention whore that everyone thinks is great cuz I stood in the spotlight and casted the competition. My motivation was the simple fact that I admired good players and good captains and good teams. That was it.
When I came up with the idea of "WSBN", I didnt have much resources or know-how to really get it done. I knew next to nothing about constructing a website, and whatever I did know about Internet casting I simply taught myself. I figured it out. Most of it was a mighty pain in the ass that took hours to figure out - everything was new back then, I had no guidebook to consult. But WSBN got a break after I wound up talking to Killa666 and Rasta from the vaunted T1 team, S3, the South Side Stoners. Rasta thought it was a great idea and offered up bandwidth and webspace for it, and the Triple 6 Killa offered to construct a website for it. WSBN was really born at that point, only as the "Worldwide Stoner Broadcast Network".
My intention all along was to keep the WSBN doors open to the public and allow other people the opportunity to do what I was doing. I put alot of effort into my casts, making sure all my equipment was tip-top, making sure all my MP3's were good and complete, basically putting the extra time to cover about a hundred little details that made WSBN something worth listening to. I figured anyone looking to get involved with WSBN was willing to go to the same lengths that I did to put on something good, and there was a LOT of people asking to join WSBN. Unfortunately though, most people who asked to join WSBN didn't know jack about computers, or else were really boring or annoying when you put a mic in front of them. Others who asked to join were great on the mic, but didn't have much technical know-how and often needed help. What wound up happening - much to my dismay and often frustration! - was that I found myself spending more and more time helping other people set up their equipment, or add things to the website, or teach myself how to configure one thing or another, it got to the point where I thought my head was going to explode. Between working a full time job, having a social life, playing T1, casting, and helping everyone else in WSBN, things began to feel like a litttttle too much effort was needed to do what I wanted to do. I shouldered the vast majority of the responsibility of WSBN. It showed.
I knew I had hit on a good thing with WSBN though. The public response was great, although most people sorta sat there with their hand out, wanting something for nothing, and not really stepping forward to help the fledgling organization. Those that did step forward to contribute oftentimes simply lacked the knowledge or skill needed to really shoulder the burden placed on me - the main dude, the technician, the manager, the coordinator. At one point I had to stop and look at WSBN and go, "Where the hell is all this going???" WSBN began to eat up more and more of my time, it was a tremendous effort to get it all to work right, and I had to question why the hell I was even bothering in the first place. Around this time people began to toy with the idea of "professional gaming", and with professional gaming you would of course need professional game casting. Many people were saying that WSBN was the first step in the evolution of professional gaming - that we were pioneers and so forth. I agreed to some extent, but I stopped short of agreeing when people thought that anyone talking into a cheap headset on a Winamp stream would ever wind up being anything "professional". I thought that what we were doing was certainly "cool", and I thought that eventually there would be a professional gamecasting organization somewhere, but I thought it was ridiculous to think that anyone at our level would even be alive when competition gaming reached the point of becoming a spectator sport. So I looked at WSBN as something nifty, and as a learning experience for myself technically, but other than that, I didn't think much more about it.
A while after WSBN started up we were approached by TribalWar.com and they expressed an interest in hosting WSBN's website. I was a fan of TribalWar before it was cool to be one, before anyone even knew who TribalWar was. At the time, the OGL forums was the place where teams conversed, compared, taunted, and talked, and the OGL ladder itself was the most popular gaming ladder - if anything for the simple reason that it was the only ladder around. It had somewhat of a monopoly on gaming, so of course it was the most popular. From the very beginning though, I hated the OGL ladder with a passion. My contempt for the ladder started with its crappy, crappy interface which often confused the hell out of my feeble brain, and my contempt grew as I began to compete in Tribes 1 and learned of really lame rules, really lame admin decisions, and the overall complete indifference that the admins appeared to have towards the teams playing on their ladder. But as much as I hated the OGL, I stayed there playing just like everybody else because it was the only real game in town. I was into competition, that's where the competition was, and that's where everybody stayed. But almost every week was a new dose of unmitigated lameness by either the OGL admins, or their lame malfunctioning software, or else their consistently down web server. The OGL forums eventually began to fill up with complaints againt the ladder itself - against the malfunctioning software, bonehead admins, crashing webserver, etc etc. Apparently the OGL admins - with typical arrogance - decided that free speech didn't meet their website criteria, so they initiated an outrageous censor-filter that edited out every curse word imaginable, deleted posts, and banned many users who were speaking their mind. Many of the banned users were simply criticizing the OGL in a non-profane way, but were still banned regardless of the words they chose. At this point my disdain for the OGL was beyond constraint, and I said so on their forums, and of course I got banned from there as well.
Around this time TribalWar appeared on the scene, really from out of nowhere. There wasn't much to TribalWar back in those days, but they had a pretty slick website and this guy, Imposter, who really dug up great news on the Tribes scene. There was always news on TribalWar, something new every day, and the Imposter guy was all over it. Plus they also had a forum in place, and best of all, it was unmoderated. You could go there and speak your mind. Along with some other guys from the T1 scene, we began to spread the word about TW, and we also began to carry on our conversations there - conversations that we couldn't have on the OGL forum any longer. Gradually the entire T1 competition scene from the OGL began to flock away from the OGL forums and to talk on the new TribalWar forums. Thanks to the OGL, TribalWar.com had a ready-made audience for their website, and I was one of the earliest and biggest proponents of Rayn, Ratorasniki, and Imposter.
So when I was approached to be hosted by TribalWar, I really had to mull over the decision. I liked the guys, I liked the site, and liked the idea, but at the same time I knew that I was playing with something completely new and different and something that might have alot of web potential on its own. Although I liked the idea, I got the feeling that I might be painting myself into a corner by joining forces with TribalWar. For starters, I didn't want WSBN to get locked into one game, it was always my intention to cover other games as well. That posed a goofy problem also because if WSBN was hosted by TribalWar.com - which was 100 percent a Tribes-related website - then what happened when we wanted to do other games? Would the OtherGame.com sites turn their nose up at us for being part of TribalWar? Would other gamers look upon us as just "stupid Tribes players" or something? What about creative control? Would someone from TribalWar try to step into WSBN and throw his weight around, simply because TW provided the bandwidth for us? There were alot of questions that I had to ask myself, and in the end, regretably, I had to decline their offer to host us. It seemed like a potential Pandora's Box of problems, and as much as I appreciated the offer, I had to say no.
That decision was one of the very few that I made for WSBN that I came to regret immensely.
Not long after I declined TW's offer they announced the "Tribes Shoutcast Network", which was basically a carbon copy of WSBN hosted by TribalWar. At this time, WSBN's main exposure to the Tribes scene was through TribalWar (TW being the center of the competition scene) and I saw bad, bad things on the horizon. With a competing network part of TribalWar, and with people in the competition scene being part of both WSBN and TW/TSN, I knew that eventually there would be a conflict. But, as I've always intended to do from the start, I kept WSBN completely impartial to things concerning teams and the new competing gamecast organization. From my point of view, it was an interwined gaming community, and it was our obligation to the community to be completely and totally impartial to everything that happens and to simply cast games in a completely impartial and non-problematic way. WSBN wasn't a competition team, and while it's easy for a competition team to be partial to one thing or another, as a casting organization I didn't see WSBN having that luxury. We were there simply as a portal of the community and our "opinions" didn't mean dick in the long run.
However, not everyone thought the same as I did. What started as a great new thing with the launch of WSBN slowly turned into something close to a nightmare with the launch of TSN. Not only were the TSN people proving to be rather unscrupulous in how they dealt with teams and people, but they were also officially part of TribalWar, the focal point of the competition scene. Problems with TSN started from the very beginning, when "MegaBoris" chose to remain in the WSBN staff channel under the pretense that he was part of WSBN, when his entire intention was to glean as much information from me as possible so he could take it to his friends Wonderdog and Beatstick, the originators of "TSN". To make matters worse, the long-standing grudges between top teams began to creep into WSBN as well.
What started off as a completely innocent and well-intentioned comment from me started one of the biggest and longest-running problems that affected WSBN. While on the air with Warwitch during a dual-cast of S3 vs Team 5150, (yes, WSBN was the first station to ever dual-cast a game), I was asked by Warwitch who I thought would be the victor. I was well-aware of 5150's playing skill, they had rocketed up the ladder undefeated and were considered a serious team, one to be reckoned with. However, S3 was a grizzled squad and the current #1 champions, a team who had "popped the cherry" of many contender teams. As honestly as I could say it, I said both teams were powerhouses and I really didn't know who was going to win, and then I added the critical line, "I dunno... I'm gonna have to root for the boys on the west coast and hope S3 pulls it out." (Or something very very close to that.) The game commenced, and a knock-down drag-out battle ensued with S3 eventually winning.
About a day or so later, all hell broke loose. I got a most curious email from "SmokingMan" from Team 5150, lamenting on how "biased" I was, blasting WSBN for what I said during my cast. Bewidlered, I immediately went to the WSBN staff channel and asked if anyone heard anything that could be construed as biased or innapropriate. Every single member of the staff said no, and agreed with me that SmokingMan's email was not only wrong, but almost insane. There was a huge discussion in the WSBN staff channel because Warwitch and I were bewildered that 5150 would be offended by something so petty. Everyone in the staff channel scratched their heads wondering, quite simply, what they hell are they tripping on? After a few hours of everyone talking amongst themselves and talking with 5150 and so forth, eventually it just boiled down to SmokingMan himself, who seemed to have taken offense for no reason whatsoever. At this point I passed the comment in the staff channel, "It's just SmokingMan, he's the main fruitypants." Not 30 seconds later I got a private IRC message from SmokingMan, and in the ensuing conversation he repasted me my exact comment, quoted from IRC: "It's just SmokingMan, he's the main fruitypants."
I was livid. The standing rule in WSBN was "what is said in the staff channel stays in the staff channel." Not only did someone break a cardinal organization rule, but whoever the idiot was probably just made the situation with 5150 a hundred times worse that it was 30 seconds before. With this in mind I went back to the staff channel and asked point blank who was repasting conversations to 5150. I knew that it was one of two people, either MegaBoris or Maelstrom, both of whom were familiar with 5150 and who I didn't know all that well. It turns out that it was MegaBoris, and being the spineless weasel that he is, he didn't admit to it like a man and instead denied it. At the time I couldn't prove it was either one, so I once again asked the guilty part to step forward and own up to it. Nobody did, both professed their innocence. SmokingMan was no help on the matter either, he wouldn't tell me who pasted him the info. So now, faced without much of an alternative, I gave the guilty party one last chance to own up to it, telling them both that unless the guilty party steps up and takes it like a man, I'm going to have to fire both Maelstrom and MegaBoris - and in the process fire an innocent guy. Again MegaBoris denied it. So after apologizing to both, (at the time I really didnt know which one of them did it, and I also didnt know just what a douchebag MegaBoris really was) after apologizing for having to do so, I kicked them both from WSBN. I simply was not going to have such a breech of trust and security involved in WSBN.
So now WSBN was slightly at odds with its friends TribalWar, and was at odds with 5150 for reasons that nobody really knew, and at odds with two of 5150's friends as well. I tried yet again to find out exactly what the problem was with 5150, but I was met with the strangest of silences, they wouldn't tell me anything. But it was difficult for me to be angry with 5150 because I knew that it was a misunderstanding of some sort, because I knew what I said on the air, I knew how many times I drilled it into the WSBN casters that they were no longer players and that they were casters, so therefore to cast impartially. What 5150 was accusing me of was the very opposite of what WSBN stood for, it had to be a misunderstanding... right?
But I couldn't get it resolved. Then it finally dawned on me that 5150 probably thought - due to the WSBN website being hosted by S3 - they probably thought that S3 had WSBN in their pocket. They may have even thought that me or anyone else in WSBN would help S3 cheat in some form or fashion when we observed their games. It finally occurred to me that it probably wasn't even about me, or WSBN, it was about 5150 and S3. That brought things into focus a little more, and also made me lose a ton of respect for Team 5150. In my opinion, they sure were being shortsighted, paranoid, and petty for such a "serious" team.
With TSN being a viable alternative to WSBN, Team 5150 chose to deny WSBN future game casts and granted only TSN permission. My opinion of the team lowered even further at this point, but it was so silly to begin with - and so unfounded - that I think I felt more amazement and bewilderment at this point more than actual anger. I decided against instigating the problem any further and simply asked my friends in NuTz and S3 to back WSBN up when the time came, and to tell 5150 to stop being such cocks about nothing. I asked my friends to either stand up for WSBN and tell 5150 to give equal time to the two networks, or else to deny TSN the right to cast the match. Fortunately, my friends in S3 and Nutz agreed, not so much as pro-WSBN I don't think but more as "fuck-5150". 5150 chose the "no cast" option, and the gaming public sat there wondering "Why isn't this being casted????" to which I had the simple answer, "File your complaints with 5150, we wanted to cast the match but they declined." This ridiculous pattern of network battling over matches would continue in a hundred different ways for over a year.
When it was discovered that it was in fact MegaBoris who had supplied the confidental (but flippant) remark I made, "It's SmokingMan, he's the main fruitypants", and thus making the ridiculous situation worse, the matter was compounded further when MegaBoris joined TSN immediately after my firing of him. Then it was learned that he was part of setting up TSN from the start, and - unlike what an honorable person would do - he chose to stay in the WSBN staff channel under the pretense of working with WSBN. The intention was to get as much information as possible since he didnt know how to do a dammned thing on his own, technically. So I personally felt like my pocket had been picked, although it was a very good lesson on honor and the Internet.
Combined with this there was also splitting camps dividing down the center - those who liked S3 and didnt like 5150, and those who liked 5150 and hated S3. Since WSBN had started with the help of S3, WSBN was thrown into the middle also, an unwitting victim of gamer egos. By this point, all of my good intentions with WSBN were being pissed on by people who had no interests outside of their own ridiculous egos, and I had a choice to make. Do I fight? It was an option - I can run a battle as well as anyone. Do I suck it up, turn the other cheek, and stick to my original goal of an impartial organization giving something positive to the scene? I chose the latter. When TSN began their ongoing shenanigans of pressuring teams to be "TSN only", I forbade anyone in WSBN from doing the same. If WSBN casted a team one week, we didn't put up a squawk when TSN wanted to cast them the next week. Although the TSN staff was ruthless when pressuring teams to be "TSN only", seemingly against all reason I forbade anyone in WSBN from doing the same. "Fight fire with fire!" was their rational reasoning, while "Two wrong don't make a right" was mine. My belief was that, eventually, the teams would tire of the nightmarish hassle of having a match casted every week, and that WSBN will be remembered as the organization that tried to keep things COOL and un-problematic. I reasoned that it wasn't worth trading our integrity for it, and to keep the WSBN influence positive, not ego-centric.
However, although the staff of WSBN knew that my intention was to keep WSBN's dignity intact, it was difficult to let the public know exactly what was going on behind the scenes. When I did speak out against the unscrupulous tactics used by TSN to pressure and harass teams, I was branded as a "troublemaker" and "instigator" by the TSN lackeys looking for acceptance. I fought quite a few forum battles with the TSN crowd and TSN staff, and it was usually over their outright lousy way of conducting business. My reasoning was that competition was competition, business was business, but even businesses have codes of conduct they adhere to. You dont stick a Macdonald's sign on Wendy's lawn, and Wendy's doesnt try to burn down Burger King's kitchen. I never tried to burn down TSN, but I damned sure would sit up on my roof with a shotgun late at night. A few times I had to put buckshot into a TSN llama...
A curious thing I noticed about the people who I came in contact with was who was vocal and who wasn't. When I did speak out with my observations about the casting situation, I would be called mistaken, or an instigator, or a self-serving liar, or even worse. It was utterly fascinating to me. Here were teams hating TSN for the bullshit they were making everyone go through week after week, and here I was getting reports all day long from everywhere as to just how lame a situation it had become, yet the TSN lackeys would blindly beat their drum and say I was "starting trouble" or lying, while the people who agreed with me the most stayed quiet. The majority of people who supported me and believed me, and knew that what I was saying was very much in fact accurate would rarely speak out in public about it. As much as they applauded my non-problematic approach to casting, they very rarely stepped forward to say "He's right". It's something that still puzzles me to this day. The people who supported me did so because I took a more positive approach to everything, and they, in their positivity, didnt want to get involved in forum fights and arguements and so avoided "getting involved". They would take the intiative to agree with me in emails and IRC, but most wouldn't stand up in public to do so. It's a puzzling Catch22 that I don't think I'll ever understand.
Around this time I began to look at TribalWar in a different light. What started as an open forum centered around competition had degenerated into having too many no-life losers whose only contribution to the world was how often and how inanely they posted to a forum. It took a long time for me to realize it, but I was having a contest of opinions with people who had no idea what they were talking about, but due to the TribalWar policy of "no censorship", whoever posted the loudest and the most insultingly got the most attention. Most of the arguements that I found myself in were devoid of reason and truth. Just like anything I guess, people given free reign to their minds can spin arguement after arguement about any subject whatsoever, while resolving absolutely nothing in the end. If I said the sun is pretty, anyone can come up with a hundred reasons as to why the sun is not, and the arguement could rage on for a week if the participants chose to do so, but in the end it would still be a goddamned nice, sunny day outside. That's how TribalWar began to feel. It was arguing for the sake of arguing it seemed, and I wasn't interested. I was entirely too busy with work and WSBN and this blonde chick I was seeing.
WSBN was eventually approached by GameLoft, an online gaming subsidiary of UbiSoft, the software publisher. GameLoft expressed interest in WSBN, stating that they liked what we were doing and were looking to help further it along. At this time WSBN needed any help it could get. At the risk of sounding egocentric, I'm going to say flat-out that I was pioneering almost every single feature that is now commonplace for gamecasting organizations. I was coaching the casters how to cast well, I was troubleshooting their equipment, I was devising new ways to cast, designing observer HuDs, designing the website, designing the IRC system, advertising, and also casting. And I was doing this all on a daily basis. Besides working a full time job, I would spend hours at night doing a million and one things for WSBN and helping the other people in WSBN. Unfortunately though, I began to cast less and less because I spent so much time doing everything else. To cast well, you need to have a clear head, not a detail-addled head with your finger in 900 pies. This fact began to trouble me because I started all this mess because I liked to cast. I didnt start WSBN to become "SuicideTaxi Station Manager", I started it to be SuicideTaxi, that guy who casts games like they do for the NFL. When GameLoft expressed interest in WSBN, I was at a crossroads, personally. I had put a TON of time and effort into WSBN, I had helped dozens of people learn to cast, I had come up with the majority of ideas for it, and here I was not doing the one thing I liked to do most - casting. GameLoft was of the opinion that WSBN was laying the groundwork for what would eventually become a mainstream, mass-appeal thing, so I had to dwell on it for a while. Was the rag-tag band of freaks that made up WSBN really doing something worthwhile?
It certainly seemed like I was doing the vast majority of the work involved, while everyone else was more interested in just casting. I rationalized that though, because to cast well, you shouldn't be worried about 100 other things, you should be able to pull up to a mic and be interested in the game, not the website, or the audio server, or whether the IRC system was malfunctioning, or why the recording won't upload, etc etc etc. I told GameLoft point blank that there was significant labor overhead to make something like WSBN even remotely "professional", and unless GameLoft was willing to invest in salaries to keep people focused on doing the work involved, I simply didn't see how WSBN could be anything more than what it was - an amatuer gaming organization. GameLoft however had big plans, and they assured me that eventually the time would come to where online gaming was a professional activity. I took this reassurance with a grain of salt - I'd heard it before but I still didn't see it on the horizon. GameLoft picked up on my skepticism and soon revealed to me their plan of partnership with the OGL and Teamplay, their plan of sponsorship for game casts, and of "exclusive broadcast rights to the two biggest gaming ladders on the Internet." It was an ambitious plan, and as much as I wanted to believe in it, it struck me as shortsighted, shallow, and unrealistic. How could they expect to generate sponsorship funds by casting amatuer gamers who are playing with software they purchased, on Internet connections that they were paying for, on game servers that they were providing? I tried not to show it, but I was, at the very best, completely skeptical. Not only did it seem an unrealistic expectation, but it struck me as morally wrong. But at the time GameLoft was the only major company expressing interest in what we were doing, so I decided to ride with it for a while. I agreed to let GameLoft host WSBN, but I declined signing anything and manouvered my way into having a foolproof way to bail out the GameLoft arrangement at any time. I would soon be very thankful for that foresight.
The loose arrangement between WSBN and GameLoft was that WSBN would strive to be as professional as possible in the hopes of furthering our organization. To me, this was a ridiculous expectation to ask since nobody in WSBN was a professional game announcer, or possessed a degree in communications, or were even interested in being any of the above. I certainly wanted professional gaming and professional gamecasting to become a reality, but the people involved in WSBN were simply amatuers involved in a recreational activity. We also had no website crew to speak of, and the little help we did get on the website was from people learning to do it. As such, our website was a mess, coded in five different languages and looking like the south end of a northbound hyena. As much I tried to push the "quality" issue to our casters, I was met with resistance because it was either beyond the person's ability or else beyond their budget. "Buy a new mic? Why?? What's wrong with the headset I've been using for the past two years??"
The stress began to take its toll on me and on the WSBN crew itself. I was pushing quality quality quality on people who had no concept of what professional quality really was. I was running around being the technical go-to guy for everyone, coaching new casters and showing them the ropes, fighting off TSN llamas on one side, and trying to meet GameLoft's expectations on the other. WSBN was struggling badly. I knew I had taken WSBN down the hard road when I declined hosting from TribalWar.com, but all we really needed was some contributing input from the rest of the WSBN staff. That input rarely came, and I thought I would burst at the seams. I have a terrible, terrible habit of, when faced with adversity, I push even harder. At some point you just gotta know when to give, and too often I have a problem reaching that point. At this time in WSBN it was one of those points - I should have just given up, I think. I was working on taking gaming to the "Next Level", but I'm not really sure how many other people were there with me trying to accomplish that. My inspiration, again, was the top-notch players and teams whom I admired. Maybe it's just my personal thing, but players who make the great shot or the wise decision on the field, and the teams that manage to pull together to beat their opponents, I love that stuff. I love to see it, to read about it, and to do it myself. That was my inspiration to keep hacking away at WSBN - I wanted to be the guy shining the spotlight on the people whose skills I respected. But now that I look at it, I was probably taking an unrealistic view of things. It was, after all, a video game, and although some people can do impressive and sometimes incredible things in that digital world, the majority of players are generally approaching it as "a pastime", a hobby. "Playing" rather than competing. (And then there are always the delusional egocentrics who swear that they are hard core and that they COMPETE DAMNIT, but then you see their demos or play them in a server and you have to roll your eyes...)
TribalWar was still the center of competition discussion, and growing. Imposter was still in a league by himself finding the best news stories, and they had also added a few more news posters as well. The forum traffic was astronomical, people would use it like most other people use IRC. Eventually GameLoft set their eyes on TribalWar as well, and it seems that Rayn and Co. were looking to break away from Zero-X's Gameshack. Not long after WSBN was hosted by GameLoft, TribalWar came aboard also. Although I was glad for Tribalwar itself, the situation with TSN puzzled me. GameLoft were now hosting two competing organizations, organizations with more bad blood than could ever be expected to disappear. "How did GameLoft plan on dealing with that situation?" I asked, to which I got a variety of unrealistic responses, such as "You two should just work together" and "It's no big deal." Although I tried to realistically explain that although I personally have been compromising and rational from the start, I didn't see anyone from TSN becoming so any time soon. My warnings went unheeded, and the daily wranglings with TSN continued unabated. Daily. Every day was something new, and it was usually problems with teams where Team A wanted WSBN, but Team B wanted TSN only and refused to compromise. Meanwhile, some members of Team B wanted WSBN also, so the team members would even be arguing amongst themselves! Arguing over who would cast their match! It was ridiculous, but it happened daily, spurred on by TSN's pressuring of teams not to compromise. WSBN would very often compromise - if we casted a team one week we would NOT cast them the next week, thus giving TSN the unfettered opportunity to cast them without hassle. However, the same courtesy was never, ever shown, and the cycle would continue.
You would think that I would have thrown my hands up at some point and said "This is too ridiculous for words, Im done with this...", but I only pushed harder. I pushed myself and pushed everyone in WSBN to do a better job. However, things began to happen that made things even more difficult. I began to get the sneaking suspicion that GameLoft was doing things to hamper WSBN. Although I tried everything within my dignity to compromise with TSN and its retarded staff, and although I tried to use GameLoft as mediators of disputes, I could tell that GameLoft really wasnt interested in helping WSBN or ending the long standing feud with TSN. WSBN was simply on its own, with just its website hosted by GameLoft. I can't say I blame GameLoft for that because WSBN was, at this point, quite simply struggling to be at the forefront of online gamecasting. Since Tribalwar got the most exposure to people, they also managed to scoop up most of the contributing members of the community. TSN benefitted from this greatly, because they also got a website out of the deal. WSBN had to do it all on its own, from website to casting to HuDs to IRC code, you name it. The Hard Road, to be sure. So with WSBN struggling like it was, it wouldnt have been surprising to me in the least if GameLoft was no longer interested, so I asked them, many times, to either help us or tell us that they weren't interested. They did neither. It's my suspicion that they knew of my ability to innovate and they either intended on keeping me around to absorb my innovations, or else have me jump ship and join TSN, or else they intended to slowly choke the life out of WSBN and destroy it as a competitor. Maybe even a combination of all three.
A curious incident occurred around this time, an incident that I think justified my previous statements that TSN were run by a bunch of honorless llamas who did nothing but spread misery. It was the pinnacle of competitive Tribes 1. Tribes 2 was slated to be released soon, and teams had been playing T1 for almost three years. Although the competition was fierce on the ladders, mostly everyone knew that the end was coming soon. There weren't many secrets left, all of the play innovations had been discovered, and in one night it all seemed to come to a head. Team 5150 was reigning the top of the ladder and had been so for months, having toppled S3 on their second attempt. S3 now resided at a quiet #2 spot, quietly biding their time until they could challenge 5150 again. When the moment arose, the match was slated to occur on the same day that S3 squared off against another superteam, Imperial Elite, for a final game on the Teamplay ladder. The three fiercest competitors that Tribes 1 had ever seen were going to be playing all on the same night, and I was making every effort to be sure that WSBN was going to be bringing it to the masses. But, of course, there were problems. Team 5150 was being difficult as usual, wanting TSN to cast the match, and Imperial Elite, which TSN co-founder Beatstick was a player for, were being somewhat difficult also. These two games were undoubtably the most hyped-up and looked forward-to Tribes 1 games ever played, and S3's Rasta wasn't buying the "TSN only" routine. Rasta, a long time friend of WSBN and generally rational person in general, agreed in the interest of fairness to allow TSN to cast one of the games, while WSBN was allowed to cast the other. The usual wranglings ensued in the days before the match, and everyone waited tensely to see how it all would be worked out. Eventually the arrangement came to TSN casting the first match against 5150, with WSBN casting the epic second match against Imperial Elite. But the night before the match, Rasta dropped a hydrogen bomb on the TribalWar forums, and in my eyes at least, exposed TSN's morally corrupt leaders.
S3's Rasta had one stipulation to TSN casting their match against 5150, and the stipulation was that since Wonderdog was slated to cast the match, and since Wonderdog lived near his fellow TSN staffer Beatstick, Wonderdog had to give strict assurances "on his honor" that Beatstick was not to observe the match over Wonderdog's shoulder - since Beatstick was scheduled to play against S3 later that evening in the Imperial Elite match. Rasta received all the assurances he needed to agree to the match, and he put his trust in Wonderdog that Beatstick would not be present during the cast. However, not long afterwards, S3 had apparently been tipped off by a TSN staff member that a conversation occurred indicating that Beatstick in fact was going to be present in the room during the cast. Logs were provided to S3, and Rasta was fit to be tied. He messaged me with the entire story, and all I could do was say "See, wtf you think I've been saying all this time..." I asked Rasta what he was going to do, and he said "Wait and see, I'm going to expose these *censored*".
Expose he did. In all of the forum posts I've read in my life, of all the contraversies I've seen come and go, I've never seen someone so hardcore owned on a forum in all my life. Rasta spelled it out from from to back, listing every nuance of detail, and even provided the logs of the exchange between Wonderdog and Beatstick. It was a humiliating post for TSN, but one that was well-deserved. Other people stepped forward to mention other moral wrongdoings done to them by TSN, and the post grew exponentially. TSN appeared to be ignoring the the contraversy, until finally someone stepped in at some point to post a quaint, hardly believable denial - the logged conversation was a joke between Wonderdog and Beatstick and wasn't meant seriously. TSN appeared to be trying to brush the entire situation off like it was meaningless, and at one point they described the affair as "a tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing." Apparently it was much ado about a lot because Rasta refused to have TSN cast his team's match, and on this decision he was adamant. This of course brought more wranglings from Team 5150 and Beatstick's Imperial Elite, and Rasta audaciously repasted every log into the TribalWar forums for all to see. Readers were amazed at the pettiness and manipulation shown by TSN's upper management, and even though the entire situation may have very well have been what Wonderdog and Beatstick claimed it was - a joke - the horrible publicity that they received I thought was very well deserved. I felt justified. I wasn't such a drama queen after all! The things I tried to bring to public attention time and again - things I thought that were so, so wrong with the gaming scene - they had substance and Rasta was proving that.
In the end, WSBN wound up casting the 5150-S3 match, and it was an epic one. Hundreds of people tuned in as S3 regained their #1 spot on the OGL, and then an hour later beat Imperial Elite in the long-awaited Teamplay match. Then, suddenly, S3 abrubtly announced it was retiring from Tribes 1 competition and resigned from all of its ladders at the top of its game, coining the legendary phrase, "V-A-B, nothing left to prove."
It was the peak of the Tribes 1 competition scene, and WSBN was still there bringing it to the crowd. However, eventually it reached the point where I knew something was too rotten to continue with GameLoft. I had known that TSN had signed contractual agreements with them, I knew that GameLoft had invested alot of effort and time to hosting TribalWar, I knew that GameLoft had signed contractual agreements with the OGL, and all of that was pointing at one thing - sponsored, advertised gamecasting. Yet WSBN - the originators and innovators of all of it, and me, the guy who trained, set up, and coached most of the casters from obscurity to premier castmanship - we were getting the redhaired stepchild treatment from GameLoft. I knew that our days with them were numbered, but there really wasn't much I could do about it. The only things, and I mean the only things that WSBN had in it's corner was my opinion that their Master Plan would fail, and my diehard belief that WSBN was looking at things maturely and realistically while dealing with teams in a friendly manner - not using mafioso tactics in order to force teams to be casted by WSBN. I was dead certain that the friendly WSBN approach was the right way and I refused to waver from it. I thought that even if WSBN was eventually defeated and failed, that WSBN would go down with its dignity intact. I wanted "professional gamecasting" just as much as anyone else, but I knew it wouldnt happen by forcing it down people's throats. I held my faith that we were doing "the right thing" in the face of all odds.
I eventually came to the realization that I wasn't imagining the "red haired stepchild" treatment from GameLoft either, and I decided to bail out. At the time I had no viable alternative for a web host, but I decided to bite the bullet and hit the eject button on the whole situation anyway. Kind of like Gorbachev when he decided to dissolve the Soviet Union - he knew it was going to suck and bring hardship and chaos on everyone, but he also knew that such drastic change would eventually lead to a better future for his country. Well, I perestroika'd my ass right out of GameLoft despite their threats of "You leave and you're cutting your own throat". I found a temporary web host, and we set up conducting business as usual. It wasn't easy. Our retarded website was a mess and wouldn't function properly, and generally nothing would work right. I also discovered that GameLoft, not content to let sleeping dogs lie, were also putting their corporate pressure wherever they could to get other companies to deny hosting to WSBN. A most promising arrangement with GameSpy was nullified once GameLoft got wind of the deal and subsquently pressured GameSpy into cancelling the arrangement. WSBN actually had the domain nameservers pointed at GameSpy and the FTP accounts enabled when the plug was suddenly pulled. My emails to GameSpy went unanswered, but eventually a "friend on the inside" informed me that GameSpy had to pull the plug in order to appease their business parter, GameLoft.
Some time after all of this I was approached by two modest, straight speaking men, Scott England and Adam Vener, directors of this company called "HomeLAN". Upon first hearing about them, my first question was of course, "What the hell's a home lan?" I'd never heard of them before, what did they want? "Sockpuppet" and "Serpentius" expressed interest in hosting WSBN, and I looked into them. The were primarily a game server host, with news and forums and a giant gamer "Federation" as well. While browsing their website, I hit a dead stop when I saw a section for the "HomeLAN Broadcast Network". No way! - I thought - I ain't doing this again! I told the courteous gentlemen that I was in no way interested in getting involved in such an arrangement again. I'm sure I made quite a caricature of myself when dealing with the two, because - coming so close on the heels of the disasterous GameLoft arrangement and generally dealing with one backstabbing organization after another - I didn't trust these two corporate weasels as far as I could throw them. Funny thing though, they really didn't strike me as corporate weasels, but that's probably exactly why I thought they were corporate weasels - cuz they hid it so well. Okay, GameLoft made me paranoid!
After talking for a considerable amount of time about the future of gamecasting, about WSBN's past, about WSBN's expectations, and about WSBN's limitations, (something that GameLoft's delusions kept them from seeing), I began to realize that HomeLAN held the same principles that WSBN did. They were grounded in reality, but were hopeful and interested in the growth of Internet gamecasting. They also operated with honor and honesty, and although WSBN sure didn't share HomeLAN's puritan view on swear words, both organizations had a positive intent - making gaming better, and more fun.
With a new partnership intact, WSBN then hit the second stage of its life. A new website grew thanks to the tireless work of MadHatter, and new blood came into the crew. It was bright new day, and then all HELL broke loose.
GameLoft, much sooner than expected, made a bold announcement of the launch of the "GameLoft Broadcast Network", stating "exclusive rights" to the OGL ladder and a bold new step in online gaming. The new arrangement not only excluded WSBN - and as such excluded many many members of the competitive Tribes scene - but also put stipulations on players, stating that global chat spam was no longer permissible during casted games, and that no team on the OGL can refuse to be casted under penalty of suspension from the ladder. It also granted the OGL complete rights to team names, player names, and team logos. The news was met with a mixture of awe and horror, mostly horror. Nazi symbols were posted in every forum thread relating to the matter, and the entire community came out in droves to give a collective finger to GameLoft, to TSN, and the OGL. Server admins threatened to ban OGL matches on their servers, and players talked of dropping off the ladder completely. Meanwhile, I just sat back and watched. I knew that it wasn't any kind of pro-WSBN stance anyone was taking, their stance was simple outrage that a company such as GameLoft thought it could make a dollar off the game they bought, off of their playing skill, off of their bandwidth, and off of their time. GameLoft, falling into the usual corporate trap of underestimating the intelligence of their market, thought that the players were so insipidly dumb that they would jump up and down at the chance of being casted. Meanwhile, of course, GameLoft would sit back and run ads for Coca Cola or something while counting up the dollar signs.
Although I knew that most people were simply taking a stand for their own rights, there were also many influential members of WSBN and influential friends of WSBN who spread the word that GameLoft was not only trying to make a buck off the players, but were also causing divisions amongst the teams themselves. Worse than ever before, players who were fans and part of WSBN were deadlocked against their teammates who might be TSN. It was a ridiculous mess who's only cause was GameLoft's, OGL's, and TSN's stupidity and greed. And if the GameLoft/OGL announcement wasn't enough of a contraversy, TribalWar decided to drop a bomb of their own.
Later that evening, TribalWar announced that their long-awaited project "The Tribalwar Ladder" was ready to launch. In reality, the ladder wasn't even finished yet, but Triston and Polaris knew a good opportunity when they saw one, so they launched the ladder a little prematurely. For the first time, Tribes players were offered an alternative to the problem-plauged OGL and this announcement was met with cheers and praise by everyone, except of course GameLoft. GameLoft immediately put a gag order on the TribalWar staff, threatening everything from pulling their hosting to lawsuits, and demanded that the "TribalWar Ladder" be taken down. Triston and Polaris, who not only had been working on the ladder coding for months but also objected to the entire GameLoft arrangement, refused to back down and instead chose to leave TribalWar.com and start a completely independant ladder. They had only one slight problem - they had no webserver or bandwidth. Enter Team 5150's TheRedDread, who ran various webservers and gameservers. TheRedDread offered up a webserver, and the "Team Warfare League" was born.
WSBN helped launch the TWL by giving players the exact same thing they would get on the OGL, only with less headaches, less corruption, and less exploitation. I personally made every effort to preach the TWL gospel, just as I had done for TribalWar when they first started. I was truly elated that - for the first time - a viable alternative to the ineptness and corruption of the OGL was forming. It was like writing out the Declaration of Independence, only in relation to online gaming.
Now I was determined even more to raise the level of quality with WSBN. With two great new opportunities - our great partner HomeLAN and the new ladder TWL - I felt that WSBN could really stretch its wings and see what it could do. We had virtually unlimited bandwidth and almost unconditional support from the community. Plus, Tribes 2 was coming out soon, and Tribes 1 loaned itself so completely to gamecasting that it was assumed that Tribes 2 would do the same. I drove myself and the WSBN staff even harder to put on good casts, to improve our website features, and to generally make things as good as possible.
Once Tribes 2 was released, WSBN really hit its stride. The game, although somewhat of a letdown as a sequel, it loaned itself easily to casting. It also added a much great dimension of teamwork needed to get anything done and it was an interesting departure from the cowboy-like gameplay of most games. WSBN had great casters on the air, I had mastered video-casting, and WSBN even did some road shows during the summer at UVALAN3 and TribesCon3. Hell, we even had our own damned WSBNmobile to cruise around to LANs in. The details to make all this possible were tremendous, and I oftentimes got bogged down with technical details and helping others, but in the back of my head I never forgot the fact that this was all in preparation for the evenuality of the competition gaming scene becoming something more than part-time gamers - of becoming professional. Thanks to a funding paycheck provided by HomeLAN, I spent most of my time learning and investigating one technology after another, figuring out new ways of doing things, consuming knowledge at an incredible rate, getting myself as familiar as possible with online media. I also spent an incredible amount of time managing WSBN. Assigning this project to that guy, helping new casters get situated, writing up How-To's for the staff so I wouldnt have to explain everything in IRC, basically diving head-first into every facet of WSBN. The bar for new casters began to get higher and higher, the average guy with the crappy gaming mic and the one computer just wasn't up to par anymore. Most of the WSBN casters were equipped with real mics, hardware sound mixers, multiple computers, etc, and it showed. WSBN put on the best quality casts and they were fun to listen to.
I eventually wanted to put together a studio. My WSBN equipment had doubled and then quadrupled, and it was a far cry from the P166 I first ran shoutcast software from. I needed more space for all the equipment and I wanted the ability to host a permanent audio server with non-stop music and gaming content, plus the ability to video gamecast, plus the ability to do sound and video editing. Rasta eventually talked me into finally moving out west, and I trucked my entire life out to Reno Nevada and set up shop. From there I hit the ground running, and I built a custom studio from the ground up, complete with just about everything. My original intention was to videocast once a week, a gaming show on a Friday or Saturday with news, interviews, previews, and so on. Unfortunately tho, the day-to-day technicals of WSBN just about sapped my will to live and drained almost all my energy, so by the time the evening rolled around I was completely uninterested in casting anything. A caster needs a clear head, period. A caster who has been coding a script all day, or learning to edit video, or designing graphics or websites, a caster whose brain is exhausted at match time is quite simply a boring caster. More often than not I backed out of doing casts cuz I thought my brain would explode if I thought of one more thing.
Eventually I reached the same conclusion that HomeLAN reached about WSBN. There was no way for WSBN to become a financially self-supporting entity. There was entirely too much overhead needed to produce a product that had enough appeal to either get people to pay for, or else to sell advertising space on. It simply wasnt going to happen. I knew it and HomeLAN knew it, and the funding for WSBN stopped. At that point I decided to stop casting altogether. I had taken WSBN from a clueless guy on a P166 and expanded it to a 20+ member team of damned near professional ability gamecasters and staffers, I'd coached dozens of people who initially SUCKED at gamecasting and helped them become proficient, I'd helped spawn an entirely new gaming ladder with thousands of players on it, I'd travelled the country and been the guest of strangers, and I'd pioneered almost every gamecasting feature that people see today and take for granted. With HomeLAN dropping the funding for WSBN, I would never have the time to contiue developing it. So I backed out.
When all the dust had settled and when I looked around with a clear head, it's really really weird to see how things have progressed but really not progessed at all. In fact, online gaming in many ways has regressed. What started off as a pastime, a hobby, a game, for a brief time it accelerated rapidly into something very hardcore competitive, but then gradually simmered back down right where it started to begin with - a competitive pastime. Teams still make strats, players still show up for "practice", but it seems the old days of staying up all night practicing or throwing everything into your game is long gone. During the T1 days and during the first six months of Tribes 2, losing was not acceptable. When you lost, you were pissed. But nowadays, losing is no big deal, nobody seems to care too much. And I don't get that. It puts me at odds with today's players. Nowadays teams lose and they go to forums, shrug their shoulders, say "gg", and talk about something else. During the T1 days, when teams lost, you wouldn't see them for three days cuz they were either bummed or pissed off. If you did see them, their team was in a server practicing everything they did wrong to lose in the first place. I'm not saying it's bad or good, but if the teams are in it mostly "for fun" and really don't care if they lose, then - in my opinion - what's the point of casting them? "For fun"? I guess... but not me, someone else can cast for fun, I'm not interested.
Added to that, a new casting group pops up just about every week it seems, and the vast majority of their casters would never have gotten into WSBN or TSN even on their best day. But nobody seems to mind the poor casting quality though, and this too puts me at odds with everything. If the teams really don't care if they win or lose and the audience doesn't care what they listen to, then my time in this arena is finished. Combined with the release of Classic Tribes 2 - which I think completely ruined the game I loved - it's definitely time to get out of the whole scene. Online gaming is nowhere closer to becoming a mainstream event and the people involved in it are nowhere closer to becoming professional gamers than they were two years ago. It's still made up of people involved in a "pastime", and not made up of committed teams intent on beating the other team at all cost. Unfortunately, most gamers still have papers to write, reports to finish, children to make dinner for, dates to go on, projects to complete, and all the rest of the "real life" distractions that keep the teams at a "hobby" or "pastime" level. Yes, there are a few gamers out there with the budget, the lifestyle, and the ability to throw everything into becoming proficient players and to build proficient teams, but on the whole, teams are made up of average people distracted by a million other things in their lives.
So with all of this in mind, I think there are two ways that WSBN can go. One is to disappear completely and dismantle all of our hard work, or the other is to open up the doors of WSBN to more people and to change our expectations of quality. Although it saddens me (since WSBN really did set the standard of quality for a long time) WSBN needs to become more down-to-earth and realistic, and to lose it's illusions of "professional quality" casting. WSBN needs to return to the grassroots level that it started off as, to be more forgiving of mistakes, and to return to being a part of the gaming communities, and not something sitting on top of the gaming communities, looking down. So with that in mind, the doors to WSBN are now open to everyone. We have a pretty pimp system intact with a lot of bandwidth, and all of the casters who were turned down in the past by WSBN are welcome to re-apply. If you've ever thought about casting, give it a shot, the gaming scenes can definitely use you!
As for me, my computer time is spent more on video editing than gaming lately, and I've been getting more and more into the art of video production. I think that the UVALAN4 video will be my last big contribution to the gaming scene, and after that I'll just become a regular dude again, hanging out in IRC, keeping to myself, and playing SoF2 a couple of times a week. I don't want to manage WSBN anymore at all. "The thrill is gone" and all that stuff. I'm hoping that maybe, if my energy doesn't get zapped by all the crap that goes down in WSBN, I might even start casting some SoF2 CTF. Becoming just a regular caster again! Oh my.
I kind of got a raw deal on this WSBN stuff, really. Initially I just wanted to cast games, but the position of being a popular gamecaster and head of an organization put me at odds with alot of people. Since I spoke to and heard from so many different people, I had a different perspective of things than the average person did because I was privvy to more information, and this put me at odds with some people as well. I didn't see things as a player or a captain or a mapper or a modder anymore, I saw things as a spectator watching it all. An outsider, a fly-on-the-wall. It gave me a different perspective, to be sure.
Plus, I was working to make something professional quality, and that put me even more at odds with some people. My expectations were higher, the level of acceptance higher, the bar of quality higher. I had to knock heads with quite a few people over it, but in the end, the person who benefitted the most from my quality expectations was the audience. I refused to accept mediocre effort from people in WSBN, and more often than not, that's exactly what people were inclined to offer - mediocrity. So instead of being a regular guy who did his own thing and enjoyed his wonderful WSBN creation, I became the guy who was looking over everyone's shoulder saying, "Deliver quality. Exert yourself." Sometimes this didn't make me very popular, but it made WSBN the benchmark for quality casting.
So now it's full circle. The WSBN doors are open to the gaming communities and people are welcome to join up and apply. Nobody really runs WSBN anymore, so if you ever wanted to run an online gamecasting orgnization, step up and do that too! The doors are open, if you ever wanted to be a part of WSBN, now is the time to do so. I'm backing off my hold on WSBN and I'm content to be just the video editing guy.
I hope that this post puts things in perspective for alot of people, especially those people who I've knocked heads with over the years. I just simply didn't have the time or inclination to deal with petty things, I was too busy trying to push the quality and cause of gamecasting.
Alot of people know me as the guy who runs WSBN. I've been a fairly "high profile" person for a few years now as the result of heading WSBN, and during those few years I've rolled through controversy after controversy, innovation after innovation, I've seen every change, growth, patch, event, and contest that's occurred in the T2 community and elsewhere. Along the way I've also gotten points of view from every direction imaginable, from the "casual gamer", the game developer, the hardcore competition player, older people, younger people, businessmen, and damned near everyone in between. Hell, I've even spoken to the non-gaming girlfriends, wives, moms and dads, and even a few husbands thrown in. Being "high profile" I guess invites people to talk to me in IRC and emails...
From the moment I got the idea to plug in a microphone and cast a Tribes 1 game to the public, I've been a "public figure", open to scrutiny, criticism, praise, and everything that goes along with it. What's funny to me is that I started all of this rather innocently. While I knew I was doing something in front of the public, it just seemed like something fun to do - something that would add to the competition scene and allow everyone to take part in the high-end competitive games. What I didn't expect, and what I don't think I was really prepared to handle, was being that "high profile" person and a public figure. That sounds pretty stupid I guess - here I was throwing myself at center stage but not expecting to become a "public figure" - but I really didn't expect everyone to look at me like that.
I really didn't expect the response that WSBN received either, it was amazing. People went bananas. I got so many PM's in IRC during my first cast that it crashed my mIRC. The #WSBN channel went from 4 people to over a hundred in less than 20 minutes, and it stayed that way ever since. I don't really think it was the actual cast itself that people liked so much, it was the fact that the T1 competition scene was hard core with a lot of really good gamers involved, and the concept of WSBN let everyone in on the big game. So in little under an hour, I went from being a regular gaming enthusiast to being one of the most well known people on the T1 scene, and in my naive stupidity I completely didn't expect that to happen. My intention and my focus was to put together the ability to internet cast big Tribes 1 games, and not to be some attention whore that everyone thinks is great cuz I stood in the spotlight and casted the competition. My motivation was the simple fact that I admired good players and good captains and good teams. That was it.
When I came up with the idea of "WSBN", I didnt have much resources or know-how to really get it done. I knew next to nothing about constructing a website, and whatever I did know about Internet casting I simply taught myself. I figured it out. Most of it was a mighty pain in the ass that took hours to figure out - everything was new back then, I had no guidebook to consult. But WSBN got a break after I wound up talking to Killa666 and Rasta from the vaunted T1 team, S3, the South Side Stoners. Rasta thought it was a great idea and offered up bandwidth and webspace for it, and the Triple 6 Killa offered to construct a website for it. WSBN was really born at that point, only as the "Worldwide Stoner Broadcast Network".
My intention all along was to keep the WSBN doors open to the public and allow other people the opportunity to do what I was doing. I put alot of effort into my casts, making sure all my equipment was tip-top, making sure all my MP3's were good and complete, basically putting the extra time to cover about a hundred little details that made WSBN something worth listening to. I figured anyone looking to get involved with WSBN was willing to go to the same lengths that I did to put on something good, and there was a LOT of people asking to join WSBN. Unfortunately though, most people who asked to join WSBN didn't know jack about computers, or else were really boring or annoying when you put a mic in front of them. Others who asked to join were great on the mic, but didn't have much technical know-how and often needed help. What wound up happening - much to my dismay and often frustration! - was that I found myself spending more and more time helping other people set up their equipment, or add things to the website, or teach myself how to configure one thing or another, it got to the point where I thought my head was going to explode. Between working a full time job, having a social life, playing T1, casting, and helping everyone else in WSBN, things began to feel like a litttttle too much effort was needed to do what I wanted to do. I shouldered the vast majority of the responsibility of WSBN. It showed.
I knew I had hit on a good thing with WSBN though. The public response was great, although most people sorta sat there with their hand out, wanting something for nothing, and not really stepping forward to help the fledgling organization. Those that did step forward to contribute oftentimes simply lacked the knowledge or skill needed to really shoulder the burden placed on me - the main dude, the technician, the manager, the coordinator. At one point I had to stop and look at WSBN and go, "Where the hell is all this going???" WSBN began to eat up more and more of my time, it was a tremendous effort to get it all to work right, and I had to question why the hell I was even bothering in the first place. Around this time people began to toy with the idea of "professional gaming", and with professional gaming you would of course need professional game casting. Many people were saying that WSBN was the first step in the evolution of professional gaming - that we were pioneers and so forth. I agreed to some extent, but I stopped short of agreeing when people thought that anyone talking into a cheap headset on a Winamp stream would ever wind up being anything "professional". I thought that what we were doing was certainly "cool", and I thought that eventually there would be a professional gamecasting organization somewhere, but I thought it was ridiculous to think that anyone at our level would even be alive when competition gaming reached the point of becoming a spectator sport. So I looked at WSBN as something nifty, and as a learning experience for myself technically, but other than that, I didn't think much more about it.
A while after WSBN started up we were approached by TribalWar.com and they expressed an interest in hosting WSBN's website. I was a fan of TribalWar before it was cool to be one, before anyone even knew who TribalWar was. At the time, the OGL forums was the place where teams conversed, compared, taunted, and talked, and the OGL ladder itself was the most popular gaming ladder - if anything for the simple reason that it was the only ladder around. It had somewhat of a monopoly on gaming, so of course it was the most popular. From the very beginning though, I hated the OGL ladder with a passion. My contempt for the ladder started with its crappy, crappy interface which often confused the hell out of my feeble brain, and my contempt grew as I began to compete in Tribes 1 and learned of really lame rules, really lame admin decisions, and the overall complete indifference that the admins appeared to have towards the teams playing on their ladder. But as much as I hated the OGL, I stayed there playing just like everybody else because it was the only real game in town. I was into competition, that's where the competition was, and that's where everybody stayed. But almost every week was a new dose of unmitigated lameness by either the OGL admins, or their lame malfunctioning software, or else their consistently down web server. The OGL forums eventually began to fill up with complaints againt the ladder itself - against the malfunctioning software, bonehead admins, crashing webserver, etc etc. Apparently the OGL admins - with typical arrogance - decided that free speech didn't meet their website criteria, so they initiated an outrageous censor-filter that edited out every curse word imaginable, deleted posts, and banned many users who were speaking their mind. Many of the banned users were simply criticizing the OGL in a non-profane way, but were still banned regardless of the words they chose. At this point my disdain for the OGL was beyond constraint, and I said so on their forums, and of course I got banned from there as well.
Around this time TribalWar appeared on the scene, really from out of nowhere. There wasn't much to TribalWar back in those days, but they had a pretty slick website and this guy, Imposter, who really dug up great news on the Tribes scene. There was always news on TribalWar, something new every day, and the Imposter guy was all over it. Plus they also had a forum in place, and best of all, it was unmoderated. You could go there and speak your mind. Along with some other guys from the T1 scene, we began to spread the word about TW, and we also began to carry on our conversations there - conversations that we couldn't have on the OGL forum any longer. Gradually the entire T1 competition scene from the OGL began to flock away from the OGL forums and to talk on the new TribalWar forums. Thanks to the OGL, TribalWar.com had a ready-made audience for their website, and I was one of the earliest and biggest proponents of Rayn, Ratorasniki, and Imposter.
So when I was approached to be hosted by TribalWar, I really had to mull over the decision. I liked the guys, I liked the site, and liked the idea, but at the same time I knew that I was playing with something completely new and different and something that might have alot of web potential on its own. Although I liked the idea, I got the feeling that I might be painting myself into a corner by joining forces with TribalWar. For starters, I didn't want WSBN to get locked into one game, it was always my intention to cover other games as well. That posed a goofy problem also because if WSBN was hosted by TribalWar.com - which was 100 percent a Tribes-related website - then what happened when we wanted to do other games? Would the OtherGame.com sites turn their nose up at us for being part of TribalWar? Would other gamers look upon us as just "stupid Tribes players" or something? What about creative control? Would someone from TribalWar try to step into WSBN and throw his weight around, simply because TW provided the bandwidth for us? There were alot of questions that I had to ask myself, and in the end, regretably, I had to decline their offer to host us. It seemed like a potential Pandora's Box of problems, and as much as I appreciated the offer, I had to say no.
That decision was one of the very few that I made for WSBN that I came to regret immensely.
Not long after I declined TW's offer they announced the "Tribes Shoutcast Network", which was basically a carbon copy of WSBN hosted by TribalWar. At this time, WSBN's main exposure to the Tribes scene was through TribalWar (TW being the center of the competition scene) and I saw bad, bad things on the horizon. With a competing network part of TribalWar, and with people in the competition scene being part of both WSBN and TW/TSN, I knew that eventually there would be a conflict. But, as I've always intended to do from the start, I kept WSBN completely impartial to things concerning teams and the new competing gamecast organization. From my point of view, it was an interwined gaming community, and it was our obligation to the community to be completely and totally impartial to everything that happens and to simply cast games in a completely impartial and non-problematic way. WSBN wasn't a competition team, and while it's easy for a competition team to be partial to one thing or another, as a casting organization I didn't see WSBN having that luxury. We were there simply as a portal of the community and our "opinions" didn't mean dick in the long run.
However, not everyone thought the same as I did. What started as a great new thing with the launch of WSBN slowly turned into something close to a nightmare with the launch of TSN. Not only were the TSN people proving to be rather unscrupulous in how they dealt with teams and people, but they were also officially part of TribalWar, the focal point of the competition scene. Problems with TSN started from the very beginning, when "MegaBoris" chose to remain in the WSBN staff channel under the pretense that he was part of WSBN, when his entire intention was to glean as much information from me as possible so he could take it to his friends Wonderdog and Beatstick, the originators of "TSN". To make matters worse, the long-standing grudges between top teams began to creep into WSBN as well.
What started off as a completely innocent and well-intentioned comment from me started one of the biggest and longest-running problems that affected WSBN. While on the air with Warwitch during a dual-cast of S3 vs Team 5150, (yes, WSBN was the first station to ever dual-cast a game), I was asked by Warwitch who I thought would be the victor. I was well-aware of 5150's playing skill, they had rocketed up the ladder undefeated and were considered a serious team, one to be reckoned with. However, S3 was a grizzled squad and the current #1 champions, a team who had "popped the cherry" of many contender teams. As honestly as I could say it, I said both teams were powerhouses and I really didn't know who was going to win, and then I added the critical line, "I dunno... I'm gonna have to root for the boys on the west coast and hope S3 pulls it out." (Or something very very close to that.) The game commenced, and a knock-down drag-out battle ensued with S3 eventually winning.
About a day or so later, all hell broke loose. I got a most curious email from "SmokingMan" from Team 5150, lamenting on how "biased" I was, blasting WSBN for what I said during my cast. Bewidlered, I immediately went to the WSBN staff channel and asked if anyone heard anything that could be construed as biased or innapropriate. Every single member of the staff said no, and agreed with me that SmokingMan's email was not only wrong, but almost insane. There was a huge discussion in the WSBN staff channel because Warwitch and I were bewildered that 5150 would be offended by something so petty. Everyone in the staff channel scratched their heads wondering, quite simply, what they hell are they tripping on? After a few hours of everyone talking amongst themselves and talking with 5150 and so forth, eventually it just boiled down to SmokingMan himself, who seemed to have taken offense for no reason whatsoever. At this point I passed the comment in the staff channel, "It's just SmokingMan, he's the main fruitypants." Not 30 seconds later I got a private IRC message from SmokingMan, and in the ensuing conversation he repasted me my exact comment, quoted from IRC: "It's just SmokingMan, he's the main fruitypants."
I was livid. The standing rule in WSBN was "what is said in the staff channel stays in the staff channel." Not only did someone break a cardinal organization rule, but whoever the idiot was probably just made the situation with 5150 a hundred times worse that it was 30 seconds before. With this in mind I went back to the staff channel and asked point blank who was repasting conversations to 5150. I knew that it was one of two people, either MegaBoris or Maelstrom, both of whom were familiar with 5150 and who I didn't know all that well. It turns out that it was MegaBoris, and being the spineless weasel that he is, he didn't admit to it like a man and instead denied it. At the time I couldn't prove it was either one, so I once again asked the guilty part to step forward and own up to it. Nobody did, both professed their innocence. SmokingMan was no help on the matter either, he wouldn't tell me who pasted him the info. So now, faced without much of an alternative, I gave the guilty party one last chance to own up to it, telling them both that unless the guilty party steps up and takes it like a man, I'm going to have to fire both Maelstrom and MegaBoris - and in the process fire an innocent guy. Again MegaBoris denied it. So after apologizing to both, (at the time I really didnt know which one of them did it, and I also didnt know just what a douchebag MegaBoris really was) after apologizing for having to do so, I kicked them both from WSBN. I simply was not going to have such a breech of trust and security involved in WSBN.
So now WSBN was slightly at odds with its friends TribalWar, and was at odds with 5150 for reasons that nobody really knew, and at odds with two of 5150's friends as well. I tried yet again to find out exactly what the problem was with 5150, but I was met with the strangest of silences, they wouldn't tell me anything. But it was difficult for me to be angry with 5150 because I knew that it was a misunderstanding of some sort, because I knew what I said on the air, I knew how many times I drilled it into the WSBN casters that they were no longer players and that they were casters, so therefore to cast impartially. What 5150 was accusing me of was the very opposite of what WSBN stood for, it had to be a misunderstanding... right?
But I couldn't get it resolved. Then it finally dawned on me that 5150 probably thought - due to the WSBN website being hosted by S3 - they probably thought that S3 had WSBN in their pocket. They may have even thought that me or anyone else in WSBN would help S3 cheat in some form or fashion when we observed their games. It finally occurred to me that it probably wasn't even about me, or WSBN, it was about 5150 and S3. That brought things into focus a little more, and also made me lose a ton of respect for Team 5150. In my opinion, they sure were being shortsighted, paranoid, and petty for such a "serious" team.
With TSN being a viable alternative to WSBN, Team 5150 chose to deny WSBN future game casts and granted only TSN permission. My opinion of the team lowered even further at this point, but it was so silly to begin with - and so unfounded - that I think I felt more amazement and bewilderment at this point more than actual anger. I decided against instigating the problem any further and simply asked my friends in NuTz and S3 to back WSBN up when the time came, and to tell 5150 to stop being such cocks about nothing. I asked my friends to either stand up for WSBN and tell 5150 to give equal time to the two networks, or else to deny TSN the right to cast the match. Fortunately, my friends in S3 and Nutz agreed, not so much as pro-WSBN I don't think but more as "fuck-5150". 5150 chose the "no cast" option, and the gaming public sat there wondering "Why isn't this being casted????" to which I had the simple answer, "File your complaints with 5150, we wanted to cast the match but they declined." This ridiculous pattern of network battling over matches would continue in a hundred different ways for over a year.
When it was discovered that it was in fact MegaBoris who had supplied the confidental (but flippant) remark I made, "It's SmokingMan, he's the main fruitypants", and thus making the ridiculous situation worse, the matter was compounded further when MegaBoris joined TSN immediately after my firing of him. Then it was learned that he was part of setting up TSN from the start, and - unlike what an honorable person would do - he chose to stay in the WSBN staff channel under the pretense of working with WSBN. The intention was to get as much information as possible since he didnt know how to do a dammned thing on his own, technically. So I personally felt like my pocket had been picked, although it was a very good lesson on honor and the Internet.
Combined with this there was also splitting camps dividing down the center - those who liked S3 and didnt like 5150, and those who liked 5150 and hated S3. Since WSBN had started with the help of S3, WSBN was thrown into the middle also, an unwitting victim of gamer egos. By this point, all of my good intentions with WSBN were being pissed on by people who had no interests outside of their own ridiculous egos, and I had a choice to make. Do I fight? It was an option - I can run a battle as well as anyone. Do I suck it up, turn the other cheek, and stick to my original goal of an impartial organization giving something positive to the scene? I chose the latter. When TSN began their ongoing shenanigans of pressuring teams to be "TSN only", I forbade anyone in WSBN from doing the same. If WSBN casted a team one week, we didn't put up a squawk when TSN wanted to cast them the next week. Although the TSN staff was ruthless when pressuring teams to be "TSN only", seemingly against all reason I forbade anyone in WSBN from doing the same. "Fight fire with fire!" was their rational reasoning, while "Two wrong don't make a right" was mine. My belief was that, eventually, the teams would tire of the nightmarish hassle of having a match casted every week, and that WSBN will be remembered as the organization that tried to keep things COOL and un-problematic. I reasoned that it wasn't worth trading our integrity for it, and to keep the WSBN influence positive, not ego-centric.
However, although the staff of WSBN knew that my intention was to keep WSBN's dignity intact, it was difficult to let the public know exactly what was going on behind the scenes. When I did speak out against the unscrupulous tactics used by TSN to pressure and harass teams, I was branded as a "troublemaker" and "instigator" by the TSN lackeys looking for acceptance. I fought quite a few forum battles with the TSN crowd and TSN staff, and it was usually over their outright lousy way of conducting business. My reasoning was that competition was competition, business was business, but even businesses have codes of conduct they adhere to. You dont stick a Macdonald's sign on Wendy's lawn, and Wendy's doesnt try to burn down Burger King's kitchen. I never tried to burn down TSN, but I damned sure would sit up on my roof with a shotgun late at night. A few times I had to put buckshot into a TSN llama...
A curious thing I noticed about the people who I came in contact with was who was vocal and who wasn't. When I did speak out with my observations about the casting situation, I would be called mistaken, or an instigator, or a self-serving liar, or even worse. It was utterly fascinating to me. Here were teams hating TSN for the bullshit they were making everyone go through week after week, and here I was getting reports all day long from everywhere as to just how lame a situation it had become, yet the TSN lackeys would blindly beat their drum and say I was "starting trouble" or lying, while the people who agreed with me the most stayed quiet. The majority of people who supported me and believed me, and knew that what I was saying was very much in fact accurate would rarely speak out in public about it. As much as they applauded my non-problematic approach to casting, they very rarely stepped forward to say "He's right". It's something that still puzzles me to this day. The people who supported me did so because I took a more positive approach to everything, and they, in their positivity, didnt want to get involved in forum fights and arguements and so avoided "getting involved". They would take the intiative to agree with me in emails and IRC, but most wouldn't stand up in public to do so. It's a puzzling Catch22 that I don't think I'll ever understand.
Around this time I began to look at TribalWar in a different light. What started as an open forum centered around competition had degenerated into having too many no-life losers whose only contribution to the world was how often and how inanely they posted to a forum. It took a long time for me to realize it, but I was having a contest of opinions with people who had no idea what they were talking about, but due to the TribalWar policy of "no censorship", whoever posted the loudest and the most insultingly got the most attention. Most of the arguements that I found myself in were devoid of reason and truth. Just like anything I guess, people given free reign to their minds can spin arguement after arguement about any subject whatsoever, while resolving absolutely nothing in the end. If I said the sun is pretty, anyone can come up with a hundred reasons as to why the sun is not, and the arguement could rage on for a week if the participants chose to do so, but in the end it would still be a goddamned nice, sunny day outside. That's how TribalWar began to feel. It was arguing for the sake of arguing it seemed, and I wasn't interested. I was entirely too busy with work and WSBN and this blonde chick I was seeing.
WSBN was eventually approached by GameLoft, an online gaming subsidiary of UbiSoft, the software publisher. GameLoft expressed interest in WSBN, stating that they liked what we were doing and were looking to help further it along. At this time WSBN needed any help it could get. At the risk of sounding egocentric, I'm going to say flat-out that I was pioneering almost every single feature that is now commonplace for gamecasting organizations. I was coaching the casters how to cast well, I was troubleshooting their equipment, I was devising new ways to cast, designing observer HuDs, designing the website, designing the IRC system, advertising, and also casting. And I was doing this all on a daily basis. Besides working a full time job, I would spend hours at night doing a million and one things for WSBN and helping the other people in WSBN. Unfortunately though, I began to cast less and less because I spent so much time doing everything else. To cast well, you need to have a clear head, not a detail-addled head with your finger in 900 pies. This fact began to trouble me because I started all this mess because I liked to cast. I didnt start WSBN to become "SuicideTaxi Station Manager", I started it to be SuicideTaxi, that guy who casts games like they do for the NFL. When GameLoft expressed interest in WSBN, I was at a crossroads, personally. I had put a TON of time and effort into WSBN, I had helped dozens of people learn to cast, I had come up with the majority of ideas for it, and here I was not doing the one thing I liked to do most - casting. GameLoft was of the opinion that WSBN was laying the groundwork for what would eventually become a mainstream, mass-appeal thing, so I had to dwell on it for a while. Was the rag-tag band of freaks that made up WSBN really doing something worthwhile?
It certainly seemed like I was doing the vast majority of the work involved, while everyone else was more interested in just casting. I rationalized that though, because to cast well, you shouldn't be worried about 100 other things, you should be able to pull up to a mic and be interested in the game, not the website, or the audio server, or whether the IRC system was malfunctioning, or why the recording won't upload, etc etc etc. I told GameLoft point blank that there was significant labor overhead to make something like WSBN even remotely "professional", and unless GameLoft was willing to invest in salaries to keep people focused on doing the work involved, I simply didn't see how WSBN could be anything more than what it was - an amatuer gaming organization. GameLoft however had big plans, and they assured me that eventually the time would come to where online gaming was a professional activity. I took this reassurance with a grain of salt - I'd heard it before but I still didn't see it on the horizon. GameLoft picked up on my skepticism and soon revealed to me their plan of partnership with the OGL and Teamplay, their plan of sponsorship for game casts, and of "exclusive broadcast rights to the two biggest gaming ladders on the Internet." It was an ambitious plan, and as much as I wanted to believe in it, it struck me as shortsighted, shallow, and unrealistic. How could they expect to generate sponsorship funds by casting amatuer gamers who are playing with software they purchased, on Internet connections that they were paying for, on game servers that they were providing? I tried not to show it, but I was, at the very best, completely skeptical. Not only did it seem an unrealistic expectation, but it struck me as morally wrong. But at the time GameLoft was the only major company expressing interest in what we were doing, so I decided to ride with it for a while. I agreed to let GameLoft host WSBN, but I declined signing anything and manouvered my way into having a foolproof way to bail out the GameLoft arrangement at any time. I would soon be very thankful for that foresight.
The loose arrangement between WSBN and GameLoft was that WSBN would strive to be as professional as possible in the hopes of furthering our organization. To me, this was a ridiculous expectation to ask since nobody in WSBN was a professional game announcer, or possessed a degree in communications, or were even interested in being any of the above. I certainly wanted professional gaming and professional gamecasting to become a reality, but the people involved in WSBN were simply amatuers involved in a recreational activity. We also had no website crew to speak of, and the little help we did get on the website was from people learning to do it. As such, our website was a mess, coded in five different languages and looking like the south end of a northbound hyena. As much I tried to push the "quality" issue to our casters, I was met with resistance because it was either beyond the person's ability or else beyond their budget. "Buy a new mic? Why?? What's wrong with the headset I've been using for the past two years??"
The stress began to take its toll on me and on the WSBN crew itself. I was pushing quality quality quality on people who had no concept of what professional quality really was. I was running around being the technical go-to guy for everyone, coaching new casters and showing them the ropes, fighting off TSN llamas on one side, and trying to meet GameLoft's expectations on the other. WSBN was struggling badly. I knew I had taken WSBN down the hard road when I declined hosting from TribalWar.com, but all we really needed was some contributing input from the rest of the WSBN staff. That input rarely came, and I thought I would burst at the seams. I have a terrible, terrible habit of, when faced with adversity, I push even harder. At some point you just gotta know when to give, and too often I have a problem reaching that point. At this time in WSBN it was one of those points - I should have just given up, I think. I was working on taking gaming to the "Next Level", but I'm not really sure how many other people were there with me trying to accomplish that. My inspiration, again, was the top-notch players and teams whom I admired. Maybe it's just my personal thing, but players who make the great shot or the wise decision on the field, and the teams that manage to pull together to beat their opponents, I love that stuff. I love to see it, to read about it, and to do it myself. That was my inspiration to keep hacking away at WSBN - I wanted to be the guy shining the spotlight on the people whose skills I respected. But now that I look at it, I was probably taking an unrealistic view of things. It was, after all, a video game, and although some people can do impressive and sometimes incredible things in that digital world, the majority of players are generally approaching it as "a pastime", a hobby. "Playing" rather than competing. (And then there are always the delusional egocentrics who swear that they are hard core and that they COMPETE DAMNIT, but then you see their demos or play them in a server and you have to roll your eyes...)
TribalWar was still the center of competition discussion, and growing. Imposter was still in a league by himself finding the best news stories, and they had also added a few more news posters as well. The forum traffic was astronomical, people would use it like most other people use IRC. Eventually GameLoft set their eyes on TribalWar as well, and it seems that Rayn and Co. were looking to break away from Zero-X's Gameshack. Not long after WSBN was hosted by GameLoft, TribalWar came aboard also. Although I was glad for Tribalwar itself, the situation with TSN puzzled me. GameLoft were now hosting two competing organizations, organizations with more bad blood than could ever be expected to disappear. "How did GameLoft plan on dealing with that situation?" I asked, to which I got a variety of unrealistic responses, such as "You two should just work together" and "It's no big deal." Although I tried to realistically explain that although I personally have been compromising and rational from the start, I didn't see anyone from TSN becoming so any time soon. My warnings went unheeded, and the daily wranglings with TSN continued unabated. Daily. Every day was something new, and it was usually problems with teams where Team A wanted WSBN, but Team B wanted TSN only and refused to compromise. Meanwhile, some members of Team B wanted WSBN also, so the team members would even be arguing amongst themselves! Arguing over who would cast their match! It was ridiculous, but it happened daily, spurred on by TSN's pressuring of teams not to compromise. WSBN would very often compromise - if we casted a team one week we would NOT cast them the next week, thus giving TSN the unfettered opportunity to cast them without hassle. However, the same courtesy was never, ever shown, and the cycle would continue.
You would think that I would have thrown my hands up at some point and said "This is too ridiculous for words, Im done with this...", but I only pushed harder. I pushed myself and pushed everyone in WSBN to do a better job. However, things began to happen that made things even more difficult. I began to get the sneaking suspicion that GameLoft was doing things to hamper WSBN. Although I tried everything within my dignity to compromise with TSN and its retarded staff, and although I tried to use GameLoft as mediators of disputes, I could tell that GameLoft really wasnt interested in helping WSBN or ending the long standing feud with TSN. WSBN was simply on its own, with just its website hosted by GameLoft. I can't say I blame GameLoft for that because WSBN was, at this point, quite simply struggling to be at the forefront of online gamecasting. Since Tribalwar got the most exposure to people, they also managed to scoop up most of the contributing members of the community. TSN benefitted from this greatly, because they also got a website out of the deal. WSBN had to do it all on its own, from website to casting to HuDs to IRC code, you name it. The Hard Road, to be sure. So with WSBN struggling like it was, it wouldnt have been surprising to me in the least if GameLoft was no longer interested, so I asked them, many times, to either help us or tell us that they weren't interested. They did neither. It's my suspicion that they knew of my ability to innovate and they either intended on keeping me around to absorb my innovations, or else have me jump ship and join TSN, or else they intended to slowly choke the life out of WSBN and destroy it as a competitor. Maybe even a combination of all three.
A curious incident occurred around this time, an incident that I think justified my previous statements that TSN were run by a bunch of honorless llamas who did nothing but spread misery. It was the pinnacle of competitive Tribes 1. Tribes 2 was slated to be released soon, and teams had been playing T1 for almost three years. Although the competition was fierce on the ladders, mostly everyone knew that the end was coming soon. There weren't many secrets left, all of the play innovations had been discovered, and in one night it all seemed to come to a head. Team 5150 was reigning the top of the ladder and had been so for months, having toppled S3 on their second attempt. S3 now resided at a quiet #2 spot, quietly biding their time until they could challenge 5150 again. When the moment arose, the match was slated to occur on the same day that S3 squared off against another superteam, Imperial Elite, for a final game on the Teamplay ladder. The three fiercest competitors that Tribes 1 had ever seen were going to be playing all on the same night, and I was making every effort to be sure that WSBN was going to be bringing it to the masses. But, of course, there were problems. Team 5150 was being difficult as usual, wanting TSN to cast the match, and Imperial Elite, which TSN co-founder Beatstick was a player for, were being somewhat difficult also. These two games were undoubtably the most hyped-up and looked forward-to Tribes 1 games ever played, and S3's Rasta wasn't buying the "TSN only" routine. Rasta, a long time friend of WSBN and generally rational person in general, agreed in the interest of fairness to allow TSN to cast one of the games, while WSBN was allowed to cast the other. The usual wranglings ensued in the days before the match, and everyone waited tensely to see how it all would be worked out. Eventually the arrangement came to TSN casting the first match against 5150, with WSBN casting the epic second match against Imperial Elite. But the night before the match, Rasta dropped a hydrogen bomb on the TribalWar forums, and in my eyes at least, exposed TSN's morally corrupt leaders.
S3's Rasta had one stipulation to TSN casting their match against 5150, and the stipulation was that since Wonderdog was slated to cast the match, and since Wonderdog lived near his fellow TSN staffer Beatstick, Wonderdog had to give strict assurances "on his honor" that Beatstick was not to observe the match over Wonderdog's shoulder - since Beatstick was scheduled to play against S3 later that evening in the Imperial Elite match. Rasta received all the assurances he needed to agree to the match, and he put his trust in Wonderdog that Beatstick would not be present during the cast. However, not long afterwards, S3 had apparently been tipped off by a TSN staff member that a conversation occurred indicating that Beatstick in fact was going to be present in the room during the cast. Logs were provided to S3, and Rasta was fit to be tied. He messaged me with the entire story, and all I could do was say "See, wtf you think I've been saying all this time..." I asked Rasta what he was going to do, and he said "Wait and see, I'm going to expose these *censored*".
Expose he did. In all of the forum posts I've read in my life, of all the contraversies I've seen come and go, I've never seen someone so hardcore owned on a forum in all my life. Rasta spelled it out from from to back, listing every nuance of detail, and even provided the logs of the exchange between Wonderdog and Beatstick. It was a humiliating post for TSN, but one that was well-deserved. Other people stepped forward to mention other moral wrongdoings done to them by TSN, and the post grew exponentially. TSN appeared to be ignoring the the contraversy, until finally someone stepped in at some point to post a quaint, hardly believable denial - the logged conversation was a joke between Wonderdog and Beatstick and wasn't meant seriously. TSN appeared to be trying to brush the entire situation off like it was meaningless, and at one point they described the affair as "a tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing." Apparently it was much ado about a lot because Rasta refused to have TSN cast his team's match, and on this decision he was adamant. This of course brought more wranglings from Team 5150 and Beatstick's Imperial Elite, and Rasta audaciously repasted every log into the TribalWar forums for all to see. Readers were amazed at the pettiness and manipulation shown by TSN's upper management, and even though the entire situation may have very well have been what Wonderdog and Beatstick claimed it was - a joke - the horrible publicity that they received I thought was very well deserved. I felt justified. I wasn't such a drama queen after all! The things I tried to bring to public attention time and again - things I thought that were so, so wrong with the gaming scene - they had substance and Rasta was proving that.
In the end, WSBN wound up casting the 5150-S3 match, and it was an epic one. Hundreds of people tuned in as S3 regained their #1 spot on the OGL, and then an hour later beat Imperial Elite in the long-awaited Teamplay match. Then, suddenly, S3 abrubtly announced it was retiring from Tribes 1 competition and resigned from all of its ladders at the top of its game, coining the legendary phrase, "V-A-B, nothing left to prove."
It was the peak of the Tribes 1 competition scene, and WSBN was still there bringing it to the crowd. However, eventually it reached the point where I knew something was too rotten to continue with GameLoft. I had known that TSN had signed contractual agreements with them, I knew that GameLoft had invested alot of effort and time to hosting TribalWar, I knew that GameLoft had signed contractual agreements with the OGL, and all of that was pointing at one thing - sponsored, advertised gamecasting. Yet WSBN - the originators and innovators of all of it, and me, the guy who trained, set up, and coached most of the casters from obscurity to premier castmanship - we were getting the redhaired stepchild treatment from GameLoft. I knew that our days with them were numbered, but there really wasn't much I could do about it. The only things, and I mean the only things that WSBN had in it's corner was my opinion that their Master Plan would fail, and my diehard belief that WSBN was looking at things maturely and realistically while dealing with teams in a friendly manner - not using mafioso tactics in order to force teams to be casted by WSBN. I was dead certain that the friendly WSBN approach was the right way and I refused to waver from it. I thought that even if WSBN was eventually defeated and failed, that WSBN would go down with its dignity intact. I wanted "professional gamecasting" just as much as anyone else, but I knew it wouldnt happen by forcing it down people's throats. I held my faith that we were doing "the right thing" in the face of all odds.
I eventually came to the realization that I wasn't imagining the "red haired stepchild" treatment from GameLoft either, and I decided to bail out. At the time I had no viable alternative for a web host, but I decided to bite the bullet and hit the eject button on the whole situation anyway. Kind of like Gorbachev when he decided to dissolve the Soviet Union - he knew it was going to suck and bring hardship and chaos on everyone, but he also knew that such drastic change would eventually lead to a better future for his country. Well, I perestroika'd my ass right out of GameLoft despite their threats of "You leave and you're cutting your own throat". I found a temporary web host, and we set up conducting business as usual. It wasn't easy. Our retarded website was a mess and wouldn't function properly, and generally nothing would work right. I also discovered that GameLoft, not content to let sleeping dogs lie, were also putting their corporate pressure wherever they could to get other companies to deny hosting to WSBN. A most promising arrangement with GameSpy was nullified once GameLoft got wind of the deal and subsquently pressured GameSpy into cancelling the arrangement. WSBN actually had the domain nameservers pointed at GameSpy and the FTP accounts enabled when the plug was suddenly pulled. My emails to GameSpy went unanswered, but eventually a "friend on the inside" informed me that GameSpy had to pull the plug in order to appease their business parter, GameLoft.
Some time after all of this I was approached by two modest, straight speaking men, Scott England and Adam Vener, directors of this company called "HomeLAN". Upon first hearing about them, my first question was of course, "What the hell's a home lan?" I'd never heard of them before, what did they want? "Sockpuppet" and "Serpentius" expressed interest in hosting WSBN, and I looked into them. The were primarily a game server host, with news and forums and a giant gamer "Federation" as well. While browsing their website, I hit a dead stop when I saw a section for the "HomeLAN Broadcast Network". No way! - I thought - I ain't doing this again! I told the courteous gentlemen that I was in no way interested in getting involved in such an arrangement again. I'm sure I made quite a caricature of myself when dealing with the two, because - coming so close on the heels of the disasterous GameLoft arrangement and generally dealing with one backstabbing organization after another - I didn't trust these two corporate weasels as far as I could throw them. Funny thing though, they really didn't strike me as corporate weasels, but that's probably exactly why I thought they were corporate weasels - cuz they hid it so well. Okay, GameLoft made me paranoid!
After talking for a considerable amount of time about the future of gamecasting, about WSBN's past, about WSBN's expectations, and about WSBN's limitations, (something that GameLoft's delusions kept them from seeing), I began to realize that HomeLAN held the same principles that WSBN did. They were grounded in reality, but were hopeful and interested in the growth of Internet gamecasting. They also operated with honor and honesty, and although WSBN sure didn't share HomeLAN's puritan view on swear words, both organizations had a positive intent - making gaming better, and more fun.
With a new partnership intact, WSBN then hit the second stage of its life. A new website grew thanks to the tireless work of MadHatter, and new blood came into the crew. It was bright new day, and then all HELL broke loose.
GameLoft, much sooner than expected, made a bold announcement of the launch of the "GameLoft Broadcast Network", stating "exclusive rights" to the OGL ladder and a bold new step in online gaming. The new arrangement not only excluded WSBN - and as such excluded many many members of the competitive Tribes scene - but also put stipulations on players, stating that global chat spam was no longer permissible during casted games, and that no team on the OGL can refuse to be casted under penalty of suspension from the ladder. It also granted the OGL complete rights to team names, player names, and team logos. The news was met with a mixture of awe and horror, mostly horror. Nazi symbols were posted in every forum thread relating to the matter, and the entire community came out in droves to give a collective finger to GameLoft, to TSN, and the OGL. Server admins threatened to ban OGL matches on their servers, and players talked of dropping off the ladder completely. Meanwhile, I just sat back and watched. I knew that it wasn't any kind of pro-WSBN stance anyone was taking, their stance was simple outrage that a company such as GameLoft thought it could make a dollar off the game they bought, off of their playing skill, off of their bandwidth, and off of their time. GameLoft, falling into the usual corporate trap of underestimating the intelligence of their market, thought that the players were so insipidly dumb that they would jump up and down at the chance of being casted. Meanwhile, of course, GameLoft would sit back and run ads for Coca Cola or something while counting up the dollar signs.
Although I knew that most people were simply taking a stand for their own rights, there were also many influential members of WSBN and influential friends of WSBN who spread the word that GameLoft was not only trying to make a buck off the players, but were also causing divisions amongst the teams themselves. Worse than ever before, players who were fans and part of WSBN were deadlocked against their teammates who might be TSN. It was a ridiculous mess who's only cause was GameLoft's, OGL's, and TSN's stupidity and greed. And if the GameLoft/OGL announcement wasn't enough of a contraversy, TribalWar decided to drop a bomb of their own.
Later that evening, TribalWar announced that their long-awaited project "The Tribalwar Ladder" was ready to launch. In reality, the ladder wasn't even finished yet, but Triston and Polaris knew a good opportunity when they saw one, so they launched the ladder a little prematurely. For the first time, Tribes players were offered an alternative to the problem-plauged OGL and this announcement was met with cheers and praise by everyone, except of course GameLoft. GameLoft immediately put a gag order on the TribalWar staff, threatening everything from pulling their hosting to lawsuits, and demanded that the "TribalWar Ladder" be taken down. Triston and Polaris, who not only had been working on the ladder coding for months but also objected to the entire GameLoft arrangement, refused to back down and instead chose to leave TribalWar.com and start a completely independant ladder. They had only one slight problem - they had no webserver or bandwidth. Enter Team 5150's TheRedDread, who ran various webservers and gameservers. TheRedDread offered up a webserver, and the "Team Warfare League" was born.
WSBN helped launch the TWL by giving players the exact same thing they would get on the OGL, only with less headaches, less corruption, and less exploitation. I personally made every effort to preach the TWL gospel, just as I had done for TribalWar when they first started. I was truly elated that - for the first time - a viable alternative to the ineptness and corruption of the OGL was forming. It was like writing out the Declaration of Independence, only in relation to online gaming.
Now I was determined even more to raise the level of quality with WSBN. With two great new opportunities - our great partner HomeLAN and the new ladder TWL - I felt that WSBN could really stretch its wings and see what it could do. We had virtually unlimited bandwidth and almost unconditional support from the community. Plus, Tribes 2 was coming out soon, and Tribes 1 loaned itself so completely to gamecasting that it was assumed that Tribes 2 would do the same. I drove myself and the WSBN staff even harder to put on good casts, to improve our website features, and to generally make things as good as possible.
Once Tribes 2 was released, WSBN really hit its stride. The game, although somewhat of a letdown as a sequel, it loaned itself easily to casting. It also added a much great dimension of teamwork needed to get anything done and it was an interesting departure from the cowboy-like gameplay of most games. WSBN had great casters on the air, I had mastered video-casting, and WSBN even did some road shows during the summer at UVALAN3 and TribesCon3. Hell, we even had our own damned WSBNmobile to cruise around to LANs in. The details to make all this possible were tremendous, and I oftentimes got bogged down with technical details and helping others, but in the back of my head I never forgot the fact that this was all in preparation for the evenuality of the competition gaming scene becoming something more than part-time gamers - of becoming professional. Thanks to a funding paycheck provided by HomeLAN, I spent most of my time learning and investigating one technology after another, figuring out new ways of doing things, consuming knowledge at an incredible rate, getting myself as familiar as possible with online media. I also spent an incredible amount of time managing WSBN. Assigning this project to that guy, helping new casters get situated, writing up How-To's for the staff so I wouldnt have to explain everything in IRC, basically diving head-first into every facet of WSBN. The bar for new casters began to get higher and higher, the average guy with the crappy gaming mic and the one computer just wasn't up to par anymore. Most of the WSBN casters were equipped with real mics, hardware sound mixers, multiple computers, etc, and it showed. WSBN put on the best quality casts and they were fun to listen to.
I eventually wanted to put together a studio. My WSBN equipment had doubled and then quadrupled, and it was a far cry from the P166 I first ran shoutcast software from. I needed more space for all the equipment and I wanted the ability to host a permanent audio server with non-stop music and gaming content, plus the ability to video gamecast, plus the ability to do sound and video editing. Rasta eventually talked me into finally moving out west, and I trucked my entire life out to Reno Nevada and set up shop. From there I hit the ground running, and I built a custom studio from the ground up, complete with just about everything. My original intention was to videocast once a week, a gaming show on a Friday or Saturday with news, interviews, previews, and so on. Unfortunately tho, the day-to-day technicals of WSBN just about sapped my will to live and drained almost all my energy, so by the time the evening rolled around I was completely uninterested in casting anything. A caster needs a clear head, period. A caster who has been coding a script all day, or learning to edit video, or designing graphics or websites, a caster whose brain is exhausted at match time is quite simply a boring caster. More often than not I backed out of doing casts cuz I thought my brain would explode if I thought of one more thing.
Eventually I reached the same conclusion that HomeLAN reached about WSBN. There was no way for WSBN to become a financially self-supporting entity. There was entirely too much overhead needed to produce a product that had enough appeal to either get people to pay for, or else to sell advertising space on. It simply wasnt going to happen. I knew it and HomeLAN knew it, and the funding for WSBN stopped. At that point I decided to stop casting altogether. I had taken WSBN from a clueless guy on a P166 and expanded it to a 20+ member team of damned near professional ability gamecasters and staffers, I'd coached dozens of people who initially SUCKED at gamecasting and helped them become proficient, I'd helped spawn an entirely new gaming ladder with thousands of players on it, I'd travelled the country and been the guest of strangers, and I'd pioneered almost every gamecasting feature that people see today and take for granted. With HomeLAN dropping the funding for WSBN, I would never have the time to contiue developing it. So I backed out.
When all the dust had settled and when I looked around with a clear head, it's really really weird to see how things have progressed but really not progessed at all. In fact, online gaming in many ways has regressed. What started off as a pastime, a hobby, a game, for a brief time it accelerated rapidly into something very hardcore competitive, but then gradually simmered back down right where it started to begin with - a competitive pastime. Teams still make strats, players still show up for "practice", but it seems the old days of staying up all night practicing or throwing everything into your game is long gone. During the T1 days and during the first six months of Tribes 2, losing was not acceptable. When you lost, you were pissed. But nowadays, losing is no big deal, nobody seems to care too much. And I don't get that. It puts me at odds with today's players. Nowadays teams lose and they go to forums, shrug their shoulders, say "gg", and talk about something else. During the T1 days, when teams lost, you wouldn't see them for three days cuz they were either bummed or pissed off. If you did see them, their team was in a server practicing everything they did wrong to lose in the first place. I'm not saying it's bad or good, but if the teams are in it mostly "for fun" and really don't care if they lose, then - in my opinion - what's the point of casting them? "For fun"? I guess... but not me, someone else can cast for fun, I'm not interested.
Added to that, a new casting group pops up just about every week it seems, and the vast majority of their casters would never have gotten into WSBN or TSN even on their best day. But nobody seems to mind the poor casting quality though, and this too puts me at odds with everything. If the teams really don't care if they win or lose and the audience doesn't care what they listen to, then my time in this arena is finished. Combined with the release of Classic Tribes 2 - which I think completely ruined the game I loved - it's definitely time to get out of the whole scene. Online gaming is nowhere closer to becoming a mainstream event and the people involved in it are nowhere closer to becoming professional gamers than they were two years ago. It's still made up of people involved in a "pastime", and not made up of committed teams intent on beating the other team at all cost. Unfortunately, most gamers still have papers to write, reports to finish, children to make dinner for, dates to go on, projects to complete, and all the rest of the "real life" distractions that keep the teams at a "hobby" or "pastime" level. Yes, there are a few gamers out there with the budget, the lifestyle, and the ability to throw everything into becoming proficient players and to build proficient teams, but on the whole, teams are made up of average people distracted by a million other things in their lives.
So with all of this in mind, I think there are two ways that WSBN can go. One is to disappear completely and dismantle all of our hard work, or the other is to open up the doors of WSBN to more people and to change our expectations of quality. Although it saddens me (since WSBN really did set the standard of quality for a long time) WSBN needs to become more down-to-earth and realistic, and to lose it's illusions of "professional quality" casting. WSBN needs to return to the grassroots level that it started off as, to be more forgiving of mistakes, and to return to being a part of the gaming communities, and not something sitting on top of the gaming communities, looking down. So with that in mind, the doors to WSBN are now open to everyone. We have a pretty pimp system intact with a lot of bandwidth, and all of the casters who were turned down in the past by WSBN are welcome to re-apply. If you've ever thought about casting, give it a shot, the gaming scenes can definitely use you!
As for me, my computer time is spent more on video editing than gaming lately, and I've been getting more and more into the art of video production. I think that the UVALAN4 video will be my last big contribution to the gaming scene, and after that I'll just become a regular dude again, hanging out in IRC, keeping to myself, and playing SoF2 a couple of times a week. I don't want to manage WSBN anymore at all. "The thrill is gone" and all that stuff. I'm hoping that maybe, if my energy doesn't get zapped by all the crap that goes down in WSBN, I might even start casting some SoF2 CTF. Becoming just a regular caster again! Oh my.
I kind of got a raw deal on this WSBN stuff, really. Initially I just wanted to cast games, but the position of being a popular gamecaster and head of an organization put me at odds with alot of people. Since I spoke to and heard from so many different people, I had a different perspective of things than the average person did because I was privvy to more information, and this put me at odds with some people as well. I didn't see things as a player or a captain or a mapper or a modder anymore, I saw things as a spectator watching it all. An outsider, a fly-on-the-wall. It gave me a different perspective, to be sure.
Plus, I was working to make something professional quality, and that put me even more at odds with some people. My expectations were higher, the level of acceptance higher, the bar of quality higher. I had to knock heads with quite a few people over it, but in the end, the person who benefitted the most from my quality expectations was the audience. I refused to accept mediocre effort from people in WSBN, and more often than not, that's exactly what people were inclined to offer - mediocrity. So instead of being a regular guy who did his own thing and enjoyed his wonderful WSBN creation, I became the guy who was looking over everyone's shoulder saying, "Deliver quality. Exert yourself." Sometimes this didn't make me very popular, but it made WSBN the benchmark for quality casting.
So now it's full circle. The WSBN doors are open to the gaming communities and people are welcome to join up and apply. Nobody really runs WSBN anymore, so if you ever wanted to run an online gamecasting orgnization, step up and do that too! The doors are open, if you ever wanted to be a part of WSBN, now is the time to do so. I'm backing off my hold on WSBN and I'm content to be just the video editing guy.
I hope that this post puts things in perspective for alot of people, especially those people who I've knocked heads with over the years. I just simply didn't have the time or inclination to deal with petty things, I was too busy trying to push the quality and cause of gamecasting.
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So... let us review.
I am:
A fat meth-addicted child molester and rapist, who is an unemployed unskilled technician that bought a $30,000 4x4 truck to drive on asphalt back and forth to work, who can't do anything without consulting an internet forum and has "shoutcasting" as the primary entry on his resume, and by either lack of hygiene or Italian heritage has long greasy hair, has an immigrant wife with no ass that he ordered off the internet, has never gotten laid, and either buttfucks or gets buttfucked by Strega on a regular basis.
Did I get everything?
I am:
A fat meth-addicted child molester and rapist, who is an unemployed unskilled technician that bought a $30,000 4x4 truck to drive on asphalt back and forth to work, who can't do anything without consulting an internet forum and has "shoutcasting" as the primary entry on his resume, and by either lack of hygiene or Italian heritage has long greasy hair, has an immigrant wife with no ass that he ordered off the internet, has never gotten laid, and either buttfucks or gets buttfucked by Strega on a regular basis.
Did I get everything?
yeah, 20
streetwi$e
Veteran-5
I had no idea it was actually 20 pages holy shit Lol
So... let us review.
I am:
A fat meth-addicted child molester and rapist, who is an unemployed unskilled technician that bought a $30,000 4x4 truck to drive on asphalt back and forth to work, who can't do anything without consulting an internet forum and has "shoutcasting" as the primary entry on his resume, and by either lack of hygiene or Italian heritage has long greasy hair, has an immigrant wife with no ass that he ordered off the internet, has never gotten laid, and either buttfucks or gets buttfucked by Strega on a regular basis.
Did I get everything?
you're getting there bro
you have to add:
"and is such a homo he doesn't mind coldly admitting all of this stuff about himself".
taxi cant help but be so such an overly defensive faggot
this is too easy
this is too easy