February 2000 Archive (1)
11 February 2000 - New Logo At Last!! Hehe, my site's had the <HooD>REViLLA title up for too long so I've finally got on with it and replaced it. The wavy look is supposed to be a bit seventies to go with the orange styling. I've kept to the styling of the old logo, same colouring and everything because I was happy with the last one. Pretty cool I think :). I've also changed how my name looks in game. Now there's no tag I can play around a bit with the colours. Site-wise I've updated my Quake autobiography/profile to reflect recent events and I'm getting to work on improving the "meat" of the site, the demos. I've got plenty to sift through, I'll just pick out the good ones. One problem is that demos are massive! Like 2-3 Mbs each so I'll probably rotate them more than I used to.
10 February 2000 - Er, REViLLA[ ] If you haven't followed the T2C site at all you won't know that T2C disbanded so I am now clanless for the first time in a while. Reasons for the clan folding are no secret to my mind. Several members simply had no "desire" to do put effort in and succeed. Some were open about this, others less so. Anyway, it's water under the bridge now, but it just feels like quite a waste of time and energy, especially the hours' of work I put into designing and maintaining the clan's site, which I'll leave up indefinitely as a souvenir of the clan :) I wish all my former teammates GL for the future, online and off :). Special thanks to SHAFT! for running the clan single handed and having 95% of the clan's "desire" to win. I've only been clanless for about four weeks in my entire playing career. Clanlessness this time has come at a good time and events offline mean that it's a good time to take a breather for a couple of months or so. Given the fact that HPBs aren't in demand for Q3 I'd say that I might remain clanless until I get ISDN, at least six months or so. So, a nice long rest ahead. Unless I get any offers that are too good to refuse :), but as I say, no one wants HPBs for league play. Btw, I know the title is STILL wrong but, tbh I can't be arsed to change it for now as each try so far I haven't got the same desired effect so it'll have to wait.
5 February 2000 - Pity The Newbies [This column originally appeared on the T2C site] I was in town today, in a PC World looking around at the Diamond Rios, mice, games, not really intending to buy anything but it's nice to look round at computer stuff. One thing I find really spooky about PC World is how identical each store is, right down to the order of the items on the shelf. Sad how little say the store managers appear to have :) Anyway, there was a display with Quake 3 Arena and boxed modems to play it on and I thought yeah nice idea because newbie players won't get the best from the game unless they play it online. There was a brilliant poster above showing some of the best models and weapons, making Q3A look like the kick ass game it is and making up for the shit awful dull grey box design. Why they didn't go with the original jet black with red q3a symbol on I don't know... Then that set me thinking about new players coming into the game. That must be an unbearable experience for a number of reasons. First of all the fact the the current generation of players are exceptionally skilled. Most of the best players have moved from QW and Q2 to Q3a so there are some amazing players to compete against. This is hard enough when you have several months experience but for a newbie it must feel like you can hardly move without being slain. Add to that the fast paced action of Q3A which means you hardly have time to get your bearing before you're engaged in combat and you're talking one mean learning curve for the new players. Then there's the problem for modemers. id didn't ship the game in a state ready for HPBs, but let's face it, newbie players will almost always begin as HPBs. How will they know how to tweak their configs to sort it out. One of the biggest aids for me was Aqua's site (linked on the links page) which at least gave me the commands to tweak. It has to be said though that that only reasonably hardcore players will know about it or have the means to find it. Newbie players won't even be aware of the "scene" as such and all the websites out there to help you out. I didn't realise the extent of this Quake world when I set out so I doubt they will. So that's what they're faced with. Unbearable lag and connection problems combined with an elite class of highly-skilled players We need newbies coming through, not for any evil reason ;) (easy fodder) but more to prevent the game fading out in the years to come. Players leave the scene every day. You need new ones to replace them. What can be done to help them? Magazines could help. Ones like PC Gamer have a decent albeit small online section but they don't give many practical tips on playing, probably because journos like that only play on the office LAN. Newbies need the raw knowledge of how to tweak their conn. They could even give away autoexecs on the coverdisk. I don't know. But not information like telling them how you can rocket jump to the middle jump pad on Q3DM17 to get up to the quad faster. I mean start with the basics. These players also need newbie only servers. Netcom was a great newbie server in Q2, not deliberately I don't think but you got a very easy game there. I personally started on Lineone which has a very friendly Quake community but few great players hung out there so you had the chance to learn in a comofrtable environment. Barrysworld/the UKCCL should maybe set up newbie servers with admins to kick any decent players :) or maybe server imposed ping limits (is this possible). Anyway the gist of this column is just to remind everyone about the poor newbie and to try to acknowledge their plight rather than just gleefully railing them from the shadows :)
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Contact Information - E-Mail: REViLLA, ICQ: 21345065 Site Created on 1 January 2000. All Content, Design and Graphics by REViLLA.
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