Vlaming

Kris was working on a history of how he ended up in Demoted. He felt shy about posting it in the public eye for some reason, but I got inspired to blog about my gaming past and how I ended up in Demoted. The story will be fairly long, but that's what the blog space is for amirite? Sort of like a Vlaming gaming life in review.

I've always been a gamer. I had an NES when I was 6. I got an SNES when they came out, and I still have my original 1989 gameboy. I mainly enjoyed playing RPGs, and they're really still my favorite genre to play today. The reason I gave up on my Nintendo 64 and bought a Playstation was because Square decided to release Final Fantasy onto that console. I eventually gave in and got a Playstation 2 once Final Fantasy X was released. Yes, I was a FF nerd. I had friends who were into video games, but not to the extent that I was.

For a few years in the late '90s my online gaming experience pretty much consisted of playing games with my buddies where we could connect to each other's modems and go from there. Warcraft, Warcraft II, Duke Nukem 3D and Descent were our games of choice (and some Wing Commander games for my buddy who was a flying game nerd). This was really only something that could be done in moderation though as it tied up our home phone line and my parents weren't too thrilled about that anyways. Back in the day I remember trying to play the first Diablo online, but I could because it required 16 MB of ram, and my computer only had 8 MB.

I think it was in 1999 or 2000 that my Dad decided it was time to upgrade our computer and bring in some cable internet. We overpaid on a beastly computer for the time and I agreed to pay 1/3 of all the internet costs. The first thing I did was go to the store and buy Everquest. I had heard that this game was life changing for RPG/Fantasy nerds such as myself. I played through the offline tutorial. The thing was that I never researched payment methods. I knew that you could pay with a credit card (something I didn't have at the time), so I was contemplating on how to ask my parents for that information. While I plotted my strategy I started playing my newly acquired Starcraft for free on Battle.net. I played around for a bit and got to know a few things about the online community, but this is where I eventually joined my first guild.

I joined up with "The Lost Soldiers". I don't even know why I joined it. There was a core group there that I eventually got to be fairly good friends with. The guild experience was new and fairly fascinating to me. I enjoyed my first experiences with being part of an online community. Premade 2v2 and 3v3 teams, general bullshitting with everyone, etc. Eventually I became an officer of sorts. With my new fangled cable internet I was able to be connected at all times. I kept an ultimate bot on guard in our guild channel (until Blizzard banned the use of bots). I fell victim to my first computer intrusion when I downloaded an Ultimate bot that "would work despite the ban from Blizzard" (Easily fixed by a windows re-install). Unfortunately with this guild I was also able to experience the dreaded guild drama llama. The guild leader's wife ended up sleeping with some other dude from the guild, and everything pretty much went downhill from there. I jumped to Diablo II and played that online quite a bit. I met a few people that I trusted and I played it for almost a year, but it was getting stale. Should I finally start to play Everquest?

Nah. I went back to Starcraft. I don't really remember how it happened, but I ended in a guild called "The Knights". I met a bunch of fun people. In late 2001 a bunch of people had a beef with the guild master (I think this guy used to sign onto fake accounts to troll his own guild because he wanted to "help us band together as a guild". The new guild was called "Clan Dayz". It was open to all members of The Knights, so as an officer of this new guild I would help people join up with the new clan. One of the people I met in the transition was WhiplashDayz/WhiplashKnight. I remember in one of our first discussion I was going to help her with some 1v1 strats. The common practice back in the day was that if you were playing against fellow clan members, you would use "allied victory" at the end so that the loss didn't go on their permanent record. So I join this 1v1 with Whip and zergling rush her base. I killed her, and she got the loss added to her record. I felt like a dick, and I'm fairly sure she thought I was a dick. Somewhere along the line I did something to change her mind of that though.

A few months went by, and the Dayz guild slowly starts fading off into the sunset. Members were leaving, recruitment wasn't that strong. I think I eventually became the guild leader. I was mainly using the game to keep in touch with Whip (along with online cribbage, literati, canasta, and AIM). The people in Dayz still kept in touch though through our guild forums. When Warcraft III came out, some people went and got that. I wasn't really interested in the game, but still found myself at the mall buying it the day it came out. I played it more after Whip got a copy herself at Christmas. Whip and I were married in 2003, we even had a guy from the Dayz clan fly in from Utah to be there! After we were married The Frozen Throne was released. I picked up a copy and I decided it was time to get another guild. I joined UCA (United Canadian Alliance - lawlz!). I got Whip into the guild and I also got a few Dayz members in also. We stuck with this guild for a long time. I still keep in contact with a few of these people today, but Diablo II eventually called Whip and I back to it.

We played D2 for a long time and actually we played a lot of Morrowind. I should also mention that Whip and I were using 1 computer at the time and splitting our time on it. Random Fact: One night Whip and I got drunk, I fell asleep under the dinner table and she signed onto my account and lost a game :O!. Anywho, World of Warcraft was on the horizon, but I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to it. Whip had no interest in it whatsoever. When the beta was made open for anyone to play though I jumped right on it. I loved the story of Warcraft and I wanted to see the world in a new way. I wanted to see the night elf area, I wanted to see the orc area, I wanted to see the major characters like Thrall and Rexxar. I got hooked right away. I rolled a Night Elf warrior on one server and got to about level 8 when I found out some of my UCA friends were on a different server so I ended up getting a human paladin on that server to about level 12. I had to have this game. Whip and I were slightly undecided though because we were newly married and had a wedding to pay off, and weren't sure if we wanted to add another bill to the pile.

The day WoW came out Whip says to me something like "You better get your game, I don't want you to have heart failure". That night I had it installed and I was online. I was one of the millions of people who made WoW their first MMORPG. UCA was being formed alliance side on Skullcrusher. Originally the guild name was spelled out as United Canadian Alliance, but the name got banned for having "Canadian" in it. Vlaming the night elf rogue was born. What would happen to Whip though? She swore she'd never leave D2. We both had so many gold items and learning a new game can be ftl. Stay tuned for part 2! (Worst cliffhanger ever... we know what happens to Whip!)