I don't think his Father hurt him or anything, just really wanted him to leave and go do something with his life, whereas Sonecha wanted to stay in his room playing Heroes of Newerth. As I understand it, this got progressively less acceptable to his Father until he just stopped coming online.
For long-term performance of raw skills, Sonecha was still "one of" the best. Sonecha hanged around the top for quite a long period, he however didn't fit your description (being the best and ahead of other players by light years). Right before Sonecha quits, his skill level was merely "averagely pro", still pro, but averagely. Basically, I would include him in my allstar team 2006~2008.
I really cannot agree with you here guys. Sure, I do remember Sonecha doing awesomeshit, but it was nowhere near the kind of things you describe, mostly funny-exploity-awesome type of deals. Seriously, I think you are being overnostalgic, if thats a word, telling untold histories of things that never happened. And whats with that glorification of epic members anyway? Last couple of times, it was all about them. Noone cares about simon being good with brenodi rifles or caggers being an asshole with the LT. Even fucking communism for crying out loud. It baffles me when you compare , raw skill only, people that, as you say, pro, to likes of mentioned before. They were fucking wizards. Its like noone good ever was non-epic. Seriously, I'd expect you'd remember people you had problems dealing with with rather than people you played with ol day erry day. Disclaimer: no, I do not say Sonecha wasn't one of the best, as I lack material to compare, but for shit sure he wasn't "god tier".
Ikalx, while, TBH, I don't recall security at all before post 2.2, so I sort of call bs on him having knowledge necessary to type allstar 2007 -+1, Trickster started seriously playing like ,what, 5-6 months after me? I remember JPL and BSID crews, even though I didn't even play on -whatever was there on the funny side of atlantic before mittoes-. No excuses.
Buildings were displayed as squares. List of squad members showed the ammo of individual squad member. And this map. You picked the wrong guy to play old with, young man. :D I didn't make friends and I didn't step into this community/clans before 2009. So I am not surprised that you don't recall me. When I scroll through some old screenshots, I can discover some old players(pubbers), they were good. But they were forgotten because they didn't step into the community. EDIT: In case you don't know, the create date of account don't have any shit to do with "when they started playing". I created this account to get 1.8 I believe, can't recall more.
No, I was based that on my own memory, as I really can't recall even a single time i've seen or heard about you then. Also, fu, I liked badlands. Blakkcooper hated this map with real passion, whihc only made it that much better. Its not even that old of a map afair. Not valley type of old anyway.
You trust your memory 6 years ago? Memory of a guy who didn't have mic, didn't communicate with his team? meh. I don't remember you either, but I am not denying your existence. Also, I have this thing called GMT+8, and I wasn't really obsessed with Empires, though I was already capping top scoreboards occasionally, I can still recall this. I LIKED BADLANDS TOO.
Yeah, but you have to remember, back in those days Trickster was just a troll, took him a while to gather the troll clan, too. And I think there was a lot more of a divide about when people would play. In the beginning Epic was largely European (I thought) so he might not have had much of a reason to pay that much attention to the American side. Just speculating here, but there might also have been something about having to go to bed/school etc, which hits fairly hard sometimes. Some people were/are pretty young, even if attitudes change. To be honest...although I played a lot in those days, sometimes I didn't really get to see those players as much as I would have expected. And with servers being full, a lot of people were spread out, more than concentrated tightly together, like in testing. Edit:Regarding Sonecha, the only time I really heard about him was when he was being raved about - usually by Trickster or an Epic if i'm honest. Sure, if a guy takes down two squads in a row, that's cool, but you guys don't even seem to remember that -even I- could take out 4-6 people regularly with my smg. Things were just that different. Look at my play now - one guy if i'm lucky. I'm better at CSS than Empires, lol, except for the tactical aspect. That's not due to me being out of it, that's due to the complete weapon change. People may say I haven't played that much sometimes, but you know, when you put 5000 hours of your life into a game, over just a year or so, you don't get 'rusty' so quickly. I used to command a fair bit in those days, and I remember very very few games where Sonecha was a dangerous enemy. I remember far more where other people were. Then again, I didn't have a lot of problems with those chopper guys either, so it could be I just dodged the majority of those games. As I said, in those days...there were like two or more sets of people playing. It's easy to not see them, sometimes.
Well, you do bring up a fair point with the weapons change. Pretty sure it'd be hard to get that bragging rights 50 - stinky zero k/d (not k/t) on glycen now. Old NFAR for life. Choppers were hilarious, although from what I remember they were mostly harrasing mittoes. 9 mining your own com. I feel kind of bad about saying this, but, good times. Pcwizdan drama, now that was funny. This is now officially hijacked as oldfaggotry thread.
SMG1 all the way, fuck everything else. I believe SMG1 is one of the few weapons that were ALWAYS decent, thorough the entire timeline.
not in 2.2 it wasnt. Inb4 saying that shooting 1 round/sec at dudes 30 meters away is decent. That being said , yeah it didnt have a sine curve of effectiveness.
I mostly remember Sonecha's fails tbh(to be fair, my memory isn't exactly the best) Like, on Slaughtered he would always rush the south east area with the cv(as NF) to build a barracks which either pretty much guaranteed a victory or if BE was competent, made us lose instantly because he got caught. Also on mvalley, he would always be too agressive and try to kill the enemy commander while he was getting his north rax up and while this worked sometimes, it's really risky and lost him the game quite a few times. Obviously, this was back when cv didn't have this 60 sec overheat thing at start. I mostly remember his commanding and not his actual playing for some reason.
WALLTEXT QUOTE THREAD POWER GOOOOO! I have honestly never been even close to as active as I was during the summer of 2008. Neither was Sonecha. Back then, he and I played pretty much day in and day out together. I forged my playstyle pretty heavily based on that time with him, and he taught me a lot (though not actively, I just learnt it from playing with him). I don't deny for a second that Sonecha didn't fuck up constantly. If we're going to talk about consistently good players, Sonecha just isn't there. He had a lot of bad rounds, lots of rounds where he fucked up with the CV so bad that even Hobbes would be ashamed to do. But when he had those rounds. Those rounds where he was just totally switched on and where everything fell into place, he just entered a whole different level of crazy. Sonecha wasn't really the greatest commander, though I would argue he often had Opie-tier boomtanking rounds. I do recall one, like Predator said, on Slaughtered. Difference is that on this one, Sonecha drove through the S-bend, drove up the side to stop getting walled and then rolled his CV upside down, which then, whilst upside down, managed to kill like 5 people. It then righted itself, he drove off, caught the enemy CV and killed it. Keep in mind that CVs were far, far weaker back then than they are now. It wasn't THAT difficult to solo a CV. On the other hand, what Security said is right. Once 2.2 came out, a lot of the players I considered to be really special, either in or out of EPIC, such as Sonecha, MrBurns and a few others never really got back into Empires properly. I mean, 2.2 was such a monumental shift in playstyle that Empires became a different game. Even when those players came back to play in the later versions, they never reached the levels of play they were at during the 2.12 time. To be honest, the game didn't even allow for that any more. The days of mowing down an entire squad in one magazine were long gone. Weapon damage was too low and rates of fire were also nerfed pretty heavily. Most of the really good players that were around before EPIC had really stopped playing by the time we came along, barring those that were still in Ghost such as Drag and Blight. I started playing around the start of 2008 when the first hotfix for 2.1 came out, 2.11, and I never really saw many of those players. Honestly Z!00000m, you didn't even play THAT often. I only really saw 2 regular CW players which were Brutos and AzureDrake. You were in there occasionally, but certainly during Euro hours you weren't particularly active. It was pretty much 90% Ghost and EPIC members, with maybe a few of the short-lived clans for players not good enough to get into either, such as RKB's "BFAS". We did try to organise a scrim once with Ghost to decide who would "get" the leftover CW members (you guys were pretty dead at the time). I know Brutos was in on that but nothing really came of it. Those "pro" players I mainly saw in scrims or pugs, not in the pub scene. A lot really did blow me away. I never saw Simon playing at his prime but Caggers, JCW (holy fuck JCW) and Goose all really blew me away with how good they were when I saw them, despite the fact that I virtually never saw them in pub games. Players like Drag I'd seen outside of that and they continued to be ridiculous for as long as they played. As Ikalx said, there was a pretty strong Euro scene back then. Europe had KM and Ghost/Emp4all/Napalm's Funhouse. US only really had Nachos once Mittoes died out, and Nachos had an.....interesting server setup. But either way, BSID and JPL weren't very active at the time. The only BSID member you ever saw regularly was SHOOTING, and JPL had very few members playing. We never managed to scrim BSID on 2.12 and JPL managed to pull like 7 members for a match once, which crashed. It wasn't until after 2.2 that we started scrimming either of those teams. My point is, a lot of really really good players from before my time seemed to have forged their reputations in the 1.07/8 testing, which I sadly wasn't around for. By 2.12 they had mostly stopped playing, at least during the hours I played, which was more than 12 hours a day at that point. Any of the really "pro" players still around, especially after Ghost caved in, we just mopped took into EPIC. We have quite a few members in EPIC that started playing before I'd even heard of Empires, all of whom were in previous clans before us. It wasn't a clan formed entirely of newbies or someshit like that. I dream of a day I can replicate that NFAR in the current version. It is and always will be my favourite Empires weapon ever.
It kind of upsets me that the original creator of the map said he wanted it gone. Arklansman did a remake and the original creator contacted Scardybob to say he didn't want it available for people. No idea why. I only played Arklansman's remake myself. I think the original, in addition to emp_gauntlet, are probably the only 2 maps I've never actually played.
