You're all making me sad. Warning, long post ahead. I'll forgive you if you said TLDR Back in 2005 we had this un-admined duel server in 1.00 and somehow the settings were on 15min rotations meaning each two player gets an entire 15 mins while everyone just spectates. Noobs would join and then my friends would trick them into /disco /qui gon etc to shorten the queue. Hiding in a glitch in FFA3 and shooting at people with the DEMP alt fire so it produces no visible shots. Spectating was disabled lol. Standing on folks' heads while they were taking the elevator. I was a backslashing duals noob and no matter how hard I tried picking up single I just couldn't cause I'm a slow learner. Then one of my pro friends in this top clan was laughing at me in front of his other clan-mate who immediately said he'd teach me. After I improved tremendously I found out that he had stayed up til 2AM to teach me. I never forgot that he gave me a chance and sacrificed sleep for it. Now I retain the same attitude he passed on to me. I am in a clan that used to have a great Euro leader. We wanted to be top but he mentioned to me in order to do so we'd have to remove several people including the inactive ones and 'ones that just couldn't be good' (ie mentally slower IRL). I said no because I knew of two inactive guys who were faithfully loyal. My Euro counterpart left together with most his Euro followers. I was grieved but I would never trade loyalty for skills, nor leave slower folks behind and I believe that to this day. In 2003 I played in no-lamer FFA servers so I grew up with that mindset. It made me very Nazi at one point, in CTF I'd be in spectate mode literally following every single person to see if they lamed and kick them. I still dislike laming now, but am less anal about it. Being a coward pre-fixes era. I was in my server with a known pro player who was also known for crashing. A guy joined and asked if my clan had this person in it - which was him actually - and the pro player started dissing that person in my clan. I said no because I was worried he'd crash. Felt damn bad, no way to describe it. Being too hard on a clan member. He wanted a promotion so badly but I felt he could be better first even if my own skills were equally mediocre. He left and later became a very loyal member of another clan. Watching a third party destroy two big clans. This guy infiltrated most of the large clans and made his way to leadership positions and tore them apart. I was in one of those (was multi-clanning) but since I had my own clan decided to just let things play out. The second time he joined a friend's clan I wanted to tell them but it's hard because who knew if he'd changed or they might say I was being a busybody. That clan blew apart and I regret because those players left. I miss teamwork so badly. Loved Siege and CTF with regulars. We played so seamlessly we could turn scores and losing teams around. People would leave when me and my clan-mate or some other friends entered. I'm trying to find such teamwork elsewhere (currently L4D2) and it frustrates me to no end that I can't. Just opening the game and there would be players, better if they were regular people who I know and vice versa. JKA is a graveyard of bots and empty servers. I miss days of full servers without bots. Spending time with clan mates and friends doing stupid stuff. We'd draw pictures, take suggestive screenshots and all. Now that's been reduced to one single Christmas gathering annually. As Art above mentioned. Running a clan. Learnt a great deal from it and it made me a better person. More paranoid too, with all the damn crashers, infiltrators and spies from rival clans. Yea, I have trust issues after my first server provider simply copied my clan server for their new client. Sheesh. Now I run my own. Watching people. I love watching people in the game just playing and enjoying themselves or even arguing, like Polish players insulting Russian players over history, or is Arsenal or Man U better etc. It's entertaining and makes me smile. Learning. As mentioned I'm a slow learner. My mentor threw me into coding, hex stuff (and bloody Linux) when I had absolutely zero knowledge. I must have whined more than the whole planet combined. Somehow I survived through to make changes to Jampded and the game in general. That's years ago though and the idea of going back to what I'd call algebra makes me cringe.