obituary

I'm listening to Slayer "Angel of Death" right now. Remembering seeing them live at the Delmar Skate Palace in November 1986 in St. Louis Missouri. I got the tickets at high school from a friend. It was my first concert. I had to stand outside in the line waiting to get inside in the Arctic cold. Then it was steamy hot inside with hundreds of people jammed into the skating rink. A band I had never heard of named "Overkill" opened for Slayer. I saw a lot of extremely disturbed people, in every conceivable state of drug and alcohol abuse, and some people who were clearly absolutely insane. The staff had no idea how to cope with hundreds of wasted metal fans. They were trying to throw out people who were mosh pit fighting and the staff were getting assaulted by the people in the pit. I had never seen a mosh pit in real life. It was like a dance party but everyone was punching and fighting instead of dancing. I just remember watching the Skate Palace staff trying to grab one or two guys on the periphery and getting attacked by the others until they gave up and then the guy they were grabbing disappearing into the center of the crowd. This was during the crack epidemic in St Louis in the late 1980s. I pretty much lost my mind for the duration of the concert, it was like being in a different universe. I was listening to these Slayer songs being played by Slayer, at the volume of a jet fighter, with 100s of other people like me. I had only previously played them on my crappy cassette tape recording I had of the Reign In Blood album, with Hell Awaits on the other side of the tape. That was 34 years ago. I still have three Slayer songs on my phone: Angel of Death, Piece by Piece, and Postmortem. So when I hear one of them, I think of my life back then.

Thanks everyone for the love! Completely unexpected and very nice to see so many people reply! @Dare - yeah it was fun and simple in the beginning... didn't have to worry about much except aimbotters or in-game problems. Masterlist spamming has always been a problem, or a useful tool for keeping a full server, depending on your point of view. And anyone who didn't have a server trick spammed the splashdamage forums whining about the people who did have a successful redirect tool (when they would have used gladly used one if they had one handed to them on a platter with a ribbon on it). Server façade was my favorite tool. The real problem with ET is the platform changed, ten to fifteen years ago desktop PCs were the norm, and people were willing to invest hours into installing and configuring their games on those giant boxes. Now its all next-gen consoles and phone games and browser-based games, how do you compete with that? You could feel the change five years ago. I got an Xbox One in 2016 and have been playing CoD on that daily ever since. Only way for ET to come back now is to make a completely browser-based version, with no masterlist or downloads, no administrator privileges needed, but who would do that for free, and keep up with all the platform changes? Some random Chrome update would screw it up, and then you would spend a month fixing it again. And it would just get ddossed out of existence when some botter gets banned and does a five-minute google search on how to ddos an IP address. So its not worth the investment. Daredevil, I think Jaybird really missed an opportunity by not selling you his source code when you were trying to get it. He should have been willing to pass the baton to someone who would care for his baby. And he released it anyway a couple years ago, now its way too late and nobody cares. I remember you tried to buy it from him for $300 eight years ago and he went ballistic, you just wanted to fix the problems, and he missed a golden opportunity to have someone carry on his work.

Long-time player / admin, thinking about ET a bit lately and came here to see if anyone still played this fossilized lovable old addictive game... I was playing ET this weekend after not touching it for a couple years and it was a lot of fun, and I really missed the time I spent playing and the whole ET community feel. No other game has the same community, because ET is free and maintained by the players, not some corporation trying to sell the next edition of the game. I used to be "PHANTASM" a while back and I made a few tutorials here and spent a lot of nights on F|A servers in the early days. Pretty much everyone I used to play with has moved on, but I see a lot of new people here so that's good. I left F|A in 2011 and ran my own clan (FBY) from 2012-2015 and that was a lot of fun (and sometimes not much fun). My clan died in a storm of ddos and interpersonal drama and I thought "well this is a giant pain in the ass" and I needed to focus on real life for a while. I thought I make come back online after a couple years away from the game. Maybe restart some servers, fiddle with some maps, weapons, scripts, all that fun stuff that makes ET interesting. See if anyone I used to hang with is still here. Glad to see Daredevil is still around :)