EPTTo sum that up, it's gonna be quite long and you could choose to read or not. There is a tl;dr at the bottom....
How I got my Internet Name
I had a gamecube. My favorite game (perhaps even to this day, that game has affected me the most next to SC2) was Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. Miles "Tails" Prower (sidekick to Sonic) had a machine called the Cyclone. It looked cool (the world) and I tried to use that as my username in Club Penguin.
It was already taken, so I just added a 999 at the end.
Club Penguin
Alright, so I was...in grade 5. I only used the internet for your Miniclip flash games and perhaps googling some homework answers. I played Club Penguin. Yeah, that was fun.
My friend showed me his piczo site. He was like, "y0 d00d, c0me chek out my website!". I had no idea it was so easy to make a website! I made my first piczo website. Advertised it to everybody.
I got this crazy idea to make this army in Club Penguin so I started to spam decorate my piczo site with videos and Club Penguin pictures of me and all my best buddies. Looking back on that, I now realized when I learned how to crop images.
I googled "Club Penguin cheats" on Google, cause you know, everybody does that for games (or is it just me) and found a ton of other blogs on Club Penguin. "wowwwww" is the right response. These "penguins" were totally gosu with their memberships and 100+ penguin armies; a ton of coins to spend and able to post anything they want on their wordpress sites....
Wordpress...that's a blog site!
SO I DITCHED MY RETARDED PICZO and made a wordpress account! Then I started to post random things on Club Penguin, and the site was called "Club Penguin Cheats". On the first day, I got ~123 hits. That's more than I got on my piczo in 3 months. Perhaps the name "Club Penguin Cheats" sounds familiar to some people (cough me)
Fast forward a little- I still had no membership in Club Penguin (parents wouldn't let me buy stuff online, especially for a game, you know, asian parents) but my site was gaining 1,000 views a day. I made an army called "CPSR"- Club Penguin Secret Rebels (sounds lame, I know) and I managed to get around a good 50 members (:D)
After that I was no-lifing Club Penguin, playing Pizzatron-3000 for 2 hours straight, sitting in the Pizza Parlour role-playing as the "boss"...I wasted an entire summer break looking for "Rockhopper" (special NPC in Club Penguin) for every day..managed to hit the max amount of coins (1 million) with a little bit of non-legit way -cough-...
Then I went to my cousin's house, and everything just took a huge swing. I watched him play Maplestory. "Yeah...I think Maplestory's boring, but my friend says you have to be level 30 until it's fun", he said. The graphics were so cute (not homo, like, korean anime chobo looking) and the monsters weren't that threatening (which my parents would approve of)...
Maplestory
I downloaded Maplestory (the setup is 1GB, and I had 1GB of RAM...every time I had to install MSSetup.exe it took ~15 minutes to startup) and played. I had no idea how to play "Maplestory" but I saw my cousin was owning slimes with his polearm and mind you, this is v48 Maplestory. v40 was their official release.
I started the game and to be quite frank, I leveled up only my strength when my plan was to be a thief. To people that haven't played Maplestory, that's like upgrading Air Weapons when you're going pure bio. It's not a smart idea (lol).
But anyways, I didn't have enough dex for my level 10 job advancement, got job advanced at level 11 (eg. don't have enough minerals for CC? Guess I'll make it 10 minutes later) and got a free hair coupon for doing a quest- changed my dude's hair into a motha!@#$in afro (which is cool, don't get me wrong, it's just ugly in Maplestory)
I made a new char, got to level 26 as a thief that was absurdly underpowered (I did half the damage I was suppose to be doing) and as that...I quit Maplestory...Global (NA Server)
Maple Servers
I did, however, wanted to powerlevel my way to level 200. I wanted to be the best, that no one ever was. I wanted to own everybody, to own those mushrooms that kill me every 5 seconds. But I couldn't. I sent my account to ~5-10 "free powerlevelers" and I lost all my items and mesos (gold).
I looked for Maplestory hacks. I wanted to be high level. I couldn't find any hacks- but I found something called a private server. Apparently it's a server that you host and you could make your own characters for your server- only you (and your friends) could be playing it and you can make yourself whatever level you want, give yourself whatever items you want, awesome!
The forum is called (I don't want to advertise any links so...)
+ Show Spoiler +
http://forum.ragezone.com
So I look at the site and find some sources that I'm suppose to compile for my Maplestory Private Server and open some bat files...boy, bat files sure look scary. I registered for this forum, not to post or get active with the community...but for download links :D I'm sure some of you guys know what I'm talking about
Fast forward a bit, I was in grade 7 and hosted my first private server for Maple. It had a good run, I managed to host the server on a 512MB old computer that came from 2000 (it lagged a LOT but whatever, playable) and I never learned how to recompile my source (so basically, I downloaded a source, and just launched it without editing anything but the name of the server)
I got around 1,000 members (holy ballaroo!) but we had around 30 on at a time. We had a somewhat active forum, a great community (If Hittman, Nikki, Knight, Shirley, Marcus, Eclipse are still reading this...if they remember Stelarstory).. The server had to shutdown after 3 months because I screwed up my router T_T
That's pretty good for a grade 7, don'tcha think? I started to get active in another forum called + Show Spoiler +
World of Gosu
Basically I flattered pros and I made fun of the noobs (like, actual noobs that think they're pro) and I somehow fit in. After I started to gain some "reputation" in the Maple server scene, I started posting on Ragezone, doing my exact same strategy- don't offend the pros, make fun of the noobs. Say "good job" for a source if the pros said so, or "wow, this is terrible" if they said it sucked.
I managed to get the MSNs of top developers in the Maple server scene and now I have around 150~ "random" developers from RaGEZONE on my MSN. I had no idea how to code. I somehow managed to start projects and now I'm somewhat of the "project vortex meaning of convincingness" which is basically my job is to "HEY GUYS LETS MAKE A SOURCE YOU GUYS GET TO WORK AND I'LL GOOGLE STUFF FOR YOU GUYS"
By then I was starting to go on the internet a ton, mainly to chat with my developer friends (at this time, I seriously had more online friends than RL friends) to do stuff, play Minecraft, stuff like that.
But seriously. The community died down and servers started to get more rare; I pretended to have an "epic source" that I was going to release to the community on Christmas to get the community morale up...but it was actually a troll
Me and my developer friends (3 of them) laughed really hard as I released the source, crush the dreams and hopes of millions of noobs hoping to leech off a good source code; but it was really just a Mario Kart DS ROM
Long story short, I got banned However, I had learned a lot during my time with Maple servers. I learned to post on forums, that there are pros on the internet that are gosu at coding, and because of this I met a lot of people online and now some of them are actually my BFFs (HI BILLLLLLY)
Starcraft
It was November 2010 when I started Starcraft II; my cousin was all hyped because he played Starcraft I. I watched some videos (I was playing Age of Empires 3 at the time) and found it really cool (Colossus pew pew lazers! Exploding banelings with acid and pew pew guns? Looks good!).
He got invited to the beta. I started in November (although I had to play on a pirated version against AI for a couple months to get warmed up, sorry Blizzard, I now have 5 accounts though
)When diamond was released, my cousin was in diamond. I did my 5 placements- got placed in Bronze. I was so terrible back then. I was playing Protoss and I would go 4gate + colossus off one base- while floating a ton of money. I discovered force fields were good and jumped to silver, and gold, then plat, in season 1.
I found out about Teamliquid and watched pro streams (my cousin use to love MarineKing even though he plays Protoss) and GSL; I started to go hardcore SC2 and watch every second of my life, get all the iPod apps, etc. I also managed to have the privilidge of a couple of pro players to say "hi" to me (Blog: "My mission during season 3") on this forum/in-game, such as Naniwa, Sheth, KawaiiRice, Spanishiwa...etc.
I finally got to diamond in Season 2; my cousin was still in diamond at the time. He was in university and couldn't find the time to play, while I'm 15 and in grade 10. To quickly sum up this Starcraft section, I was in diamond from S2 to S7, where I got promoted approximately 1 month ago (I had a blog on it) into Masters.
Now I'm a masters Terran (we're a rare breed now, aren't we)!
Teamliquid has seriously been the site I go to every single free Internet minute I have- whether it's watching streams, setting up my streams, seeing if mech is viable yet, BW pros switching, there's just so much stuff in this e-sports spirit that's addicting. Seriously.
Closing/Acknowledgements/TL;DR
Closings: To sum it all up, three things have gotten me to become active on the internet- a flash game called Club Penguin, a 2D sidescrolling RPG called Maplestory, and an action-packed sci-fi RTS game called Starcraft II. Each game had their own effect into my life and how I finally arrived at this stage, as a geek that's addicted to gaming on the PC
Acknowledgements:
I wish I could name every single "pro developer" on RaGEZONE because each has affected me...but owell. I'll just name random things.
Billybombill: HEY BILLY, play more sc2. seriously. And no, I'm not playing SCP, and I won't be playing Amnesia for a while T_T
Parents: you know, if I don't throw this out here I'll probably get traced by my computer-techy dad and then i'll have to leave this wonderful world called the interwebz
Zygon I bother you way too much, you go do your gosu coding skillz with packet structures and stuff, but make sure you haz time for sc2 ^.^ you should be gosu by now if you played more :c
YEAH THATS ABOUT IT.
TL;DR:
Club Penguin-> Wordpress Blog -> Got famous in Club Penguin -> Maplestory -> Maplestory Servers -> Respect in community of Maple servers due to flattery and agreeing with respected members -> Starcraft
Thanks for reading, if you did.
