EPT
As I am writing this, I should be doing homework. A frequent and most welcome problem that has not changed over the past five years: why do homework when you can browse TL? I'm sure Haji agrees.
A lot of suggestions have been made to put Teamliquid's history on paper. Where did it begin? How did it develop? Who helped shape it into the wonderful place that it is? We always conclude that this is very hard to do, considering TL is an old site and doing the story justice would be troublesome to say the least. Not to forget, that deep down inside, most of us are a bunch of lazy bastards leeching off the truly great.
I can however tell you my story. I'll try to keep it short and to the point, but I always stray and associate.
I remember, and now we are speaking 5 years ago, a very old TL site, before this one was forged. With no more than a couple of posts a day, if lucky, it wasn't anything compared to todays magnitude. I posted a little. Most of the topics were about Nazgul if I'm not mistaken. He was a rising star and, seemingly, a charismatic fellow; Nazgul has always been a man of morals and values. I don't remember much, besides it being hard to see if there were any new posts. Haha.
Five years ago I played a lot of StarCraft. My passion for StarCraft began many many years ago on LAN with my real life friends. The computer kept nuking us to death, so I trained and trained till I could beat the ai. I felt such a sense of accomplishment the first time. I will never forget it. Not to mention how awesome the UMS 'Protoss Temple' was. Oh God, the memories.
Most of my active StarCraft days I spent in the same clan as my real life friend, aka 'Mr_Battlenet', Twisted and his brother. We played a lot together. [pR] [iR] Man_Clan. It was splendid. I was actually very decent at it, too.
Mr_Battlenet cheated, Erwin. I did not however. I like morals and values.
I have always been perfectionist and back then I vigorously hated losing. StarCraft really has never been a game for me, I'm better suited for Warcraft III; It is impossible to to reach a pleasant state of perfection in our beloved game. Not being able to see why exactly I lost. Grrrrrrrr. Grubby would agree. The amazingness of this game pulled me in though, and it still does, even if I don't play.
Wanting to do something for the community, specifically the Dutch community, I started working as a newswriter for a site called Deathstrike.nl. Their forum was populated by the (imature) Dutch scene. After covering the foreign news singlehandedly for a couple of months, I was contacted by Nazgul. He told me about his plans to create a new TeamLiquid site. It would contain all sorts of StarCraft news. He wanted me to post foreign news. This might be new information to a lot of the current Teamliquidians: at first this site was meant to cover the non Korean scene as well. I declined, remaining Loyal to the small Deathstrike site. I was thankful for the opportunity they gave me; it would feel like betrayal. Luckilly after a while, inspired by the immature Dutch community on that forum, not to mention my own immaturity, I got banned there.
In the meantime, Teamliquid emerged from the ashes. I registered here as user #6 on 9-23-2002 at 00:41:50. At first I just posted, not even a lot. I immedietly liked it here though. It felt like something potentially awesome.
Teamliquid expanded quickly. I don't even know why. I suppose it got covered by other sites? The statistics of the first four days are as following:
2002-11-24, 1303
2002-11-23, 987
2002-11-22, 623
2002-11-21, 7
Great users such as Mensrea, Waxangel and Meat forged Teamliquid into a beautiful site covering a scene which before wasn't really properly covered for non-Koreans: the Korean scene. These people really put their mark on TL and even if they rarely ever post, they are surely not forgotten.
About half a year after TL's creation, I was asked to write polls for TL. Topic. I guess this was asked shortly after the WCG 2002. Here I proudly won a vacuum cleaner and gave Twisted a rose to conclude years of online love.
My passion has always been the General Forum. I have made a total of 560 threads and about 50% of my posts are in the General Forum. At times though, I would get annoyed by people 'ruining' my threads. I once complained about the quality of the posters - because they were ruining my threads - by creating a thread in Men in Red (staff forum). Nazgul polled me how I would feel to be a moderator, to which I said I liked the idea. He then talked to the others, to which the ever blunt Rekrul created a thread called 'ok naz u were right'. Inside it contained 'b3y for mod!'. Voilá, moderator Beyonder.
One of the things I'm most proud of, is our IRC channel. I truly see it as my little baby. We initiated it August 14th 2004. It originally lived on Gamesurge, but after a while we moved to Quakenet. A shoutout to all the IRC regulars. I love you guys.
During my time as mod I've had my share of drama; I've done good work, I've made mistakes, and I've done things which I'm proud of. It's funny when I realise how much I truly learn and have learned from this site. I genuinely feel that it helps me the - supposedly good - secondary school teacher. I'd do it all over again if I could choose right now.
These days TL is truly massive. We have a solid team of staff, a solid userbase, and a solid site. I'm proud to say that I could contribute to this, even if it is so little compared to most of the big guns: Mani, Saro, Meat, Mensrea, Wax, etc.
Even if I don't play StarCraft and I haven't for quite some long time, I absolutely love TL. It feels like family; it contains so many wonderful characters and never fails at making me smile. I could write so much more and I have so many more thoughts to put down. I however have to play dota soon, and I still need to follow up my homework spree.
- Beyonder
