NI made my teenage life great.

[Malong]

Twenties made me draft some stories. It was kind of fun thinking about these stories. Though it wasn't the best use of time, I can't say NI was a complete waste.

Summer 2013: Never playing NI again

Dan continually spams me which server to join on NI. I join TeamSpeak to listen, but never play. Dan would coordinate the Ragnarok runs, and with no exaggeration the ensuing dialogue would be:

Dan: Any loot?
PCK: Yeah, I got a Hurricane Bow.
Dan: Shut the fuck up!

Eventually one of his spam messages prompts me to respond something to the effect of "stop asking me to play NI, I'm never playing NI again."

Fall 2013 to Winter 2013: The fun part that readers want

As in human nature, people are tribal. NI is no different, and groups rarely, if ever, intermingled. The groups also did not particularly like each other for some reason that I never fully understood. Members of my "side" (for lack of a better word) saw members the other "side" as not contributing enough, and, in turn, they saw us as "elitist." One of my early negative experiences was being in TeamSpeak and getting spammed by Omphorus trying to pressure me into trading him Dan's Hurricane Bow for some crafted items. He had assumed I was a new player who got a lucky loot and he wanted to scam me out of it. Whatever the reason people had, some of "us" did not even want to be in the same server as any of "them." I never minded, but I remember Dan leaving at the sight of FreakyZ in the server list. Dan would coordinate a Ragnarok run by spamming us on Steam with the server name, and announce how many spots were on the server in TeamSpeak. I refined this process by getting people in TeamSpeak, then sitting at the server select screen, waiting for everyone to be ready, and then all joining the server simultaneously with a countdown. We called it "server bombing," and it was quite effective at preventing "them" from joining.

Hilarity ensued. "They" would repeatedly provoke "us," such as:

1. MonchoMan sending me "you suck dick yo" in TeamSpeak chat
   
2. SlimShady spam poking us in hopes that any of us would crash
   
3. An anonymous person (I assume this was SlimShady) sending me a message on TeamSpeak chat with racial slurs of my ethnicity and trying to get me not to say certain words
   
4. Suns picked up my bow after I died and thanked me for dying and dropping it to troll me. He was using two Short Heavy Barricades as a platform, so I stood in front of him. He kicked me, and the friendly fire got him stuck between the barricades. He typed "fuck you" in global chat, then left the server.
   
5. An anonymous user joined the Tricksters TeamSpeak channel thinking I was from a southern state in the US due to some epithets I use. Upon learning I live in Boston, he brought up the Boston Marathon bombing to try to troll me. I freely told him that the victims were just random strangers who happened to be in my city, and mentioned 9/11 and its death toll to him. He fell silent and left shortly after that comment.
   

For reasons such as above, I will always deny instigating anything, but fully admit to escalating matters. While this might not be the "best" reaction, is that really wrong? I would say no, and lack of "turning the other cheek" aside, I would do it again given the chance.

Suns created a Steam group named "Anti-Elitism." I thought the existence of an anti-elitism group that was invite-only was both ironic and amusing, so I created the "Anti-Anti-Elitism" group in response. Another hilarious incident was the one that got Dan banned from the official TeamSpeak for a month. I don't think this worked in the Administration team's favor. Within five minutes, I rented a TeamSpeak server and we used that instead. The offficial NI TeamSpeak server would be a ghost town as the active players used mine instead, even after Dan's ban expired. There was no reason to return, the successful active players found no reason to go back to a more restrictive, and public, server.

Hypernoma also saw the videos in that aforementioned post, joined TeamSpeak, and scolded us: "I ought to ban each and every one of you! This is cyber bullying!!!" Dan was the only one to speak up in our defense about how we were being provoked and may not have responded appropriately, but hoped that context would be taken into account. He also pointed out that not all of us took part in destroying the barricades. Plus, Dan and I came from a competitive PvP environment. If two groups had a friendly rivalry, we knew it was all playful teasing to elevate each others' play. And if two groups had a not-so-friendly rivalry, we insulted each other far worse than anything that has ever happened on NI. "Giving each other shit" just falls under "bullying" by today's standards; and by these standards, I was probably bullied most days growing up. Oh well.

While we were perceived as the bad guys, nearly all of those above players got banned. Given that piece of information, were we really the bad guys?

1. Omphorus: exploiting a map bug, since unbanned
   
2. FreakyZ: selling his items for outside currency
   
3. MogMog and Drumlix: selling their items for outside currency, getting unbanned, then getting banned again for racism in public servers, unbanned again to sell their items
   
4. Suns: trolling and ban evading
   
5. Chris: exploiting a map bug, since unbanned, re-banned for too many kicks and warnings, unbanned
   

The time I got banned

The mod used to have an IRC channel, and was moving IRC servers. After a drinking event, I decide to go on the new IRC server and register some names of members of the administration team. I'm not sure if it was a rule at that time, but regardless I never actually used the names to impersonate them, and it was meant to just inconvenience them. For example, if I wanted to be Malong, but it was taken, I would then have to be Malong2 or something. None of us knew this was a problem until two weeks after when I get a message that I'm banned.

Apparently, the administration team had a problem with this but didn't let the community know. They also claimed they spent two weeks trying to track this down. I un-registered the names, but remained banned for a month. The month ended, I appealed my ban, but am told it's permanent. In good faith, I wrote a Perl script to parse the text from IRC's nickserv and whois in the channel in less than an hour (this task does not take two weeks) to demonstrate how to compare the hostmasks across two logs. Others spoke on my behalf too, but the administration team didn't care.

Bradapple was incredibly drunk one night in TeamSpeak and offers to appeal to Hypernoma about the issue. He says he would offer that I get unbanned, but if I ever get in trouble, both Brad and I would get banned. I appreciate the gesture, and after thinking about it for a day or two, I ask him to do it. Hypernoma wants to converse with me on IRC. I explain everything, and get my permanent ban turned into a one month ban. I believe the admin website shows my unban reason as something like "I [Hypernoma] am way too nice."

Spring 2014: Post unban

It's Spring 2014, and nothing lasts forever. Despite getting unbanned, I start playing less. I would be remiss to not acknowledge and thank Nka for taking care of House of Tricksters when I had little to no interest in NI whatsoever. The house certainly would have disbanded without him.

It was a Saturday in May 2014, and I was at a hobby tournament when I get a phone call from Dan. He was fully quitting and asked me which items of his I wanted. I told him something like "just give me all of it." But he only gave me the Warden and Crossbowman sets, a barrel and other stuff. Nka got the Twigs and other stuff, Clickeverywhere got the Shield of Kings, a Fell Edge, and some other stuff. He wouldn't even give me all of the stuff even though he still owes me $15 from when I bought Marvel Heroes items for him. We still message each other, but most of the time he just wants me to validate his HBONow login. Not surprisingly, he uses my account instead of paying $10 a month.

Winter 2017 to now and event stories

Between the last part and this one I was primarily playing events and not public servers, unless there were events like Legendary Week. But now, I was playing with a group of players that wanted to play more often. The loot system would soon be overhauled, finally removing the illogical reductions in chance for playing with fewer players, increasing material drops, and so on. Awakened legendaries were introduced to give more goals and general reasons to play. Despite basically nothing changing in the gameplay, seeing tangible progress with each completed run made the game fun again. We had fun with the social aspect too. Public servers were filled with quotes and scenarios from the Quote Boards in my signature. Events were filled with whistling (and after months, Berkays learned how to whistle!), guitars, a recorder, and a harmonica.

There were monthly PvP competitions. One involved Berkays and Faravin being captains, dueling to see who would get first pick for their team. Berkays won handily (get rekt Faravin) but wasted his first pick on me. We devised and executed a good tactic and won 2-1 despite that wasted first pick. Then there was the free-for-all PvP where the pick of Boots and Gauntlets were the prize. When I heard that some players were going to coordinate to try to win, I knew I had to as well. This was a matter of principle, not just leveling the playing field. It didn't hurt that this was a moment to use critical thinking to crush our opponents, and opportunities like this on a mindless tower defense game are too uncommon. So we got on the server, explored the map, found a meeting place, hid in there, and only emerged to outnumber and kill players not in our group. Finally, when we were the last ones standing, Zocki had the most kills, and we all died to him to give him the most kills on the server by one (take that Thunder!) to win the boots. I typed in server something like "fuck yeah, we had the best plan, get rekt!" Winter disqualified us from the second run of that event. I probably should have held that comment back, but it just completely astounded me that none of the other players coordinating plans could think of that incredibly simple idea that was obvious to our team. The other sessions of the event explicitly added the rule that there was to be no coordination because of us.

Then there's the story of the most fun I ever had in NI. I created a new character named BeatsByDre, which references a parody song, and then equipped Teutonic Robes. Cherry, Shagz, Thunder, and Twenties wanted to join in on the fun. After about two hours of us playing Normal servers, laughing the entire time, we were each kicked and given forced name changes. Almost immediately afterwards, Shagz asks me "Do you still have your robes? Mine are gone, and I can't find it on the marketplace." I was responsible for yet another change in the mod: Teutonic Robes were removed.

And then there's Winter's Summer Ragnarok Challenge. This was another one of those rare chances to use tactics and critical thinking, and I knew we had to participate. I took the active Tricksters with some special guests and we crushed it. The only other winning team was made of a good amount of the former team, and basically plagiarized ideas we developed. But either way, our group had won twice. The fact that the second winning team being named Team Ninjas 2 rather than DB 2 lends further credence to the idea that it was "our group." In essence: