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« on: Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 02:05:38 AM »
AA has always been a love/hate relationship for me. I think we all love the classic days and funnily enough, those are all different time periods. We came in at different times, knowing different people, enjoying different servers and different crews on different versions. But we all share the same fondness for a specific period. The way it used to be.
It's almost heartbreaking, the poor timing I've seen in this game. I came into this game around when 2.6 was released, maybe a bit before. This was a weird time. All the anti-cheat sites were still popular but MD5 checks didn't exist and you could do crazy easy cheats and only get caught if the server admins were lucky enough to get a screenshot. I met Crusade just as he was starting to take off on modding and hacking, bringing back a lot of the old school coding to life that was pioneered by PAS clan and Rifle over at the Hazard AA Tracker. I had learned about modding and loved to run my own server and looking to make it better, I found out about custom maps and that's when I met BlueBlaster. Both him and me were scraping together the remnants of the custom maps once created by enthusiastic people at aa-maps.net. We were too late to work with them but instead just browsed through the forum which was more of a graveyard. This is just a tidbit of my personal history with AA and the great people I've met through it. I say the timing is heartbreaking because, knowing what I know and seeing the timeline unfold, I was always too late. Finding out about cool shit after someone else was done with it. I've come across so many super talented people over the years I've been involved with AA. It's impossible because it's gone but I often wonder what would have happened had the timing been right and a lot of us gotten together to create something amazing. Brilliant website coders and designers, creative UScript, LUA and C++ coders, 3d modelers, countless talented mappers, tons of eager people willing to learn. It's been such a waste. Looking back, a lot of these characters quickly burned out. I'm sure they all had various reasons but I can't help but think that given what we know and have today, if that same enthusiasm and knowledge they had 10 years ago, if that was around today... wow.
I don't know what it is about this game but it's just heartbreaking and frustrating. I miss the way things used to be. I am disappointed in the waste of potential due to timing.
What do you miss? What do you wish was different?
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