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Crayola Clan Crayola Clan History Member Web Pages |
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Games That Crayola Clan PlayedNote: The edit password is "crayola." It's only there to reduce spam. NetQuakeEdit Crayola Clan played its first "official" match against Clan Flag!, a well-respected clan at the time, in March 1997. Crayola lost all 3 maps, E1M1, E2M2, and E2M5, though they arguably got better over time. Green, Yellow, BlueSky, Turquoise, and UltrViolet played in those games. At the time, Clan Flag! was one of the best around, and while the result was disappointing, Crayola showed many sparks of competitiveness. By our accounting, Crayola compiled a 9-9 record in NetQuake as we struggled to find our form. We routinely suffered humiliating losses to Gunslingers, Flag!, and EQ. For a short time, we tried to play both NetQuake and QuakeWorld matches, but we soon realized that the playing mechanics were different enough that we had to pick one or the other, so we stopped playing NetQuake matches. It turned out to be a good move because we played some of our best matches in QuakeWorld. During this time, Crayola asked Post and Riker from Ungrateful Dead to join. They selected Red? and Brown? as their colors. At one point, Ermac from clan Flag! (one the best modem players around) played in a couple of matches (one HPB match against clan Knightmare, I think) under the name of White. He didn't stay very long though. QuakeWorld Released: December, 1996. Match record: 31-4. Turquoise created the logo at right for us when we started playing QuakeWorld. QuakeWorld was initially released in December, 1996, but according to an old copy of the Crayola Clan web site, it was not until August 1997 that we started playing QuakeWorld competitively. Crayola played a lot of QuakeWorld and won a lot of matches. At the time we retired to play Quake 2, we were ranked #2 behind our arch-nemesis Dog Pound, in a ranking system that ranked clans that participated in major tournaments and leagues. We would find ourselves in the #2 spot quite frequently over our history. We compiled a 31-4 record altogether in match play. We suffered a frustrating loss to Burning Chrome in a QWHPCL league match, a controversial (to us, anyway) loss to Western Alliance in an ICR2 league match, an embarassing loss to CMD in the first round of the ICR2 playoffs, and a close loss to Death Clownz in a Shredfest league match. Red? and Yellow recall the Burning Chrome match, played on a laggy server on the west coast.  <]CC[-Red> ug that BC match SUCKED ASS <Yellow> i was so pissed having to sit that one out :/ <]CC[-Red> I did so horrible in that match <Yellow> i remember hating all of em after that <Yellow> until we smacked em down in the rematch :) <]CC[-Red> all I did was go up the water hole in ctf1 and discharge. <]CC[-Red> we had to play on their gimpy server too <]CC[-Red> I lost that match for us, BTW After impressing us with his skill at Rocket Arena, Slothboy joined Crayola with the name of Copper?. And somewhere in there Argon officially joined and chose the name of Silver?. Ultima OnlineEdit  When Ultima Online was released, most of the Crayola Clan played it nearly every moment they weren't playing Quake. (Red?, Brown? and Copper? didn't like the game very much, though.) Through crafting and dungeon exploration, Crayola players collectively put together enough (legitimate) gold to buy a small castle, which was situated on the southern penninsula near the Honor shrine, south of Trinsic. One trick we used: We used to increase character skills by leaving our characters logged into the game running macros over and over. We'd tape the function keys down on the keyboard and leave to go to work or sleep. :) After buying the castle, Crayola stopped playing as much because there really wasn't much else to do in the game besides accumulate wealth. Eventually, Crayola stopped playing altogether when a dupe cheat was discovered that allowed anyone to manufacture unlimited gold for themselves, which completely ruined any fun left in the game. UltrViolet's account was actually banned when another player stumbled across a number of checkerboards stacked on his front porch and alerted the authorities. (It was commonly known that checkerboards could be used to exploit a bug in the game to create huge sums of gold.) The investigators found that UV did, in fact, have inexplicably enormous sums of gold and banned his account. UV entered the game again under a new account, but didn't play very long after that. Yellow played under the name "Lanfear," UV played under the name "Lefty's Cousin." Crayola frequented the towns of Vesper and Trinsic, and usually forayed to the Deceit dungeon for loot. During the UO days, Crayola developed quite a reputation as idlers on IRC. Trivia: When Yellow didn't show up at a LAN party, we found him playing Ultima Online. He said something about his car breaking down halfway to northern VA. We didn't buy it for a second. Note: I got the screenshot above from some random web site, it does not reflect actual Crayola gameplay. However I'm sure I recognize the establishment shown as a favorite place where we performed tailoring. Quake 2Edit We played Quake 2 most of 1998 and 1999. Some of us liked the slower pace of Quake 2 right away, others hated it. It was a slow transition from QuakeWorld but we eventually made it. We continued our winning ways for a while and then fell into a slump, undoubtedly due to the extreme boredom from playing the same CTF maps over and over and over again. Eggfuzz was asked to join when our interest in Quake 2 was flagging and we needed a "spark." He chose the name Orange. Orange was particularly good at dying in the enemy's flag room on CTF2. Here is Red's private IRC message to Eggfuzz that we were looking for a new member: <]CC[-Red> BTW <VD-EggFuzZ> ? <]CC[-Red> Crayola MAYBE looking for a new member.. know anyone? <VD-EggFuzZ> eh? <VD-EggFuzZ> really? <]CC[-Red> know anyone who maybe intrested? <VD-EggFuzZ> maybe.. <]CC[-Red> its still a maybe.. <VD-EggFuzZ> yeah i see <]CC[-Red> ok, thats all I wanted to know:) <]CC[-Red> carry on:) <VD-EggFuzZ> :) hehe <VD-EggFuzZ> we'll see ;) <]CC[-Red> :) We found a new arch-nemesis in the TULL Clan during the Quake 2 days. We fondly (kind of) nicknamed them The Grapple Monkeys, for their skill in using the grappling hook to evade enemies. In the Q2ICR league playoffs, we defeated Tull in the finals of the winners bracket. The playoffs were a double-elimination format, meaning you had to lose twice to be eliminated, so Tull then fell down to the "losers" bracket. Crayola sat atop the "winners" bracket awaiting the winner of the losers bracket, and Tull ended up victorious. So we met again in the true finals. We lost 2 maps out of 3, in a very very close match that was lost in the final minutes by a single flag capture. Because one of us had to lose TWICE to be eliminated from the tournament, we had to play them AGAIN to determine the final victor of the Q2ICR season. Between the first and second matches, we played Tull three times in other leagues and tournaments, losing two of them. Expectations and tensions were high throughout the gaming community when we played the final Q2ICR match. We won the first map, lost the second by a nose, and collapsed on the third map to hand Tull the victory. We ended up in second place. Turquoise created a Q2 crayon player model for us, which ruled. Not only did it help distinguish our team from the other team, but it was funny as hell to watch giant crayons running around fragging people. Our record in Quake 2 was 65-15. Amazing that we played so many matches on the same four freakin maps. Crayola even hosted their own tournament, the WaxFest. I can't remember who won. :) It turned out to be a bit of a disaster as we didn't realize how much work was involved in organizing all the clans and matches of a tournament, but somehow we got through it. (We did not play in it.) Around this time, Turquoise began his career as an artist in the game industry. He had long been interested in the field, and went to work for Rogue Entertainment. His first project was the game Alice. TribesEdit Tribes was released in 1998, and Crayola quickly jumped on board, most likely due to our boredom with playing the same CTF maps in Quake 2 all the time. Tribes gameplay was very different from Quake 2 in that the maps were huge outdoor terrains, and you could fly around in jetpacks and vehicles. Because of the huge open spaces, games required large numbers of people, too: Usually a minimum of 8 people were needed on a team for a decent game.  This presented a problem because Crayola typically didn't have enough people online at any given time to play Tribes matches, so we pseudo-joined Western Alliance (WA) and played under their name. Gold, Green, and Yellow in particular were key players with WA, and a major reason why WA was consistently ranked very high in the Tribes gaming world. Western Alliance players were named after cities: Gold was known as "Washington, DC," Green was "Reston, VA," and Yellow was "Charlotte, NC." (Yellow was one of the first to harness the deadly potential of the chaingun in Tribes, and came to be nicknamed "Chaingun, NC.") A post on TribalWar.com by Yellow indicates we did actually play (and win) at least one Tribes game under the name "Crayola Clan," against Jedi Masters around March 27, 1999, though I personally don't remember it. If memory serves, there were political issues about the way WA was run that Gold, Green, and Yellow frequently complained about in IRC, not unlike the old Ungrateful Dead days. UltrViolet wrote a very simple HUD for Tribes, shown at right, which displayed flag status for both teams and some statistics. "UV-HUD is a client-side script that adds a sometimes useful flag status and kill statistics HUD to your screen. Mostly it's just a neat toy that eats up your CPU cycles while you play." It is dated March 1999, which suggests Tribes was released later in 1998. It was useful for a little while, but it was soon replaced by other, much more sophisticated HUDs from other developers. Yellow apparently also played for the clans z2 and United States Rangers (source). Here are some YouTube videos I found showing Tribes matches in action, in case you've forgotten what it was like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kby-bZqfDqE Asheron's CallEdit  A portrait of UV's character Violet standing in Hebian-To, April 12, 2000, near the end of his playing time. Note the total playing time reads 17d, 11h, 26m, 22s. It's a little embarassing. A number of Crayola Clan members played in the Asheron's Call (AC) beta and retail. Gold, Green, Yellow, and UltrViolet in particular played it practically non-stop. BlueSky? also participated. Red? and Orange hated the game. :) The open beta period for Asheron's Call began in the summer of 1999, and the retail version was released October 31. AC had a kind of feudal pyramid scheme, where players could "swear allegiance" to a higher-level player and receive goods and services in exchange for experience points. Green and Gold's characters took advantage of the system and became lords in a large heiarchy. Yellow and UltrViolet preferred to stay away from the politics and beauracracy of allegiances and stuck to more solo-oriented adventuring (though I think Yellow was involved in some random allegiance or another). Gameplay basically involved stocking up on supplies in town, then going out to a wilderness area where there were monsters you could kill (this was sometimes called "hunting"). Then you stayed in the wilderness killing monsters, collecting experience points, and picking up monster loot until you couldn't carry any more (your character ran slower the more weight you carried). Then you would return to town, sell the loot, and repeat the cycle. Alternately, you could go to an area where there was known to be a chest that periodically spawned mad loot and stand there (this was called "camping chests," or something like that). Crayola spent countless hours in the Asheron's Call world, killing Lugiens and camping at chests to gain mad loot. The EverQuest phenomenon of selling characters and equipment on Ebay was also popular in Asheron's Call. Yellow tried to sell his character Xenon but I don't remember if anyone bought it. More Asheron's Call Screenshots Quake 3: ArenaEdit  UV's one amazing flag run in his otherwise completely forgettable Quake3 career. We waited two whole years for Quake 3, during which time we played the same four CTF maps over and over and over again in Quake 2. Some match burnout had set in. :) Because of our failing interest in the competitive gaming scene, we recruited AquaMarine, Black, and Chestnut as new members to bolster our ranks. We didn't end up playing very much Quake 3, though, because we felt the game sucked and everyone cheated like bastards anyway. (Well, maybe not everyone, but it sure seemed like it.) "Cheats" (aiming bots, radars, timers, etc.) were readily available to anyone that wanted them and they were usually not detectable. Crayola sparked controversy by pulling out of a high-profile tournament with cash prizes, because there was no policy to deal with cheats. It was around this time that the Punkbuster anti-cheating system came into being to deal with online cheating. It is entirely possible that some of our members' obsession with Asheron's Call also contributed to the lack of Quake 3 participation. :) One other factor may have been that Quake 3 gameplay was considerably faster than Quake 2. Some of Crayola had grown tired of the insanely fast-paced "twitch" factor of matches at the end of the QuakeWorld days, and weren't terribly anxious to return to those days. Despite all that, mainly Black, Blue, Red, Orange, and Yellow bravely compiled an 11-3 record. Rumor has it, though, that toward the end they lost a bunch of matches and didn't record them on the web page. :) Tribes 2Edit The same Tribes people played Tribes 2 I guess. (I wasn't around much for this so I dunno. :) Return to Castle WolfensteinEdit  A random screenshot from a single-player Wolfenstein level. Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW) is especially noteworthy because our very own Turquoise, working at Nerve Software, took part in the creation of the multiplayer elements of the game. Crayola made a brief return to its old glory in a series of spirited RtCW matches between December 2001 and February 2002. The magic quickly faded when we discovered that in order to be consistently competitive against the top teams, we actually had to practice! This conflicted with our generally lazy nature (and the fact that most of us now had real lives outside of the Internet and precious little time for games), so we faded out of the RtCW scene. Nevertheless, it was fun while it lasted. Another factor in fading interest may have been the media circus that match play had become by this time. High-profile tournaments often "shoutcasted" live commentary (an MP3 stream) about matches in progress, similar to color commentators of professional sports games. This was a far greater level of pressure than Crayola had ever experienced before. (Listen to the MP3 broadcast of Crayola vs. Ocrana in the BoB tournament Round 2 (we lost). You have to wait past a bunch of annoying music at the beginning before the match starts.) UltrViolet dusted off his old QP statistics program and built a new version, uncreatively named WP, for parsing Wolfenstein logfiles. Yellow reportedly continued to play RtCW for clan LoT. (Incidentally, UltrViolet saw some people with the "LoT" clan tag playing Call of Duty 4 -- was it the same clan?) On January 3, 2002, Indigo? joined Crayola Clan. Asheron's Call 2Edit I know virtually nothing about what happened with Crayola and Asheron's Call 2, except that some people played it. I played for only a scant few hours during the open beta, but never saw the retail version. I personally was not terribly impressed by the beta, since it was plagued by server problems and looked basically the same as Asheron's Call anyway. It couldn't have been that good because they shut down the servers on December 30, 2005, whereas the original Asheron's Call servers are still running. More as developments warrant... Due to an apparent flaw in PmWiki, we need to set the title at the bottom, otherwise the last title set in the included files will be used. |