IWZ is no more. (Well, kindasorta)
It’s been a lot of fun. Over the past two and a half years, we’ve had a lot of fun together. IWZ, the “gaming community” or “clan” that we built has slowly been dying over the course of the last year or so. Why? EA/DICE released Battlefield 2. It was flashy, with new graphics a new engine, modern combat, etc. and it basically killed IWZ. When it was first released, as a demo, we were all about playing it. A lot of fun was had on the demo map, Gulf of Oman. When it was finally released, an unheard amount of bugs were found and it became a lot less appealing. With each new patch, up until 1.3, it became worse. With the release of the 1.3 patch, it was playable. Bugs were still there, but not nearly as bad as what it once was. When they released the 1.4 patch, it became unplayable by me once again. I stopped playing it. I went back to playing Forgotten Hope, which in reality, was my true love.
Forgotten Hope is what Battlefield should have been. Problem was/is, there’s only a few servers playing it. One, the worst of them all, WOLF gaming. WOLF’s FH server was admin’d by what seemed to be either extremely young people or the elderly with no rational method of administration and absolutely no common sense. I knew two full weeks ago that my time in Battlefield was soon to be over. Folks would ask: “what about Forgotten Hope 2”? FH2 is suppose to be coming out soon. It’s a mod of the BF2 engine. See, there’s a problem with that. There’s like a total of probably 1000 FH players left. At any given time, there’s only 200 or so people playing it. With these numbers and the fact that EA/DICE have recently released Battlefielld 2142, which is again, more shiny, more flashy and appeals to those with A.D.D., there’s little hope in increasing the player base of FH and FH2. When and/or if FH2 comes out, I’ll probably try it out. It should prove that the server base will fall into the realm of WOLF and a couple other servers once again. When that happens, the same people will be developing the rules for the server, again, not based on true logic and common sense, but based on what WOLF accepts as logic. Their community along with the release of Battlefield 2, have ruined my online gaming experience.
You see, WOLF’s FH server is full of people with little to no real playing skill. There’s a small percentage of really good team players that play there. As for World at War, Battle for Europe, these folks take “teamplay” to the extreme. I’ve signed up and played with them (I hosted a server for them for a couple month, until…) on three separate occasions. Each time, I began playing, in their teamspeak, with squad leaders that wanted to micro-manage their squads to the extint of telling us which vehicle we had to take to the next spawn point and telling us when we could deploy from the vehicle….. we would follow the orders given and deploy at time “X”, within point “Y” and get immediately whacked by enemy forces A thru W. It was unbelievable that people would continually hit a spawn through a full frontal assault, over and over again without even trying some unconventional. I was once told by a squad leader not to fire my weapon at that distance, you cannot shoot someone from there. Duh? In Battlefield, if you can see it, you can kill it. Period. I can shoot someone from any distance that I can see them. If you don’t believe this, you don’t have the ability to lead a dog to piss, let alone a squad in a Battlefield simulation/game.
The overall skill level in Battlefield 1942/Forgotten Hope has steadily declined over the last year as my own skill level has increased. I played BF2 and I was a kick-ass player and I’ve gotten even better in Battlefield 1942/FH. It’s basically the same thing that happened in Desert Combat. It’s gotten to the point of being a joke. I fear no single player in the game. I don’t care if I am tanking, flying a plane or ground-pounding, there’s no single player out there that will “own” me. They may tie my abilities and we’ll come out of the game with a similar score, but they’ll not kick my ass. Knowing this, I have attempted to take on new challenges in the game. I have learned to use all weapons to the best of my ability and as good as anyone else. Flying planes has become rather dull to me. I get more kicks out of tanking than anything else. With the exception of using dive bombers to take out tanks, actually commanding a tank is my favorite thing to do. I’ve learned to zook with the best of them, I’ve learned to knife in FH like there’ no tomorrow. Hell, in Desert Combat, I use to go around with a knife and a medic pack, while engaging an enemy firing a fully-auto rifle at me, point blank range and I would still be able to evade and medic myself enough to walk up to him and stab him with my knife.