User:M0ns00n

Steam profile:

Gaming history:

The first online game I played was Unreal Tournament '99. I played this for many years and became a member of the online community which was forum hopping all the time. It is also the first game that I played competitively and was in three major clans during my active period. I became renown as one of the best flag-runners in the Capture the Flag mode. I attended a local LAN hosted by some of the top figures in the community which was a blast, however around this time the community was splitting up and disappearing. Whilst still playing UT I got into Warcraft III which is another classic game of all time and naturally found my way to the custom game DotA. I played many versions before Allstars became the dominant game found in custom game lists and joined the community and forums somewhere around v5.xx. I met mafaga in a random public game and we became friends and I was invited to join vR (Virorum Reges) which was a remake with most of the v3 (Veni Vidi Vici) members. These were the days before Delay Reducer and all those other fancy programs and Clan TDA was upping it's security for troll accounts. I didn't play many competitive games for their A-team due to having a dodgy mic, sizeable Australian ping and I was pretty young too but occasionally they'd get me off the bench. Due to mafaga's global moderator position I was often invited into exclusive inhouses with Pendragon_, syl-la-ble and very rarely Guinsoo. This was my peak time in playing DotA and afterward my hours were declining steadily and then I stopped playing all together a bunch of versions after Icefrog took over the map editing. Not related to Icefrog at all, just for a time reference, about when Tauren and Firebat were released.

Before my next big competitive game I played a variety of other online titles, including all the Battlefields, Diablo 2 LOD, Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2. My next big competitive online game was kind of unexpected. I highly anticipated this game for the campaign co-op which looked amazing as I'm a big fan of teamwork but I managed to get a lot out of the versus game mode in Left 4 Dead.

The learning curve for a game has never been so fun. This game encouraged a strongly linked team working together, learning and adapting to the game environment. I made friends with many good players and friendly people and we played together so often that I eventually made a clan, whose name was based on my favourite Left 4 Dead character; the Crazy Bill Clan. Despite having 'clan' in the clan name it was more of a friends community which was filled with people who I believed had good sportsmanship and weren't dicks. Eventually we gained a lot of skillful players that wanted to play competitively so we made a team on the CyberGamer ladder and rose quickly to a recognisable status. Despite Left 4 Dead's lack of support for competitive play it was a very popular field for strong gaming teams. The competitive side of our ranks dissipated after several seasons of the CG ladder, mainly after a de-moralising dice-roll loss in the grand final of an undefeated season. Even the victors, who were good friends of ours stated we deserved the victory. It provided a wild Gamestah VOD but shortly after we left the competitive Left 4 Dead scene for more casual gaming. The Crazy Bill Clan community is still strong today, with a lot of it's members still hanging out with each other in assorted games.

As I had a strong history with DotA Allstars I ended up playing a lot of Heroes of Newerth from beta, even competitively for a few months but not with a very consistent or strong team. Today, Heroes of Newerth is still my focus, particularly for the lack of delay for Australian players and the modern touch up of graphics and mechanics. Warcraft III, whilst classic, has passed it's time for me. For others too, I guess, hence Dota 2.

In the future, I plan on playing both Dota 2 and Battlefield 3 competitively with people from the Crazy Bill Clan and hopefully some new people we meet during our games. I'm hoping to get into Dota 2 as much as possible, shoutcasting is on the agenda and I hope I get early access beta key for myself and other -cbc! members so we can jump right into it.