Cheers to all you guys that ever read this forum,
About a year ago we came in contact with a mod called Dayz, nothing new as we tried out multiple games a month, but in this particular case we freaking loved the game and more-over found ourselves a new challenge. Coming from a background of StarTrek: Elite Force and RtcW: Enemy Territory we always kept our fair share of FPS lovers.
It wasn't untill long that we also had our own server and with that we also had our own encounters with hackers and scriptkiddies. That, together with the fact that with every server restart you had to start all over again, was one of the reasons the interest in custom Dayz dwindled. But we were hooked. In came Dayz: Origins. Also with our own server this mod seemed to fix what we were missing in the old-skool Dayz, less hacking and some proper base building. We had a blast and if the mod updates were more frequent and focussed on base-building we wouldn't have looked any further but then we wouldn't have tried EPOCH.
EPOCH was perfect for the interests that we had in PVP and the 'long-term' gameplay we were looking for. We had our experience with kiddy admins so we were very picky on choosing a server to play on. This is how we came to the AiC server. It was supposed to be a short presence to test the mod but we were so impressed with the admins and the server performance that we dropped the idea of our own server and permanently set-up camp here with you guys.
Our first base was slightly north-east of Cherno, 1 click west of the small dam. We were then with a small recon party and were properly intimidated with the air presence of some clans and the armed HMMV's that went cruising through Cherno evening after evening to hunt down lone survivors. We opted to keep our presence on the server low profile, as we didn't know the important factions on the server we avoided confrontations and only replied with bullets if cornered. After 2 weeks we had the area mapped out, including bases and intelligence on factions present so we decided to move in.
A new location was picked west of Selenogorsk in some abandonned farm houses where a previous clan already attemped to make a base. Again we chose for the low-profile approach and only did some interiour decorating. At this point we moved more aggresively through the map to mark our presence and it was hilarious to see that Veshai took most of the 'visible' kills and thus was bombarded as the Lone Ranger. This was also the time where we went for our first base raids and had our first active base confrontation with Er Terrible and Azazel or Azael (confusing) at the Factory. I alsmost crashed the heavily fought over chopper while getting it out of the base so we even had to go back in again for parts to fix it :facepalm: .
After that things went on overdrive. BBC was heavily raided during the setup of their camp near Pogorevka with moderate resistance, Bruggolia's house (he build a proper house from the modular build materials, it was so cute) was overrun with him leaving all doors and safes open and also some random camps which were abandonned or from whom we couldnt locate the owner. We then turned to the more heavily fortified. Devils Castle was scouted long ago but was left untouched because it seemed untakeable. Only after we learned the destructive power of miniguns on doors we found our key and decided to go for it. First raids were without resistence present but the best raid was when we tried to recapture Shood's Merlin. The base at Prud was located so brilliantly that we missed it on our first intel missions. When we stumbled upon it we quickly realised it was an absolute goldmine in term of items and vehicles and quickly started a raiding scheme. The lay-out in combination with skilled homeowners turned the first raids into a massacre and untill the last day the decision to raid it was made based on PVP and not yield as the expected losses always would make it a negative business case.
And now it is over. We are the last regulars to remain on the server, the evening has a handfull of newbies and hackers but the dayz (see what I did there) of a half loaded server and clans roaming Cernarus are gone. Even AiC does not log-in anymore and it saddens us. Although we had our differences, we always admired and respected the players and especially the admins. It is hard to find a clan and server that adheres to their own rules and doesn't bully people around simply because they have the powers and can't win things straight-up. We despise cheating and at the very sight of conspicious behaviour we always ring all the bells we can find both in side-chat or on TS. 20k slots in a SUV, vehicles that don't spawn regurarly, 80k damage shots etc etc, we reported and bitched about it immediately. The thing we didn't know was the power of satchels, these things are fairly overpowered to say the least. When our base was all blown up (to the ground I might add) we went into a frenzy simply because we didn't associate it with normal game mechanics.
But enough of the explaining. We would like to thank AiC for the beautifull server they have running and honorous admin team that watches over it. We say goodbye to all the fine riflemen that caused us so much pain but also brought us so much joy. If the server returns to it's former glory so will we and let's agree to nerf satchels and minigun damage on buildings or make them incredibly difficult to get your hands on.
From The Netherlands with love,
Casper
CEO/Il Presidente/Fattest Hamster of them All
Netherlands 11th Division/ NED-Clan
Also saluting:
* Ishihiro Tanaka;
* Veshai;
* Remlej;
* Shood;
* Lord Xander;
* P0sy;
* John;
* Gilles;
