About my old interests (I)

It’s been almost 5 o 6 years, but the memories are still with me. Let me tell you a little story. As most kids my age, when I was around 9 years old, I discovered, through some friends from class, an online game.

It was not the first online game I played, since I already had been playing Habbo since I was eight. Nevertheless, I never considered Habbo a really fun game, though a very great way of meeting people and making friends, a so called ‘social media’.

Anyways, Habbo is not the point of this first article. The point is, I really hadn’t online gaming experience per se. For almost two years, the only online gaming action I had was just pointing to squares, building rooms, and endless and mindless chatting.

The game that changed it all, and fueled my love for online shooters and other online games, was S4 League. As I said, I discovered it through some of my old friends. Time has passed, life has happened, and I don’t hang out with them anymore. I can safely say I haven’t seen them in quite a few years.

Game was like nothing I have ever seen or experienced. Until that moment, I was naïve enough to believe that games like that, with such movement and graphics and such smoothness when it came to the gameplay where only a thing to the consoles.

I was wrong. And I was glad I was. I can vividly remember myself walking down the street to go the nearest cyber to rent a machine and play along my friends and every other person right there. The cyber was full almost 24/7, with kids spending 4 or 6 hours there every day, skipping class only to train those tricks, aim and skills.

It really makes me think about the importance we, as youngsters, give to things. Specially when we have nothing, or almost nothing, to hang on to. To hold on to. And we are left, or maybe thrown, into the world, just to experience it for ourselves. So, you find yourself facing the giant, and you have no one to advise you, to guide or help you. You are just there, alone. Playing an online game.

Grinding. Farming. Chatting. Making friends and connections that will not last. When life calls, this virtual reality fades rapidly. All those tricks and skills mean nothing against real consequences, real effects.

But S4 was great. A lovely epoch that I will hold on to great esteem. Why? Well, I can safely say that it really sucked a lot of time of my life, and that I could have spent that time somewhere else, maybe making friends or flirting with girls.

But there I met great people. Those contacts are lost in time… but the memories are still alive in my mind. Honestly, it was perfect for me.

The game was supposed to be a shooter, but its many flaws when it came to security (hacks were obnoxious and very common, specially aimbot), the enormous skill gap that made it difficult for players to improve, an ever-growing elitist (and toxic) community and, cherry on top, the esper-chip and enchant system that blatantly converted the game into a Pay 2 Win, sentenced it to death and to a certain degree of collective weariness.

Let’s clarify those a little.

Yeah. Throughout all of its history, the game was plagued with hackers of all kinds. At first, those were the typical, annoying speed hacks and 1-hit-kill hacks. Eventually, those would get patched, but it never was a really sure thing… Aimbots were everywhere. Game-breaking bugs were everywhere (like that one where you could drain half your opponent hp before starting a new round).

However, even if its sounds crazy, those weren’t the most annoying things about the game. The game, perhaps aware of its thousand vulnerabilities and the cost of fixing them all, implemented a pay to win system that consisted in the following: - Pay to upgrade your clothes, giving them enchants that could increase your damage, critical probability and accuracy, amongst other perks. - Pay to buy or upgrade esper-chips that you would then ‘install’ into your clothes (there was one for every piece of cloth). You could upgrade them to LVL 5 and they drastically increased damage, SP production and HP, accuracy, etc.

Obviously, the clothes themselves, named sets, had their own stats, which varied whether they were premium or not. If they were premium, they could be either temporal or permanent, and you could only get them through capsules and shopping (but only the temporal modality, permanent sets were subject to RNG capsules).

If they weren’t premium, they had zero stats.

So, think about it for a moment. It’s the year 2010. You just heard about this game that’s been popping. Your friends, whom have already been playing for one or two years, or since the opening (2007 in Europe?), have told you how great the matches can be, they told you about the dynamism and the frenetic shootings that take place, the sword duels, the huge variety of weapons (not so huge, I will comment on that too).

Community was pretty active and diverse that year, so I wouldn’t say it was still ‘decadent’. Obviously, perhaps peer-pressured, you hop in. You register, download the tedious launchers and wait until the game updates, only so you can play with your friends. After a little struggle, you finally find yourself in the Europe lobby, which is almost full and had you clicking for two good minutes. Okay. You find your friends and start playing.

Of course, you notice that you are pretty bad and that can barely move and understand the controls and mechanics, but because you like the aesthetics and the gameplay, you stay around. Your friends are naturally better than you and, if you want to improve to play better with them, you might want to join other rooms where the randoms are. So, you do, and you rapidly discover one of the bad faces of the community: its intolerance to newbies. Again and again, you are kicked, berated and generally looked down upon because you are, in one word, bad.

They will tell you to go to the newbies channel, which was always known to be, specially since the ban of newbies in general channels, hacker’s playground. Therefore, the community was not only elitist, it also failed to welcome new players and thus it buried even more the game and its name. It was also very difficult (unless you were a smurf trying to practice) to beat paid players because of all the enchants and chips they had. Therefore, rewarding that lack of skill and the willingless to put in money meant that they ostracized their non-paying players to some kind of ‘free’ ghetto.

Some would argue that there was a mode, not official, that players used to organize trying to rid themselves of the burden of the chips and enchants. Because, to a real, competent player using all those ‘boosters’ meant nothing. If you wanted to prove your skill, you played S5. S5 was the competitive mode of S4 League. As I said, not an official mode, because the only thing that changed from the official modes were the stats: there couldn’t be any. Chips, enchants, premium clothes: those were prohibited and thus everybody that wanted to play in those rooms had to join as God brought them to the world: naked (with stat-less clothes and weapons).

Obviously, there was still things that could be improved: wallshooting. But even if all this sounded fair and ideal if you just wanted to enjoy the game without paying, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. That is because, as I said, S4 players, especially those that dared play S5, were amongst those ‘OG’ and elitist players that would kick you out in a heartbeat if they didn’t know your name or your KD and winrate was just mediocre. So no, a new player had to really give in, really like the game or have very insisting friends, to keep on playing it for more than two or three days. Because, even if you tried with all your will to like it (not even fall in love with it), you would find yourself deeply and quickly disappointed by all the flaws I already mentioned.

The competitiveness and the elitism are to be expected. You see, S4 was meant to be a competitive shooter, which, in its golden era, sponsored international online tournaments known as Supersonics. Lots of pro clans and players wanted to participate in those, and the race to be the best player was really a thing (at least in its golden era, in the dawn of the game).

However, this spirit quickly faded away with the uninteresting, useless updates and the complete disconnection from the developers, that would go on a crusade to burn their creation to the ground. What could have been a lasting and strong community faded away in the span of a few years because those who were responsible of maintaining and holding it together did not care about their game but the money that could be milked from it.

That shows a clear lack of hope and vision about their creation, which was, honestly, very innovative and funny to play in its first stages. So no, I wouldn’t blame the community at all, although it did wrong by me, I also did it wrong many times. I think that those years were weird, full of in-game and real-life events that made it a turbulent epoch to live in.

In one hand, we had our personal lives, school, work, family: many of us were still making our first steps in matters like love, girls or moral and ethical obligations. In the other, we had this developing and growing game that had us very excited, very hopeful for its future, but that failed to meet our expectations. Then the developers and the publishers, with that painful lack of interest about their product, milked the cow to the literal ground.

I can’t finish this article without letting some of that blame fall onto myself too. Even if I think it was pretty stupid, I found myself kicking newbies from my rooms and disrespecting them for being bad or not knowing how to move, jump or do certain basic tricks. I was part of the problem too. I also abused many of the game-breaking bugs, specially those that let you multiply your belongings. At last, I got banned, but I was already pretty exhausted of it all. The game had taken too much of my time, and those people that used to be my friends in there are no longer with me.

S4 is dead now. It finally came to an end about two years ago, leaving the road free for private servers to operate with impunity. For the nostalgic, like me, it represents what S4 could have been: a free to play game, competitive, without P2W mechanics and ever-roaming hackers that can just shut all the servers at will.

There could be improvements: a modern matchmaking system that got rid of the old, server-room selection system, and a stricter enforcement of rules would help. But I don’t think that would ever happen. If you’re an old player like me, the first thing you notice when you log in the most popular private server, Xero, is the same familiar names you’ve been playing against or with for the past 13 years.

Gaming world has moved onto new things. The competitive gaming scene has drastically evolved throughout the years, and if S4 was not prepared to face the challenges of its timeline, I don’t believe it would stand a chance in the modern-day market. Outdated graphics, outdated code, outdated systems and, some would say, gameplay, has marked this game as a very little niche game that contains a small community of no more than 1000 active players.

Anyways… I already wrote way too much. Perhaps I will make a second article elaborating a few points I mentioned in this article, but that is for today…

See. You.