A Change Of Heart
Xander2KX January 2006
After testing games with Nero, GeNoCide, TraKeR2x and DarK for a few months during 2004 we still couldn't decide where we would go. So during that time we stood with MTM2 even though the end of this was getting closer and closer losing players at the zone all the time.
In december of the year before we had a letter saying Monster Truck Madness was going to be taken out of the zone and seeing that we all stood up together to keep it there but not only we did that, the time was arrive for me the host the 3rd anniversary tourney with my ultimate creation for this game; Xander Zone rumble. The night of the tourney was an american movie ending like when after a ultimate effort, Inferno and I won the last round in a 2 vs 2 vs 2. Not only was I proud to show my rumble to everyone who really enjoyed it, but winning on it was a dream come true.
The weeks following this were a lot alike. The Wolfpack was making the fun in there hosting tourneys, talking trash and owning the place like every winter until Febuary 10th where we hosted the MTM2 Farewell tourney. Sadly, 100% of people knowing the zone was set to close the zone the day after this, maybe 20% joined the tourney which we once again won. Happily, this date marked the beginning of the expansion for the team.
A meeting was made a few days later and this lead us to get into Ghost Recon, Unreal Tournament 2004, a try at CoD1 and a return to Rogue spear. It turned out to not be very sucessful. I killed the division that TraKeR had rebuilt in Rogue spear; it was simply full of crap. We were not ready to pay for servers and CoD1 was impossible to get in for that reason. However, luckily we met Silencer (Nemes!s) one night and we made him join right away. At UT04, despite really trying hard to recruit and kicking ass, it was impossible to recruit. We got 2 players, we lost soon enough for not showing up at all. The problem was also that mostly only me and GeNoCide were playing this game. A Lying DarK told us he wanted to play but in reallity he didn't like the game. A certain Inferno didn't really try at all either even thought he had the game. This unsucessful quarter of the year brought us to summer and a well deserved break.
Just before that I had started to clean the team of everyone useless. I told everyone before we leave for summer that this would continue in september and that things were going to change for good. During the summer I finally met DarKaTTaK and TraKeR2x when I went partying at their place for one week-end. We had a blast, but DarK's lack of trust toward me and his girlfriend leaded to big problems later.
When we came back in september. I was ready. But not everyone else was. I wrote this 4 hours long text where I explained in details what was going to happen and there was also a form in it for everyone to complete. It's hard to believe but it took over 30 days to get everyone's repplies. Within those 30 days I was easily able to kick 60% of players out of the team. We went from.. around 35 to a bit more than 10? No problem for me. It's never been about the number but the quality. During the survey time, I got happily surprised by the answers of the members saying they were really looking forward to this expansion. The sad thing is that many didn't respect what they said. This made me reduce the captains number from 5 to 1 and that last one was DarK with who I wasn't sure to keep as a captain either.
We played some Raven Shield and Ghost Recon as well as a bit of MTM2 where me and former member Slayer kicked ass in racing tourneys every saturday until it finally arrive. Call of Duty 2 was the game that had received the most vote for the expansion and we were damn happy to have our hands on it. Starting with DarKaTTaK, GeNoCide, Nemes!s (I thank him for beeing patient enough to really only start playing with us then) and a friend of him we didn't bother practicing at all. Those 3 were pretty good in general but it wasn't the same story for me. I was a shotgun noob and the reason for this was that I could only kill people with it. To everyone's eyes I was a damn noob and it was hard to understand even if I had never really played that game series before since I was always very good at everything I was playing. From october to december, all we did was playing, getting a member here and there but it wasn't going as fast as I wished it would. Some members couldn't get the game right away and we deadly needed more member if we wanted to have some impact in there.
Meanwhile the MTM2 division was still alive with very few members but we still found the way to recruit some including old friend and huge rivality of mine, Collector. Him and I realised how stupid we were to not joining forces before that. But it was hard when Coll was always seen as one of the top player in top teams and on my side, I was known as a top player too but that wasn't the case of the rest of the team on the cube. We both talked a lot and I slowly introduced him to CoD2. He was going be another member for this division as well as little Demon and Inferno who both received the game for christmas Seeing how things were going the last month of 05, I felt the year coming was going to be from far the best. I wrote a news-letter explaining what we would need to do to make this work and I garantied that 2006 was going to be Wolfpack's year. Guess what happened?
