KaW Memories (Part 3/?)

Hello all, Toast here with part 3 of this continuing series. This thread is simply a collection of screenshots and associated memories from my early KaW years. This particular lot of them is from early 2011 until just before epic battles were released (mid-2011). I always enjoy going through my many, many old ss, and I hope you can enjoy these photos and rambling musings too. Feel free to post any of your own memories here as well, old or new, ss or no ss. Forums are for discussion and connection, your comments are why posting is still fun!

Remember, this isn’t a history thread. This is just random memories and whatever ss I have on hand to support those memories. It’s personal, not an objective overview.

Links:
KaW Memories: Part 1
KaW Memories: Part 2


In the true forum spirit, let’s start off with some classic shenanigans:



This is something that gets shut down ASAP nowadays, which is probably for the better. But we used to get this stuff every month or two, people hopping on a trend and taking it just far enough. The actual story here is that two people quit and made threads about it within a few hours of each other. Some jokester made a copycat thread that contained something like “lol, jk, just wanted to be trendy” and that spawned so many more. These are all I have photos of, but I counted up the total “quitting KaW” titled threads the next day and it was over 20. More than 20 unique authors. Ah, good times.




This was my first real interaction with ghoomba. Very popular forum figure, eventual mod, I hated his guts for a while. I think he racked up forum posts quicker than anyone else had by that point. Once I figured out his friendliness was actual friendliness, and not manipulative guile (which is why I distrusted him initially), we got to be good buds. We’re still friends now, though we don’t chat much. KaW days with him were good fun, we paired up for forum and ingame shenanigans many times.




This is from a “who has the most money?” sort of thread. This was the largest value posted, and it wasn’t posted by -VM- in the ss I don’t think, just got passed along. -VM- was I believe high on the allies lb, and most people honestly thought the ss was faked.
For context: this was before highlands were released. As you can see by the building count: only lowlands. Imagine making 2t using just your lowlands, no ebs, and nobody over about 800kcs to farm for gold, and an ally market where costing 3b is a high price for 80percent or more of the active playerbase. Active new players get vollied to 500m if they’re lucky enough to find good sized people to volley them, but more likely get to 200m. A 1b new player volley is “oh my god” reaction material, though definitely did happen. So this ss was a tad incredulous, but shows the enormous gap between normal players and lbers (back then, it’s just as insane now).




An actual screenshot taken by somebody who was not me. From the days when jailbreaking your idevice was very popular (is it still? I actually have no idea), you could download one of the custom apps and edit the UI images and texts of any app. This had no effect on gameplay, but you could make cosmetic changes, screenshot them, and then post them for attention. This was a classic “omg I found the castle code” picture, which I saved and used to boost my ego (for the castle code joke, refer to previous threads).


Once upon a time, I got this invitation:


So I did. Ah, the golden days of recruiting. “Hey, I know like 200 people on a very personal basis. I’m gonna wall some and get like a 50percent return rate.” CC was a thrilling ride though:

Seriously though, it was a fun stay. Dilly was reviving his old clan, Conclave of Shadows, which I’d never gotten to visit before it went inactive last. So I stayed a few weeks, then headed off to The Observers, where I pretty much stayed forever. That sounds bad, now that I’ve typed it out… Yeah, six years’ clan loyalty?!




Mmmmm cookie update. Gimme gimme! A rare goofy admin, nearly all of which I managed to obtain ss of (up through early eb era, anyways [it’s amazing how much of wc you can keep up on with several dozen active friends all posting comments on it in a third-party chat room. I kind of miss that, actually]). This was about the highlands release update, the same as the pink dolphins unit announcement from the last thread I made. Not included here is the first forum post detailing the cost of the highlands from a little while later, as I thought it would be extraneous.




Ahhhhhh, this old forum feature. Back in the old days, forum posts looked like that one at top. Or like any other of the dozens of forum pictures I’ve posted. Clicking on the name led to a wildly incomplete forum profile (example pics are ahead), and so was infrequently done. The simple layout meant that if you were really good with bbcodes (this guy is not a good example), you could make a very convincing fake post (never perfect, the exact name color wasn’t/isn’t available for post content, but you could get close enough that most might miss it when they passed over). Down to editing your text size for the line spacing. I think I came up with the most accurate template, but I’m not sure I have a copy of it anymore. Luckily it doesn’t work anymore with the format changes since then (also, it never worked on pc), so if I do find it, I’ll post it in the comments somewhere. Maybe in that “reserved” spot I always place, but never use…
Side note: the content of this picture is/was a bannable offence. I don’t know if he got banned or not though, the whole thread was full of impersonations.


The next three pics I’m gonna talk about up here instead of below them. Initial context: I changed my ign to “a_dev” just to see if I could get away with it, mostly. I did. I was a very innocent 14y/o enjoying myself by trying to be a little edgy, at least I wasn’t doing drugs. But anyways, Makai was a good old friend (we still keep up occasionally), part of the insane, slaphappy, craps-and-giggles team of us. So we’re having a good laugh, while on the other hand J3J3 and I are having a civil, subtle “whose-thing-is-bigger” competition about forums (mine, for the record. Don’t listen to J3J3). J3J3 was a big figure in early KaW (like, 09-mid2010), took a break for a while, and then came back. Very decent guy, solid and down-to-earth, but always down for a good time. Wrote some guides, did some classic posts, modded for a while later on, he’s one of the folk that I’m no longer connected with at all, but I really wish I was. (J3J3, if you ever see this on a hidden lurking alt, hit my pm up and let’s catch up man.)
Really these 3 pics boil down to us all having fun as friends. I like them particularly because of the dissonance between Makai’s insanity and J3J3’s perfect manners while trying to claim he’s better than me.








Oof, shot down by kaw himself! That’s me there, another name change. This time I convinced somewhere around 4-6 common forum people to all change our names to a 4-char barcode variation. So that was fun. But jeez kaw, have some mercy
Side note: the impersonation warning was directed at someone else in the thread. I promise I wasn’t in trouble (this time).




Still me. And hey! Look! A milestone!
Actually though, I was the first person to hit 10k in the forums. I was honestly kind of proud (again, 14y/o). I had made a lot of good friends for the first time, so forums were hugely important to me. They still are, very fondly, but I’m a lot busier now.
Fun fact: Bastion almost beat me to it. We were close for a long while, but I had a higher post rate so eventually beat him to it.
Fun fact #2: despite not being active in forums since 2012, I still have an average of 7.61 posts/day. And I’m still 1.63percent of the entire forums.




Nope. Just narcissism.
Context: somewhere in the first month or two of the friend feature being added. Lots of people would follow literally every username they came across, and brag about how many people followed back. Personally I’ve never been a fan of following back unless it’s actually someone I want to pm.


Keep at it! We’re nearing the end! I’ve been typing almost two hours now, because I’m multitasking. More on that at the very end.


So this is a thing that happened. I’m still not sure why this happened, the account only cost around 13b. In retrospect I’m pretty sure it was a reset lb account before the board updated (it was gone the next day), but at the time nobody really knew what was going on. I couldn’t tell you why it reset though.





Classic forum shenanigans. The thread went on like this for I think five pages before somebody broke the chain.




Ahhhh, so this and the next one take some explanation and justification. There used to be a minigame in several third-party channels where the game was seeing how many noobs you could convince to give you their clan ownership, which you then disbanded. Aftermath didn’t matter (e.g. whining in forums, the like), just that you managed to disband their clan (that they, as a noob, paid either 3b [remember, that was a fair amount, that’s the cost of the last lowland], or 100 nobs for [buying clans with nobs actually happened back then, believe it or not]). Cruel? Yes. Absolutely. But at the time, it was funny, and we jokingly rationalized it as “there are already too many useless clans.”
This pic is me failing to get ownership, so I settled for admin and kicking everyone, wiping the clan page, and leaving. For more context on this particular case, the fellow who owned (doglover) had been a noob in forums very recently. The whole group of us used to rally against noobs who posted like they were bigshots, or who managed to irritate any of the popular folk in any way, and give them mob “justice.” Again, messed up? Definitely. But to a bunch of young teenagers who are all buddies with each other? It was just fun then. The aftermath:


Bless Nikki. The word missing there is “clipping,” which got clarified later in the thread. Dog took the clan ruining to forums, which was frankly a mistake since that’s where all of my cohorts lived. Ironically, the dog got chewed out.




A brief introduction to The Observers (TOS). We had an important system war coming up, so cc was obviously quite active and ready to go.




The face of a mod who silenced me twice in cc. *shakes head* people doing their job properly, pssh.




Honestly still one of my favorite tactics. We did this numerous times, to an unclear, confused result.




Context: there were two permanent items that gave 500atk/def and 500spy atk/spy def, respectively. Not 500k, nothing like that. Just 500. I still have them, not that you can tell from my profile.




Aha! A hint on the new update (ebs)! But still no castle code


I’d like to finish this photoset up with one of my favorite kaw interactions ever:


That’s right. kaw_admin gave me, personally, a cookie. I used to get cookies from feedback too occasionally. Even more occasionally, I’d get what cookie was actually slang for (an xtal). Ahh, those were good days.
Also, hai mems!



So anyways. There’s just a handful more of my screenshots, with a whole helluva lot of rambling. I’ve been writing this while waiting for data to come out one datum at a time, roughly 2min apart with 20s of action between each one. So I’m honestly a little fuzzy-minded, which is likely while there’s so much reading material this time around.

You can probably tell, but this was a really fun era of KaW for me. There were a lot of people involved also having fun, the game was beginning to change rapidly, and we just pushed ahead getting our giggles while we still could. I still know quite a few people from around this time, more than any other time. It takes something special to form lasting friendships. For all this game has been through, in all the ways it has changed, that core aspect has never left completely. Ebbed and flowed? Yes. But for most of us, I think it’s fair to say that it’s the people that keep us coming in over the months and years no matter when we’re from.

As I’ve said in the past, go out and have some fun. This is a game, so enjoy it! Make friends, make enemies, but never lose sight of how to enjoy yourself.

Until the next installment,
Toasty

 

Reserved.