KaW Memories (Part 2/?)

Hey all, buckle in for another long-winded thread by yours truly!
I'm Toast, Outdoortoast, iamtoast, and a huge host of other names that have been kicking around for close to 7 years. All this is is a collection of screenshots from my glory days, in rough chronological order. Part 1 started at the start, and this part is just picking up where that left off (link below). All SS in this set are things that I enjoyed or thought worth saving when I was 14. These are fond memories with context given where possible. This isn't big history, just a small bite of perspective from one player.

Link to part 1: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=182365

This first set is the very first All-Star War in 2010.

The original clans, towards the end of the war. They got to have 200 members a piece and were disbanded after it ended.


Strongest clan list. iG and Foxes (congrats Foxes on rebirth recently!) leading as per usual, except for the massive powerhouses that were the ASW clans. After this war the infamous TYR clan started (favorites from the beginning), they're still around today. Used to be very elitist, and rightly so.

Following are some clanmates of mine who we were very proud of, as we were a small, tight clan. Makillia I miss dearly, she was active in MH for a long time but I haven't been able to contact in a while. Kielitis was our beloved clan owner, he still plays and we chat occasionally. The third ss is some noob who managed to get in, and just shows that no matter how carefully you prepare, you just can't stop some people from being worthless. :^)





On to some forum stuff!


AKA, J3J3 is ruling active topics. J3 was an original player, frequent forumer, and generally helpful and liked guy. He modded for a little while. No clue what he's up to now, but if you see this come say hi!



AKA "oh god, shut up, KotFE." These threads all had something different and unexciting going on in each of them. Go ahead, fight me about it.



Ah, comedic timing. Gen and Blade were good buddies to each other and also to me.



Here's some drama involving our #1 #1 #1 #1 player.


Majesty almost never showed up in public (wc, forums), so anytime he poked his head into either was instantly mass alarm. But yeah, take a chill pill!


Naturally.


That got serious real quick, for a tiny clan who had previously had a member farmed by lbers.


Maj not giving a darn. The drama I mention was nothing important, just current news summed up by a 14y/o. Someone else bought the guy and that was the last we heard.


Typical noob-spam that always flooded wc:

Ugh. Hire mes. Used to be such an issue, you practically couldn't have a page of wc on the screen that didn't contain one.



Not sure of the context here, just that I thought my troop count was funny. iOS users, this is one of the old UIs!



Gen_Spartan being a smart aleck like usual.


Rare v3n0m sighting! AKA the oldest user listed on the forums.



"REEEEEEE KOTFE" -younger Toast



Mr Kool-Aid in his mod days, not too long after mods got green names on forums. I can't remember if they got forum powers yet or not, but they got their color distinction after not too long.
You know you've played KaW too long when the :lol: face looks like it's moving in a screenshot!



Original description of the reset bonuses by kaw_admin. Back in the days of 25 lands only, you could reset your account at will. If you reset after unlocking the 25th land, you got a special item each of the first four times.



KaWspiracy theories! I still laugh at this every time I see it, then I realize how messed up it is and laugh more, but slightly uncomfortably this time. That's a level 3 forge, for anyone who has never seen one. Used to be probably the most common building in KaW, so it was intimately familiar to literally everyone at the time.



A wild kaw appeared in wc! Those abhorrent-looking blue names were the second iteration of color after updating the game to make clicking on wc names bring you to their profile. Fire at the bottom is referring to kaw's Hawaiian shirt that somehow came up.


Kool-Aid. What a noob. Getting farmed by the biggest noob of all.
Dillybar up there is me, that'll come into play later.



Look at those stats!!!


Sometime this year, ATA released their second game: Future Combat: Patriots at War (FC or PaW).


Here's me in wc in the first few hours of release. Mods had just been chosen (from a pool of KaW players).


And here's me getting the very first silence in the new game! Bragging rights nothing more.


And Mr Mod himself apologizing. ily2 benny
Also: see some other noob trying to sell me off to wc. FC's economy works (worked) like KaW's but scaled down slightly, so imagine those numbers and you can get a rare feel for the original days of KaW.



This is mostly a testament to the wild, hilarious insanity that often was forums. The major group of active forumers all knew each other well and we were always joking and randomly exerting our social power over people in [at the time, it seemed] humorous ways. The guy whose wall this is was making caps locked posts all over forums, and big-name FFer Raeki (super cool dude) got sick of it. The awful spelling is not typical, but definitely adds to the effect.



This and the next two pics are Raeki giving me the literal castle code. To my knowledge this doesn't work anymore, so I'm not really posting anything haxorz. I never did it right, but it was interesting to scroll around through the sprites.





This was the end of a clan I tried to run on my pc alt (Kal) for a little while (it failed miserably). But KaW did get this noob Fi out of it, who grew up to be our wonderful Saber (yep, the old mod). I taught him the basics and helped out regularly whenever he pm'd me. Great guy, and it was an honor to watch him grow up with me (and well past me, in KaW!).
Toastis was my current name there.



Remember that series of TCK fails in part 1? Look! A win!



Makai was my good friend, how could I resist? Several unique people had posted for chicks in the past few minutes, it was an understandable reaction.



Look at this reset little noob. That's right Cor, I OWN(ed) you! Now he owns me, isn't it great how life circles like that? We were clannies then.



Literally bennymod telling me to bot. Tsk, tsk.


Insta-regret, now comes in green! Jokes all around though, clan chat was always fun with 2-5 mods at any given time.
Oh, and "dont screenie" lol
Asut was messing around "helping" "pin" me, with Cor naturally encouraging him for the good of the clan.



The Observers (TOS) mission statement. Back in the day, pwars were wars against a clan with a just few pure spies or hansels in it who stayed open the whole war. The war was forfeited by the other clan before it ended, and a fraction (like, 20%? or something) of the total plunder generated was awarded to those OSFs who stayed open for a couple days, yielding massive massive plunder gains. EBs were actually partly the devs efforts to stop pwars (after many, many attempted nerfs), and technically they worked.
TOS was just here for the S&Gs (somethings and giggles). We had no way to have real losses, and gained much enjoyment in whacking people who cared more about it than we did.



One (of many) of my peer-pressured name changes.


Sometimes I think about "LAMENT! FOR I AM ATION!" randomly and start laughing to myself still.


Yeah yeah don't worry I actually did it. I had 21nobs to start with (mostly through quests), I'm used to having a little backstock! and by backstock I mean enough to change my name on a whim.



Here's what I said would come into play later! And there's our dear Maki, making an infrequent forum appearance. (You can tell it's a fake quote though, I never ever capitalized the t's in Outdoortoast.)


We also had wc discussion about it, and I actually changed it while dillybar was in TOS with me. I'm unsure what the war is about here, but the name is what's important. That last bit reads AwesomeToast so people would still know who I was.



kaw moping on his own wall. Seriously. Poor, misunderstood kaw.



First set of people to break the trillion gold mark of hire price. :') anyone now could hire all of them after any event ends.



Ahhhhhhhh. Cor used to record KaW videos for youtube. This was one of the several times we made him stop because we were being ridiculous in cc and he couldn't concentrate. Benny presumably was on pc.
Bacon picked me and J3J3 to relive in his name variety. I'd say I miss him but we're friends on fb so we still chat occasionally.


Cor explaining exactly why we're awful people.



Classic forum shenanigans. Sholron was amazing (still is, last I heard on KaW). One of my best mentors, and a stellar figure in the community.



More clan tidbits. TOS was always good fun.



Oh man. This one was the culmination of repeated frustration. See, I ALWAYS missed posts ending in 000 (it was hip to make a note that it was post #1000, or whatever at the end of whatever post you just wrote). Every damn time. But I caught this one, which only convinced me I was actually cursed.
See also: nearly 7k posts in 7mo. It only got more intense after that. That's why, despite not really being active since 2012, I still average about 8posts per day. (Used to be over a hundred at its peak). I also still have 1.65% of all forum posts, you all need to step up your game!



Back when they made forum names link to your ingame profile instead of your condensed forum profile (as shown above). This was hilarious to a 14y/o for the first time.



Also in this update, was the inability to follow your own name to your profile. I thought this was unfair and decided to raise a huge, sarcastic parody petition about it. This was a badly-edited visual to drive the point home. I made a long thread about it and took signatures.


Yeah, look at all those names so quick! Forums used to be much, much, MUCH more active than they are today. We could have ten threads each being commented on within a 5min period during active times, or maybe around a 30min period during less active times. Of course there were dead times, but not like we have now.


Support's anticlimatic reply. Whoops, just a bug! (except I wasn't convinced, the error message was too well-placed.) Look at young me concisely selling that idea though. I emailed the devs a lot back then, and I am eternally grateful they put up with me.



THEBlade (forumer extraordinaire) completely owning kaw. Which is a feat, because kaw was expensive for the day.



This was back when the devs rarely showed their sense of humor. I managed to compile many of the instances over the years, which gives you all the benefit of seeing them. Devs nowadays are absolutely wonderful with their player interactions and engagement, in the older days it was rare to see them in public (even in their own threads, which were almost always locked to players).



Let's end this with my favorite text on a plain background I've come across. I'm a noob. You're a noob. Mods are noobs. Devs are a big buncha noobs. Embrace the noobhood, and enjoy the game. I've lost some of my ability to enjoy it, frankly. I'm not as good at having fun as I was back then. We sucked, and we were proud of it. KaW was my greatest source of joy. I took it seriously, but not stressfully like so many people seem to. KaW was where I learned to have friends and be a part of a social circle, and it was also the place where I learned how wonderful those things are. It was a serious part of my life by being an easy-going, fun, happy place.
So. Get out there and have some fun this day, week, month, etc. Enjoy the game for being a game full of fantastic people. Meet a random on wc. Enjoy casual banter on the forums. Because what is a game, but something we can enjoy?


Until next time, whenever that may be.

~Toasty

 

I'd make a preemptive apology for any typos, but I'm not sorry. I don't proofread, except for bbcodes. I have too much confidence in my own writing, sue me.

 

Salty:
There is more. I even linked it!

Lone:
We old folk don't mess around when it comes to threads. This was a standard type thread.

Snoopman:
Don't drown in your tears of joy, but in the blood of your enemies.

 

Also dear lord is this long on mobile. I am a bit sorry for that, I guess. Onward to page 2 to avoid scrolling to replies!

 

@sweet:
Nobody would know how to organize one. There aren't many OSFs available, and the ones that are may not have the time for a war. Instituting a major mechanics change just for a weekend would be difficult and riddled with bugs too.
But wouldn't it be funny if the dev clan just did one?

@venom
They were special in the sense that only a few players got the massive bonus, unlike now where everyone can.
Also, this was less than a year's worth of KaW. I have a LOT of screenshots. This was less than a quarter of the ones I have from this time period.

@galan
Mine are all on old idevices. I just charge em up and then email them to myself in sets of 5 or fewer. I just post and write, because I like talking and this is my chance to muse to a captive audience
I also have an excellent memory for KaW because it was literally my entire social life for years.

@aph
Ikr? It's amazing the people I remember going through these. Like last post was easycheese. I'd totally forgotten about him, but he was such a fun time back in the day.
Ghoo I'm actually friends with on fb as well, Nikki visited TOS a few months back for chats. Haven't seen the others.

@ash
There were tons of silences in wc once you got to 2011. It was also the golden age of update telling who'd been silenced.
To be fair, most of the popular forumers and even wc presences were in their early teens. I started when I was 13, many others started when they were 11-13, and for the first few years we were all young and driving the public social aspect of the game.
Farming I agree with. Hits used to be just for lulZ, with farming going on when people decided escalating was worth the fun. But now there isn't enough public socializing for so many random hittings to happen. We used to hit noobs in wc and forums all the time just for being noobs. Now you can't because it's like singling someone out, and they instantly make a big stink to their clan. Used to be you'd wall the clan owner with "hey, we're farming your member so and so because he's a noob. Just thought I'd let you know ahead of time!" And you'd get back "Lol thanks!" Or "lol [some expression of not caring about that noob member]".
Forums used to be fun cause they were active. You could develop a personality that everyone recognized and communicate with that as a backdrop. Like hanging out irl with friends, some things don't need clarified, justified, or explained. Now they're not active enough to make a presence known, or have casual chats (because then threads get locked for going "off topic").
Wc is always scarily dead, but that's an old person's musings.

@snoopy
They leave. Every time. Because they come back in waves, never all at once. I try to sometimes; I literally can't because there's nothing to reply to on forums. No threads have any real discussion to contribute to, and the other threads are so inane that any witty comment you put just sounds out of place and like you're a troll because you're the only person really engaging.

See: no1curr, one line threads, one paragraph threads that only contain one line of content, threads which could turn into discussions or a place of friendly banter and fun but are locked immediately because they have been "resolved."

 

I've had at least 3 perms on this acc, I think it's actually 4. I've never asked for one to be removed. Various authority figures got them lifted despite me insisting I deserved it.

There were plenty of adults around. But it was the younger folk who really drove most of the forums. Wc had a higher proportion of adults, and still does I think. Adults contributed huge amounts to the forums, but the persistently active ones around all the time were mostly younger.

 

Spock:
Arguing over what constitutes a silence is not relevant to this thread. I'd prefer if everyone stayed on topic to discussing old KaW.

Aph:
So long as non-KaW threads stay on topic, they've generally always been good. Most of our threads weren't strictly KaW-related. The ones that were were usually only marginally related to actual game content, and we ran with them anyways.

Roni:
Please refrain from making personal attacks on my thread. If you continue to post personal attacks, I will ask a mod to remove them as per the ToU and forum rules. Especially as the attacks are not relevant to the thread content.