Uncle Rico
2010-08-03 05:43:15
A while back Nino did an interview with zman in this thread: http://www.hl2dm-university.com/forum/p ... andlelight
Since Nino's kinda busy, I totally ripped off his idea and decided to do a few interviews. First one in the back of my van is eFPS entrepreneur holymoly.
I'm here with the master mind behind eFPS, trolling legend, and connoisseur of all things HL2DM, holymoly. How are you, holy?
holy: I'm good! My video card burnt up last night but I just found out that it's under warranty by just 17 days. So I cut it close, but its great to not have to buy a new one. And "trolling legend" is very kind of you :p
Where did the name "holymoly noway" come from?
holy: When I first started playing HL2DM in 2005, I played in this 24/7 dm_runoff server. I was on this really good killing spree and I fired two shots in mid-air with the magnum, and got two kills. The first guy I killed said, "holymoly!" and the second said "no way!" So I just changed my name to what they said and it stuck.
So, tell me about your history in HL2DM.
holy: Well, after a few weeks I got tired of runoff and started playing on the server with the lowest ping I could find. It was a server for this clan called {Hells Elite}. I became in-game friends with this one {HE} guy named BuckyKatt and stuck around. I joined {HE} and played with them for a solid 3 years. We weren't a good clan, competitively speaking, but we formed some solid friendships. And made a lot of penis jokes.
From your perspective, how has the game changed since you started playing?
holy: When I started playing, there was this really neat atmosphere of discovery. Whether Valve intended it or not, this is a really complicated game, and people were still discovering stuff that we take for granted now - like bunnyhopping and the crouch glitch. I felt like I was part of solving this complicated puzzle of how to be good at this game.
holy: Now, most players know all the tricks you need in order to be good at the game. So players are no longer really trying to figure out how to use the tricks. Now competitive players have gone back to practicing fundamentals. I see the community focused again in large part on the basics of the game, like spam conservation and hit-scan weapon accuracy. And its interesting because it seems like we've come full-circle.
What's been your most memorable HL2DM experience?
holy: The most memorable experience I've had in HL2DM was probably the most humbling. I had spent about a year only playing on the {HE} server and got really self-confident because I saw that I was better than most of the people that joined the server. Of course, we were playing rats maps and other pub maps, and so we mostly got new players joining the server. So one day this player named Vdrei joined the server, and he killed me a few times. I challenged him to a 1v1 to prove that he wasn't as good as me. Of course, he beat me really badly. And that experience really opened my eyes to the fact that I had been hiding in one server out of a thousand and hadn't really experienced the larger HL2DM community.
Favorite map and why?
holy: dm_lockdown, for sure. It's just the perfectly-balanced map. There's showers, supercharger, and back-mag. AR2 in the shower, with SMG nades. RPG in the back, with SMG nades. And it set the stage for map-makers by showing them the best way to deal with the RPG, which is kind of an overpowered weapon for a deathmatch game. In lockdown, by placing the RPG in a vent and making players be careful not to get chopped up by a fan, getting the RPG becomes a real risk. That's a great way to make sure matches don't turn into a competition over one weapon.
You spent some time away from the game. What brought you back?
holy: It's true, I spent some time away from HL2DM trying other games. I played Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and eventually Left 4 Dead 2. I really enjoyed those games, and they're great titles, but they lack the fast-paced, split-second reactions that make HL2DM fun to play. An intense HL2DM game really gets my adrenaline going, and I didn't ever get that feeling in TF2, for example.
Tell me about eFPS. Where did the idea come from? What do you hope to accomplish with it?
holy: Well, this summer I really felt like I wanted to make a website. So I started thinking about what I would want the website to be about, and I knew I would have to be passionate about the website's content or I wouldn't want to keep up with it. So I naturally thought about first-person shooter PC games. I talked to BuckyKatt, my oldest in-game friend on steam, because I knew he was a really talented website developer (he did a project for Geico last month). I had wanted to make a site hosting skins and maps, but Bucky suggested we include leagues, forums, and news as well. So the ball just got rolling from there, really. It was a really easy, natural process - it was really cool to see all these pieces fall together as if the project was just meant to happen.
How will the eFPS league differ from CAL?
holy: eFPS will be a wholistic community. We're going to have skins, maps, news, and forums in addition to the league. Most importantly, maybe, is that we're trying to put the community in charge of whatever leagues we decide to create. I felt like, in CAL, we had these people in charge making decisions who weren't really listening to what people wanted. CAL tried to take one formula and apply it to all its games - it didn't take the time to really custom-tailor leagues to fit what each game required. Plus, we're all HL2DM players. eFPS is a league that truly cares about the game. We've invested so many hours in this game, and the HL2DM league really reflects our love and commitment to this game.
With HL2DM players dwindling, do you think your league can spark interest in the game once again?
holy: Oh, this is great. One of the things we really want to do is start offering consistent, large cash prizes each season - like $1,000 dollars or more for each of the games we decide to make leagues for. I think large, consistent cash prizes - not just one huge cash prize - will get older players coming back to compete and get new competitive players into the community. This is a really great game - it just needs publicity to get people to try it and love it. Valve never gave it a chance to get that publicity - it was just the phrase "multiplayer included" on the box cover of HL2 for them. Its really up to us to get new people to pick up the game. And it's free! What a great way to get people to play it - offer them a chance at winning money for playing a free FPS game.
That's pretty ambitious. How will you fund the prize money?
holy: Great question. We're planning to use advertising revenue from the website to fund prize money. When we launch the site, we'll try to make it clear that the more people go to the site, the more money we can give back. Our estimates are that after about a year, we could afford to possibly offer upwards of $5,000 per game in prize money per year. It's an ambitious goal, but according to our numbers and projections, its very doable.
Offering a substantial prize each season will increase competition, but it also changes the game community atmosphere. How will you prevent team stacking, admin bias and cheating so that we don't see the same team winning over and over again like with CAL?
holy: Well, I think that if we limit competition at 2v2, we'll be able to really avoid a lot of the team stacking. At worst, we could have two of the very top players together. But the skill level difference among top players isn't so great that we'll see two people dominating consistently. We should always see some really good competition.
holy: As for admin bias, I've taken careful precautions to prevent that. I personally have no clan right now, and I don't prefer certain teams over others. Both Da11as and Valiums, as the other admins, obviously would like to see their clans do well. But by having three admins, I've tried to be sure that one person's bias won't affect things, since there are always two other people to shut them down.
holy: We've done a lot of research and work with anti-cheating plugins, getting the very best anti-cheating package we could find. It might not be perfect, but whatever the software misses I think we can catch manually. With that much money on the line, you know that every losing team will go through the recorded, public sourceTV demos looking for hacks. I think that consistent peer-review will catch the hackers that slip through the cracks. And when they're caught, our zero tolerance policy will keep them out for good.
The HL2DM community - what are your thoughts on it?
holy: Haha I love this community. It's small enough that you pretty much know all the competitive players, but its not so small that you feel bored with the same people. And it doesn't hurt that we've got some really funky people around. Some of the most epic internet drama I've ever heard of has happened within this community. Girls that turn out to be guys, hardcore internet detective work - this stuff keeps me on my toes, and I love it.
If you could slap one person in the community, without any consequences, who would it be?
holy: Dude, I would slap the poo out of Kigha. Because you never slap a man unless its a man who wants to be a woman. Seriously, lying about your gender and trying to date some guy - that's almost impossibly selfish and just crazy manipulative.
That's about all the questions I have. Anything you want to add?
holy: That about covers it! I'm looking for someone to be in charge of an un-moderated forum for hl2dm. Flame wars encouraged, but not porn or hacks. You want to be flame-master in chief and run that forum?
You bet your sweet ass I would.
That's it for this episode of In the Van. Join me next time when I lure another unsuspecting victim into my van with the promise of candy.
