All of this thought of returning players I wanted to post a topic to spark a little debate. I am going to list a few players that have left/retired from the game. I curious who everyone one thinks would do the best in a Stock-tournament game and who would do the best in a Unlim game. Here are a few players:

Xide
Alexio
SupG
Blue Adept
Mind Dagger
hELLCAT
Doctor Who
Traitor
Res

Just for kicks I am going to do an overall ranking based on games I played with these players. Again, this is MY opinion, this in no way reflects the views of......well, you get the idea. lol

Alexio
Blue Adept
Mind Dagger
Doctor Who
Xide
hELLCAT
Res
Traitor
SupG

No disrespect to anyone on this list. This is a pretty nice list of players to have played with or against. I have gone against all of these players multiple times. Most of these players were also scripters as well. Only ones that I don't know of are Dr. Who and hELLCAT.

Guess I forgot to mention my "Bests". Alexio for an Unlimited Game and Blue Adept for a stock-tourney game.

I've only played with one of the players in your list, that I know of.

hELLCAT has got to be one of the best all around players I've ever seen, mainly because he excelled at playing solo, once we got him on the corp we were unstoppable!

A player that did not make your list that would be the only one I could rank highest is Hosem. Badest pilot of the "Purple Photon Machine" you'll ever see.

HellKitty used TWX before it was publicly or privately available. Along with Alexio, he also had an advantage of speed due to being always (ISDN or something like that) on while many of us were still 56k.

A fair amount of the notoriety there due is due to fast macros and Xides TWX.

I know he was on a fast connecton, T-3 from work.

He was one of my blues, and the most economical one to support. (I mainly played red.) He was very conservative with corp assets, that's what I really appreciated about playing with him.

As for TWX or Kill Macros, I can't tell you what he used. I can tell you there wasn't any "botting" going on.

Didn't know hosem. Never played. Alex did use bot scripts, but they were individual scripts that had triggers. He kept them pretty private. hellKitty was a monster.

If it was neither publicly or privately available, he must have read Xide's mind to use TWX I guess?

AFAIR, hellCat did not use TWX, just macros. He did have a blindingly fast connection from his employer though, not to mention reactions like a cat. A very fine player, honorable too.

Zoobar
Eleq
Mega Hertz

Did you ever see Gypy's War Room? I think it's still on the wayback machine somewhere. His address was www.azi.com.

Hosem, Black Slayer.. and I forget who all, were the early "sages" at that time and Gypsy would post interviews. He also interviewed Gary Martin once, that is on the musemum.

Hosem would very often play with Monday as well. Monday was the CEO, Hosem was the killer. And yeah, I think all the killers of that time used macros, and had stable connections.

Good times! When we were still discovering and strategizing.

Dont split hairs with me Kav.. By private i mean for sale, by public i mean for free. I guess i shoulda specified. He had it when it was Xide and friends only.

to be quite honest, I don't think you can actually list them in any order. Out of the list you have, I have played with or against most of those people. They each had their strengths and game style. I would agree that hELLCAT was probably the best all around player next to Blue Adept. When I would see Xide, Alexio, or SupG in a game i would tread carefully but I wasn't intimidated enough not to play. Res was a very good player and one of the better killers when he played.

My apologies to Mind Dagger and Doctor Who... I am not really sure if we ever played in a game together or not, so I don't want to disrespect you by not mentioning you.

I recently just came back to playing again, and there is one name I haven't seen since being back that I was wondering about. Prestone? He still play? He was another player that cause me to play with caution.

I wasn't Kaus, genuinely did not understand what you meant. That said, TWX back then did not give any advantages that I can remember, none of the current reactive attack scripts had been written, or if they had, I never saw them or similar ones used, and I played in several tournies against heLLcat and one with, one against Xide, before TWX went free to the public.

I think it was Res who told me that the Cat only used macroes (as did Res). Nazwes Chaiwind used refer to him as "the macro monkey". He might well have used TWX, I can't prove a negative, however even if he did, no advantage over Telix or Qmodem, probably not over Zoc.

Prestone pops in here in occasion. Very good player.

Hi Vader. Seeing you reminded my of your interview with Xide in 2004, some time after hELLCAT stopped playing. Here is what he had to say:

"hELLCAT: Just watching him navigate the game and the way he reacted to problems inspired me to build my own approach to online combat. I don't think he ever directly taught me much, but I learnt far more just by watching and analysing his methods. I will always consider the man a TW legend with what he managed to achieve using only macros and some impressive keyboard skills."

Doesn't sound like he had given him a bootleg copy of TWX.

That has always been the case, hasn't it? If a player if very good, they call him a cheat or put him down in some way. Rumor has it the only way I won back in the day was because I had access to tedit... if you don't know, ask. Don't insult a player then expect them to tell you their "trade secrets".

A couple of months ago I got all excited, a player on my server logged in as hELLCAT 2.0. I checked their IP, and it was from Los Angels, CA. Oh man...

Turns out it was Prde2or. Hehe...