Hey everybody, it&#039;s me, Ralphis. I&#039;m gonna take some time to respond to some stuff I was alerted to tonight that Kilgore wrote over on the ZDaemon forums. A lot of the stuff he said is inaccurate, but not hardly unexpected. Let&#039;s have some fun!<br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]there was a time when ralphis was not banned. One day he got upset about something concerning deathzor (which was none of ralphis business mind you) and we suddenly saw this post where he complained to ID about zdaemon.[/quote]<br /><br />This entire version of his story is wrong. Kilgore and I had argued for months about the legality of getwad until Kilgore made some off beat comment about id software not caring. So I sent a simple email, [url=http://lupus.keystone.gr/ralphis-id.pdf]found here[/url] to Todd Hollenshead (with whom I had exchanged a few emails before and since) to ask him whether or not it was legal. He said it wasn&#039;t. Kilgore threw a fit. That&#039;s fine, because I&#039;ve heard that I personally tried to have FBI agents sent to his house before and other ridiculous stuff.<br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]The fact that ID didn&#039;t do anything about it, tells you something about my argument. Do you think they&#039;d let it fly if it were illegal?[/quote]<br /><br />It doesn&#039;t really tell a whole lot. Like Kilgore said, the game is old and I&#039;m sure they did little investigate or care about the situation. However, they did acknowledge that it was illegal at the time and I&#039;m sure they&#039;d continue to do so.<br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]To put things in perspective, these gentlemen tried to get us in legal trouble, which means real life trouble and without any provocation from our side. This went far beyond the &quot;some silly game&quot; realm.[/quote]<br /><br />Once again, please. <br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]And now you are talking about grudges... the only grudge here comes from ralphis who keeps organizing his PR campaigns thinking that he can generate enough pressure to let him back in.[/quote]<br /><br />For the record, I&#039;ve told many others who have attempted to get me unbanned from ZDaemon that I don&#039;t really care if I&#039;m ever unbanned or not, nor did I expect to. I did not advocate Hatred&#039;s current posts, Nostar or Ladna&#039;s recent efforts, or anyone else since I was banned to &quot;pressure&quot; on my behalf. Why would I want to &quot;be allowed&quot; back into a community of old authoritarian jerks? I sent Kilgore an apology email a few years ago (where I never asked or even hinted that I wanted to be unbanned) just on principle, but his heart burns with black hatred. At the end of the day, we&#039;ll both live.<br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]Consequently, ralphis and alexmax are out for good. Get over it. I&#039;ve been totally frank about it, and I really don&#039;t appreciate their PR campaigns being served on our forum.[/quote]<br /><br />Again, I don&#039;t push a PR campaign. I could not care less to go back to ZD&#039;s barren forums, community of yes men, or crap public servers.<br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]When that gentleman got banned from here, he tried to come up with a zdaemon alternative so he could take our players away. That was an attempted resurrection of csdoom (renamed to odamex). He soon realized how much work it is to make and maintain a doom port, so this was abandoned.[/quote]<br /><br />Hilarious. This is wrong on two accounts. First off, that forum post that was linked with the id software emails was posted in April of 2006. However, the first build of Odamex dates back as early as July of 2005 (July 2nd to be exact). I already had my foot well out the front door long before Kilgore thought he pushed me. So yea, that&#039;s incorrect.<br /><br />Yes, of course we wanted to take ZDaemon&#039;s players and we still do! Abandoned? [b]Odamex has had its entire released life span since about ZDaemon 1.08.04.[/b] You want to talk about abandoned? ZDaemon has made barely any progress at all in half a decade, yet Odamex only continues to get better as an engine. Odamex 0.5 is due out in probably less than two weeks and will have had somewhere around 400 changes to the svn since the last stable release. Seems like Kilgore&#039;s brain abandoned his head.<br /><br />[quote=Kilgore]His next attempt was a league running on private servers so ralphis can play on it and also &quot;stick it to zdaemon&quot; (by taking zdaemon players out of public servers). That league was IDL. So.... what&#039;s the argument? support a league run by ralphis and whose purpose is to &quot;stick it to zdaemon&quot; ? are we crazy here? If you guys want zdaemon to support a league (any league), make sure it doesn&#039;t run on private servers; if it does, then you&#039;re not doing zdaemon any favor and zdaemon will reciprocate.[/quote]<br /><br />Kilgore quotes &quot;stick it to zdaemon&quot; twice in here. I&#039;d love to see the full log in which he pulls this quote from. So yea, I ran a league so I could still play and take the best players from the ZDaemon servers and guess what? It worked! Even four years later, I found a way to continue to play with the best players and continue to play with my friends (and make a ton of new ones) despite Kilgore&#039;s wish to see me gone. I don&#039;t want to give myself a pat on the back too much but I&#039;m pretty much the freakin&#039; man. (If I really wanted to take your players that bad, it would take all of two minutes to make the Odamex master server register zservs, hex edit a few things on the ZD serv binaries, and run my own ZDaemon community top to bottom).<br /><br />With that said, the IDL is one of the best things I&#039;ve been apart of and the reason that so many people come out and &quot;pressure&quot; Kilgore and Raider to unban me is because we&#039;ve all become great friends here and know what it&#039;s like to be loyal to each other while still staying competitive and keeping what we love to do alive. I respect and enjoy the presence of almost all of my IDL peers, even the ones that I frequently disagree with (don&#039;t worry, when we disagree and you piss me off you won&#039;t get banned from the IDL). We want other people to become part of the NEW true heart of doom multiplayer, which is IDL. Guess what? We&#039;ll get a lot of them too, regardless of if we ever end up getting to advertise on ZDaemon servers or not. Just a few posts up Fastidious pointed out over 80 players that have come and gone through IDL, not on top of the 32+ players who played this season.<br /><br />I see people talk about how they want ZDaemon to be like what it was all over their forums when I go there on occasion to read up but ZDaemon can never be like it was. It was a different time with different people. Nightfang was young, smart, cool, and [b]in touch with his player base[/b]. Conversely, his player base liked him and were also cool. <br /><br />Raider and Kilgore are so old that when they were in school, history class didn&#039;t exist yet. They have no sense of humor, and have no real apparent love of competitive Doom. If they did, maybe it would be reflected in the community that they allegedly oversee. Maybe they wouldn&#039;t be surrounded by backwoods yes men that would just agree with everything they say. It&#039;s ok to have that fire though! Just imagine, if everybody was allowed to hold grudges with each other as openly as Kilgore and I are doing this week, ZDaemon might be like it was years ago when people actually cared about being good at the game (which is the core foundation of ANY VIDEO GAME COMMUNITY).<br /><br />Unfortunately, the players that don&#039;t stray outside of the main ZDaemon community (or lack thereof) will never be able to have this. They&#039;ll never be able to call Tai a dumb dog dick and tell him his clan sucks all over the forums to watch him get all mad and upset. They&#039;ll never get to witness huge high profile clan wars that do or don&#039;t happen like NG/NS, UD/DUI, UD/DX, SIN/DUI, and others because they&#039;re in a community that will never allow it. Kilgore and Raider want to be baby sitters (and let&#039;s be honest, knowing Raider he would really like this) but rarely lead by example. <br /><br />The pushing and campaigning to get me unbanned year after year is flattering and I love you guys for it, but I can&#039;t save ZDaemon. As long as it&#039;s &quot;run&quot; by such lethargic &quot;admins&quot;, it has no chance regardless of what personalities, talents, or otherwise are there. The ZDaemon engine is fine as long as there is a base of IDL players and latin americans to use it, but the ZDaemon [b]community[/b]? People who are afraid the ZDaemon community is dying, bad news. ZDaemon has been six feet under for about 5 years.<br /><br />With that said, I can assure the IDL community that as long as I&#039;m around I&#039;ll continue to do my best to give you guys a &quot;home&quot; (along with the help of many others throughout the years and surely many new people to come in the future) just as you have helped give ME one. I love Doom and I&#039;m even partial to most of you (no homo).<br /><br />So to cap it off with my final thoughts on the ZDaemon guys. Some 17 year old kid affected their lives so bad with an email half a decade ago that they&#039;re still apparently crying over it. I&#039;m sure this line will ensure I&#039;m banned for another 143 years but [b]what a bunch of women[/b].