User:StepS/How it all started

It all started when, in 2003, I got gifted a CD copy of Worms Armageddon (Russobit-M) from my father's friend. Our family PC had Windows Millenium installed on it (previously Win 98) with 2 GB of hard disk space, for which Windows XP was too heavy. At that time, W:A was already considered to be "very old", probably explaining the reason of gifting the CD.

And so I started playing the game. The trainings, the missions, everything went well except one thing: the game progress would always reset every time I started the game. This was the only thing that disappointed me, and so me and my father opened Google, to look for a patch. He used "Warms" in the search query and said, "well, isn't Warms and Worms basically the same thing?". And then we found the Warms patch, applied it, and hooray, the team/mission progress started to save. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to use the Ninja Rope for the first time, but once I figured it out, I immediately started liking it. Can't remember how many missions I completed, but I didn't complete them all till the end (possibly 16 or 20). Later (in 2004 or 2005, probably) we got a new PC with Windows XP, where W:A didn't work anymore. It launched, but attempting to start a match failed with a black screen. And so I started forgetting about the game.

Then, during the boring summer of 2009 in a village, I remembered about the game. The old W:A CD was on the attic of the house where I found it. The home PC was the same, with Windows XP. I installed the game and then discovered that, during all that time, it was being supported with official updates. I was very surprised because I thought WWP would be way more popular and stuff, but no, it was W:A, the game of my childhood, the only one which I played and loved. I then installed 3.6.29.0 and completed the whole singleplayer missions, training and deathmatch. Before going online for the first time I already played much with RubberWorm, had WormNAT2, and other things. I still have all of those replays and logs [TODO: upload them].

And so I wanted to try connecting to WormNET for the first time. I clicked the network button, the yellow WormNET link, and... I'm there. The list of channels, a lot of people. Then I join #AnythingGoes, and what would you think? I'm immediately banned, and can't connect anymore for 12 hours. I couldn't understand the actual reason of the ban, I googled on this problem for the whole two days, trying different serverlists and other things. I joined the ItakaGames server, but it was very empty, etc. And then I discovered the Russian forums (where I later became an admin) with a solution to my problem. Turned out it was due to my ISP using a static NATed IP, and it being blacklisted on the DroneBL database. I then removed myself from there, but still had to wait 12 hours, and the next day I had to fly out of the country for some time.

I returned in the end of August 2009, and started playing online. Of course there was that typical problem with the Shopper rules which I didn't know, but the way in which I learned them was quite unusual: I hosted a Shopper myself. Then, once the first guy joined, he said "here, cba afr ktl, got my ruls?", and so I immediately understood the meaning of that secret sentence. I used WormNAT2 for hosting, but occasionally also HostingBuddy. Played some RubberWorm games as well. I also registered on the Team17 forums, and various other forums. Later in winter I discovered Worm Olympics when a tournament was going on a #RopersHeaven channel. 2009 was when I started playing online.

<to be continued>