Just cuz you like trannies doesn't mean everyone does Nimmy :P lol, and thank ye. Just don't tell Reckless where I'm playing; tis too much fun watching him run around in circles chasing his own tail!
So I've noticed. We need to spam the old trolls emails and force them to come back and provide us with that interactive entertainment I so dearly miss.
Hey pang, I think you have some things missing or mistaken about your steel post. After the merger Russin did vanish, however Raycore(the IRON VP pre merger) stayed on a bit longer. Russins stated reason for leaving were time constraints with work and RL, I stayed friends with him and in communication for a year or so after the merger. At that point a lot of the IRON members did leave(DMX, TheVoices, etc.) but there were a number who did stay.
As for IRON de-merging it was actually Flensburg and I who led that one, and I will admit that I did what I could at the time to steal our old members back, but I was leaving because of a disagreement on the direction Steel was going, and what seemed like a marginalization of the remaining IRON members. Also there was a petty fight between myself and Stellie at the time which hastened my departure. I started a brief conflict when I got into a dispute over FA policies with TFace which you may remember. Biscuit and I ended up clearing the air, and the next set I realized that the new IRON was going nowhere and I can't recall exactly, but at that point I either joined SoL or came back to Steel. Regardless, I headed the kill team and did FA work with you for some time after that in Steel, Shyne and Biscuit were running things at that point, Viper was running the War Dept, and shortly thereafter I ended up doing the IA work.
I recall you left Steel before too long and I think that was when you went to LaF. We picked up Cave from I think it was LCN to do some of our IA work as Biscuit had largely become inactive by that point and I took over VP duties after my first tour in Iraq. Shortly thereafter we fought a short and effective war against FIST, and Steel spent a number of sets netting.
We faced a slow decline in our numbers due to our core players retiring and a lack of effective recruiting. It was at that point that Saiya joined Steel under an alias and played there unnoticed for I forget how long before the Omega/Steel war. That war started out promising, Viper had decided on an AB FS and you can feel free to check the archives to see his post explaining it(good luck reading it as that man had the most god awful spelling of any earther ever!) but things were fairly evenly matched to begin, but I recieved some troubling messages from players saying that one of our members, I believe it was TorsoZ or something of that nature, was actually Saiya who was going low profile after the M4D deletions. I checked around with certain heads to get IP's and all the info I could to be sure, but before I could do anything more than detag his main country and lock him out of the site we got hit with a round of crippling deletions.
Our official line was that he had convinced some of our noob members that it was ok to share game logins and then with one mass report we lost most of our noobs. That was partially true. That did happen, but obviously Saiya had also been running multies right under my nose. I take the blame for that, I was trying to do too much at the time. I was an instructor at the US Army Airborne school, which is very very long hours, in addition to doing most of the IA and FA work for steel. Our HIA had been deployed(he was also military) and our FA was busy at that time with RL issues. So add up my military workload, plus all the clan work, plus warchat running, plus I was taking classes on base working for my degree, and I was getting around 3 hours of sleep a night(less when Omega finally started hitting me) so I missed some of the warning signs that I should have seen.
I do have to give Omega credit, it was one hell of a war. I had a nice boost wargaining and ended up by and far the largest country Steel had after the deletions and took a ton of hits. I stonewalled for a week and a half or so before Omega finally took out the rest of the original Steel countries and then focused on taking me out for the tagkill.
Grelk organized a killrun one evening and within 90 seconds of the first hit my country was dead and Steel was tagkilled. That marked the end of Steel honestly. Member interest waned after that, and the only other major event involving Steel before the merger into IX was the brief war with SoL that I kind of sort of started lol, but hey, it was not really my fault, tbird was just a prick :P
In any regards, that war started over retal policy, and the opening shots were fired when Dragon put my country up as the first target of the FS as a Bday present to Dalyx(or vice versa, its been 6 years, so I can't recall exactly) and shortly after that, the war was over in an overwhelming win for SoL-they had like 3x the members we did at the time.
Steel did not last much longer as we lost more and more members to inactivity and I myself lost interest for a while. Our numbers dwindled until we finally had no choice but to merge or disband. We merged into IX, with maybe 15-20 of us left. That marked the end of an era which was a lot of fun.
I do miss running my Biscuit Demo Techer-I still have the strat laying around somewhere lol.
One thing you may or may not be able to help me out with is there was a time that we let Budvar back in and I can't remember if that started a war, or if we avoided it, and when it was. Anyone remember?
