destroy3r

im around. More than 20 years ago now... we have a FB messenger chat with a few of us. There is so much irony in the message and closure of champsite. We brought out the best in each other and it was unfortunate on the ddos attacks. They happened to both sites, my email was hacked, i had to move cncgamer several times to try and deal with the attacks. Keyloggers installed on my machine. The post really I belive is someone not wanting to be involved in all of that and calling it a day. Their dev kane was involved in a much larger site and didnt have the time to work on all the features we were building for the community as well as manage incoming hacks and attacks. Good every so often to search, read and connect with people I spent so many hours and years with.

cncgamer was my first move into programming, I now develop software as part of my job so it was the start of my career! No time to bring it back and although a little strange having it redirect to some random forum it was a lot of fun running it im using destroy3r...

On who killed TS, WW firstly started to kill off TS by stopping their ladder system and then disabling chat in the lobby.. it was pretty soul destroying for a game I had played for so many hours a day for the last few years suddenly to not have a ladder system and there being no way to speak to others in the lobby... then the XWIS project which only indirectly supported TS while pushing RA2 and alongside all of that our communities were constantly hacked. Databases lost completely, no continuity; why should people stick around? Also something I learned and the reason I stopped owning a gaming website is that games work in cycles and once your supported game flags in numbers you then need to start supporting and investing time and resources into supporting another game. All games generally end this way; look at gamereplays once a massive site ran out of steam as Darky and others got real jobs that pulled them away from the churn of supporting new games as the old ones die off!

this obviously needs a reply and some clarity as I have started to use cncnet and will be using this forum.. Firstly it is unbelievable that this actually happened over 10 years ago! CNCGamer and Champ were both great sites serving the TS community and the rivalry we both had benefited the TS community in so many ways. The features created for a relatively small community were really good... I remember both sites boards news' showing off new features and competitions weekly and we all felt part of something. Unfortunately during this period the TS community had a small number of hackers creating trainers, recon tools etc and these people were also hacking and DDOS attacking sites. CNCGamer was hacked and DDOS attacked countless times, my MSN was hacked, I even had a key logger somehow installed on my PC! Not only my site but also my personal email was hacked - the hacker spamming past work colleagues and family and then deleting all my email. He would also delete the backups I had of the site from my personal computer.. The DDOS attacks happened on BOTH sites, hacking happened on BOTH sites, we were both completely powerless to stop it at the time. That being said although CNCGamer started as an underdog with most of Stefors clan using his site, over time we started to attract most of the TS players. Our ladder (even if it was manual) was the main ladder in use at this time after we both competed heavily for the same player pool. Still to this day I look back on the rivalry with a smile as although there was a lot of shit to go through with the hacking it made me a much better developer and website owner. Every new feature I would make myself while Stefor had to go to their developer "Kane" who would have to prioritise it with the needs of his much bigger website - gathernetwork. This meant we would react faster to the players needs and in the end this swinged it for us. We were the first website to offer TS replays, supported the XWIS ladder with comments and interaction and then went on to support other CNC games. I was invited by Aaron Kaufman (EA community manager at the time) to the CNC Tiberium Wars summit in LA; flights, hotel and everything from the UK included - pretty cool Not sure how many people were around 10 years ago that really remember the detail but for sure noone would call me a hater of TS. Many on the Champ list of people to thank actually include moderators of CNCGamer who knew me well; we were one community and the closing message is defeatist and not at all accurate!