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Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

Tribes was the game I remember that showcased the card best - you had a legitimate competitive advantage if you were running this card.

(also, shazbot)

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That and high speed internet. I played for a couple of years on 28.8K. The day I got a better graphics card was great. No more choppiness. The day I got cable internet was life changing in Tribes (and Tribes 2)!

I think I still have a pic somewhere of the infamous NoFix scolding "LPBs"

"Shazbot!" "The enemy is in our base!" "Woohoo!"

I remember when Cable internet started showing up... I'd cart my computer to a friend's house once a month to play LAN party for the weekend and run updates.

Back then, updates over modem took hours to run, it was kind of crazy considering how many easily exploited bugs existed back then.

> it was kind of crazy considering how many easily exploited bugs existed back then.

Anyone on IRC learned this pretty quick.

I thought my computer was up to date on everything, ran win2k, zone alarm firewall well configured, and someone on IRC said they had a script with all known exploits and I invited them to run it against me… they still managed to crash my computer.

Maybe it was an early metasploit?

I learned to never trust a computer.

True enough... ironically, I ran a fw/router before I got high speed internet with an early linux distro in the mid-late 90's. So no open inbound ports to the internet. Had a script to set/fwd game ports while playing and close out after.

Win2k had a few file/print services and similar on by default.

Nothing like eating a disc to the face while you are lagging in mid-air on a dialup connection. <3

There was a moniker for the few people with high speed back then - LPB - low ping bastards. All those fortunate enough to live in a city with adsl or cable high speed in the early days (or gaming at work or university on the T1)

Interestingly enough, these days it's often an advantage to have high ping, because modern games make client-side hit detection authorative. With Apex Legends, Respawn uses the argument that playing against laggers but with client-side hit detection makes the bullshit that happens "symmetrical" and they want to keep the game accessible for people with poor connections, but anyone that plays against laggers knows that is absolutely not the case.

I wish modern games would just include a Ping Lock toggle in the matchmaking. "Do not match me with anyone with poor connection quality" (>100 ping, >1% packet loss). With a big fat pop-up warning that it'll increase matchmaking times.

It was deeper than that. That was just the way we were all classified back then: hpb (high), lpb (low), slpb (super-low?). When we got a cable modem in `99, I felt like hot shit to leave the hpb shame behind.

I had something like 2-7ms ping to any server anywhere near Los Angeles for a real long time.

I was also pretty good at a lot of competitive online games, so accusations of botting or other shenanigans got old.

Recently my ping to 1.1.1.1 went down to 12ms and I got excited.

vgh! Except that texture transparency worked with glide (voodoo) cards and not with opengl or software rendering. So if you made a custom skin with transparency texture there was a brief time in the Tribes 1.1 to 1.2 era where you could be somewhat invisible to people with voodoo cards (if your skin was in a skin pack that everyone had).

I think I played Tribes 2 for more time than the time I've spent on every other game combined. Years!

It's too bad that tribes games' learning curve is too steep for people now. Tribes Ascend was pretty well made but died quickly, and Tribes 3 seems to be dead even faster.

Very few people who didn't already play the earlier games have much stomach to figure out how to even move effectively across the map or hit anything moving at high speed, let alone do proper cap routes, chase, etc. I played Tribes Ascend for awhile and on most random servers you could play the first 2 minutes as a chaser to verify "yup there is nobody who knows how to move quickly", kill yourself over to chaser, and then end the game in like 4 more minutes when everyone else is just slowly messing around in midfield doing nothing productive. And I wasn't even any good lol, when I went into any semi organized pug I would get destroyed.

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