UKTerrorist

How to be 'e-cool'

Posted by JinKster at 19:12, 10/5/2005

Certainly an article I've thought about writing a few times, but why bother when one is already in existence, and written so well at that.

Article by: THEiNTERNETS <a href="http://gotfrag.com/portal/user/232970/">http://gotfrag.com/portal/user/232970/</a>


Five easy-to-follow steps to making yourself e-cool.

Step One: The Name

Probably the most important piece of your online persona is the handle and/or alias you choose for yourself. This will be your all-identifying label, and a name can say a lot about just how e-cool you really are. Add to this the prestige of your clan tags and club tags and you can quickly identify yourself as “just another scrub” or a “leet haxor.” There are several rules to making a leet name. The first one is: NO NUMBERS (except for zero). Numbers are soooooo 1.3 and while being old school counts for a hell of a lot in this game, having numbers in your name just looks dated. Number two: squash it. Take every letter out that isn’t absolutely necessary. Vowels, consonants, they all must go! Think of it as a clearance sale — you don’t want all that extra stuff sitting on shelves where it’s just going to be browsed over. You want the absolute minimum and highest quality merchandise only. Whatever you can pull out, ditch it. This appears clever to the average Counter-Strike player. Don’t ask why. Just accept. Number three: be selective. This one is aimed squarely at the source players. I know you guys are all just giddy as hell that you have all of these crazy characters to play around with. That’s fine and all, but don’t go overboard. Nobody wants to read a name with a damn little squiggly mark in-between every freaking letter. It doesn’t look cool, it looks OGL. Do yourself a favor and hold back on the character abuse. Save it for one or two letters of the name. Don’t take every damn letter and find a symbol for it. That’s just bad, and remember you want to be e-cool, not homosexual.

Step Two: The Clubs

Let’s face it, if you don’t have a tag on the end of your name you’re nothing but another loser scrub. Yeah yeah yeah, not all the CAL-I players are in clubs but there are two differences from them and you: a) they are in CAL-I b) they are in CAL INVITE, as in they are special and were INVITED to the party (whereas you are not INVITED to the party)! They are allowed to do whatever they want because they are good enough. You are not. You are just trying to be e-cool, and that means you need a club. It doesn’t really matter what the club is—it doesn’t even have to exist! Sometimes the more obscure the tag is the better. Try and come up with something that looks cool and remember that most club tags are only two characters (Why? Don’t ask stupid questions like that!). Try making up your own club tag. You don’t even need a channel for it. Most others will be so busy trying to be e-cool themselves they won’t have time to check and see if it really exists. If you really want to go for the gold, tag yourself up with one of the CALi clubs (1g, st, dt, somethingelse-t, that other one with the bunny rabbits). This is like an instant reputation boost for your e-cool. Just remember that other players can always check and see if you really belong to these clubs, and if you don’t it becomes an instant e-cool detractor. It is a double-edged sword of sorts but, the truly e-suave will be able to pull it off regardless of their membership. Which leads us right into step three.

Step Three: The Ops

Another key to, and the most obvious symbol of, your e-cool is having ops in the right channels. The more people the channel has in it, the better. And the higher the channel’s prestige, the better. Getting ops is the tricky part because everyone wants them and obviously if everyone has them in a given channel then they aren’t really that valuable any more. It’s sort of like the samurai hierarchy. You’ve gotta have the peasants bow when you walk past because otherwise you wouldn’t be hardcore. It’s the same thing here. You have to have the peons and “the voiceless” because otherwise you wouldn’t look so damn cool with that big old @ next to your name. Getting opped in the right channels can get you anywhere and everywhere in the Counter-Strike community. If you get opped in a high-profile club, welcome to the big leagues! It doesn’t even matter if you suck terribly at CS, as long as you have that access no one is going to mess with you. It’s getting to these positions that is the hard part. I recommend a strategy of vicious flattery, and brown-nosing.

[b] Step Four: Proof [/b]

If there’s one thing every CS player is looking for, it’s proof. Because let’s face it, the internets has a tendency to turn people into LIARS and everyone can say they're CAL-I but not everyone is going to go that extra-step and photoshop CAL s9 roster pages so that they have “the proof.” So go ahead and do it. Leave your morals at the door and be a good liar instead of a bad one. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have demos. Just say you lost them, or they were reformatted. Chances are the kids you are talking to are so desperate for skill themselves they will believe anything (even a poorly photoshopped webpage!). So go give yourself a few seasons of “proof” and flash them every time someone calls your skill into question. This will shut the average jug-head up. The above average jug-head will ask for demos. But if you are already lying to them about your “proof” go ahead and lie some more. Make up a story about your dog or aliens or a nuclear holocaust, it doesn’t matter what you say, so long as you get them off your back. Make up LANs you’ve attended that don’t exist. Tell stories about your old 1.3 CAL-I matches. This last one almost always works because apparently EVERYONE was CAL-I in 1.3 and I do mean everyone. Hell you can even say you remember playing them. If they are buying it maybe they will “remember” playing you too. Congratulations, your “proof” is complete!

Step Five: Walk the Walk

Sort of like in high school, what defines your e-cool is what you find to be uncool. You can’t have an “in” crowd without an “out” crowd. Hate a certain kind of music? Preach about its follies. Hate a certain race of people? Preach about their dirtiness and ignorance. Hate a certain team of players that totally annihilated your pug last night? Preach about their “online skills.” The more you hate, the more people will love you. You see, you can effectively make e-friends by making lots of e-enemies. The more people you dis, the more you make fun of TsN’s coverage, GotFrag’s writing staff, and the entirety of Amped news, the more people will love you. Because now, to them, they feel special in your eyes. They are the chosen few, somehow above the rest of the e-world which you detest with an undying veracity. See a team getting bashed for hax? Jump on the bandwagon. Terrified of change? Come into the source forums every damn day and talk about how much the game sucks in every thread you can touch. The more you hate on, the more they will love you. And this also has the delightful side-effect of making you “mature” because clearly maturity is a way of being close-minded not open.

I hope you all have learned something valuable. Good day, gentlemen. Hate on and hate well. And I hope you found this article “pointless” because, if you did, that’s precisely what I think of you and your posting.

Hope you enjoy this GotFrag? community submitted article