>But I have to object to this:
>
>>I'm going to go back to the beginning. At the very start,
>the
>>skill gap in CF was considerably smaller than today.
>
>This is so, so, so not true. The gulf of skill and especially
>knowledge between the top players and newbies (i.e. me) back
>in '94-'95 was so much more pronounced than the modern era. I
>can illustrate that with examples if you're really curious.
>:P

I have to second this, seriously. I haven't posted in months, but I logged in just for this. :P

By the time I was actually able to approach hero and get into cabals, Knights was around. Being the goody-goody that I am, all my first characters were Knights. The sheer level of imbalance was mind-boggling, and I don't think it was so much a game imbalance thing as it was a skill imbalance. There were Shadows who were virtually untouchable, even though they were playing the same classes as everyone else. They just, you know, had a clue. The dissemination of even the most basic info is so much easier today.

Someone else mentioned Gareth, so I'll tell my favorite anecdote. I was playing a pre-spec dwarf warrior in Knights, back when all clerics cast instead of communed. There were three of the steam-rolling Shadows online, and three of us Knights online, huddling in the Knight cabal. Because that's what you did when that many Shadows were on. One of them alone would probably come and kill you in the cabal anyway, but hey, you did what you could.

Then Gareth logs on, a guy I've never seen before, same race and class and cabal as me. I don't even think he said hi on the cabal channel; Gareth's characters were never particularly friendly to anyone. A few minutes later he arrives in the cabal... and starts dropping all of the most epic gear I'd ever seen exclusively held by Shadows before (usually while looking at them as a ghost while they finished raiding). I recall he glanced at me at one point, then handed me two wide coppers. Once he unloaded he ran off again. Check who pk, and lo and behold, two of the three Shadows were ghosts.

None of us had ever seen the like. Wide coppers were only for gods!

So maybe Gareth was an outlier even then, but either way, the skill imbalance between the upper crust of players and the average peon was staggering.

Aarn