fisherman bob wrote:It went way over my head. Fill me in on the details..
This is going to be a big sidetrack... Enter at your own risk...
Jangos was the name of someone's avatar in an
Everquest guild. The guild was called "
Legacy of Steel".
Tigole Bitties was their guild leader (transpose the first letter of the first and last name to get in on the joke) and he ran their website:
http://www.legacyofsteel.net/oldsite/index-1.htmLegacy of Steel was one of the most accomplished raiding guilds on any of the Everquest servers. But that wasn't what made them special. There were a lot of great upper-tier, elite raiding guilds with major accomplishments that nobody ever heard of.
What made Legacy of Steel stand out was their web site and how Tigole maintained it. They had a web presence that was unmatched due mainly to the way Tigole ran things.
Now, you have to understand, this was before the advent of
blogging; nobody was doing anything like this. And not with the flare that Tigole was doing it.
Tigole had a great sense of humor and it came across in this writing. He was tireless, really, about maintaining that site. He posted loads of screen shots of their exploits and updated it frequently.
He also ranted. And he ranted like it was nobodies business. Since his guild was often the first to experience new content, he was usually the first to see how things were screwed up, and he was relentless about ripping the developers for their foul ups. But he didn't just rip them; he often offered solutions on how things should have been done. And his reputation, the website, all of it, eventually landed him a developer job at Blizzard designing
World of Warcraft. Tigole went from being a game player to a designer, and that was pretty cool.
But what was funny - what was sheer
comedy gold for those of us reading that website - was the
Stalkers, Wannabees, and Unoriginal Bastards.
Stalkers, Wannabees and Unoriginal Bastards were people who stalked Tigole by sending him private "tells" of a funny nature. And while what they said was often funny, what was even more hilarious were the character names they came up with to stalk him. They would create characters with outrageous names, usually puns based on Tigole's name or someone else in the guild (like Jangos), and they would create these characters with these weird names specifically to stalk Tigole.
But the extra-funny part was that Verant, the company that designed Everquest, had a bad-name filter. So the challenge for people was to get past the naming filter. And each time they did, Verant had to tweak the filter some more. So, due to the filter, you had to be extra creative to come up with a name. And people came up with some funny stuff, like this for instance (grabbed from the April 1st, 2001 update):
Tigoledundee tells you, "That's not a knife. THIS is a knife!"
I mean, it was just sh*t like that... it was funny; just simple fun; and it often made my day.
I played Everquest for 5 years and belonged to a raiding guild. And I can't begin to explain to you the skill and the tactics and the strategy that goes into raiding, and I can't begin to explain to you the camaraderie that you can foster in a guild like that. I've really never witnessed anything like it, not even in the military or in a rock band. I've never quite had that kind of experience; it was unique and I still have friends to this day I chat with online that I met in those games.
Legacy of Steel's website was required reading. It was like waiting for
Peter King to update his Monday Morning Quarterback. You just waited with baited breath for Tigole or Tork to update that site and smack you with rants and funny sh*t.
Jangos is an uncommon name. So when I read that, well, you can see where my brain immediately went. Funny, stupid stuff that sticks with ya.
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