Came across this thread and thought it would be fun to share my story. Not in it for the reward, but if I have to participate to enter I'll take My lucky Number 7.
Started at the time igunz was around, which was somewhere 2005, was always convinced that I had played longer than that, but it's hard to defy facts. Anywho, I got introduced to GunZ by my cousin who was playing the game with some of his irl friends that I know as well. Seemed like a fun game to me which reminded me of The Matrix movies and Max Payne games. I started out with the same name I'm using now, R0B3N which is a combination of My name and my Cousins name (Robert / Ben) writing it down in leetspeak, because I guess that was a thing we did back then.
The memories are vague, you start off spraying eachother and work your way from there, back then everyone was spraying and there wasn't anyone that knew K-style, so I have kind of lived throughout the development of skills being used in GunZ. I think my first map was Factory, but I remember playing Station and some other maps too.
I'm not sure where to go from here, because there is so much to tell. Eventually my cousin stopped playing, I started meeting a bunch of people, when k-style came to igunz, we started learning it together and so a generation of the first (international) pro's started to come to fruition. There's actually still quite some people I'm in contact with who had a big reputation throughout iGunz and early ijji or the golden age of ijji. So I'm glad I was able to find back some of my buddies from back then.
Anyway, eventually we learned that there was going to be a new kind of gunz and igunz would eventually close down. This new gunz had premium items and it was hosted by ijji. At first there was some kind of beta for ijji if i remember correctly, if you leveled up to level 15, you would get a small taste of what premiums were like (you got the fire element)
I remember being in a ton of fun clans and playing around with friends, but at the day, I wasn't so structured with adding friends from games on a different platform like msn or so, so when I was playing for a while in early ijji and getting my first premiums through events (christmas set lol!) my router started getting issues in mid-late 2006 probably, I got NAT Error, as well as Agent Error. So everyone ended up being 300+ ping or 999 ping at first and eventually everyone turned out to be 999 ping.
This was a continuous thing until October 2009. This meant that I not only had missed the times of Prime GunZ with official cw's (and not the self hosted Town CW's we did in iGunZ) , huge clans and everyone making a reputation for themselves, but I also missed playing with my friends and by the time I returned, GunZ was already declining massively in popularity and playerbase. Many of my friends had quit or were quitting at the time, I was heavily looking for some kind of confirmation of my previous GunZ existence as well as my old friends, something which kind of still takes too much of my time nowadays.
There were some people I played with or had recognised, but some of them didn't remember me. I think the first time when I saw some old friends, was when this clan called Arashi came by and they were randomly calling me out. When I figured who they were, it almost brought a tear to my eye. These were people I played with on a daily basis in igunz as well as early ijji. Town TDM's mostly.
But aside from that, I knew I had to start over and start playing decently, because when I came back in 2009, I still had to properly learn DBF and RS and stuff like that, at the time I was forced to quit, those things were starting to develop a lot, so I had just missed out on it. From that time on, I started becoming better and better, and even became somewhat semi-good at the game again. Though after learning DBF and RS, I didn't learn that much extra, because after all. I had always been a scroller, and almost the only thing changed to my configuration was putting my sword on E. But managed to do so, because of learning how maps work, how people play, but mostly because of my selfproclaimed godly aim which seems to be somehow missing nowadays on this server.
Soon after playing (I still didn't have premiums) I was already better than the average person again, and I got invited by some friendly guy called Guideline into a clan called Interference (sound familiar?), because he thought I was a good player and I was clanless. Yes, Interference already existed in ijji 2009 and prior to that. I met so many new and nice people, people I still talk to today, and made new fond memories with, though the real oldgens will always hold a special place in my heart.
I even made an oldgen discord, where a lot of the Arashi people are in atm, as well as some others. I've been on and off on GunZ until the end of ijji, played aeria for a few days, but there were like 5 people online(that was officially ded) I started playing some pservers, but for the sake of this one, I won't name em all. Met with a bunch of people again, quit multiple times for multiple years and came back again. Eventually came back to this in 2017, played for a few days again, and quit until late 2019 / early 2020, when I came back to this again and somewhere during the start of covid I dropped out for half a year again until recently (few months ago). Sadly the decline is still here, but I see some people still holding tight to gunz and I still have some friends playing and I am still making new friends, so even though the game might be in decline and I can't relive the old days, no matter how much I want it, I am able to bond with new people that are also awesome and make my day a good one.
My story doesn't even come close to covering my full gunz life, but here's a small piece for you all to enjoy or not.
Anyways, it feels nice to drop a part of that story on a place where it might be remembered. (My old memories storage was destroyed rip gzf)
I wish you all well o/
