SHOCKPLAY.SE

My little Couronne story

My first contact with Couronne came from my older brother who introduced me to the free-of-charge site http://www.couronne.nu/. It was a really popular site which they eventually had to close down due to its high maintenance cost. Raketspel seems to refuce ads on their sites, which to me is ludicrous, I believe Shockplay would be a huge international site if they funded it with ads and made if free-of-charge. I was really terrible back then, when I played my brother we just pushed each other's chips behind the line. Neither of us really knew how to get them out of there so a one set game could last 30 minutes. But we had lots of fun, I guess I took a liking to it more than he did.

When they had closed, I kind of quit playing Couronne and took up my Warcraft 3 career again which had been on ice. But it wouldn't last long till I got curious of Shockplay. Back then they had a free week tryout, I took the offer and I was really impressed with the site. When the week was up I paid for another month, I was hooked. My first day at Shockplay, I believe was around the 10^th of May 2003. One of my first games was against Rocketman, I was extremely impressed with his skills and wanted to beat him badly, when my brother joined the site we kind of competed to be the first one to beat him. My brother won that when he beat Rocketman two weeks later or something like that.

The first couple of weeks I didn't progress much. I just played with the first few friends I had at Shockplay for fun. But then I started beating a couple of good players which made me want to be even better. My points started increasing (points were the only way of measuring the skill of a player back then) and soon I found myself being in the top 15. At this time I had my first encounter with the two high score leaders, Royal and Ugglepuffe, to my surprise, I managed to play 2-2 in games against Royal and I believe I beat Ugglepuffe. I do remember though that I got really pissed at Puffe, I thought he was a prick cause he was talking too much, saying stuff like "nice shot!" and "you're so good" on almost every shot which I think is really lame, because most people who are competitive only do those things to annoy their opponent. I don't know his motives but at the time I thought he was a prick.

As the summer passed I kept climbing the high score list. At this time I had my first encounter with Inqy who was a real legend, he was the player who was the reigning champion of Couronne Masters. I had seen his cool trophy in his profile so I challenged him immediately. I remember asking him about that trophy and how he got it. I finished the game by telling him, next time it's going to be me! He didn't care too much about it because I wasn't all that good then. But we kept playing a lot and became good friends, we practiced a lot against each other and exchanged ideas about the game.

At the end of the summer, they introduced the Shocking News! at the frontpage of the site. They published clean sweeps and stuff like that. They didn't count them until a few weeks later. It was a really cool feature back then that they started counting sweeps which gave all the top players a new incentive to keep on pushing their game. After the first day, Jaya the Cat lead the charts with something like 12 sweeps, followed by Matrix Power and me. The following day Jaya didn't play that much and I took the lead with Matrix Power right behind me.  After that I didn't let go of it for two years or something like that.

Matrix Power was sort of my nemesis on Shockplay. We we're rivals, both of us were fairly new but had advanced to the top during the summer of 2003. We played a lot against each other and pushed each other to become even greater. Hands down he is certainly one of the best players I've ever played and a really cool guy. He had a big mouth but that's okay when you can walk the walk.

At this time, the beginning of the fall of 2003, we got a new member at Shockplay who would really stir things around. S-M-V came over for a visit from Miniclip, there had been a lot of talk about him by the people who played at both sites. My first encounter with him ended by he beating me badly 2-0 in games. I was thinking to myself, who is this guy? He truly pushed you to be at you're a-game or you'd lose. Second time around I came out on top, I had managed to read his game and was able to take advantage of his weaknesses. I still think that he is one of the greatest to have ever played this game, he later changed his name to Cyclone although he never admitted it, at first Cyclone claimed not being from the same country, although his IP said he was from Bahrain like S-M-V. He later said he was S-M-V's son or something like that. Although I still to this day believe they are the same person.

Back to the stir S-M-V brought with him, some of the players at Miniclip had discovered that if you have two mice with a ball inside them you could remove the wheel spinning sideways, by plugging in both of them you had a straight shooting mouse and a normal one. I became aware of this fact by one of those players who played at Miniclip, I immediately believed this to be cheating, went to Rocketman to make him aware of this glitch, I also made the entire Shockplay community aware of the cheat. Mostly to make Rocketman act as fast as he could, I also came up with a solution to the problem, Rocketman was not as convinced by it as I was, he believed a lot of the more non-serious players would be annoyed and start complaining. It would take months and months before he implemented the Random Angle Fix.

The league started later that fall, I had been chosen to beta-test it and played alright there, didn't take it too seriously. When the actual league started I was stoked, didn't expect that much. But I wanted to finish in the top 3. To my surprise, I managed to be at my a-game that week and won all nine games. It really pleased me to have won the first league week ever and tried to focus on keeping my game up for next week. Although I lost one game the second week to Puffe, I managed to win the remaining eight games so I won again.

At this time I managed to convince my long time friends GodisGuden and sese to come join Shockplay. They had mocked me playing Couronne for a long time. They were playing "real games" like Counter Strike. GodisGuden and I met nine years ago while we were 15 years old playing Starcraft: Brood Wars online, since then we have met in real life a couple of times. Sese and I met eight years ago also playing Starcraft and the three of us has been really close friends ever since. At the beginning they were like my Guinea Pigs for practicing against, but they picked up the game really fast and were elite players after only a month or two at Shockplay.

During week four or five of the league, The Wolf got really mad at me during a league game because I refused to talk during games believing it to be rude to speak while someone else was playing. He was of the exact opposite opinion believing one should give credit to people after they did a great shot. He gathered up his posse of friends and they all accused me of cheating, abusing the straight shooting glitch. They convinced a bunch of people that I was cheating, how else could anyone win every week of the league. I responded to their slander at the forums and I got a lot of support from a lot of the respected guys at Shockplay. I sort of shook the most of it away after a week or two. While some to this day still believes that I cheated. My quest to fix the cheat had backfired at me. People who would have never known about this glitch if it hadn't been for me letting them know about it accused me of cheating. It was really annoying to me since I had really been pushing Rocketman to implement the fix while they were trash talking me behind my back and accusing me of cheating.

I sort of shook it off eventually, it took a couple of weeks. The seventh week of playing I only finished 4^th in the league. I had been hospitalized for 3 days at the beginning of the week and wasn't able to play all that well when I got back. The week after that I managed to win again. But Matrix Power had improved his game a lot and won the 9^th week.

The weeks progressed and I was waiting for the next Couronne Masters to come. It's early 2004 by now and I really wanted to get that trophy I had told myself to win the next time I got the chance. The league wasn't that fun anymore I wanted a bigger challenge. Since there was a lot of rivalry between Miniclip and Shockplay, Rocketman decided to invite everyone from Miniclip and Shockplay to participate in the tournament. It was named Shockplay Vs. Miniclip and was replacing Couronne Masters that year. It would take place in March to April of 2004 if I don't recall wrong. All the best players from both communities were participating in a showdown. Eventually Shockplay slaughtered Miniclip only sending 2 or 3 players to the final 16 round where none managed to stay in the top eight. In my first game I believe I played Cronos, I won, that's about all I remember.

Next game, in the semifinal I was facing sese. He had me by the balls that game, I believed I was losing it badly, I was down two to nothing in a best of seven game. He was just playing better than me, he was simply amazing. I couldn't get a grip of the game, but fighting for the third set, his temper got the best of him, missing an easy shot he got pissed and just wanted to leave, he started to get anxious and I managed to come back and win the game. Sese later joined the league where he had won all eight games, when he lost his ninth he resigned from the league, that's the kind of temper he had.

On the other side of the bracket, GodisGuden had beaten The Wolf in the other semifinal. So I was facing him in the final game of the tournament. I prepared as much as I possibly could to beat him off as GodisGuden was really amazing. Back then he actually played strategically too, he pushed and had marks for most shots. This game went exactly the way I wanted it and I managed to win 4-0. So there we had it I had won the Couronne Masters followed by my two closest online friends GodisGuden and sese, who had beaten The Wolf in the bronze medal game. Even though GodisGuden never really enjoyed pushing or doing gentle breaks he can still outshine almost anyone even when playing stoned or drunk. Amazing sweeper, he truly deserves the spot as the sweep king of Shockplay.

I had reached my goal to win the next Couronne Masters just as I had told Inqy, I was extremely pleased with myself to have reached my goal in Couronne. I had won 20 out of the first 25 weeks in the league. I had somewhere around 1500 sweeps, the runner up had around 600. I felt I had nothing left to prove to myself in this game. I left the league and after this I have only played sporadically. I have been in the Backgammon league where I've won one week. I was the admin of the Couronne league for a while and the Backgammon league for 101 weeks.

Well that's the story of my couronne career, hope you enjoyed reading about it.

Best regards,

Hektor