The 7th year Anniversary thanks speech

jenz

UNLOZE Founder
Leader
Oct 11, 2016
1,172
3,181
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denmarkland
This is kinda long, just random stuff getting into my mind.

Today its been 7 years ago that i started unloze together with the help of Killer-Banana. I had summer holidays back then still living at my parents. The steam group was first made on 19th June since we did not have an actual name for the first 3 days. The first 3 days it was just called "jenz's zombie escape server" but then killer-banana invented the name UNLOZE, we made the steam group on the same day and its been stuck ever since. If you wonder Who killer-banana is, some people also know him on GFL under the name Nick.

Nick back in the days wanted to help me out since he had the idea of gaining some practical experience as a developer for a gaming community, but he never had the thought of wanting to stick around for a long time, which was also why he resigned somewhere in 2016 to instead join GFL for more challenging tasks as a developer. George joined us 3 months after the launch in 2015 and for a short period of a year were george, nick and me a trio leading unloze basically until nick's resignation. From that point on it were just me and george, which it still is today, however that does not mean we were the entire period only two leaders.

Rushaway unofficially but practically speaking was an unloze leader together with me and george back in 2016. Thats been around 6 years ago by now so obviously most people dont know that story (that was the second worst mistake so far on unloze).
Another special notation is @William! :D who officially was a leader with the red role around the year 2019. More people probably remember that time period. William had a huge impact on how unloze worked and we sure had a lot of discussions inside the admin and staff team where he helped push us forward even if it sometimes meant internal fighting. However i am very thankful for all the time william spent on unloze, it was meaningful to me and also especially fun having him not just as a normal player around but also as a fellow leader and as a friend thinking about unloze and acting for unloze.

The first two unloze admins were @Géovanni and Dante as far as i remember. Kinda crazy that geovanni still plays sometimes, dante already back then had cancer so i fear its unlikely he is still alive now a days.
It took a while before we adapted the idea of senior admins to handle admins and those first few years were certainly more chaotic in regards to picking admins. It often caused many discussions and talks which took many years to streamline and normalize. In fact the first few years there were some particular topics and events that had to happen very often because things were not set in stone yet. Up until 2018 i think it was pretty common that we still had an official admin meeting every 2-3 months. Those had some great meme material and were really memorable. Now however things have found a natural flow and it means there is of course less often major things to discuss about how unloze should function since most things just already work one way or the other for years.

It sure is fun when you start and everything seems open to decide on, eventually now things mostly are set in stone. Unloze is slightly different than it used to be, that is rather simple to understand. It used to be very personalized, maybe even a kind of cult, but it outgrew that and is now more a thing for everybody. That was a also a particular thing i thought about for long. Unloze is not more my personal thing that i share with some few friends, its now a thing that must exists for the sake of people being able to play css ze. And i also very often think about that change and how i must be careful not to let it die due to me somewhat letting louse of it.

We saw the end of i3d and gfl and have now been running actively for almost as long as they were alive. Soonish nide and unloze will have been the longest active ze servers in css despite first manifesting around the time where all other css ze servers started dying. I sure do hope that both places still have many years in front of them. Going down to a single active ze server in css would be horrible, however that is not exactly inviting to much cooperation between unloze and nide when viewing back on all these pasts years. Only with the entry of @cmer and @Boss to nide did nide ever actually contribute something in overall to Zombie Escape. Before that was nide only borrowing features from other servers while never contributing anything back.

On old unloze did zacade and george (@tb) sometimes make contributions as unloze developers that also went to GFL and that way to nide like the new entwatch system. There however was a long period where Unloze sincerely had changed its mind to not wishing to contribute too much officially. We anyways ended up contributing several things however as botox sold our git repository to people. Maybe he also just gave it for free to people, we would not know. Mostly it was @Neon who got affected by this i believe as it mostly were his content that unwillingly ended up on other servers or in public gits due to this. @Neon is a huge contribution to the development of unloze and some of his contributions like top defender basically also became a standard plugin on almost any ze server in both css and csgo.

I sometimes had my fair share of fights with neon but i am happy that he did not resign and i think each day it gets a little bit better as we move away from the past and into a better future. In the past there were very certain issues specifically caused by botox and dogan that had ended up with me and neon fighting but with the removal of dogan and botox there has not been any real issues between us and so the wounds are healing as we are moving further and further into this new age where botox and dogan cant do any damage here. On our own we dont run into issues with each other, only those two other aforementioned guys caused issues between us. I do have to admit i held a grudge for a while towards neon, to some degree because of my paranoia against botox as he kept having access to the unloze machine for over an entire year after his official demotion where he sometimes caused fuckery and mayham that nobody could explain how happened.
Several times when i should be focusing on exams just a few days away did i instead sit with shit botox caused on the machine at that exact day. However since then did a majority of unloze's infrastructure get virtualized which hopefully finally should be the end of my personal nightmare (That experience did make me a worse person overall).
For sure the unloze machine was also finally "freed" of botox grisp for good when the entire OVH datacenter burned down in 2021. Which i personally would call the only upside to the datacenter burning down. Plus we have more SSD space available now and better bandwidth.

I would say there exists several layers of stability. One layer is actual player activity stability and has the largest degree of external factors. What we do does matter but only to such a certain degree in terms of normal guys wanting to play here. Meanwhile there also is admin stability and staff stability. For the most years now the Senior admins took care of Admin stability and fairness in terms of bans/abuse reports. For many years did unloze struggle with staff instability meanwhile the normal player base could keep itself together and just ignore whatever shit storm there was between the higher ups. We had major issues in the staff due to certain past members.
Those were Botox, dogan, Rushaway, nivinski and to a lesser degree zacade. Zacade was a double egded sword as he had many good and sincere intentions to be a guy around here just wanting to help people as well as just wanting to be a good friend to many here. Of the rest i cant say that and i just hope they get run over by a car.

Summarized: Botox was the worst mistake in unloze history ever and the biggest mistake i personally ever made. If he only were a pedophile you could ignore that but he has the absolutely worst morals possible and as a guy called juky once vaguely said "All your contributions to ze are over shadowed by your horrible actions as a human being". The worst part was after him being officially demoted where he started hijacking the unloze machine as he had added back doors during his period as a developer here which haunted us for years to come afterwards.

Rushaway was a close second as unloze easily could had ended in 2016. He had told george and me that he should own the unloze machine back then due to being able to talk french with the customer support at the hosting center. This was due to us switching from a german hosting provider to the french OVH because of ddos attacks the german hosting provider could not handle. George and me decided to trust him but not many months after him being the owner of the unloze machine he started with pushing george out of unloze and soon after tried pushing me out as well. Me and george gave him an ultimatum to hand the machine ownership over to me or we would move the entire community to a new machine and perm ban. He did hand over the access to the machine so we did not perm ban him but barely a few days after he started threaning us with supposed backdoors existing in the machine. However unlike botox did nothing ever come of rushaway's supposed backdoors.

Nivinski is in third place. You can look over the fact that humans sometimes are trouble some to speak with or arrogant, but the drop overflowing the barrel was him installing a bitcoin miner on the unloze machine that neon discovered was the cause of lag on the css servers. Nivinski had that way reduced the life span of the entire unloze machine just for gaining some minimal profits for himself.
Dogan is in fourth place for sweet talking us into accepting botox since forever, in the end it was my own fault for actually myself accepting him in but dogan is a constant sweet talker focusing on peoples perception who always until the end of his time in unloze always was loyal to botox and never to the unloze staff. He also made way too many contributions during his time as staff here which majorly were impacting the server in a negative way due to his obession with adding micro management that would just make the gameplay experience more and more inconsistent while defending all his actions through sweet talking.
Zacade was a trouble maker for a really long time but most of us liked him like a brother. Unlike the rest mentioned above did many people including myself really liked zacade personally and could recognize he just did wrong decisions due to having slight Lifeblood of Zombie Escape. For that reason was zacade also the trouble maker who was the longest time around. If he did want to return to unloze would we accept him with open hands, but he could never be anything above admin.

Now you might wonder why do i ramble about this? Well simply put after the last two bad members (dogan and botox) finally were removed from staff there started being a lot more of a unity between the unloze staff. For so many years we were used to having to argue with those guys mentioned right above but after the final two of them were removed we suddenly had a situation where all staff were willing to work together and could function well together just on a personal level as human beings. Since 2020 has the unloze staff had the most peaceful time that ever existed so far. I am endlessly happy that things have been running between us as they have since then. And i really am sure that i dont want any new developers any more on unloze due to these past experiences with the bad devs.

The point is just the staff has been very united and stable since the last two trouble makers finally got removed and that way there does not appear any instability anymore. So we only have to focus on potential instability in the admin team or in regards to the player population. Of course does stability of the player population matter the most because if the servers were dead there would be no point in us all doing our work here.



Some of the cool people who are not a part of the admin team or staff anymore but who had a huge impact on how this place folded out the way it is today are for example skullz/chris (the guy known as the harry potter mapper) who early on took the unofficial role of being something like a senior admin before the role even existed.
Another guy is @Struppi , i believe most people now a days only vaguely know struppi as the ancient wrath mapper but he was for several years the right hand of me and george who was tasked with the impossible task of planning on what video games we should be running game servers as well as what our ambitions should be.
Also a shout out to my pickle meep who sincerely has the most admin demotions on record for any senior admin while being able to justify them. He did obviously not always act professional but he had his intentions in the right place.
Also thanks to @Kriesley who probably was the very first senior admin around here at just the age of 16. That guy just pops in and out through out all the years and its great how some people you are familiar with can return after years, sometimes people changed, some times they dont, but i always liked this tunisian guy and the often bizarre stories of his life.

@IgglePiggle was never an admin or part of staff but god damn he is the most real unlozer out there. He can come with sincere serious input when people need it, joke around with the rest when they do or come with thoughtfull messages that just lights up ones day. He is a living human and i love that. Also greatest music taste around here ofc.

Zacade is to me personally a great friend and i wish i would keep more contact with him. At this point its probably only people that are considered old players who remember him, he was the biggest admin abuser on unloze crashing the server more often than all other staff and admins combined. He could do shit like spawning balrogs, making towers out of players or spawning predator boss fights on narrow corridors. We laughed a lot and we yelled a lot but eventually he decided himself to move on for our sake. When he left unloze he did that fully consciously thinking that it would be better for us, he did not think of himself. For those reason does zacade always have this sweet spot in our hearts.

@ZeGaWa zegawa lived unloze for some years and made so many friends here. Nobody is seemingly ever going to catch up with his forum activity. He put so much time and effort into being a part of unloze and contributing himself into making this place function. I will forever remember him for those years he spent with me and everybody else together here. He matters to me and he matters to many others too.

@ricca2554 Particularly in 2022 i also want a special shout out to our new star mapper ricca. Ricca has in 2022 released an insane amount of maps constantly delivering us with new content to play which immensely helps with keeping ze fresh.

We sure also tried a lot of things in the early days: UNLOZE 3 times opened a gmod TTT server and once also a gmod hide n seek server. In the early days we also had a crew of 4-5 people who actively played Killing floor 2 on the unloze killing floor server. Not even to mention the minecraft server that sporadically is played on for some days or weeks every few years before disappearing again. UNLOZE was also for some years active on CSGO. Obviously the ZE server in go had the most impact as we picked up some people from over there like @Revo , @Kaka and @Fatima . I am pretty happy they still stick around. However if i should pick myself i certainly had a lot more good memories of the unloze csgo kz server and the unloze csgo surf server. These felt a lot less like unthankful work to maintain than csgo ze and were just fun servers to jump on with your friends for some voice chat gaming.

I think over the years however we did lose interest in really caring to expand to other video games. Especially due to most of the developers + george and me being short on time now a days. The short time we have available should best be used on the css servers, primarily ZE and MG, but ZR and JB of course also some times deserve some attention when we can give them that. If we went to other games would our spare available time be even more shortened for each one in particular. Since we started in 2015 there also already had been some years with the trend of community based online game servers being less and less common. Probably barely any new ones have been made at all since unloze started. That is also kinda a factor which since a while forced gaming communities to rely on old games that exist.

The special part is just being able to run your own machine that you can edit and configure as you want to tailor the gaming experience as well as some few people being able to have real influence on the environment unlike "gaming" communities just centered around things like league of legends. There you cant tailor much, no matter if we talk about technical terms or social human terms, simply because nobody outside the game producer owns anything there and therefore cant do any real decisions. Here there are some few people who can do real choices and most of the time hopefully the majority can enjoy these decisions made by the few in charge. The people who run the place and make real decisions are also what can turn each community into a somewhat special place.


On a last note, i hope in 2023 we will get MG kick started more again, outside of that are the only plans for unloze just the dev team developing more and more things that actually seem worth it for the css servers and the senior admins doing the required routine work for the admin team to function. As well as the admin team doing their routine work for the player experience to be hopefully good.

I hope we still have more years ahead of us of actually being an active css community. We are an ancient relic and the more that times moves on the more and more unique it makes us if we stand the test of time and keep being alive/active.

There are so many people who have been here over the years who each had their own shape and influence on this place and how it came to be. I remember most of you but it would take endlessly long to thank everybody. Know that you all had a change on me as a person and made up a huge part of my life so far.

Thanks for everything.
 
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too long didn't read + ratio

On a serious note thanks jenz, the whole admin team and the community for everything
Many of you must consider me as a paranoid fag toxic player that only complains and inflates but I truly enjoy playing with all of you, i'll try to improve in the future but for now happy birthday unloze!
 
me cry :sadpepe:

Thank you for all the memories we've had, and that we're still going to spend, I never thought about continuing to play this game after the fall of i3D, but I'm glad I continued, so many memories, so many friendships that were made, I would like to be more active like I was before, I was really addicted to this gamemode, I have so many memories that I will never forget, thank you jenz for keeping CSS ZE alive and thank you to the community, and congratulations guys, we made it through another year, let’s go to many more years.
 
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Even tho i played here on late 2015 for the first time, im just a "noname" here xd.
These are still my favorite servers on whole steam cs:s. also the only servers i really was enjoying playing(mostly MG). sadly im having really a little bit playtime on cs:s last 2 years, im happy that the servers are alive still. Shortly thank you jenz and anyone who did something for the servers that made the servers what it looks like now(including dev, admin and mapper staff) :pog:
 
Jenz, I would lie if I say that your message didn't make me drop a tear..
You have no idea how Unloze helped me in some way, I made a lot of great friends, I had a lot of laugh and I still have a lot of great memories.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the chance you gave me to became an advisor back in old days. I tried to contribute as much as I can to this community and I know that all admins who joined this adventure are doing the same.
I hope Unloze will keep css ze alive for years.
See you on the server :D
 
I joined in summer of 2020 to this community, i was expecting that i was just going to play and nothing more, but i didn't expected that i would end up contributing to this community creating ze maps, I wish i had more time for i can dedicate more to help the community, i started to create ze maps too but i have a lot of problems and i don't have a good knowledge about mapping, i hope i can learn more stuff about mapping and creating a lot of ze maps too, will Fereloz be the 2023 great ze map maker and be recognised? i hope so, i'll try my best for help this community ;).
 
I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to all Unloze admins and community for all their hard work, dedication and great service given to the ZE community :hyperclap:. You have held strong through and made significant strides towards constant improvement. Stay strong !

Let's work together for a better ZE future. :pepocheer:
 
Thanks jenz,
I joined in 2016 on Unloze and i have soooo many memories on the Server with so many nice people. For more Years of ZE on Unloze. Lets goooo
 
Your server filled the hole that the end of i3D left behind and therefore the most og ze experience you can have these days. I am forever grateful for that!

I am proud that you managed to create such a popular server. I still remember playing on your zombie-kebab server ;)
 
Well I want to really thank @jenz and George with the mission of creating a brand new server in 2015. If I knew about a new CSS ZE server starting after CSGO was released, I would have thought you guys are mad.

It only became the great ZE server ever made, and I've had so much fun playing here. I play much less now, but it is still the best.

The admins have also been important to ensure it reached these heights, and most of them have shown so much dedication. A few of those who have been incredible admins are @ZeGaWa and @D3J4de and @Batata and @Neon . But there are so many others who have helped.

And of course, the players, Unloze would be dead if all of us (new players) came on the server and did not add the server to our favourites. There is something which made us welcome to the server and want to return.

:hyperclap:
 
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dam 7 years huh, time really go fast
i still remember the first server u made and how it always filled with danish fucks, and thank u for all the good times we had
also thank fuck i3d died that server was dogshit,
 
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Really cool this community still exists, I was playing ZE with i3d and might have been around in 2015 on unloze but I quit playing css at that time.
I remembered those fine and awesome days recently and found this. Blew me away ze is still going on, might actually start playing it again.
Just wow to realize what happened during the lifetime of this game and this community. ZE was one of the mods I enjoyed most. Really appreciate you kept this community alive. Not sure I can enjoy ZE again the same way I did during i3d days but who knows.

Here are some screens from 6 years or more ago, not sure if anybody recognizes any namesze_ffvii_mako_reactor_v5_30004.jpg
Not sure if anyone of the players are actively playing here.
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