Honorable Players - or HP - began in April of 1998 as a small group of people playing Starcraft on Battle.net. One of that group, Zyklone-B, presented the idea that a more formal group of players with the same ideals should form; a group of players who disliked the cheating, backstabbing, and disconnecting prevelant at the time. Beginning as HPCWAL (Honorable Players Can't Wait Any Longer), the group quickly renamed themselves Honorable Players - HP. Come May of 1998, HP went through a drastic reorganization, opening a web site on Geocities and readmitting most of the membership. In a changeover lead by Seron and Areseris, HP was reborn with a simpler infrastructure and a new look - but the same ideals. The new HP grew from Starcraft and Blizzard games into all online game genres, as the membership grew and interests diverged.
In October of 1998, PotPie, a longtime HP member, brought to the HP Council the idea of acquiring and using the honorableplayers.com domain name. Negotiating with his own internet service provider, Net-Link Systems, PotPie secured a webspace and domain hosting for HP. Through late October and early November, the HP webmasters (Areseris, Seron, and Strauss), cooperatively with PotPie, and with advice from other Council members, worked vigorously on a new web page design to kick off the move. On November 9, 1998, the Honorableplayers.com website was launched as a central site for the HP movement.
HP continued to thrive even as Starcraft play died down somewhat. The honorableplayers.com forums became the main focus of HP, instead of any game in particular. Various online games have risen and fallen in popularity among some HPers, among them Diablo, Tribes, Ultima Online, Everquest, Diablo 2, Tribes 2, and others. As games have come and gone, the good fellowship shared among HPers has been the one constant.
In early 2001, due to circumstances beyond our control, honorableplayers.com went offline. Not to be deterred, BPost and Seron quickly set up temporary HP boards at ezboards.com. Shortly thereafter, the domains honorableplayers.org and honorableplayers.net were registered, and the modern HP site, which you are now visiting, went online. When he was able to, Potpie pointed the honorableplayers.com domain name at the new HP site as well, and now all three domain extensions point to this site.
In May 2001, HP suffered a sad loss; Blizzard's change in their policy on non-game clients able to connect to Battle.net caused us the loss of our Battle.net bot, Trinity. Coded by Strauss, Trinity -- formerly known as HP-Bot -- would moderate our Battle.net channel, and let us know what other HPers were online. (Prior to the implementation of the Battle.net friends lists, keeping tracks of friends online was very difficult, requiring manual issuing of many /whois commands, or the use of 3rd party client software from outside Battle.net.) Strauss even enhanced Trinity to perform such functions as storing messages for members and delivering next time they came online, and outputing member online status to a web page, to let other members see who was on Battle.net via a web browser. Sadly, with the change in Blizzard policy, Trinity is retired from active duty at the moment. Perhaps one day she will be able to serve us once again.
With the new HP site fully up and running, Frums proposed a gathering of HP members in real life. Many of us had been hanging out together online for over 3 years; plenty of time for a get-together to let us meet one another!. Whit volunteered to host the Gathering, as we now call it, at his home in Deleware. So in mid-2001, the first HP Gathering was held. Attended by Frums, Ladotheus, Le'Ren, porktoss, Smitty, Vayn, Whit, WolverineJon, and WolverineMissy, the Gathering was a big success. We got a 6 or 7 machine LAN going for Starcraft and Unreal Tournament games, as well as some Dreamcast gaming and a role playng session.
