It had been ten long, fun, and exciting (pun intended :P) months since I began playing this game. At this point, I was being to question when to put an end to all this. When was it my turn to retire and move on to other great games? I was still having fun, still racking up wins, and still enjoying the community so why quit? :) After all, I was almost 3,000 wins away from finding out if the excite wins cap at 9,999 or continue on to 10,000+. That was something I was interested in finding out. :D

October and November weren't very big months in the community but they did have some small stories to tell. Early in October we picked up a couple of new board members to add to our autumn crew. PAROX, a racer I recalled racing here and there over the summer, joined the board along with his friend Axcel. SAMZILZ was with the board shortly after BIG AIR invited him over through YouTube, the place where he had several funny ExciteBots online videos. :lol:

Something else happened in October that was unfortunate for my zero bets lost profile, TopZerO. It was October 2nd, I was racing Gold Guatemala with Thelma (LOONEY!) and some other rookie. I was running the race just fine, at my normal farming pace. By the time I reached the red bar on the 2nd lap, the 30 seconds starting to countdown. I was certain I would finish in time if I farmed the rest of the course. Sadly, however, I crashed multiple times on the way to the finish line. I had eight or so seconds left and was about twelve or thirteen seconds away. :( I was two seconds shy of beating the timer. TopZerO didn't make it. :cry: Thelma was the one to finish in first so she should be the one to blame for this, right? No. It was my fault for making that risky decision 7,200,000+ bets won along on the profile. I deleted the profile at 1,240 excite wins. Oddly enough, I wasn't as disappointed in losing the bet as I thought I would be. :o I just kind of froze, laughed, and just continued racing under my TopStar profile. No plans were in work to start a new zero losses alternate.

These months were the months of statistics. theJude introduced a new database of information known as the Online Racer Index. This was a thread that would display the online stats of players. The index helped identify players that changed their screen names frequently. This new feature on the forum helped my score database out a lot because I didn't have to worry about tracking two different names of the same player on accident. :? The index isn't completely perfect but it was definitely a great step in bettering the ExciteBots Community.

After nine weeks of ranking updates, it was finally time for a makeover. We finally collected enough scores to increase the size to a top 75 scores per course. :D I also followed the formatting advice from theJude, and enhanced the posts so it was much more readable. :) New rules were also enforced to prevent abuse in the rankings. For example, no looping or backtracking courses for more stars. With the new system in place, collecting scores for the many new racers online became a whole lot more fun. :)

It was this point in time I started to become more involved with GameSpot than just the forum itself. I started posting images of my records and of some of the most memorable moments of my time spent with this game. BIG AIR became the graphic guru of the board. He ended up creating many user icons for the members on the board, including myself. :oops: JOOM and BTC were working on creating their own online forums to help expand the options of communication. JOOM, upon finishing the forums part of his site, began working on an ExciteBots Anthem. The anthem featured many of our names in its lyrics. It became so popular amongst the forum that a multiple song collection is in the works. :)

Online for ExciteBots was still active, 20 months since its release. New players like DARIEN, ALEX123, PANTS, GMJ, and Lil Fox helped kept the fire going. Competition this time around was basically narrowed down to BIG AIR, since CodyRs was still absent. :? However, a long time player by the name of BAB was getting increasing better, better to the point that I needed to be more alert when racing him. Not a lot of new players came to the board with the exception of SNOOOOG, who BIG AIR invited over here through the old name-changing campaign. SNOOOOG turned out to be of two other famous racers from online: BAB and K5STAR. :o I felt like I lost two rivals when I heard this news. :cry: It was alright though. Now we had another powerful racer with us in our community. :)

I passed my 7,000th excite win in October and was slowly making my way to win number 8,000. Online was beginning to slow down towards the end of November. I was finding it harder and harder to find players, other than newbies, to collect scores from. Was the online finally running dry? The holiday season was now in full swing. December was right around the corner. :) To Be Continued…