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I got into Quake 1 about a year after the game came out. I was drawn to CTF (capture the flag). The group of players I played with also used the Grapple mod. I was a very mediocre player when I started. I got better as I practiced more, but I still was just an above average player. I was missing something, I wasn't quite sure what. I saw other players doing things I could only dream of. It wasn't until I went to a Clan LAN party that everything changed. We did a simple 4 on 4 match, I remember it well. One of the guys on the other team was fraggin people and capturing the flag almost single handedly. Consequently, my team lost, so the winning team stayed on to play another team. I decided to go watch the other guy play, just to get pointers.
He was doing moves I'd never thought possible. It wasn't like they were hard, he was grappling to walls spinning around and firing on people from elevated positions, I don't even think he walked on the floor very often. I asked him how he was doing it, and he was like just press 'A' to throw your grapple, and 'A' again to hold it. 'A'? I said to myself, isn't that the left strafe? It was then he told me about how to remap the keys and how he used ESDF. I was blown away. I immediately went back to my computer and reconfigured my keys. At first it was hard to get use too, my hands wanted to use WASD. But after enough practice, I began to do as well as the other guy had, if not better. A month later, I was in one of the top Quake 1 CTF guilds on the planet. I was a varsity player, I played in all of our matches. Once The PGL (Professional Gamers League) started, my clan got a lot more serious. To this day I have been making my living playing games in competition.
I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't switched to ESDF. Switching to ESDF literally saved me life.
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