My Warcraft 2 History
My war2 history is probably like most peoples. Got the game, liked it, got kali, liked it more, played online for a bit, joined a league, made some friends, had loadsa fun, had classic games, then got bored of it. Thats the short version, the long version is below if anyone cares to read on. The chronology might be a bit out, it was a long time ago :)

If you would like to contribute your own war2 history to this site, you are welcome to submit your story and I will feature it here. This history was inspired by Wicked Al's War2 history which you can read by clicking here.

Update : I lifted a few histories from the Warcraft Occult forums and ive linked to them below.
Archangel's war2 history
Sc~nixon's war2 history
Sappy's war2 history
Sypher's war2 history
Allstar's war2 history
Burning Blade's war2 history

First PC
I got my first PC in feb 1996, a state of the art pentium 133 with 16Mb of RAM, woohoo! It wasnt multimedia (no sound or cd drive) so i had to buy those in a seperate package. I got a few shareware games with them that were mostly crappy, though a couple were playable, even so i had to go out and find some games for it as that is what pcs are really for :)
I bought Fifa 96 and Heretic, they were enough in the beginning, i used to play Fifa96 against other players in a league using the modem to modem option.
A friend of mine in Canada was telling me about his pc on the phone one day and how he had bought this game Warcraft 2 which he said was brilliant. I hadnt played RTS games to this point, and didnt understand what he was on about when he was describing it to me, it sounded pretty crappy. I carried on playing arcady stuff and for a while, then one weekend on the way home from work I saw this warcraft 2 game in the shops and thought 'what the hell' and bought it. I didnt play it when i got home, it looked pretty complicated from the manual, and i was knackered as i worked that day so i left it till the following morning.
I was up early the next day for some reason (up early on sunday???) so i sat down in front of the pc and installed this game with the manual at the ready.

First Look at War2
Wow! the first thing that struck me as how professional the game was. The graphics looked fantastic, and the game had a kicking soundtrack, not the ambient rubbish you get on war3 :) Not ever having seen an RTS before, It took a while to get to grips with the concept of it all, I had no idea of hotkeys so everything was clicking, still I spent hours going through those first few human missions and was totally hooked. I had to take a break in the afternoon and go and do some stuff around the flat and go out, but i was constantly hankering to get back on the pc and finish the next level. I spend all evening getting to about level 6 or 7 on human mission (told you i sucked) and over the next two weeks slowly made my way through the human missions and then the orc missions (human 13 was a right bastard of a level).
I spoke with my friend in Canada soon after buying the game and raved about it, he mentioned a program called Kali which you could use to play against other people. I was too interested in finishing the campaigns to go looking for kali online so I just carried on in single player, when i finished the missions, I started playing the PC in custom maps and made a few maps of my own just to practise.
It took me until that point to learn the basics of 1v1 play mainly you can build more than one barracks and more peons = a good thing :) After playing the computer and beating it easily, i went onto the net and looked for this kali program i had been told about.

Kali
I downloaded Kali and gave it a try, the 15 minute thing meant i couldnt play any games but it looked interesting. It took me a while to get my ass into gear and send of my $25AUD for the registration keys. I received them a couple of days later and was given the serial 019059. Looking back i wish i had taken the step of registering kali earlier as a certain Kudos developed in the kali community if you had a four figure serial, still 19059 was fairly low, certainly by todays standards :)
I chose the nickname Frielfan, in tribute to the British Actress Anna Friel who was a babe :) I shortened this to Friel some years after and still use this on kali.
Once it was up and running i tried to get a game, but began to find you needed certain patches and downloads, like version 1.2 and war2kali. Once i got those i went hunting for a server with lots of war2 players.

Kali Central
I was living in Australia and only had a 28.8K modem, however my isp, though expensive, had a dedicated backbone to the US so my ping to the American servers wasnt to bad and i didnt suffer from lag that often. I noticed the server Kali Central had a lot of users on it, so i joined and went in to find a game. Having beaten the pc so easily i actually thought i was a good player! lol, my first game changed all that.
It was a 2v2 on Gardon of War, I was at 4.30 and one of my enemies was at 5.30. I started to build units and after no time at all they were getting hit by guard towers. I had been towered at the edge of my base and within a couple of minutes I was totally dead. That was my first game, and i probably learnt more from that game than i did from all my games against the pc.
Undeterred I carried on playing in other games, remembering to scout this time. I really sucked for a while, but a lot of players on Kali Central sucked so you could have some even games.
I started to get better and get some build orders together. After a week or two I was winning as many as I was losing. One game which was my first really 'good' game was a 2v1 on Garden of War. My ally dropped so I decided to carry on and fight the other two. I dont remember much about the game except I was top left and they had the bottom. I ended up losing but had managed to fend them both off for quite a while, I actually thought i had it won at one point but in the end they overran me, however I met up with them in the lobby of the next game and they both praised my play which was pleasing as I still saw myself as a below average player until then.
I began to get a decent rush order together which helped for all the POS games and the 1v1 games on on way in/out. Soon in a team game, I wasnt worried about my ally having to help me all the time or save my ass, I was confident enough to play anyone or alongside anyone. It was a nice time, I met a lot of cool people, of course by the next day you usually have forgotten who you played with the previous evening so I didnt really have any permanent kali buddies, as I never went into kali chat, I always went straight into war2 and looked for a game.
Kali Central often got a bad press which was unfortunate as for a beginner it was the best place to hang out and find games. There were lamers around, but far fewer than you would find on bnet nowdays. It was a beginner's server and the standard of play reflected that, after a while certain rules started taking shape which are detailed below.

Ogre Rules
Ogre rules got ragged out by alot of people and to be fair with good reason. It was pretty stupid, and was probably made up by noobs who wanted the chance to get some tech units without getting rushed out the game in 5 minutes. I went through my ogre rules phase for about 2 weeks and soon it seemed every game by default was ogre rules. It was fun for a while but i got bored of it and stopped doing it. It doesnt really do your game any good, grunts are a part of the game as is rushing, you need to know how to do it and defend against it.

Archers Only
These games began appearing and they were like fun for about 5 minutes. I got bored of these straight away but used to love joining them and rushing people with about 8 grunts, muahahah. I did it to this one guy about 5 times, just kept logging back in with a different name and joining his game and rushing his archers with grunts, lol he got real pissed about the 3rd time, i hadnt laughed so hard since the bombed Libya.

No attacking for 15 minutes
This shit actually went down and i steered well clear, i was into improving my game in a big way by this time and wasnt interested in any restrictions, especially stupid ones like this.

Kali St.Louis
A lot of fansites had cropped up around the world, there were hundreds. Reading the guides to online play, i became aware staying on kali central wasnt going to improve my play so I started playing on the Kali St.Louis server. This server was for more intermediate players and the games were alot tougher, I still managed to win more than I was losing, though I usually only played team games. I would play just about every night, and for several hours on Fridays, the best night for gaming!

Expansion Pack
Version 1.3 of the game came out which was the expansion pack and friends began to become a popular map amongst a lot of people. You didnt need to buy the game to play it, just needed to download it, but i heard the expansion pack had new campaigns and as i had so much fun with the original campaigns I bought the expansion pack anyway thinking it would be a nice break from online play. The campaigns sucked, they had none of the character of the original and the heros were a joke. The maps were 99% rubbish, the new orc tileset was awful, the whole thing looked rushed and thrown together. Still, Friends pud was a fun pud to play so i suppose thats one thing they did right.

Change of ISP
My isp charged by the hour and i was spending serious amounts of time online playing war2. I was earning good money as a programmer but was spending too much on connection fees so i knew i had to get a pay-monthly isp which probably meant no backbone to the USA and having to find a local Australian server.

MPX Australia
With my new low cost monthly ISP i sorted through the kali server list by ping and noticed near the top there was a server with a few players on it (20 or so, compared to 250 odd you would get on Kali Central!). I joined the server and fired up war2 and there was indeed a game going so i joined it. The first thing the guy said to me was 'OZWL?' I didnt have a clue what he was on about so i went back to chat and asked. It turned out it was the Australian Warcraft League, some players on MPX Australia had joined it. A league sounded like fun, so i had a look through the website and joined, though the site wasnt automated it was all done by email in the beginning and had to wait to get accepted.
Most of the people on MPX had war2 and so i began to play some team games and one v one games. Most of them had only just started playing the game, i had been playing onlinel for about 3 months so id had a lot more practise and was beating most people with ease, getting some good stats and getting a reputation as one of the best players on the server. I wasnt really, i'd just had more practise - still it was fun being a big fish in a small pond for a while.

OZWL
I became good friends with a gamer called Spooky. He hadnt had the game long but was quick at picking things up and was keen to learn the game. I gave him a lot of advice, we played some one v ones against each other and a fair few team games. He became pretty good pretty quickly and I advised he joined the OZWL league, which he did, just at this point i was accepted into the league and started playing OZWL games.
I beat a few players in the beginning, lost a few, the standard was higher than against people on the server who hadnt joined. The league only allowed for one v one games in the beginning. I was looking to join a clan when i played against the leader of the Burning Blood Clan, SoothSayer on 1way in/1way out. I had become a pretty good rusher and got my build order bang on that game and rushed his ass big style. He was very impressed and invited me into his clan straight away. Burning Blood were the third best clan in OZWL, Khaz Modan had the best players and were top, Kinslayers were second, founded by the guy who ran the league, Lews Therin.
I racked up an impressive list of scalps, MindB, BattleTech, and MeatHead who was the top player in the league at that point, he was much better than me, i just got lucky on a game of POS where i rushed him before he could finish his wall-in. I used to look forward to the league being updated to see where i was, results were submitted by email and it was done by hand when Lews had the time. MindB was regarded as the best rusher in the league, but also had a reputation for poor sportsmanship, i.e disconnecting when he was losing. I played him twice one afternoon after he got kicked out the league. High Resources on Plains of snow. Two rush masters going at it hammer and tongues, each time I started to get the upper hand, each time I got to his base and outnumbered him, the game suddenly dropped! I think i was safe in saying I beat him :)
The good thing about the league is people didnt take it too seriously and were willing to play different maps. Some maps were given extra points just for playing on them from one week to the next, this encouraged people to play a wide range of maps without specializing on just one or two.
MPX was getting more popular too, every night there would be 25-30 people on it. Not much compared to Kali Central but enough to organize plenty of games in chat, or just hang out if you fancied chatting and not playing.
It was a real pleasure to come home in the evening and log on, see who was on, see how many games you could get and what they would be like. It was also good to pit yourself 1v1 against good players and the kudos that developed when people regarded you as a decent player.
I probably relied too much on rushing which was fine in the beginning as strategies like the wall-in werent really tried that often and the benefits of rapid expansion and towering in hadnt been explored that much.
A group of friends from Canberra had joined the league who were all of a good standard and formed their own clan Raining Blood and quickly took the top spot in the clan table. Then one day some bright spark discovered X Marks the Spot.

X Marks the Spot
The crappiest map imagineable. People began to research what limited strategies there were on this one trick pony and use them in league games. The thing about OZWL was the rule was if you challenged someone to a game, the one being challenged chose the map, the other chose the resources, and everyone was choosing this map. Once the killer strat had been nailed, everyone copied it, soon it was the same thing over and over again. Lots of players suddenly came from nowhere and had a ton of points simply by playing just this one map and regurgitating the same strategy.
I played a few X marks games, won some lost some, didnt really feel that id achieved anything by winning, just that I had executed an equation more efficiently.
This was a turning point in OZWL, games were taken more seriously and people started to stick to one or two maps, most ly pos and x marks the spot. I practically stopped playing OZWL games from this point and only stuck to friendly team games, they were more fun. The only games i remember playing after that was 2 games with spooky against the Raining blood pair Bluehawk and Whitestarr, one land (maze) and one sea (FOC), which we won 2-0, i got a ton of points as they were both high ranked players :)

Das, Hoog & Spooky
Das had been in OZWL when i joined. He was a human player in Greyhawk clan. Id played against him a couple of times and he often joined in the friendly team games. We decided as we were all in the same city we'd meet up and go for a beer or three so me das and spooky hit the western suburbs of Sydney for a night of drunken debauchery and stayed friends after that. Das had a network set up in his house so whenever I'd go round there we'd crack open the beer and play war2 for most of the evening.
Hoog was from Melbourne and joined a bit later, he was quite green to start with but was a nice guy and a keen learner. He always joined in the team games and became another good friend, him and Das were good mates.

New Improved OZWL
Lews Therin gave up ozwl and Garfield the graphics master and Prowler the Web Expert created a new league on MPX. It was still the same OZWL but with a superb interface and was totally automated. Players could create their own profiles and update them with graphics and backgrounds, there was a well worked forum and overall the site looked brilliant.
The scoring system was a bit weird, it wasnt a ladder it was points based, based on some international system, but we all joined up as soon as it was released, however a league is a league and the same old problems arose with people only wanting to play certain maps so I didnt play that many games, i spent more time designing my own profile or graphics for other peoples clan pages.
The biggest improvement and the secret of OZWLs success was the clan set up. Clan wars were organized and the race to be the top clan each month soon became very competitive. You would get points for winning 1v1 games against other players, however you would declare war on a clan and have to be 5 or so 1v1s and a couple of 2v2s with the leaders facing off to decide the winner of the war and who's clan would get a ton of points towards their monthly total. At the end of each month the clan of the month would be announced and clan points all set to zero.
Raining Blood were the top clan in the early months of 1997, Competing with Clan Nemesis whose OZWL profile page you can see here

Diablo
About this time Diablo came out, and it took people from the server away from war2 for a while, but it was a totally different game and didnt have the online longevity that war2 had, once you killed diablo, what was the point after that? :)

KRT
Me and Spooky and a few others created our own clan called Knights of the round table. I was too busy designing its website and doing graphics for other peoples websites to play much at the time so we didnt take part in it much, however Hoog and das joined and das eventually took over the running of it, even managing to chalk up a cracking war win against DaggerFall whose leader was a guy called Kanga - widely regarded by most of OZWL as a total knob.

Late Nights
4am was the usual bedtime on Friday and Saturdays when we all played together. Minimum. Hell the evening didnt really kick off till midnight, anything else before then was just a warm up. One night, Das, Hoogy and I decided to have 'just one more game' at about 430 am. It was a 3v3 on GOW, the game itself was over as a contest pretty quickly, however the last guy decided to play 'hide the peon' and it took us a long time to find and kill his last unit. All the time we were looking for it, we were still building more units and expanding and mining more gold, I guess we were eager to be top of the stats :). When we killed his peon, we werent on allied victory, we had all these units so we decided to turn on each other. LOL. It was carnage, we had lots of gold and strong bases, man it took forever, I cant even remember who won, what i can remember was going to bed at 7am! It was light outside and I was going to bed, thats when I realised I had a problem :)

Canberra Lan
In the Winter of 1997 (Summer to the rest of the northern hemisphere) the Raining Blood guys organized a lan day at a hired hall in Canberra. Someone brought a hub along, at the a cost of $20 or so a head it was too good an opportunity to miss. I hitched a ride with das and we took the three hour trip down there.
We met up with Hoog and Smallman who had driven up from Melbourne (7 hours!) and then went on the the hall.
We were given name tags to stick on ourselves and then went round meeting everyone we had become friends with on MPX over the previous year or so.
It was a fantastic weekend, the network wasnt quite working, we couldnt get all 20 odd pcs talking to each other but we got enough to play lag free 4v4 games. Network problems gave us a chance to chat to people we had met in person for the first time.
Hoog - terrific guy, was life and soul of the part, everyone seemed to get on with him at the lan.
JJJ - Gosu player in a different class to everyone else, quiet man.
JimiH - very outspoken lad who rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way on kali, quiet as a mouse all weekend!
Smallman - Organizer from raining blood, did a good job running the weekend, fairly quiet but a nice chap
Big Dave - Leader of Raining Blood, quite an extrovert, easy to talk to guy, quite a joker.
Khan - Best Raining Blood player IMHO, quietly spoken man, but always a throughly decent chap, I liked him.
Kanga - Weird bloke, had fallen out with Raining Blood over the running of the league but spent all weekend creeping round them, i.e helping them in games (he's expanded top left). Knob.
Astro - long haired skateboarder, just as i had imagined him strangely enough :)

There were plenty of others, but I cant remember right now. I dont remember how many games I played that weekend, I dont think it was that many, but they were mostly 4v4 which was quite a novelty as lag usually kicks in when we tried those sort of games on Kali. Still it wasnt really about playing War2, just about meeting people for the first time.

Dunbar
OZWL had become very popular, at its height it had 250 or so members, not bad considering its humble beginnings, was probably the biggest league outside the states, although it was open to all. Unfortunately you couldnt go onto kali and chat without people constantly bothering you for a game, as I wasnt really playing many games in the league, I left in the hope that I wouldnt be constantly bothered by people on kali asking for OZWL.
I created my kali alter-ego Dunbar, whenever I fancied playing an OZWL game, i would join as Dunbar, if I just wanted to chat, i would log on as Friel. I didnt play too many games as Dunbar in the beginning, basically I wanted to enjoy my time in OZWL so I decided I wouldnt play Plains of Snow, X-Marks, or 1 way in 1 way out, just the rest. This restricted me somewhat as most people who challenged me to a game only wanted to play these maps - and if you suggested Fierce Ocean Combat for example, they would have heart failure (aww c'mon, lets play a REAL map, like POS). Still, i had some good games against those willing to diversify, and collected a couple of decent scalps, most notably Khan on Arena.pud.
I joined das's clan Knights of the Round Table, let him in on who i was, and we had a cracking game against Raining Blood on his network.
Clan points were given for games played, even if you lost you gained points for your clan, this encouraged players of a lesser standard to play more, and not be scared of letting their clan down.
At the beginning of one month, I resolved to have my clan at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the first day, So i was up early one Sunday and played anyone on any map for the entire day, I cant remember my record, think i won slightly more games than i lost, still I did manage to get KRT at the top of the clan table by the end of the day, although i was majorly sick of POS and 1 way in/out by then as most of the games were predictably on these maps. To win the clan title each month, you really had to have all the members of the clan playing constantly, the competition was that fierce, needless to say KRT didnt end the month on top.

Big Team Games
With ISP's getting more efficient, and 33.6 and 56K modems appearing, big team games became possible and on kali we having terrific 4v4 and 3v3 games, 8 player ffa's and left vs right games on pos, (we would join a melee game and the left side of the map would ally and take on the right side of the map). These games made war2 fun again, and I was often up late each night playing these games. While everyone else was going head to head on the same maps again and again for league points, we were having lots more fun with our big team games! I lost count of the number of mornings I felt crappy cos I had been up till 1.30 am as everyone had persuaded me to play 'just one more game'.
A lot more good players had joined the league by this time and a lot more strategies were being perfected for each map. I started to lose any edge I had in 1v1 games by forgoing these for team games, soon i was an average 1v1 player at best, but I always saw myself as a good player to have in a team as I had much more experience of team play. The two game types were totally different.
About this time, das announced he was leaving kali, which was a shame as he was one of the most active players in our little group and a good friend of mine. In his honour we all created a 4v4 left vs right game on pos where we all joined as das, so you didnt know who your allies actually were, just that you were on the same side as i.eteal, red and blue so you allied with them. I cant remember much about the game, just that it was a fitting tribute to one of the most underrated players on ozwl and a great team player, after the game, we all revealed what colour we were and bid das a fond farewell.

Starcraft and Total Annihilation
Garfield and prowler, the creators of the league were working on their starcraft league page when Total Annihilation came out. They didnt have the time to create a league for it, but didnt want to ignore the game which had rave reviews so they asked me to do the graphics for the league OzTAL as i had become a graphics wiz at the time, I also was charged with running the league which took a lot of time, especially as cavedog were constantly bringing out new units and i had to update the page with the new stats and info. Unfortunately the game did not prove as popular and the league didnt attract many members, which was a shame as i had put a lot of time and effort designing what i thought was a nice looking site. I think people were just waiting for Starcraft to come out - still i got paid $300 AUD for my trouble :)

Parramatta Lan
Another lan day, in the sydney suburb of parramatta, though this was organized by some of the quake mob on kali so it was mostly quake that was played that weekend, i only remember playing one game of war2, still it was a nice day, and another chance to meet up with the kali mob, we hung outside most of the evening, drinking and having a laugh.

War2 fades
I was starting to play a lot of computer golf and was spending more time on the Links LS Kali server, i had joined cases ladder for links98 and even managed to get myself into the top 50. Das's circumstances changed and he came back on kali, we played a few online games, but not many, i was rarely on MPX, only when i went round to his place we would play some war2 on his network, but not as much. War2 was starting to get old, it had been 2 years since i first started playing it so it was inevitable really.

Starcraft
Starcraft then came out in 1998, we all rushed to buy it but I wasnt too sure about it at the start, it did look weird, but did start to grow on me - The single player campaings were a masterpiece, even better than the original war2 ones. We all joined the Kali Starcraft League (prowler and garfield decided having Australian infront of the league name was a hindarance to its popularity). Unfortunately Battlenet ensured kali was not the primary source of online play for starcraft, and with its ladder system, leagues became a bit obsolete. Still alot of us needed the change from War2, and found red alert and total annihilation didnt provide the alternative until Starcraft came out.
Starcraft signalled the death of War2 on MPX, though we all hung out on the server playing it, though some didnt like it and disappeared from MPX.

OZWL regenerated.
After a lull, when alot of old OZWL players left, it began to pick up. I think people had a large break from war2 and began to come back to it. Maybe people didnt find Starcraft that good in the end, to be fair it wasnt that great until Brood War came out. OZWL used to be hosted on an MPX website, but it got bought out by the Online gaming network. Clan Nemesis and Raining Blood had finished their tenures as top clans and Dark Evilution took over who won it several months running, though in August Clan Nemesis returned to fight for the monthly title. I even re-joined myself at one point, I think I played one or two 1v1 games and I really sucked, a game on FOC came to mind when I out-jugged my opponent and then got schooled by just a couple of dragons, thats how much i sucked at head to head warcraft by 1998.
OZWL began to fly again towards the end of the year, the clan wars ensured a lot of people kept interest, The October clan competition was the fiercest since the league began almost 2 years previously with Dark Evilution going for their 8th Straight monthly title, however they were pipped on the last day by Clan Nemesis. On the final day in October, 186 games of War2 were played in the league. That was an all-time record.
November of that year saw Clan Nemesis win the title again, but it was much easier that month, after spending nearly all year being the top clan, Dark Evilution only managed fourth, but still were the most successful clan in terms of monthly titles. Raining Blood, Nemesis and the Stone Dogs may disagree as to their position as best clan of all time in OZWL. :)

Kali fades
With the advent of battlenet, it was also inevitable Kali would start to lose its popularity, fewer people were on the MPX server, and eventually, MPX died as did Power UP, HunterLink, and all but one of the other Australian Servers.
I left Australia for England in August 1998, for nine months, I managed to log on now and then and catch the remaining crew on Kali, mostly to play starcraft, but sometimes war2. I returned to Australia in March 1999, after Brood war had come out which really gave Starcraft a shot in the arm, and the Kali server became more popular again as people were sick of the losers on Bnet. In December 1999, I left Australia for good and returned to England.

War2 reunion
In the summer of 2001, i logged onto kali one sunday and found das, hoog and talreuse online at the same time so we all decided to dig out our copies of war2 and play a couple of games for old times sake, which we did, it was fantastic, seemed such a clumsy game to play after getting used to starcraft, no rally points, or hotkeys, still it was a nice reunion.

War2 BattleNet Edition
A lot of cool multiplayer features like shared vision, access to bnet, control groupls was a nice enhancement, but by the time this title was released most people had become bored of war2 so it wasnt enough to start a huge resurrection. Maybe a year earlier may have made a difference. As it was usually to be found in the bargain bucket of most game stores, it was something I had to buy eventually. I have played a few games on the Europe Server, some with Hoog on kali, its mostly weird custom maps like paintball and big game hunters, but i did have an excellent 8 player ffa on GOWwhich i won by a mile :). It took me back to the good old days for a month or two :)

Warcraft 3
Well it was a long time coming, i never got a sniff of the beta, but i know a lot of people who did and the reaction was mixed. Warcraft 3 didnt grab me, it seemed a little contrived and i was bored of the single player campaigns after an hour. The good thing about war3 was the battle net set up, one push of a button and it would find you a game against an opponent of similar level - excellent feature. I played war3 online for about 3 months, mostly playing random 3v3 team games, again i preferred team games to 1v1 games. I think i got up to about level 17 or so, but the games always seemed very similar to each other, even replays i watched from top players seemed to be the same thing over and over again.
Sadly the war3 expansion set Frozen Throne is the first Blizzard title ive never gone out and bought the first day of its release since i discovered war2, i left it a month or so, bought it, but ive hardly played it.
Egg McEye of nemesis tried to resurrect OZWL for war3, but it didnt take off as most people that remained on the Omninet server didnt like war3 as much as starcraft, those that did chose the bnet ladder. Still, you can find the new war3 ozwl at http://ozwl.com
Sure War3 has much better graphics, movies, multiplayer features, but where's the love? :)

Warcraft 2 Today
You can still log onto BNET and play war2, unfortunately its much harder to find games, especially decent ones. Nowadays it is all crappy custom maps for thick lazy people like Big Game Hunters (no need to expand any more), Chop Chop, (no need to defend against ground units) and other various pieces of crap. Garden of War is the only standard map that seems to be played with any regularity, however there are players out there with the right mentality and still enjoy playing warcraft 2 as it was meant to be played.

Epilogue
War2 was an awesome game that lasted alot longer than most do, the online play we take for granted nowadays was such a joy then, and given that people still play it today (160 players on bnet last i looked) is a testament to its appeal. I made a lot of friends through kali and war2, so it has a lasting legacy for me. Of course those days wont be revisited, but they were fun while they lasted. Alot of fun. You can still find me on kali, Omninet (the last australian server - server #280) I still live in England but my adsl means i can catch up with the few remaining die hard kali addicts for the odd game of starcraft, and who knows maybe even War2.

Friel