Mike “Tavros” McKee

“Tavros has been such an integral part of the site for so long, and I can’t imagine how MEC would have survived without him. He was the backbone of the site for as long as he was administrator, and everyone looked up to him.” -HMMcKamikaze

Tavros, the founder of the site, the greatest admin to grace the forums, and considered by some who know him well enough to be one of the greatest people that they’ve ever met. It’s hard to actually consider anybody to be in the same league as Tavros in anything. Every single task that he needed to do, he did it exactly how it needed to be done. As a person, nobody ever could disagree with him. You knew that Tavros was right, just because nobody could ever remember him being wrong. As long as I’ve known him, I never remember him making a mistake. You never had to worry about asking Mike about something that he didn’t know, just because there really isn’t anything that he didn’t know. If you have a question, he could answer it, and the answer would sometimes seem more detailed than you were asking for. Let’s take a look back at Tavros’ history with MEC, and see just how he brought his site to be what it is at this point.

Tavros started his connection with Ogresnet back in late 2002 when he met DisturbedRoach, now known as Besim. He went to Besim’s site, Age of Mythology Center and became an administrator after a few months. After a little bit of time, Rise of Nations Center was launched by Mike. Eventually, he retired from the job and stepped out of the site running business, as far as we know. During the short time that Mike was gone, Besim merged the sites with Ogresnet.

“I remember the time when we played BFME online together Was a fun game, and the only time we ever played online together. He beat me, actually. He was pretty good” -TokyoBlade

In September of 2003, Mike came to his former partner, Besim, and proposed the site now known as Middle-Earth Center. After accepting the proposal, the creation of MEC began. With a launch in May of 2004, the masterpiece of Mike’s that we all know and love was brought to the world. Within a few weeks, the site started to pick up activity in anticipation of The Battle for Middle-Earth. Mike was doing a great job in getting people to come to the site and the community was excellent. By the time of release, Tavros had already built up the strongest communities and one of the most active sites following EALA’s RTS.

Mike is one of those guys that you know could outsmart you through intimidation, without even being intimidating. You just know he’s right every time. When The Battle for Middle-Earth was released, he played online often, and you rarely stood a chance. Eventually though, real life caught up to him and his playing career was cut short. By the end of December, he no longer had much time to run both a fan-site and to be active while playing. He had made a lot of friends with the members, but he had to focus on real life events. In the end of December, he recruited MEC’s 2nd administrator, Tharquan.

“Mike is a symbol to all admins, a Greek mythological figure of power to the admin world. Every admin should be like Mike, or at least somewhere close to him.” -Berethor

Mike was missing in action, as some would say, for many months during the beginning of 2005. He wasn’t seen on the forum and nobody had spoken to him on MSN. At this critical time for MEC’s potential success, Tavros was unfortunately unavailable. Tharquan proved to be a steady admin, but he wasn’t the type of person that Mike was. It was hard to really get to know Tharquan as a person, which was one of Mike’s greatest characteristics. During the early summer, Tavros started to become more active, especially during the infamous weeks of ABG.

After ABG ended, MEC went into a lull. A few months later, Mike promoted Freek to be a third administrator for when he wasn’t around to help Tharquan. Tavros became more of a legend and became to be known less around the site. He stayed behind the scenes, helping with many issues such as the renewal of the downloads feature and helping make a smooth transition from InvisionPowerBoards to vBulletin. He became more of the technical admin that other staff would go to if they had a question about something. This seemed to be the perfect balance. He had enough time away from the site to work on any personal things going on, but he was always available in case his help or advise was needed.

“I have this great memory of the first time I went into staff forums and posted a topic, the first reply was credited to Tavros saying ‘You’re Fired’. I was literally laughing my ass off.” -Tornado`

During February of 2006, Tharquan had resigned from staff and the activity of the site was slowly dwindling. In a last hope to keep the site alive, Tavros went to one of his staff members with many interesting ideas, Radagast, and promoted him to admin. Radagast, while being good at getting his ideas out and well-known to everyone, did lack technical knowledge and required much assistance from Tavros when it came to fulfilling his plans. Through this new change of relationship with the other members of staff, Mike was once again involved with the community and worked a lot with the site. During the summer months, he fought an ongoing war with the spammer commonly known as Chiss, who made at least twenty accounts over the time period.

One of the most recent dramas of MEC that Tavros has participated in would have to be the rehiring of Berethor to a global mod position. Berethor had been a mod before but had lost the position back in June of 2005 due to being the head of the ABG organization. When Mike confirmed that it was alright to hire Berethor, the forums went into an uproar. Nearly every member made sure that their opinion was heard, whether they were in support or were in objection to the appointment. Eventually Tavros put his foot down and worked out an agreement where the members would choose whether or not Berethor would get to stay on as a mod. Eventually winning out by quite a large margin, Berethor was kept on staff and still is there to this day. Unfortunately, the leader of the resistance, Radagast, had leaked some important information that he had learned while he was an administrator. Though the effect was not bad, he had lost Mike’s trust and was banned for a month.

“Mike was the MAN. You couldn’t know it any better than he did. He literally taught me everything I know when it comes to running a website, and I don’t think I learned anywhere near one-fourth of what he had to teach. When you talk to him, you knew he was right without a shadow of a doubt. I could have asked him how a nuclear physicist would go about creating a more powerful atomic bomb, and he’d be able to at least give me some answer.” -Dan

On December 22, 2006, only three days before Christmas, Mike decided for the last time that he was going to resign from the site that he had built. In an emotional day for all of the MEC staff, both past and present, we had to say good-bye to our long time leader. Many people could not believe that the day was here that we would have MEC, but no Tavros. Even towards the end when he wasn’t always around, you knew he was always there if you needed him, and he always knew how to help. Many difficulties were faced for the site when he resigned, but the members and staff seemed to have overcome them through hard work. It’s just a matter of time before the site passes away, like it inevitably will, but even until the end, let us all remember our leader and founder, Mike “Tavros” McKee.