Some more Soulstorm pictures

Soulstorm Picture 2

You have to feel sorry for this computer, who doesn't know that dark reapers are lethal.

It's a common mistake. I see it from real players too.. reaper rushing, as I call it, is so massively overpowered.

There was a second game after that one that was 3v4 Insane Comp Stomp versus orcs. Me and the guy who I play with far too much and some random Tau idiot.

Tau player turns out to be a noob, and his base gets destroyed within the first 10 minutes. Being Eldar, I just jump into my friend's base. We not only hold out for 40 minutes or so whilst we tech up, with hordes of orks sweeping towards us, but then go on to win the match.

Being me, I forgot to screenshot any of it however. I shall find a screencam that I can run constantly in future, so that condensed parts of it can be shown.

And yes, it was another Reaper rush... but with Wraithlord support so that I could take out bases. Ork bases are suspectible to giant 10 foot tall metal structures driving giant hammers through them. I think it's the fact that the orks haven't really learnt how to build bases, and just get a pile of guns and call it home.

The aftermath?

I kill 3500 orks. My friend kills 4500 orks. We both have over 15000 military score thanks to kills.

The Tau player who was knocked out in under 10 minutes? -55 points overall.

We lose less than a 1000 troups between us. 7-1 isn't particularly bad I don't think. I'm still amazed that 2v4, we took them on and won. If only players were as stupid as computers.

Team Fortress 2 Medic Skillz

Trying to get the 1000000 heal points as medic achievement on Team Fortress 2 at the moment.

A few pictures from my stint this evening

My mediocre start out.

It soon improved however.

And I maintained the top 3 slot for sometime

Neat huh?

An introduction to EVE Online

EVE Online is one of those games that has no tolerance for people who don't understand it. The playerbase, as a whole, are bastards, scammers and unpleasant people. The corporation mechanics are seemingly designed to allow people to pilfer and steal from, and generally wreak havoc amongst, their own corporation.

Flying the ships is easy enough.

Understanding the game is an artform.

Most other games, especially in the MMORPG market, set out to try and snare you in with short-term rewards, gratuitious play, and grind-fest tactics to get you to spend the maximum possible time on their servers.

EVE tells you, on day 1, that you have a training queue and, thoughtfully, provides you with a list of skills that you might consider training. About 200 of them. The shortest ones take about 7 days to max out, using base stats, and the longest ones take several months. That's several months REAL TIME. EVE Online doesn't do the short-term planning idea.

Those times are set in stone, you can't change them. It's not that you have to spend time in the game to train. Quite the opposite. Your character trains 24/7 whether your online or offline, whether the servers are working or completely and utterly fucked up. So long as a skill is in the queue, it's training. And you can only queue skills to start within 24 hours, meaning that you have to log on every so often to set new skills in the queue.

If all that isn't confusing enough, then it's worth noting that no one in the game has maxed out all the skills in the game yet. It's just not possible.

It would take several decades of 24/7 training to accomplish this, by which point CCP would have brought out some new skills. The idea of 'level' doesn't really apply (the closest you get is your SP total, which goes up at the rate of about 1m/month if you're training).

Everyone in EVE eventually specialises, which brings me onto the second peculiarity of EVE.

In other MMORPG's, multi-boxing (logging in multiple accounts) is frowned upon. That's great. In EVE, I estimate that there's about 2 accounts per player. On average. I have between 2 and 4, depending on whether or not I can afford the subscription fees (which are high) for all of them each month. Everyone in my corporation has at least two accounts, some have three, a few have four and one guy has nine.

Why?

EVE is addictive. You discover, as fast as you play it, that it wants you to carry on playing, and it's only another 2 weeks till you can fly that new ship, and only another 2 weeks after that till you can fit it with the right equipment, and only another 2 weeks after that until you are able to...

You get the general gist.

I'm nearly a year into this game and I'm still playing it. For someone who got tired of WoW within a month and bored of Runescape after a pitiful 12 months - remembering that I was of the generation where everyone had an account, even the 'cool' kids - this is quite remarkable. Especially when you consider that it's £11/month/account. I try not to think too hard about the amount of my money that's landing in some else's pocket.



This post has gone on too long without pictures.

Here's one of my new shiny, an Interdictor, which is essentially a ship designed to piss off people by stopping them from warping (hyper-speed drive!) off.

If you can't see it, it's that tiny speck in the middle of the screen. It's quite small...

And here's one of my corporation POS, essentially a giant floating structure in space where we can store items, ships and hide from enemy fleets (unless they blow it up, which has happened to our things before)

More pictures and less text will be winging it's way onto this blog whenever I actually get around to logging into my EVE accounts (I have some VERY long skills training at the moment, so I barely log in)

A confession

I thought I should clarify that my team fortress 2 skills aren't particularly uber.

Once again, a picture says it all

Reasonable number of assists and a reasonable amount of Healing though.. I'd only been playing for a couple of rounds.

Still got to get the achievements for 7000 and 10000 healed in one life. If I ever work out how to stop dying, I'm sorted.

Soulstorm Picture

Me and a friend tried playing a Eldar/Tau rush tactic against some Chaos/Necron dudes.

This picture sums up the endgame.

Yeah. We lost.

Flaming, flaming and more flaming.

We went to use the 'Create a server' button in Team Fortress 2, and watched as our carefully constructed plan collapsed around our ears.

No one could access any server that any of us created using this tool.

Having just got paid, I did my thing, and threw money at the problem. 10 minutes later, I was renting a private server with 10 slots.... only realising that it would take 1-3 hours to set up after it was all set up. So, back to public servers.

Once the inital teething problems were over, the secondary problem hit in. 10 players were supposed to show up. We had 4. One of whom ragequit early on as I had 30 kills to 13 deaths, and nearly all of those kills were on him. So, being the best player on the server (god help those who were also there) I volunteered to continue 2v1.

Whoops.

Lets just say that they won't be doubting my prowess at this game anymore.


I'm now the proud renter of a private TF2 server.

So I started a quick clan.

Steam: "mediaboy has changed their name to [GoD] mediaboy"

Guild of Death enroute.

Of course, I now need to find something less suicidal. Being called 'GoD' doesn't half attract some unsavoury characters.