However, did manage to play a bit, spending my time swapping between CODMW2, L4D2, Killing Floor (but not much
, Serious Sam, Batman: Arkham Asylum (really awesome game – shame that Lee never got around to posting that promised review ), and a bit of Borderlands.It was also a good time to meet up with some of the guys and gals than make up our little family. We had three out of town visitors in Cape Town this year, being Onny, Shadey and Grav. Was great to see you guys, come back again soon!
Anyway, enough with the holiday stuffs. That’s now well behind us, and 2010 is well underway. And with that comes (hopefully) a new commitment from all of us. With BF2 finally being retired from the competitive scene, we are effectively without a game right now. However, with the launch of Bad Company 2 in March and the Beta arriving later this week, this shortage will hopefully be addressed ASAP.
Anyway, it appears that we have a couple of months to get ourselves organised before the possibility of league games will arise. I hope that everyone has pre-ordered the game, and thereby secured their Beta code for Thursday. There will be SA servers hosting the beta, although we don’t as yet know who will be hosting them, or how many there will be.
In the interim, while we wait for the retail release of BC2 to arrive, there are a few things that I will be working on:
Local hosting for the clan website
One of the things that I want to try and organise is local web hosting. Although I don’t suffer from it myself (or at least I haven’t thus far), I’m sure it’s a pain in the arse to be capped on international bandwidth, and thus unable to access our own forums. Up until now it’s been too expensive to use local hosting, but I’m hoping to persuade WebAfrica to subsidise clan website hosting, as part of their WAGE gaming service. Hopefully they’ll be keen to differentiate themselves with this sort of offering.
Support for WAGE, specifically for BC2
For anyone who doesn’t know this yet, WebAfrica have launched a new gaming service, WAGE (Web Africa Gaming Experience). As part of the launch, they have introduced a few really good ideas that should make their offering successful:
1. They got their game and server administrators from the guys that host the OC LAN’s. Smart move, getting gamers to run their gaming service.
2. They have created ‘Freezone’. Freezone is an area within their network that WA clients can access without any bandwidth costs (non-WA clients can still access this, but they’ll have to use their cap as usual when doing so). All of their servers are hosted here, as well as all game related downloads – no more cap loss when downloading patches.
3. Steam content server. They are currently downloading and populating their own Steam content server, and this will be hosted within Freezone. No more massive bandwidth usage when downloading Steam games and updates. A note on this: Just because there is a local content server, doesn’t mean that your downloads will all automatically be taken from there. However, there is a program called Steamwatch that forces Steam to only download content from a specific server. I’ll post details when I get them, we just need to know what the IP of the WAGE server is going to be
4. They are working on getting full ranked status for BF from EA, and plan to host a BC2 beta server.
I personally think that it’s about time that someone took on SGS with an alternative service; they have rested on their laurels for far too long now. It takes forever for them to make server updates and changes, and they don’t seem to care about the community that they support.
There are alternative services out there, but none of those have managed to make much of a dent in SGS’ dominance. Unfortunately, no matter how good a service that they provide, SGS has always been the central point for the community, and that makes it difficult for other providers to break in.
I want to assist WA in this regard. If we can show SGS that we aren’t happy with a substandard service, then maybe we can improve gaming conditions for everyone by voting with our feet. With that in mind, I’d like to encourage everyone in the clan to register on the WAGE forums – http://forums.webafrica.co.za/ and try and use it as a forum for BF and general gaming related conversation. Their forums are pretty small and slow right now, but can only be changed by people making an effort to use them. I intend having a chat with the various BF clan leaders, to try and get all of the active BF clans to move across. As it stands, Chaos, Eggman and I are all BF admins at WAGE, so hopefully that will help pushing support.
Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so if you don’t fancy making the effort to support WAGE (or if you think that there is a better alternative that we should support) let us know, and we can discuss this. However, we’ve all had occasion to bitch about the SGS service levels and if we don’t do anything ourselves, it’ll never change.
Get the clan ready for BC2
The next instalment of Battlefield. It’s been a long wait, but we finally have a game that is a logical progression for the clan as a whole. We’ve tried other games (COD) for competition, and these attempts have failed. We are BF players, so we need a new BF to play. BC2 does differ quite significantly from the BF2 formula but still looks to be the first game that everyone in the clan is interested in moving to. And with the BF2 AGASA league having been cancelled for this year, I certainly hope that BC2 is a worthy replacement!!
We need to get ourselves ready for a BC2 league that may start as early as April i.e. one month after the retail release of the game. Fortunately, it looks like the majority of active players have pre-ordered the game, and thus will be able to play the beta once it’s released this week. Of course this won’t give us a full view of the game, but at least we should be able to get an idea of the game mechanics.
We are also missing a few players this year
. In addition to a few resignations since last year, we also have a couple of regular first-teamers that are not longer able to play for the team. Chief amongst those losses are Scorpyon and BaselineAC. When we add these to the members that are currently unable to play due to connectivity problems, I think that we may need to look towards expanding our membership. This is actually a positive thing, one of the objectives of the activity drive at the end of last year was to ensure that we have capacity to bring in new members that are active (and fit the grrr profile) as and when we find them.One of the first things that I want to establish in the coming month and a half is who is willing and able to play competitive BC2 for the AGASA league when it does start. Also, it would be good to get an idea of people’s preferred specialisations, particularly in light of the new gameplay mechanics that will change (and reduce) the roles in a team (e.g. no commander).
Of course I don’t want to step on Lee’s toes here, he is the Battlefield team leader, after all. But I think we should already have one eye on the competitive side of the game right from the start. Once upon a time we were a team to be feared in BF2. That wasn’t the case for a lot of last year. I want to get that back again. We have the talent, the playing field is about to be levelled with a new game that no-one is expert in, and there is a likelihood that there will be a lot of new clans entering the arena (those that move from COD4, for example). I want to be sure that we are in the top echelon in the new league; even if that means that I don’t make the grrr first team.
grrrAge ‘10
“What?”, I hear you say, “It’s only January. There’s nine months until rAge!!” That’s true, but I want this year’s grrrAge to be the best one so far. I want to get record clan attendance by planning everything out well in advance. Fundraising, sponsorships, accommodation and travel planning, as well as ensuring that the Saturday night grrr party is once again the place to be invited to! As an appetiser, we have plans to get DJ Duck spinning discs as a part of our entertainment this year (anything to keep him off the Southern Comfort). And of course there is the competition. I really want us to give a good account of ourselves this year.
All of these objectives for 2010 are going to require good organisation. I will be asking various members to help out making all of the above a reality. I know that we’ll get it all happening. If anyone wants to volunteer their services to help out with anything, or has other ideas that they’d like to implement as clan improvements this year, please let me know.
Okay, boys and girls, that’s enough for now. I have a feeling that we’re in for a grrreat gaming year in 2010, personally I can’t wait for it all to start happening!! Bring on Thursday and the BC2 Beta!!
