2 Month 2 Late!!!

Sorry, been really lazy the past couple of months.... well years actually.
So whats new::: the 76SOG have merged successfully with the TDB clan and we have now formed a crossover clan called the WTF. I personally chose the name but i cant actually remember what the WTF stands for, the AbbR sort stands out and takes over.

The new clan plays Armed Assault mostly but the real benefit from the merger is the increase in forum traffic and Team Speak is now a solid clan hub with different members using different
channels and there is usually always someone on to chat too.

I was going to place anew members roster but thats pointless as technically we are all new members.... if your that interested, check out the members list, oh and if you are a member and your name aint there.... get in touch.


Cheers::: Vinci.

Back From The Abyss:::

Well its been around 4 months since i last had an internet connection. I spent the majority of that time finding quiet peace and contentment in things that i never new could be as enjoyable or as fullfiling as they turned out to be. Cleaning my kitchen after every meal gave me a large sense of satisfaction, and as for the meals themselfs.... i have perfected my pasta's, and i dont use any off the shelf sauces. Every ingredient was chosen for a purpose, and prepared. Having practised a new approach to "sauceless" pasta, i feel i have bettered myself during my time away from the all demanding internet. My talent for cooking steak has also increased and i am now very proud and confident when cooking for others. The cleanlyness of my home has become a top priority, scrubbing my toilet is now to be considered a pastime as great as watching the freeview channels or filing all my payslips into accending order of month.

But today the internet has once again invaded this tranquil space that i call home. Once again, there are dishes in kitchen, and by "dishes" i actually mean an empty Pot Noodle tub that once contained todays lunch. That reminds me.... i have to take the 3 empty crisp packets and empty coke bottle down to the bin..... that was dinner.

But seriously, its good to be back. well it would be if i could remember all those things that i really needed to check on the net, and all those e-mails that i needed to send, during my time in internet limbo, but i cant, typical really. They will return in time, sure enough.

So far i have been updating my games.... ready for the brutallity to begin again, it appears that the Clan forum has slowed down recently and a simple check of the last post date on this blog shows just how busy it has been around these parts but the clan are still playing games.

Anyway, the future is bright, and very expensive. I am starting my upgrade quest to have a system capable of running Crysis in all its shinyness. a few of the Clan appear to have taken to LOTR Shadows of Angmar, Lobo has now been roped into ArmA and some of this crazy gang have actually been playing Joint Operations?... well so my sources tell me.
I looking forward to some great gaming again.

HOOORAH for the internet.

right, just gotta sort the 4 months worth of e-mail in my Gmail account. Bummer!

A Summary of Events

Well for the three people that follow this blog ;) you may have been wondering what the 76th have been upto for all this time. Well due to various Real Life commitments we haven't been able to update this as often as we would have liked. Anyway here's whats been happening...

Armed Assault:
Both Vinci and myself have been extoiling the virtues of this wonderful game to the rest of our clan. We have been so successful in convincing them that we now have a total of two players in our Armed Assualt Squad, yip you guessed it... Vinci and Myself! Even at that we have not being playing much online. Vinci has been getting to grips with the mission editor (hopefully we will have one to share soon) and I have been practicing to be a better commander. It now takes me more than 10 mins to get my squad killed. I would be fully qualified for a general office command in WW1 for my efforts. :)

War Rock:
Well we have had a couple of patches and things on the whole seem better. Although occasionally one or more of use will be invisible on a map, or worst everyone else appears to be invisible to me yet they can quite happily see me.
We are in the process of chucking ideas around about a War Rock Clan team and although we are very enthusiastic about this we have made little progress. Oh well we never were renown for organisational abilities.
We have some awesome (like the hotdog) players and general finish within the top 6 players on the maps we have played. Now there is a boast and a half!

Guild Wars:
Has seen a revival of sorts for our little group, we haven't been playing that for weeks. Then suddenly everyone got back into it. We are all over the place with various characters at various stages so you are bound to bump into one of us and if you like an easy paced PvE Guild you are more than welcome to join. Look for Fist Of Oppression.

Joint Ops - IC Mod v4:
Outta the blue (for us at least) came the v4 update of the fantastic IC Mod for Joint Ops and the clan went for it in a big way, with at least 6 of us dusting off our copies of Joint Ops and logging back into Novaworld. The game is still giood fun and the IC Mod is a must for Joint Ops. One thing to note is that several members of our clan have been having trouble connecting lately, mainly due to issue with Tiscali's service, and Joint Ops seems to be one of the few games they can connect to.

General:
Well hopefully this little post will encourage some more of us to post on this blog, if they can peel themselves away from gaming for an instant! I will endevour to bring you another update next week and hopefully have some interesting news on our web site development. Stay tuned.
www.76sog.co.uk

War Rock out of Beta

www.warrock.net
...And it is incredibly good fun. Myself and Mesmiley had an hour long shot on the Urban Ops maps in which we were taught valuable lessons by , I think, a group of Polish players. Apologises Meggie if you and the others that were playing are from some place else. The lessons? Always and I mean always move in pairs, team up with a buddy or just follow another player. You can provide and be provided with covering fire and exact revenge instantly if your buddy is killed. Of course this only applies to those close encounter situations. If they get killed by a sniper chances are your dead too! However on the Urban Ops maps there is very little occasion where a sniper gets away with that.

Unfortunately we also learned that spawn/base raping is an accepted practice. For those that may not have heard of these terms, I'll explain. Spawn/Base raping is the practice where by you camp in the spawn base of the opposing team and rack up cheap kills as the newly spawned players will envitably spawn with their backs to you, and in war rock armed only with fists for the second it takes to press 3 for main weapon.
For me it takes the fun out of it and the challenge of engaging an enemy that can actually fight back. But hey that's just me and to be fair it wasn't all that bad, just annoying.

After the Urban Ops map we joined up with Chezzie for some Battle Group maps, in actual fact the maps turned out to be the same one twice due to an administrative cock up! Eh Mesmiley? The map played was Emblem But regardless it was a good laugh. The first game involved only 4 or 5 a side and pretty much concentrated on an intensive battle for the central control point. Game 2 saw most of the players drop out and started with only myself, Mesmiley and Chezzie. No problems there as we decided that now would be a good time to practice some sniping. After 40 odd kills and the score being 172 v 168 (we had accidentally started the map with a 300 point limit!) we were joined by Vincenzio, who immediately made his presence known by killing me as I was lining up a shot on Chezzie!

From that point on the game was played out as a classic Battle Group map with all manner of vehicles and weapons being used, and most of the control points changing hands numerous times. Unfortuately at around the time it started to fill up with players, Mesmiley's connection the server was lost and he missed out on the last hour and a half of the map. Yes it did take that long to complete. We also got hit with severe lag in places, which didn't affect all players just some and for varying amounts of time. But this issue passed and the mayhem continued.

Vincenzio and I had a bit of a friendly grudge match around the left control point, as viewed from the orange team, and racked up a severe amount of kills on each other and some very humourous synchronised deaths. I think we killed each other by headshots at the same time at least 12 times. We also had a fair amount of kills due to some intense punching action. Is it just me or does that sound rude? In the end though Vincenzio was the much better player and finished the map with a 110 kills and something like 60 deaths (not sure about the last figure). I managed a 1:1 ratio with 75. Angry999 takes the award for being Vincenzio's 101st kill on a single map beating his previous record of 100!

I shall be looking for a re-match...

Leasons Learned: 28th January 2007

Below are some of the leasons I learned from the various games (two) that we played on Sunday.

Armed Assault:
Infantry caught in the open by armoured vehicles, without any anti-armour weapons, are like shooting fish in a barrel. However, we (Vinci and I), learned of a weakness with the AI in the ArmA demo... Shoot out the tires of the Humvee or BDRM and the crew bail out to be cut down by our accurate rifle fire. Unfortunately this trick doesn't work against real people, but it does make their get away really slow with two burst front tires, giving you enough time to re-spawn and re-arm with rockets to blow their ass sky high. We are still working out the bugs in this tactic, hopefully getting rid of the need to die part first.

Team work is extremely important in this game, especially overwatch of your team mate(s) whilst they are doing any task that will leave them vunerable. For example anti-tank troop engaging armour, the weapon blocks most of your field of view on the right. So positioning yourself on the right of that soldier provides protection to him from enemy infantry.

On the CO-OP mission we formed into a two man assault element of a larger force, mainly due to ourselves being on our TeamSpeak Server but mostly to do with the other real players going off all Rambo and getting themselves killed. Two riflemen working in close co-operation can take on quite a sizeable force. Especially if the larger force isn't organised, you have the element of surprise, or the advantage of the environment.

We also had a moment that was reminiscent of Blackhawk Down, you know the part when the two SAW gunners are on their own? Well it was like that except we had PKMs that we had pinched off of the larger force (see above) we had just neutralised.

Battlefield 2 could learn alot from the folks that make ArmA support weapons that are accurate and can deny an area to an enemy or just obliterate them where they stand. Rather than a support weapon where the safest place the enemy can stand is directly in front of it. Ok I'm exaggerating just a wee bit.

War Rock:
After having most of the clan playing different games for most of the night, we thought we'd try War Rock and see if the server's were back up (see Vinci's post below).
Indeed the servers were back online and hurray everyone could connect this time, so a room was created and we tried our hand at Urban Operations.

It was supposed to be 3v3 but Vinci had to leave early. So it ended up 3v2 on a rotating basis. Well it would've been 3v2 had Chezzie not been victim to a bug that only affects him and only if he gets in a vehicle at the start of a round/map. So it ended up OldCynic, Lobowolven and S8nSpike against me.

What's that? You want to hear about the bug?

Oh well then. Chezzie has found a rather interesting bug, that as far as we know only affects him. If he gets into a vehicle at the start of a round odd things happen. In the game that ended up as 3v1 he got into an APC just as I spawned and tried to get in as gunner, but when I got in the APC didn't move. This is despite repeated calls over TS for him to do so. So thinking that he hasn't spawned yet and it is just his name hanging in the air rather than his player, I jump out, only to be informed by TS that he has indeed moved and is attempting to engage the enemy. Fair enough I think, but the APC hasn't moved, I'm standing looking at it. Just as i'm about to voice this fact, the APC zooms off down the road and round the corner as if it is the Star Ship Enterprise entering warp facter 9!

Ok this is stage one of the bug and is not yet fatal to Chezzie. Although after engaging the enemy and defeating them with my help (hey it's my blog post alright!) I turned up in a tank which upset them quite abit. Anyway I'm digressing, 5 minutes later Chezzie dies which is 4 minutes after the APC got blown up and is force to respawn...

Bug Phase 2 - The fatal part.
So after spawning he jumps into the respawned APC and heads back into the fray, only to get 5 feet before he finds a miine field that didn't exist previously on that spot and that noone in the enemy has laid. Fair enough the mines kill him and the APC, still that isn't the fatal part. The fatal part is, that after getting blown up in drops him back to the main login screen and he can't rejoin the action!

So anyway back in the battle...
It's now 3v1 and I'm having a hell of a time keeping the bases capped, there is just no chance I can keep 3 bases capped against 3 other players. So I turn my attention to practising my skills. Now I didn't fight the whole battle from a tank, they learned real quick after the first complete set of kills (all three of them killed in under a minute) and came at me with a tank of their own and a cross fire of rockets.

I didn't survive so for the rest of the match, bar a couple of incidents, I fought on foot. I lost the match but I did rack up 22 kills for 9 deaths.

Chezzie was then able to rejoin the room and another battle started only to be exited and restarted, as you guessed it, Chezzie jump into the first vehicle he found and found the mine field 2 seconds later. At this point some one had enough points to go up a level and wondered where the shop for upgrades was...

Each of us in turn exited the room and went and spent some of our hard earned Dinar (the credits you get for playing games) I rented the M4A1 Assault Rifle and the G36C SMG for 2 days (you only rent weapons for a set number of days)

With these new weapons the carnage of the next few maps was extreme. The G36C is a wonderful weapon for the close in maps and is an available upgrade for Engineer, Medic and Assault classes. I scored a lot of headshots with it, but so did S8nSpike as he'd bought the same weapon load as myself.

The M4A1 available for the Assault class is a highly accurate and deadly weapon at close to medium range, with a fair degree of killing power at long rang too. Between S8nSpike and myself armed with this weapon it became a case of whoever saw the other one first won that fight. We had numerous occasions where we killed each other at the same time.

It's safe to say both of these games are on the top 5 wanted list. Anyway enough of my drivel.

Vyper

A Very Silly WarRock Sunday:::

Well the long planned event to be held on Sunday the 21st of Jan was nearly called off due to a couple of problems @ the server end. First problem was due to the Warrock system undergoing maintenance?, but this got fixed around 20:30hrs, but then a couple of the clan members had issues with connection. but it still turned out to be a brilliant night.

Having only had a brief go with WR in the past i wasnt sure how i would perform, but as soon as i played the first round i instantly realised that this game shouldnt be compared to BF2, but actually as a re-done Soldier Of Fortune 2, the combat is fast, with encounters being settled quickly just like with SoF2 but it also is very similar in other aspects too. The way the sniper rifles handle is almost identical and the need to "tap tap tap" the mouse button when trading rounds at medium to long range with an assault weapon reminded me of the battles in SoF2 using the AK.

Maps in WR seem to be nice and tight, very much like SoF2 or CS:S maps, big enough to have some variety but small enough to keep you on your toe's.

I aint worked out how to heal myself yet.. i did find an ammo supply though.... which i though was a medic center, and after the bar filling up i left happy....... only to die of blood loss 10 secs later, but at least i was fully armed. Yes if you take enough damage and dont see a medic or a medical center then you will die of your wounds, a nice touch i feel.

The game Dev's do seem to have taken a good look at other games around and raided them for the best ideas that work in each... the map design and weapon purchase (more on this to come) from CS:S, the ease of use with sniper rifles and free flowing modern combat from SoF2, the use of vehicles from Joint Ops and Battlefield and the all mighty fisticuff action from Quake, i just wish they had included the bayonet from SoF2 as well, this would have been the icing on the cake.

Weapon purchase is done outside of the actual game, @ the main menu. you seem to start the game with about 30000 credits, which you can spend to unlock different weapons for each of the classes, but rather than unlock them on a permanent basis, they are unlocked for a varying length of time, with the price going up depending on how long you want to unlock that item for.

Aint sure how to make more cash though.... i pressume from just doing well?.

I am pretty sure Warrock will become a regular clan favorite, and will sit well beside the forthcoming ArmA, with WR offering fast paced fun and ArmA supplying the more tactical simulation element.

Good times are ahead for this clans gaming.

Well just had a brief shot of the Armed Assault Demo (about 3 hours worth). Joined up with Vinci and a few random internet dudes on the CO-OP mission, and I have to say it is truely excellent. The learning curve is quite steep and the game offers no forgiveness for Rambo style silliness, to run off on your own is to meet a bloody end! This game not only encourages team play it actually rewards it. The time of day system is really cool, and playing at night with NV goggles is a very surreal experience, especially when trace rounds float towards you. This is a definite for the must get list. Check out the armed assault site here

Armed Assault, First Look:::

Tried ArmA for the first time tonight, only the demo but its brilliant. Flashpoint on steroids.

Ive played the coop and multiplayer maps and both are brilliant fun, especially the Conquer The Island mode. Blasting across the countryside in a tank is great fun, well untill you come across 2 enemy tanks or a lone sniper that you cant see, Oh! lession 1 - never get out the tank to have a look around when said sniper takes a pot shot.

The targeting is similar to OP-Flashpoint in that it takes a load of practise to hit anything at more than 100 yards and considering a lot of the encounters start at around the 400 to 500 yard mark its fairly tense, but its balanced by the fact that 1 hit to the torso will drop your target.

The AI on both sides is impressive, the bad guys will try to flank you while one of them keeps you entertained with his heavy machine gun talents and armoured vehicles are panic encounters, if your on foot and in the open, your finished unless he targets your pals and if you have a lot of them, you might be able to make like Ben Johnson while the rest of them take one for the team.

Cant wait for this to be released, the Coop missions will suit this clan perfect and will be a welcome replacment for the Joint Ops mayhem of the past. Oh except i dont think you can respawn in ArmA CooP, so that will make it a lot less gung ho!.

Cheers

RSS, Its The Future.... Of Something.

We now have an active RSS feed available, not sure why anybody would use it at the moment as we are the most useless bloggers on the planet. But all that will change, the clan is going through something of a renac..io..nonce.. , ... a change, and we will be back stronger than the 6 or 7 posts we had last year.

this counts as a post!

were off to a flyer!

Cheers