I have a lot of stuff coming up, including videos, a competitor summary of E14 and some more. Just be patien.

Antarctica E14 on June, 28th

When it comes to AvA, we’ve seen a lot of changes during the last days. Apart from the expected shift of hexes, we already saw agencies, for example TGCI, leaving the former multialliance XIII, doing their own thing. In the named case, they teamed up with MESA along with TIS and Vikings forming the TOXIC alliance. At least MESA being a well known name among the first days of Echelon, they still bring in a lot of experience and thus were able to establish themselves a lot of land in the north western to central north. Their territory got shattered today though, when they opened and a lot of agencies jumped on them, realising their potential threat in becoming too big.

TGCI suffered the same fate, going from a good lot of hexes in the south eastern territory to a mere possibility of producing anything. Both agencies still have a large possibility at staying on the topmost ranks on the leaderboard if they keep up and dish the smaller agencies back who invaded their territory.

RSquadron managed to hold their island though they needed to sacrifice some of their land to a new Stahl agency, called DieTempler, who proved themselves against a lot of smaller agencies.

The next new alliance is PINK, consisting of Cyclone and Mercenarys. Both have a lot of players who are well known in the european AvA community with the latter also being around since the first days of Echelon. Cyclone instead is a bunch of old and new AvA’ers and all around competent players who also try to enrichen the european community by giving good and intense fights.

While Mercenarys had to make place for Intrepids expansion plans, Cyclone set up on the old Intrepid/TGCI space, establishing themselves a nice niche there.

Although it is still Intrepid who are dictating who may or may not build their stuff up on the map, they also abandoned a lot of hexes during the last days, enabling other agencies such as Cyclone, Linearc, Deathwatch and TIS to fight over. One might still speculate what their true aims are, maybe settling elsewhere on the map, expanding or just being there for the fights - no one knows. But so far it seems they have been really open to approaches of newer agencies who wanted to make their first step on the map by abandoning hexes and freeing up land.

Antarctica E14 on July, 4th

Alright. So with all these new agencies, we finally increased from seven agencies to 14 competitors on the map. Most noticable, RSquadron barely managed to generate any more net worth than they had on the last update while jumped over more than 170k in net worth, undoubtly topping the leaderboards at the moment. MESA is still on their toes though, having a lot of Tech II facilities left on their shattered territory. Although only the 5th place on the leaderboard, Cyclone made a fast run for their 61k in net worth, generating all of them in nearly one timeframe. So we can expect them to catch on the other agencies very fast if they don’t get interrupted in their efforts.

There are still 30 days left until the map closes and the first winner of the AvA season will determined and there is still everything open since most agencies can catch on the others in only one timeframe generating net worth.

Leaderbord of Antarctica E14 on July, 4th

Antarctica E14 on June, 27th

With the new Net-Worth System, keeping track of the agencies will be a lot easier than in the older system, determining who’s a runner-up and who showed the most constant effort. So far, the first few days were mostly about the agencies getting settled. RSquadron managed to get hold of the isolated island with a 50% and a 100% mine.

Also TGCI seems to be very settled in the south-eastern corner, with no rare hex whatsoever. Mercenarys also showed themselves very strong along the middle coast, capturing a 50% and a 100% Factory plus a 100% Mine.

Another team worth a note is Intrepid, since they managed to capture five rare hexes, looking a bit scattered though. At the end of the day, they had three 50% and one 100% mines plus a 100% factory. So far they seemed to be one of the strongest teams out on the map but it is still to early to make sure claims on how the teams will perform.

Leaderboard after June, 27th

RSquadron came out as the leading agency Net Worth wise with Intrepid following up a good step behind. Closely behind are MercenaryS with at least HexNation having nearly the same Net Worth, then followed by the rest which is only Erebos and MESA to this point. To date, none of the Stahl agencies appeared on the leaderboards so there still a few names missing who will hopefully pop up in the next days.

Good job Hi-Rez. While you’re watching your playerbase dry out, I’ll take a closer look at what titles we can actually look forward in exchange for the time we would’ve invested in Global Agenda if it was still a good game.

All Points Bulletin.

Since I left it out in my last blog entry, I should take the opportunity now to give people an insight into the game. Talking about generic gameplay, APB is really a nice title. I had the opportunity to play it while in closed beta all the way till its release and I often found myself shooting criminals for at least 2-4 hours after the AvA with my fellow GA players in San Paro. The game mostly feels like GTA mixed in with Counter-Strike elements which guarantees for a real good core gameplay. And I’m sure that people who tend to play fps titles on a casual basis will find a title they can fool around with for the next few years with APB.

Unfortunately there are several major flaws in the game and its mechanics for people who are going to play fps games on a more ambitious and competitive level. First off, the match making is random at least - sometimes you complete missions without any opposition, sometimes you get even teams and sometimes you get like 4-5 times the amount of people in your team as an enemy. And with enough enemies, some missions aren’t even remotely doable since you can only form teams of four people and everything above is just random reinforcement.

On top of that, just before the release, people had still massive lag and stability issues with the game. It happened more than once that people one or two people out of a four man team dropped out of the game in the middle of a mission, unable to rejoin after they relogged. The random matchmaking and small team sizes combined with no need at all to work with people above that limit together totally eliminated the need for a clan except for receiving rewards from clan leaderboards.

Those worked essentially like this: Get as much people in as possible so that your clan has the most kills/objectives/missions done/etc. and everyone receives uberslotted weapons. Any need for small but strong clans working as elite units? Nope.

So APB has its positive sides, but there is essentially nothing which should make a more ambitious player play the monthly fee of around 10€ for APB, not only because of the stability issues but more of the lacking longterm goals.

Mortal 'Servercrashes' Online

Dumb enough, things wen’t not really well with Mortal Online since the game still has issues with game server crashes, inventory bugs, disabled magic system and general gameplay flaws. Its still fun to log in and farm around a bit, but after most of the five people we started with quit the game already because of technical issues with the game, the spent 50€ on the account couldn’t have been more wasted. For people who love true sandbox MMOs its still worth a shot in one or two months though, if there is still a playerbase left.

Black Prophecy

Good enough that the Black Prophecy presentation on the E3 earned nothing but positive feedback. The game even has been crowned the biggest surprise of E3 because literally nobody thought that the game would that well developed already. It still is the biggest hope for me and everyone I’ve been closely playing with the last months. It has a strong Clan vs. Clan component and seems to be already in a well polished state. As details about the gameplay get known now day by day with the closed beta still running at a small chosen playerbase, the new E3 trailer was truly one of the milestones this year for the folks following this game for a long time.

The release is slated for November 2010 and as far as it goes, Reakktor seems to be able to hold that deadline.

Until then it seems that there isn’t just any good crosshair based game with MMO aspects out there thats worth playing. Too bad. I may concentrate my blog entries more on Black Prophecy in the following days if you guys want more infos. I’d write about Jumpgate Evolution as Reakktors strongest competitor also, but since we heard literally nothing about the game till E3 2010 of them, I’d rather see how they perform regarding possible beta tests and development of the game.

Especially with the E3 being over, there is a lot of stuff I’d write about right now but I think thats it for the moment. I’ll keep all you fellow GA players updated if I discover anything thats better than token farming and .. well… waiting for AvA to get fixed.

But as one fellow Kompaniet guy asked for it, I’ll try to get back to regular posts here - though I doubt that they will be about AvA in the future.

Sorry Reb :/

But lets start from the beginning. As most people will know, Mpire won the Echelon map, the last bastion of european activity in AvA before 1.3 hit live and I just can’t file my next blog without mentioning that it has been an honor competing on this map. I will surely miss those times that were marked by ups and downs, especially for the strikeforce I normally played in - saying that the past months were beyond awesome is still an understatement.

But well, times are over. And Hi-Rez brought us this new 1.3 patch. Having the patch for around 3 weekends before they took it live on the PTS, most of the high-end AvA’ers experienced the following things:

• Oathbreaker & Super Smash Boost (new medic and assault boosts) are ridiculously overpowered. Every merc match will be decided by the number of conquest boosts a team can bring up as every fight about a point in AvA is just over when one of the two sides fires their first conquest boost up. You don’t even need to play smart with those boosts since both the medic and assault are virtually invulnerable, eradicating or pushing everything from the spot.Of course, Hi-Rez knew it better since they are the most incompetent capable AvA players out there and instead decided that Oathbreaker needed a buff of 40% dmg resistance for the casting medic while active. They now reverted it to 20% which makes the medic still virtually invulnerable if he is able to predict the incoming damage correctly, even more if he has something like regeneration up or a heal medic in his back.Essence of all that: AvA, Merc PvP and Double Agent are broken due to gamebreaking boosts. Nice work, Hi-Rez!
• The new AvA System won’t work. Even a brain damaged chimp would’ve seen that removing ALL taxes for holding hexes in AvA, throwing all agencies on one map AND regulating attack/defense by timeframes the agencies themselves may choose, won’t work at all.
  But wait. Theres more. They even managed to completely bug-infest the whole new shiny AvA system thus having such funny events like complete teams getting kicked out of matches while the other team is able to lock the contested hex for themselves without a fight. And since that is not enough, every AvA match is now fought on US servers because Low-Rez wasn’t able to activate european servers for european hexes.
  It must have been hard fights for JL, but in the end they managed to nearly take over half of the map without any opposition.

The result was, that most european agencies quit AvA in an instant and its fully understandable. After lots of delays and repeated proof of the fact that Hi-Rez just doesn’t know a shit about balancing their own game (Androids, Black/Golden Vandals, Oathbreaker, Super Smash), people got finally sick of dealing with devs who ruin their own game.

Mortal Online, 1st Person Sandbox MMO, Ultima Online rebuilt.

Personally, I’m somewhat lucky that they always said something about “earning the subscriptions” of the players, because I can’t see that I will subscribe if the payment system goes live. With all this crap going in Global Agenda, I at least saved the money that I now invested in Mortal Online. The game is bug ridden as well, but that doesn’t matter much taking into account that its a sandbox MMO.

And to be honest, the time is better invested in lumberjacking brownwood trees for stats and g0ld than Oathbreaker-owning shit out of pug merc PvP people. At least until Black Prophecy goes live. The game that will be end of all games as we know them. Holy Grail and stuff.

Don't judge this game by its payment system. Really.

Expect more info on those two games in the future here, maybe even some kind of Mortal Online movie as soon as some ex Pain members and me got themselves some cool weapons to smash heads.

Yes. Thats right, I made over 1million dmg/min on the PTS.

Especially the new combat jetpack brings a lot of mobility and speed into the game. Being able to shoot while jetpacking through wide areas will surely be one features with the most impact on the gameplay. All the new devices seemed to be in good shape regarding game balance with the flame tower of the Robotic being the only new device I personally felt to be a bit underpowered without any AoE on its short range, even if its able to fire 360°.

The only things feeling a bit too strong were the new boosts, literally all of them. The Robo is now be able to summon himself a Vandal which can be mounted by anyone in the team whilst being able to chain this boost through repairs alone. The new Assault boost is now practically a knockback aura which with an area wide enough to corner people in close halls and then just killing them off through a bit more than the standalone damage of the aura.

But the cornerstone of awesomeness regarding strong boost abilities seems to be the new Medic Oathbreaker boost. An aura that literally negates all healing in the area for 10 seconds while dishing out a good 170-240 dmg (different classes) plus the damage of a poison aura or grenade just kills off anybody dumb enough to stand in the area for more then 4 seconds.

But well, we will see how these boosts will really perform in AvA because its just another new target priority to focus down.

Nonetheless, the new additions look promising and may bring fresh ideas into the AvA matches and apart of that, people finally have something to do while AvA isn’t up which literally PvE farming for new items. At least for the first weeks.

Echelon map at the end of last week.

But lets go back to the actual AvA on Echelon. Of course its still RebeL vs. Mpire. And of course powers shift on a daily basis, mostly determined by activity and fielded strikeforces. In the beginning of this week, RebeL were even able to push Mpire back on all three rare elements and resecure the eastern base.

But as already mentioned, the activity in RebeL dropped in the second half of the week, leaving Mpire in the late advantage thus being able bring the eastern base down and to retake one of the rare elements.

On a sidenote, STEALTH declared that they will quit with AvA because of activity issues. Sad to see another european agency go, you had one of the hardest paths among all of us. Gl&hf in the future.

Echelon map at the end of this week.

Echelon map before opening on May, 4th

The first half of the week wasn’t that interesting to be honest. The daily Echelon AvA portion consisted mostly of Mpire and RebeL bashing each other, desperately trying to get the upper hand over the other one while Stahl was sitting in their corner, observing and producing whatever tech they got currently running.

In fact they actually weren’t obliged in any way to pay attention to other hexes since the space between Mercenerys and RebeL swaps its owner almost daily while the last constant part of the map, STEALTH, is ghosting some of the bonus hexes to the east of their territory.

Things were about to change when Mpire suddenly withdrew all their HQs from Echelon to Obelisk and shortly after placed their very own forge on Obelisk. There wasn’t any resistance despite JL on the map, so people in Europe may have already seen a secured mapwin for Mpire. But it shouldn’t have been, at least not when the Americans are around. With support of two Golden Vandals, they brought the Forge down, right before the Vandal nerf was patched in.

The day after we saw said nerf, making the Golden and the Black Lance Vandals just useless for any AvA match due to the massive weight increase. A bit too late for Mpire but since the Blueprint and the Ressources are completely refunded when the forge hex is conquered by the enemy, they are free to test the might of the americans once again.

Mpire Forge on Obelisk

With the forge down on Obelisk, Mpire switched their focus back to Echelon, eventually capturing the whole bonus cluster - obviously with the goal to put a forge on Echelon now. And if it wasn’t enough, they even managed to contest the RebeL base in the east. With such a big hole in the territory and the defense of RebeL, Mpire truly thrusted a spear right into the heart of their enemy, putting the pressure on the blue forces to respond and hinder the pink behemoth on putting the forge up.

We will see if they are able to.

Echelon map after closing on Thursday, May, 6th

Echelon map before opening

Basically, RebeL and Mpire traded two of the three rare ressources with each other, even along with the missile facility, standing next to the northern one. Aside the both big players on the map, nothing really interesting happened. MC got crushed down to one hex as OER-C settled on their former homeland. Stahl still seems to be sitting on their homeland, maybe even being satisfied with having nearly no fights at all while being able to get their production up and running.

As most people are waiting for the new patch, activity significantly ceased on Echelon - even more when Hi-Rez said that the open maps on patchday will be determined by ressources left. A lot of ambitious fights went down the drain on this day, it seems.

But nonetheless, people are still playing and do what they can to keep the european community alive - even with some silly americans trolling our official forums.

Echelon map after closing

The real question is, if 1.3 can really save anything for the european crowd. While the americans have still a lot of players, the EU pug queues are just plain empty and every alliance seems to have their own issues of sticking to the game. A lot of good people have been quitting the game all along, moving over to bug-ridden but to them somehow promising titles like APB and I personally doubt that they will return on the long run.

When the patch hits the live servers, people will return eventually, play the new content and then vanish into nowhere again. Even more when Hi-Rez really wants to split 1.3 up in several small patches. I personally hope that the playerbase comes at least to a stable state so that I don’t have to worry if there is still AvA going on when I return after a week or two.

But apart of all that and especially all the shiny features they promised, Hi-Rez really needs to get at least something onto the test servers. Just because people get impatient. And Global Agenda is not that good that people will stick to it no matter what indefinately - even as a lover of Action-MMOs.

Global Agenda 1.3

Echelon map before opening

The wild colour mix, that is Echelon, made something perfectly clear: Whoever is on the brink of getting completely wiped out won’t never ever accept this situation. Starring in this theatrical show of pushing each other out of the ring consists once again of Mpire and RebeL. The ongoing lack of ambitious people willing to play in the premier league of Global Agenda left their markings on both factions though. As Mpire reinforced their ranks with Nosebleed, RebeL followed the path of regaining strength through fresh and new partners by inviting Animosity to the alliance.

The answer to the actions of the days before didn’t take long to be delivered as RebeL made their approach to secure themselves a base again. While Stahl, fighting for a base at the same time, received a friendly donation of the Pinkpire and had their shields up in no time, the arch enemy of the eager mapwinner didn’t had such an easy path to walk on.

But finally, after two days of constantly pressing on the core hexes of Mpire, RebeL seemed to have enough room and could finally secure themselves the last base hex plus getting their shields up again along with capturing one of the rare elements.

With Thong and Euro gone and scattered, the destiny of Echelon lies only in the hand of the two big players left to lay waste to anyone who tries to get in their way. Stahl is a strong ascendant though and we may see at least some hard distractions and shifts in power when they decide to take a more active role in the raging wars over rare elements before the 1.3 close is gonna happen.

And above all, there are the shady rumors of some american agencies/alliances, seeking to bring nothing but utter mayhem upon the heads of the european Echelon community. Thursday is closing in and we may see what is really going to happen. Will it be the Golden Vandal army or just a night passing by with the daily wars between RebeL and Mpire, with families leaving their homes seeking shelter under the wings of the smaller alliances, houses burned down to ashes and .. well, hopefully no HQ/Defense Facility fights? We will see.

Echelon map after closing on 27/04/2010

Additionally, I wanted to take the opportunity to tell my fellow readers that I still am really grateful for the continous feedback and checking on my site for the reports. Just because you guys stick with me, I think it is just fair to tell you that I won’t be able to play or get at least access to the internet until Tuesday, 4th of May. So there won’t be any reports until then. I may find a bit more time to write stuff afterwards, but I am currently considering to reduce my reports to only 1-2 per week since the strong daily shifts in politics as we had them weeks ago just ain’t present anymore.

We will see if this changes when 1.3 hits the live servers. Hopefully it will be the case!

I think you get the point.

Echelon map before opening

It was fairly obvious that Mpire wouldn’t stop the nuking party they sincerely invited RebeL to. And just because every party needs its own hooker, our fellow pink-dressed designated mapwinner invited Nosebleed to join up and joining up they did. So we saw another major milestone of Echelon history today as Mpire once again strengthened its ranks, leaving Euro split up and torn apart, behind.

With their new partner, it was just a matter of time until Mpire completely smashed what was left of the RebeL base while other elements already settled on the unfortified lands of the former lands of green. Hex after hex lost until eventually RebeL decided to disband everything - be it as some sort of sign or to allow themselves a fresh new start. We do not know.

What was left of Euro, specifically STEALTH, settled up in the north of the former RebeL territory and at the end of the day, OBNOXIOUS held all the hexes around the former Mpire base.

In an attempt to get hold of all rare elements, Supremacy either lost nearly all of their land with only Thong being the one with a reasonable amount of hexes left - besides Mpire.

Today, we saw the full-blown and all-out revenge of Mpire, as they came back stronger than ever - once more and in this wake, renewed their statement regarding a mapwin. The question is and will ever be, how Echelon will react to this recent shift of Mpire.

Will people leave the map, not seeing a point in standing up in fresh revolution against the pink oppression, or will they take their forks, clubs and slingshots and bring Goliath down? Once more? We will see and - as Einstein said in Red Alert II: “Time will tell.”

Echelon map after closing

But well. I’m afraid that wasn’t everything. Tonight, we saw another prominent agency close their doors for good and leave Global Agenda completely. Hibernating for about a month already, Fruitz finally made if official that they won’t be coming back to RebeL, leaving only Pain and Intrepid. Personally, a very sad day for me, though I wish you good luck and the best of whatever you need to successful compete in the next game you guys are playing. Farewell, Fruitz.

Disclaimer: Read my last blog entry if you don’t understand the “negro reference” in the intro.

Echelon map before opening

At first, I think I should apologize for the lack of AvA reports the last week. Due to a lot of work and not the most of motivation, I just couldn’t pull off enough time to write something up. Can’t promise that things will change in the near future, but I’ll do my very best. I think I owe you guys this in return for the awesome lot of good feedback on this blog. Echelon ftw!

I think there would’ve been a lot to write about the last week with Mpire being incomparable successful at regaining their territory. During the whole campaign, they had Euro supporting them indirectly, but nonetheless, they managed to take the central base from Thong and besiege RebeL to the day.

Along with Mpires campaign to take their bloody revenge on anyone who stabbed them in their sleep, smaller or less active alliances made their appearance once again on Echelon while others vanished as quick as their appeared during the course of the last week. While the Sleepers are completely gone again, Supremacy  took their chunk of territory where once Kmd. resided. Sydo made several appearances in the north and the west of the map, taking advantage of the ongoing fights between Mpire and RebeL.

Even the Americans showed up under the label of JL, reserving them a nice and sunny place above Euro territory.

Thong, after completely beaten out off the center of the map, concentrated their efforts on Euro again, who seemed to be the biggest disturbance for the blue troops when they tried to get hold of their own base, be it the eastern or the central one. Interesting enough, they bit a good chunk of flesh out of Euros body, coming to a halt right at the doorsteps of the eastern base. One may speculate if they are going for more in the next days of Echelon AvA.

While everyone had their nice and small fights against each other, Mpire and RebeL proved themselves once again as childrens of the atom, as the true priests of war, leaving nothing behind but the scorched earth and burned bodies of the enemies and their land.

When Mpire captured hexes all around the the Vale, it was fairly obvious that a missile facility would be set up tonight. And so the tactical missiles launched once again, emitting sweet roars of revenge as they pushed themselves high into the sky shortly before their deadly transformation into a rain of fire and death, supposed to tear the shield completely down. The air was thick from the stench of the brutal wars, fought on every hex of the Vale. The aggressive forces of the pink giant, who came to life again, rained on the southern base in a myriad of attacks and with every bit of territory the defender could secure, the green forces were able to stand their ground.

Obviously and to no surprise, the pink ones split the territory of RebeL up in two parts thus increasing their taxes but at the end of the day, they could not gain the upper hand on the base. Maybe it was a surprise for both sides, maybe not. But when the map closed today, both factions were able to look back at compelling and intense battles, valiantly fought. The question is though, if the resistance will be strong enough to keep Mpire off the southern base for good or if the green forces will give in someday. Nonetheless - brutal and ambitious fights are inevitable. Fights that deserve to reveal themselves to all of Echelon as nothing less than true bloodshed.

Echelon map after closing