It has been a long time since my last entry and I apologize for that. A bit suprisingly to myself, I find the time to write even because there is no AvA going on in Global Agenda. The last weeks were busy enough, mostly with due to issues in my own agency that finally fell apart after 1.3 hit live, so that were was just not enough time to continue with my reports.

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.