Nar Shaddaa - How rude!!

When my little KF group first arrived in SWTOR's Nar Shaddaa we were immediately struck by the impressive skyline. However this was quickly followed by many lols; partly because we were surprised Bioware didn't notice, but mainly because we're childish twats.

To be fair, I'm regularly called a lot worse.

A little update

Lots has happened, but I've had no time, kinda. My house is under quarantine due to throat/chest/pukey pox and I've lacked motivation to move, let alone think about writing :P

Kill Frenzy in WAR is pretty much on hold again. A lot more people than just little old me got narked off with the whole situation WAR is in right now. A few die-hards are sticking around, but most of us have now quit and are looking forward to new games. Slightly depressing to see our WAR communtiy floundering so, at least as much as a computer game can be depressing, but the future for KF is bright with us gearing up for SWTOR and quite possibly a few other games. Our KF-RIFT guild is still going very strong too ;)

What little gaming time I've had over the last couple of weeks has been spent pottering around in Star Trek Online. It's been bloody great too. From reading forums it sounds like there's a range of issues with the game (shock horror), but I don't care really, I'm enjoying it. The atmosphere is great, it runs really well, the storylines are very solid, the character/ship development and customisation is interesting, it has some pretty spectacular graphics at times and it's casual friendly. However, I'm not doing any PvP in it at the moment and I don't plan to with any real dedication or effort. I'm purely playing this for casual entertainment where I'm free to AFK or pay loose attention and in those regards it's come up trumps, just be aware that my expectations maybe different to those looking for a full time MMO. I wouldn't like to say how solid the game is in that regard, at least not yet. Anyways, there's been a fair few interesting changes in STO since I last played it and I'll talk about those soon. One in particular is a great example of when Devs do the right thing.

nn :)

Gobbo Frenzy

To mix things up a bit, yesterday we had one of our KF event nights. KF and friends went on a GOBBO FRENZY!

We cobbled together a full warband entirely made up of Shaman and Squig Herders, got ourselves a little bit organised and joined the madness that was last night’s Praag. There was loads of Order everywhere, constant AAO for us and as a result a fair bit of renown and entertainment. I think some of our enemies may have found it surprising quite how potent that horde of gobos could be… but everyone assisting on one target will do that. :P

Alas we didn’t have anyone frapsing last night, so no video this time round, but basically it was lots of running away, arrows, squigs, laser beams, getting sandwiched by multiple Order warbands, cackling on Ventrilo and general nonsense. All good fun. Oh and we got to totally screw with Order’s keep take by having everyone assisting on their ram each time they deployed it. Having well over 30 DoTs on a ram melts it fairly promptly, I think we destroyed about 7 or 8 rams in that one keep take. :D

Elsewhere.. no gobbos involved but lol

Knowing when to step back

Initially after the appearance of doubt about us being able to run Kill Frenzy in both RIFT and WAR, things went a bit ropey. With KF-WAR down to about 3 people, I made the decision to close the guild in WAR and we focussed on RIFT. Since then as you know I have returned to WAR and KF-WAR is very much back, growing in strength and entertainment value. However the KF-RIFT guild is still extremely active. I’m only playing RIFT a little bit myself, but the guild is solid, continues to grow and the guys have started on the 10man raid scene, but are also focussed on getting everyone the Tier 2 expert gear they need to progress. As an aside, the key to success in PvE is in the preparation. Get people geared and while you should never order people to spec certain ways (unless you’re one of those prick ego guilds with no life or grip on reality) make sure that the specs/classes/roles in the raid have some synergy. Uhm, yeah… stopping this tangent before I go off on one.

The key to us keeping both guilds going was in me acknowledging that I was no longer in a position where it made sense for me to lead our KF-RIFT chapter. To progress in a PvE game you need a leader who is online a lot, is organising events and actively driving the guild forward. It takes more time and effort than I’ve got spare for RIFT. So I stepped back to my arch-overlord of the KF community role, focussed myself more on WAR and promoted an utter retard and morally suspect git called Filthiusia to guild leader of KF-RIFT, whilst giving him the support of the very keen and progress driven Lowtwo in an officer role. Of course alongside the existing KF-RIFT officers. With a bunch of old school KFers putting the time in at the helm, things are working out ok.

Giving up control can be a tough choice to make for a guild leader; you’re always worried about things drifting away from your core ideals or just the whole thing collapsing. Yet, in exactly the same way as management out in the real working world, if successful an organisation will grow to a point where it’s owner/MD/CEO/whatever’s time becomes sparse and for them to try and to run everything is to invite disaster. You have to know when and what to delegate. The when and what is often quite easy to recognise, the hardest bit is really in the act of handing things over.

Of course there is one other huge thing… who you choose to delegate to. As anyone that follows football (soccer, for those of you in hats), the result of that choice is the hardest bit to reliably predict. There are no foregone conclusions there, no matter what anyone says. That’s where as a guild leader you have to make a leap of faith.

Gratz Skreaver!

First Kill Frenzy member to hit RR100!

One of the best Marauders on Norn and a good bloke too. Gratz you slag!

A message for the KILL FRENZY!

Regarding WAR I have this to say:

Oh yeah, you know what to do.

SQUIG FRENZY! The video!

The last time I had talked to Durtbocks about this he told me that him and the video were not talking... Thankfully it turns out the man had some inspiration and it is with great pleasure I present to you the Squig Frenzy video :)

Be warned, it features a little Squig porn and foul words.

Breaking the first rule of Fight Club

After the dismal performance by the English football team on Sunday and the crushing defeat by our biggest rival Germany, I was in desperate need of something to lift the spirits. Thankfully we had the perfect tonic already prepared. That evening we had a little guild event scheduled, but not quite to our normal daft standards, this was more serious, well a bit anyway. We had arranged to meet up with the Order guild “Champions of the Gods” in a secret location and have an evening of even numbered fights and amusement away from the zerging that is so rife in WAR’s RvR lakes. It was a brilliant night and both guilds had some tough fights, healthy banter and a great laugh.
 
CotG joined us on our ventrilo in a channel set up for them and our two guilds met up outside the fortress in Butcher’s Pass. This ensured we would have no interruptions from zergs by either faction and gave us plenty of room to fight. Being the first of these events and the evening after big World Cup games, we both had slightly lower attendance than we probably hoped for, but both guilds had enough people for 12 player teams with substitutions available on the bench. At first we planned to fight to try and claim a banner from behind the other team, but we actually both ended up ignoring it and just fighting to the death, or until it was obvious one side had won.
 
It was a fascinating match up tactically, as we both set up and approached it very differently. CotG had a mixture of DPS, which included a melee assist train and 3 Bright Wizards in a bomb set up. Where as we had 2 Sorcerers both more set up for single target and our usual collection of MDPS, so pretty much the usual KF single target heroes bundled together. Due to a healer shortage I used my Zealot for the first few fights and it didn’t go too well at first, with us losing the first 4 fights in a row. Half of the losses were fairly quick, yet the others took quite a long time before we got fully nailed. After each fight we spent a few minutes discussing and preparing different tactics to try and believe me we tried every trick in the book, but no matter what we just couldn’t deal with their combination of excellent melee assist training on our healers and the stacked Bright Wizard PBAoE reaching that infamous critical mass of firey death. At least not while we played as pure single target…
 
So we changed tactics again, respecced our sorcs and two of the Chosen, juggled the groups about, another Zealot logged on and finally I got to change onto using my Chosen. We went with a Sorc/Chosen Bomb mixed with Marauders and others including me on healer shafting duty. Instantly everything changed and we got a surprisingly fast victory. CotG are no mugs though and they adapted to our new play style and the next few fights were much tougher, one of which was an absolute epic. After our big tactical change we had 3 wins for KF and 1 for CotG, giving a final result for the Fortress fight of a 5-3 victory for CotG. I’d like to think had we continued further we might have pulled it closer to a draw, but it’s hard to say, many of the fights could have gone either way at numerous points to be honest. Plus it didn’t matter really, it was just plain fun, I was pleased with how we built on our losses to start winning and when either side lost they had always put up a great fight anyway.
 
After the Fortress fight we decided to do something a little different and took ourselves off to the secret demon prison lair for some 6v6 and good filming opportunity for the KF auteur Durtbocks. Those duelling flagged themselves for RvR, while Durt remained unflagged and resplendent in naked greenness, which allowed him to get some decent footage (more filming required, so this vid is a while away). It had all got a bit silly for the 6v6 with us fielding things like 4 Chosen groups or Marauder groups and I had to AFK quite a bit, so didn’t monitor results at all, but I could hear that everyone was having a good laugh. I have to say it really was a very atmospheric setting for a fight club event, certainly one to use again. As the evening came to a close we all jumped into one vent channel and everyone was saying what a great night it had been as well as a refreshing change from playing dodge the zergs. We’re definitely going to be meeting up again, not too often or it could get stale, but we’re already identified some great locations for our next event.
 
If you’re guild hasn’t done something like this already, I highly recommend you consider organising this kind of event. If you can keep the epeen out of it, focus on just having some good scraps, good humour, be open to try new tactics and learning a few things, then you are assured of a great night’s competitive, fair and thoroughly entertaining RvR.
 
A big /salute to Champion of the Gods for being good sports and all that stuff ;)

Football won't stop my WAAAGH, well ok it does a bit.

Huge football matches today, so I'm a tad distracted, but of course I realise I have a duty to post something to give you working (I've got the afternoon off YAY!) alt-tabbers something to distract yourself with. Of course there's yesterday's post, but showing my recycling skills here's some vids.

You've probably seen them before, but if not or you fancy revisiting the WAAAGH pimpdom, here's a couple of our classic KF videos:



and our masterpiece KILL FRENZY SUCKAS!



Enjoy!

Marauder vid is for the big

Biggsie has just posted up his latest Marauder roaming PvP video. Well worth a look if you want to see some solo Marauder spanking action.



Or go here for higher res options

Praag: Vice City

Someone needs to clean up the streets of Praag, seriously man, its really going downhill fast. First there was all the fighting and shit, but now you can't turn a corner without some pimp offering you his Elven sluts...


Youtube link available here.

/salute Durtbocks the KF auteur

Sneak peak at new WAR armour graphics

This morning Mythic gave Kill Frenzy special access to the test server for a sneak preview of armour set and graphic improvements coming with the 1.3.5 patch. As you can see below, the Chosen set is quite striking!

I for one can’t wait to see this go live.

Pimptastic KF teaser trailer

Coming soon to WAR cinemas everywhere...

We're gonna git you sucka!

New vid under construction ;)

Another greenskin night vid

Just noticed they've finally fixed the sound on this video of an old Kill Frenzy Greenskin night. Youtube got all paranoid about permissions, etc. Video was made by Lotusblade.

Whole vid is ofc worth watching, it might start off as a standard music+action game vid but it has a bit more to it ;) Highlights include:

• 2.20 - The infamous Steveo nekkid Orc roflstomping, which went on to spawn a guild tradition.
• 2.30 - Ever tried organising Orcs? This eventually leads to me having some kind of mental breakdown on vent.

Oh and just loads of naked Orc action.

KF being a guild full of dirty old men and equally foul women, this video is a bit on the sweary side. Oh and the last song on there is a bit, uhm yeah... So if you're all precious about language, well you've been warned.

6 sieges in one day, the big 40 and getting nekkid

When I heard last week that we’d hit the 4th siege of the day on Karak Norn, I planned on writing a blog post that would sneak in lyrics from Crowded House’s song “four seasons in one day”, however it was not to be. The server community ruined this glorious opportunity for a tribute to jingly jangly Australian nineties music by having another 2 bloody sieges. Still it’s worth posting about anyway. Six city sieges in one day. SIX! V sodding I! 3 each for Altdorf and the Inevitable City. If ever you wanted proof that WAR’s campaign is totally FUBAR, this is it. In fact I’d go so far as to quote a friend of mine when he says the situation is “ricockulous”.
 
In other news, my guild Kill Frenzy finally hit guild rank 40! It’s taken a while, but then we don’t restrict alts or anything like that and as a result the guild shows as being about 140 members, when in reality it’s actually about 30 actives with a mix of casuals and hardcore. In case you don’t know, the more characters in a guild, the more guild renown you have to earn to level. This is why you can power level guilds by stripping it down to just 6 members and then farming PvE instances :P I couldn’t be bothered with that myself, so thanks to my stubbornness KF earned their ranks the hard way.
 
Finally and this is a real shock… I actually did a city siege for the first time in months! IC got invaded, I had a warband of 15 Kill Frenzy and we thought sod it, nowt else to do… So in we went and found ourselves against 17 Order, who other than one group from my new fave order guild “Uprising”, appeared to be a random collection of players. We brutalised them horribly, obviously with us on vent together and them being randoms, but at the end the fun began. We spotted Steveo, a famous Bright Wizard, on his runepriest alt. We like Steveo, he’s always played with good humour and we once ganked him with naked Orcs, which sorta turned into a guild tradition… whenever we see his corpse the whole guild will drop everything to jump on his corpse.
 
After one of our Marauders had pulled him into us a few times, Steveo reacted with true style and went for the only real solution that didn’t involve quitting. He got naked. This then snowballed, as everyone stipped off and suddenly the streets of Altdorf were full of naked characters dancing, fist fighting and generally larking about. Good times.
 
 I’ve not got any pics myself, but there maybe a video appearing at some point…

It is all in your head mate

The tabletop version of Warhammer has rules for what it describes as psychology; things like fear, terror, panic, frenzy and stupidity. Rules designed to make the game’s units act like real people. Before Warhammer Online was launched, I remember seeing people debating if these rules would somehow be included in the game. The thing is they didn’t need to be coded into the game, simply because the in game characters have real life players controlling them. You’ll get to see the classic Warhammer psychology rules in action almost every day…



Fear
More than anything in WAR I’d say numbers cause fear. Often you’ll see the following scenario take place; warband A strolls around a corner and discovers a horde of enemy sitting there, the warband become hesitant, unwilling to commit, perhaps the odd person starts backing off. Battle commences and with confidence low, even if the numbers weren't actually that different, it’s a foregone conclusion.

Panic
This one you see all the time. 2 zergs are fighting, bombing away. Everyone is comfortable in their bombtastic scrap. Then a premade guild group/warband arrives and charges the enemy in the flank or rear, panic starts as players run in random directions, healers die and within seconds one zerg falls apart.

Terror
We saw a classic example of this recently. We had 2 groups of Kill Frenzy fighting at the south keep in Praag, alongside us was at least one warband of PUGs, probably two. The enemy keep was claimed and defended by a big reputation enemy guild. They’re very good and are known for always moving round in a large and strong warband, but they also make the most of psychological warfare outside of the game, with people dedicated to inflating their reputation on forums. And it works too, some people just crap their pants on seeing their guild name. So, back to the keep… The inner keep door breaks, but instead of a static defence, the Order charge out of the door; I think 3 groups to a warband of the aforementioned guild, backed up by a couple of other groups from other solid Order guilds.

Other than my 2 groups of Kill Frenzy, every other Destruction simply turned tail and ran. Utterly terrified they routed before they’d even been hit. It went from Destruction outnumbering the enemy 2-1, to my poor 2 groups being left alone facing at least double our number, which obviously didn’t go so well. To add further insult to injury I could see the Destruction so desperate to escape that a bunch got stuck in the outer doorway, their pixels doomed to a bombtastic death.

Frenzy
This one I’ll claim for me… If like KF you normally run with 1-2 groups in oRvR you will often end up facing greater numbers. In those situations running will achieve bugger all and if our pixels get killed, well... we don't care about that. We’ll just charge in and see how many we can kill before we die, proper frenzied troops style. Sure we’ll give the enemy some renown, but we’ll get some ourselves and most importantly it will be more fun than running :P Of course if we’ve got back up somewhere or something, then we’ll attempt a tactical withdrawl, but otherwise I'm all for shouting WAAAGH and feeling the frenzy! :P

Stupidity
Alas this one you’ll see all too often. It would make a huge bloody wall of text just describing what I saw yesterday. :P So I’ll just pick one moment… A destruction player put a king keg down on our spawn point barricade in Altdorf, which stopped people getting out of the spawn. I’ll assume it was stupidity, rather than a dirty cross-realming tart.



If I recall correctly the tabletop game has other psychology rules; stubborn, unbreakable and so on. All of which you’ll see in WAR. And you know, that’s the beauty of PvP based MMOs and particularly WAR, you don’t need to code in things to make your enemy react like real people. PvE is all good and well, but you just can't beat oRvR style PvP.

Complacency beats KF to death with their own shoes

My guild "Kill Frenzy" has always been pretty good in scenarios. In the past when we did regular premades it would normally result in a night of wins, with at absolute worst only a handfull  of competitively fought losses. Order publically respected our groups and I can say without ego bias that we had earnt it. 

Over the last few months we haven't been running premade scenario groups, other than a few random occasions. People got distracted by other games, or alt characters and we pretty much dropped out of the scenario scene.

This week we returned!

And we got our arses kicked really, really badly. You see, we came back thinking we're good, just cobbled some groups together and went out there all confident. On two seperate nights we had 1 healer and 3 lowbies per group, plus there was no synergy in our set ups. Yet we were surprised when we lost in horrific fashion. In other words we got cocky and extremely complacent. Unintentionally we were probably disrepecting our Order enemies and we paid the shameful price. I was bloody livid, at myself mainly for letting us get so damn slack. One doesn't simply walk into Mordor...

I guess sometimes it's easy to forget the red names are other people, people who may be just as good as (or better than) you think you are. Having had this wake up call we've decided from now on with our pre-arranged guild RvR nights we'll only do scenarios with serious groups. Though other times we'll mess about more, but no more 2 random KF groups in one scenario.

There is no place in PvP for complacency, as my sore buttocks can testify to.     

WAAAGHMAGEDDON [updated!]

Kill Frenzy had a greenskin night last thursday. Any guildies that only had lowbie greens were apprenticed up and summoned... Summoned to the WAAAGHMAGEDDON!


HD version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHtL7OP084Y&22&fmt=22

WAAAAAAAAGH!

GJ Durtbocks on the vid ;)

UPDATE! Another of the guys (Lotusblade) made a vid from the night's fun. This one includes some audio from our ventrilo, which includes me getting a bit sweary trying to organise Orcs :P So don't watch it if you're overly sensitive.


Comedy :)

KILL FRENZY GET TO DA CHOPPA!

So last night Praag was the place to be. Blood, murder and mayhem. At a critical moment Destro was trying to take Martyr's Square and with my 3 groups of Kill Frenzy I yelled on vent for us to stop Order reinforcements making into to our fellow Destro. Turns out Durtocks was frapsing at the time... WAAAAAGH!

Oh yeah baby. Great times :)

HD version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iL2mtOUVtQ&fmt=22

And patch day! I'm hoping for the best :) I'll post about the patch once I've had a proper go.

[UPDATE!]
One quick thing... I've had a quick go on WAR and the game performance has had a vast, and I mean VAST, improvement. I cranked all the graphics up to full, put on specular lighting, etc aaaaaaaaand... It ran really well, in combat too. Looking forward to trying out some large fights.

I've read a few forum posts where people are mewing about the game crashing when they had a 300vs300 fight in a keep... Well duh :P As if anything can handle 600 players in one doorway ;) OK, perhaps we need reasons not to have everyone in one keep, but even so. I think Mythic need a bit of slack there.

One of those moments of RvR awesomeness

So last night there was all sorts of action going on across Tier 4, I was logged in with Gashface my choppa and decided on going to Black Crag with an alliance warband (we're part of The Evil League of Evil). The zone was rapidly turning blue as Order appeared to be pushing for a lock, giving us a lot of options, but since one of the guilds in our alliance had claimed Ironskar keep in the north, we decided we best try and hold it. As we rode through the winding canyons the alarm sounded, 21 enemies were attacking Ironskar. Clearly we'd made the right decision to push for the last Destruction controlled area.

At that point we had around the same number in our warband, so rather than rush inside the keep, we planned on charging the Order from behind. They were like lambs to the slaughter (or is that Slaughtererer? Nornians will get that :P ).

They must have been a PuG not using voice comms, because it was an utter, horrific massacre. We romped through their healer camp, cutting a bloody swathe through their lines and forced the rout in moments. Much cackling was heard on our ventrilo, but we knew we'd been lucky to face unorganised opponents. We withdrew to the keep and waited to see what Order did next.

We didn't have to wait that long, as shortly after roughly half of the same bunch returned. A group of us melee types went out to deal with them, which we were in the middle of doing when we heard yelled from the keep walls (ok ventrilo) something along the lines of "Order! Bleedin' thousaaaands of 'em!".

Those of us outside left the small combat outside and ran like buggery for the keep door. A few of us were cut down, but thankfully in res range.

We were now up to a full warband, there was about 1 group of random Destruction that had just arrived and a shit load of Order had arrived. GAME ON!

From here on there are so many tales of awesome PvP combat I could tell you, but this post would become insanely long. We successfully held the keep against 86 Order with just our warband and six others, almost 3-1 odds and we held. It was truely epic, we dragged the fight out for over and hour by destroying every battering ram they deployed and using coordinated melee assaults to clear the doorway... Their ninja teams were caught and killed everytime, were gave no quarter. We rained death from above and thrust sharp pointy sticks in their squishy bits. I saw some of the most gung ho ressurection missions ever as our brave Disciples of Khaines accompanied by melee fighters rushed into the enemy to retrieve our fallen. In the end as the door respawned, we wiped them to a man and won a monstrous defence bonus (don't remember the numbers, but it was BIG).

I can't do the fight justice, it was the best defence I've been on since the early days on Karak Hirn. I salute all my follow Destruction that earnt their victory and also the Order who didn't give up despite our brutal defence. Wether you were on the winning or losing side, it still provided a long and entertaining battle.

It's nights like this that show how awesome WAR can be.

PS it also meant I got 1.5 more levels of renown and finally got to equip my Annhilator chest and helm ;) Just need the shoulders now. "Woot"! or some other such geeky expression :P