Happy Birthday =XDC=

@________ wrote:

re read it with my left eye shut and im happy woth wha I typed.

lol it was a good effort 🙂

To be fair to the others though we’ve had some trouble getting people into PS2, but it’s not for lack of trying or interest. For a start the people who have tried it with me don’t immediately see the attraction because it’s taken me a long long time to find a formula that works in terms of finding fights which don’t overwhelm new players. The classic example was about 5 months ago now when we had an 8 or 9 man XDC squad of noobs in the game on my recommendation after I thought I had finally found a suitable approach. Unfortunately that coincided with a patch which totally fucked up that approach and while we had one really good fight (from my perspective) we ended up stuck in the mother of all clusterfucks which was no fun at all, but we had to persevere with it for the benefit of an alert. I can’t remember what that specific change was but there have been others which make it incredibly difficult to pick a fight which will keep all people in the squad entertained. That particular night though it was either no fight or too much of a fight, and for the majority of the new players it was difficult to see what we were trying to achieve.

It’s not all been the devs though as when we turned up for that night our comms were light years behind where they are now. Leading a squad is difficult enough but add to that entry level players and clusterfucks where you can’t hear yourself think and you have a nightmare scenario for anyone trying to showcase a game. It was further compounded by me taking a gamble on playing NC that night, which was chosen because both yourself and recoil had a preference for the faction and Alex was refusing to play VS, but it really is the hardest faction to get used to as a BF player, and I didn’t have the knowledge at the time to help people overcome what initially feel like cumbersome weapons. One of the best NC infantry players on cobalt gave me a tip on reddit recently which would have helped everyone that night, burst fire (and limit your movement much more when firing than with other factions), but even with that knowledge it would still have been against my better judgement which was to run the event as VS which has the most familiar weapons to BF3 players.

Over the months I have also been too stubborn in my playing of all factions to the point that nobody was ever really able to get comfortable with one set of weapons before I’d drag them onto another faction and start them from scratch. Many did keep giving me the benefit of the doubt, coming back frequently but never really seeing what I see.

ALL of that changed around June though, and despite SOE’s best attempts to throw us more curve balls with increased zergfests and recent performance issues, we have a core of XDC in PS2 sticking through problems and evolving our playstyle to the point I’m confident we can cope now with the vast majority of what the game throws at us. In the last month we’ve had myself, alex, paddy, ben, gary, steve, zigzag, my brother bakura, Ronathon, Occa, and Voo all playing with us. Not by any means as frequently as I’d like but people have different levels of availability, and we’re still having some difficulties when we end up with a bigger than normal squad because it’s hard to keep a fight challenging for the experienced players while not overwhelming newer ones. We also have trouble with communication with new players as the level of our squad play in PS2 has far surpassed ANYTHING we’ve done before in XDC and we’re on the same wavelength so often now that a new player can easily find himself detached from the group (especially if they die when the nearest spawn point is some distance away)….it’s a problem we still have to address, but at the same time we’ve had some great success with the majority of new players who’ve taken our advice and stuck through it.

There’s still about half of active XDC who remain sceptical or are just too involved with other games to be able to devote time to this, and then we have the likes of Doc who just like shiny bells and whistles. You can’t please everyone, but it is a shame we don’t have more of them involved since we could really make a name for ourselves with them onboard. That said we already are though, because we are one of the few outfits on any server who try their damndest to fight outnumbered, and our success rate is impressive. We regularly take on the big name outfits on the server and I’m sure they know our tag by now because you always remember the guys who give you the hardest fight, and we are definitely in that category, even if we can’t match the scale of fight others can.

Now I’m finished working full time the plan over the next month is to recruit directly from the ps2 playerbase which, if done correctly, will take us to another level and establish ourselves amongst the most respected groups in the game. That’s the goal, and others are welcome to join us, however from your point of view it’s unfortunate we’ve chosen VS. You should join us though and see how you like what we’re doing because if anything it’ll be a change of pace 🙂 The thing which keeps us going is the squad play though, so TS is a must, but you should be able to pick up what we’re doing pretty quickly and it really is worth it. Even for someone like me used to running solo or with large platoons, I am having the most fun I’ve had in PS2 with XDC backing me up, no matter how small our squad!

When EA release a decent version of BF again, those of us playing PS2 now are going to wipe the floor with anyone who hasn’t got the comms and understanding we’ve developed as a team. It’s the first game where we have actually gotten our arses in gear and developed a team, rather than being a bunch of talented solo players trying to outdo each other on the final scoreboard 🙂 This is actually in essence why I love PS2, it keeps me sharp as a FPS player, and is massively improving the team play and squad leading skills of every single one of us involved. Those missing out are losing out, but hopefully we’ll be able to pass it on when the next big BF title hits the shelves.