Since some of you were interested the last time I brought up the subject, I thought I would post a couple of the latest DDR clips that I've taken. I bought a second high-quality metal pad from my friend in July, which gave me the chance to start learning Doubles play - which involves using eight arrows instead of four! I'm still learning the ropes, but have progressed to the point where I don't feel embarassed to post videos online.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkydRyyuOy0

In this first song (Shivers), I tried putting the camera directly behind the screen, which was a mistake because my body blocks most of the view of what's going on. I also had too much glare reflecting off the screen, making the arrows almost impossible to read. But since it was a perfect score "AAA", and it took about an hour of trying to shoot this video, I wasn't exactly about to get rid of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaqiRHniWFA

This other video, of the song "Come Clean", I think I managed to get a much better setup featuring both the screen and a clear view of the two pads. If I seem a little tired in the video, it's because this was about my 20th attempt at getting the song perfect! (I was off by a single step roughly four or five times.) This song is quite slow, so the difficulty comes from the large number of double steps (hitting two arrows together at the same time) thrown in. There's a good example of this around 0:29 and again at 1:05, where I have to jump sideways from the one pad to the other. Fun stuff!

The closest I come to screwing up is at 1:13 on the clock; I'm doing an eighth note patten and have to reach way out to hit the left down arrow. When I froze the video here, I realized that I just BARELY grazed the corner of the arrow with my foot. But it counted, and that's what mattered! Overall, I was extremely pleased with the way this one came out (also a perfect score "AAA"). Almost no one seems to play Doubles in DDR anymore, sadly, so perhaps these are worth posting. I'm going to try and add a Videos section to the DDR part of my website soon and include these. After all, Doubles play looks pretty cool, doesn't it?

Well, as of last month, I left to go and concentrate on schooling, but, due to certain circumstances, I'm back to remodel KTHX to it's former glory. Though I'll be assuming the leadership position, I'll be more of a figure head giving instructions, and not a full time player. My Co-leader, Joshua (Raiz Of Hope) will take my place for all meetings that I'm not able to attend, and I hope that things will become back to normal very shorty :D





~Tourniquet

Okay, so I've been thinking about this for a while now and GW just isn't keeping my interest anymore. It has nothing to do with the mental breakdown we all experienced after the meeting. I just can't stay interested in the game. I'm tired of grinding for titles (most of the time I fall asleep while doing so), I'm tired of farming (it serves no purpose except to get more stuff and waste my time I can be enjoying other things), and I'm bored most of the time. GWEN doesn't even seem fun to me anymore and I have almost no interest in going through it with all of my primary characters. It seems like ANet wants people to grind for titles, armor, and what not to try and keep people busy until they launch GW2. At this point, I might be done with most online gaming. I might just stick to console gaming. The other thing is, we just aren't that active in game (we have a roster of 90 people and maybe 1/4 at best show up and play regularly) and don't group together very often to do things as a guild or an alliance.

I'll still come around Saturday nights if you want to go through the game Hawk, I won't ditch you on that since we started it together. If anyone else wants to go through GWEN together or do dungeons PM me and we can try to set up dates to go through the game as most of my characters are around the Hall of Monuments or Gunnar's. Other than that I'll show my face here and there in game to see whats up or perhaps see if my interest in GW is rekindled in any way. If an alliance or guild event does actually happen, I'll do my best to be there. I'll probably also show up on AIM sometimes, so if you need another person for any PvP and I'm available, Wyrm can get a hold of me. And of course, I will still be checking the forums.

If anyone has XBox 360 and goes online, PM me and I can give you my gamertag and my AIM screen name if you want to IM me to do something in GW.

This is just a heads up on what my activity level is going to be like. I didn't want people to think I just up and left because i will be around, but don't be surprised if I'm only on once a week now.

Preliminary results are up for Epic Thirteen. Please let me know if I missed anyone!

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/epic13results.html

Participation was down somewhat from last year's Epic Eight (44 reports as opposed to 59) but still quite strong overall, including a lot of new faces. The Netherlands and Khmer were the most reported civs by percentage, perhaps indicating that they had good starting positions. The Mayans were among the lowest to be played out, which could be attributed to the lack of fresh water at the start. Ethiopia's small turnout I simply can't explain.

Most of the shadow games were a result of either attack before 1000BC , or simply reporting beyond the deadline. We also had a lot of incomplete games, which I think is a reflection of the longer length of Beyond the Sword's gameplay. An extended space race, a more persistent AI on defense, and just more turns overall seem to be resulting in noticeably fewer completed games. (This is one of the things I feared most about the expansion.) I'm going to brainstorm some possible solutions for future games, so feel free to chime in if you have any ideas. Longer game lengths, fewer overall games, perhaps?

Also, whoever came up with the "January/July" dating system needs to be clubbed with something nasty. That's as asinine as when Master of Orion replaced its one year = one turn dating nomenclature with the confusing "galactic cycles" in MOO2 & 3.

The documentation on the Apostolic Palace could best be described as sketchy, and I'm hoping someone can give me some more information. Consider a hypothetical case where I'm Hindu, and my Buddhist neighbor has built the AP. I conquer it.

1) I assume this immediately leaves me vulnerable to AP defeat, since I now hold a Buddhist city?
2) Can I convert the AP to Hindu by sending a Hindu missionary to the AP city? By exterminating my neighbor?
3) I noticed in Epic 13 that cities with only the AP religion got the hammer bonus, even though it wasn't my state religion. If I spam Buddhist missionaries into all my cities, I assume I'd have to switch to Buddhism to get the hammer bonus in cities which have both Hinduism and Buddhism?
4) If I kill off my neighbor, and he is the Pope, is a new election held immediately?

Preliminary results for Adventure 22 are now finished:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/adv22results.html

Congrats are indeed in order for our players who managed to beat the map; darrelljs turned out a great scenario. I wish I could have commented more on the games when they were posted, but my computer issues strictly limited my online time. Special kudos to our two spaceship victories (blid and uberfish), sooooo's finely played UN effort, and a nice cultural victory from newcomer Mortius!

Hopefully the Epic 13 results will be done sometime tomorrow, but I make no promises. We had a lot of submitted games!

So, I thought I'd start a discussion on what it means to be a monk in GvG. Monks seem to be the hardest profession to play and alse are one of the most complicated, maybe moreso than being the leader/spike caller. There was a recruiting post on the QQ forums for a top guild (not sure if they're top 100 or 200 atm) looking for a strong monk. Here's the extract about what they were looking for:

Greedy Gus Wrote:Monks

- Experience or willingness to play in builds with large extra defensive infrastructures or little to none at all (full range)
- Voice opinions about the viability of different builds' defenses
- Allow your first instinct to be playing with less defense and improving/relying on player skill, rather than starting off as safe as possible
- Skilled at constantly having small prots in place to mitigate damage
- Good reaction time for spikes, and knowing exactly what is needed at different times to be efficient and keep people up (rof, big prot, infuse, gift).
- Awareness of the field, used for pre-prot, pre-kiting, communication, and:
- Follow the enemy offense, rather than feeling restricted to a certain circle of ground at the flagstand. This means leaving entirely at times, to heal a split the opponent collapses on, pushing forward when the enemy tries to spike our overextended frontline, etc.
- Judge the enemy offensive threat at the flagstand, and understand when/where you're not needed.
- Be highly communicative when necessary, be prepared to command the defensive strategy & call retreats (whether partial or full)

So, these are the builds I use more often than not, although they might be changing soon to accomodate some of the new GW:EN skills. In any case, the most important thing about running a monk is to be comfortable with your build and know what skills are where without having to look at your skill bar every time you want to use a skill. For that reason I suggest disabling skill tool tips if you haven't already, they'll just get in the way.

ZB Prot, most for RA, TA and AB:
Prot: 14 (+2), DF: 11 (+1), Healing: 8
Reversal of Fortune (RoF), Guardian, Zealous Benediction (ZB), Gift of Health, Dismiss Condition, Spirit Bond, Remove Hex, ???*
* The optional skill is usually Glyph of Lesser Energy (GoLE), Dash (or some other running skill), or, in the case of RA, a Res Sig.

LoD Infuse, GvG version:
Healing: 14 (+2), DF: 11 (+1), Prot: 8
RoF, Light of Deliverence (LoD), Signet of Rejuvination, Infuse Health, Dismiss Condition, Protective Spirit, Holy Veil (or other hex removal, Cure Hex is a possibility now), GoLE/Return

LoD Infuse, HA version:
Healing: 14 (+2), DF: 10 (+1), Prot: 8, Inspiration: whatever's left
RoF, LoD, Dwayna's Kiss, Infuse, Draw Conditions, Prot Spirit, Remove Hex, Channeling

I haven't played RC in a long time so I don't really feel comfortable putting one of those up. Anyways, those are the three basic builds I use these days. You'll notice there's not too much variety in them, and that's intentional. Remember, the more cumbersome your build is and the more you're uncomfortable with it, the more people are going to die.

As some of you may know, I've been going through terrible computer problems for the past month now. That's had a negative impact on this community in several ways; delayed results, updates, and even necessitating that I drop out of the succession game I founded. My Diablo team has been wondering when I would finally be able to show up again.

Well, four weeks, two different repair places, and several discs from Microsoft later, I'm finally back up and running again. I'd like to thank those community members who gave me a hand and helped keep things running relatively smoothly, especially Atlas (who created an Adventure literally on 24 hours notice) and Darrell (who made a needed change in the Adv. 24 savegame file). Griselda, as always, has been a beacon of sanity when things seem to be going to pieces.

First task will be compiling the results from our back events (Epic 13/Adv. 22), followed by finalizing the tournament schedule for the rest of the year. Good luck to all players in our current events!

Hoping someone here can help me with this. Apparently, the patch for v 3.13 is blocking civs running Mercantilism and State Property from founding corporations.

Of course, I understand that civs running Mercantilism *should* be able to found corporations -- but what about civs with State Property? Seems counter-intuitive to me, but I haven't been able to found any clarification on this one way or another.