AV is currently designed in a way that gives the Horde an advantage right off the bat. We all know this — I’ve always wondered why we always seem to be behind in resources all the time.

However, the alliance does seem to win a lot. It turns out that Alliance, even across other battlegroups, are using the same strat: take the relief hut immediately. Well, it turns out, talking to some horde people, it’s really fucking up the horde. I mean, they are completely caught off guard, so much so, some of them are starting to boycott AV.  *shocked*

This got me surprised, I got to wondering why they are caught so off guard. The horde has an initial advantage, but yet they can’t cope with the Alliance taking Relief Hut.

So, I look at the AV map, I noticed we have two GYs within Stormpike. Okay, alliance has an advantage there. We are literally a skip away from aid station (our equiv of Relief Hut). When alliance dies, they always res at Stormpike GY because Horde always immediate takes Stoneherth. Then I realized, wait a min: the Horde have the advantage here if played right. I mean, the horde can effectively take out TWO GYs back to back, effectively locking out Alliance from Stormpike — but why aren’t they?

Then I realized, the Horde is always turtling up to the top. They take out the first alliance GY and …. oh …. effectively locks the alliance into Stomepike, IF they don’t get another GY outside of Stormpike soon. Very very interesting …. The horde are actually hurting themselves here. See, by not allowing Alliance outside of Stormpike, they are unable to get into Stormpike…. oh, how the tides are turning here.

Now, the Alliance knows getting a GY outside of Stormpike is key. If they can’t get past Stoneherth, they are effectively dead locked and Horde will eventually win due their initial advantage. Alliance initially kept trying for Stonewall GY (an initially uncontested graveyard), which is the very next gy right outside of the “block”, but have failed as Horde always seems to get that dropped pretty quickly.  So now the Alliance decided to go for the farthest GY, effectively getting around the Horde’s attempt to lock Alliance into Stormpike. Now the Horde is baffled!

Does the Horde not see they are actually hurting themselves now? You have to hand it to Alliance with their ability to kill Drek w/out capping out any towers. That shows some serious strength on the Alliance’s part. Now, if we can learn to communicate!!

Why can’t the Horde figure out they are hurting themselves? Why can’t the horde figure out “if the Alliance is rushing to Relief Hut, why don’t we rush to Aid Station?” Nor do they realize: “Hey, look — Aid Station and Stormpike GY are right next to each other. We can take them BOTH out AT ONCE and effectively locking OUT the Alliance from Stormpike!”

Are the Horde the “unintelligent” ones? This is an interesting thought. We effectively now have a BG that is actually about strategy (although, admittedly some strat negated by zerg), but neither side actually realizes this. I say neither side because eventually the Horde will realize they can lock out the Alliance from Stormpike and the Alliance will start QQ’ing about the proximity of the graveyards. But until then, Alliance — eat up your honor while you can!

During my slow day at work, however, I did run across a couple cool video series if you’re into WoW Machinima. The first one is Azerothian Super Villains. ASV, as I’l call it, takes a rather humours approach to the current super villains of WoW and their attempt to take over the world! They have a nice mix of “Pinky and the Brain” type of humor as well as little touch of a little insanity. It centers around Illidan, Archimonde and Kael’thas. It’s a good watch.

The other one is Chronicle of Annoying Quest, which has a bit of an EverQuest ring to it. I actually hadn’t seen this yet. I saw the first 15-20 seconds of their 20th video and decided I had to watch them in order! Sadly, dumb ass WoW Movies makes it extremely hard to tell what the order is: the title of the video, which contains the episode number, gets cut off in their minimal space.

Outside of Delusioned, I have been working on a new project of mine. It’s an MMO raid tracking + signup tool. It’s purpose will be to merge the two current main market ones that I know of: EQDKP and phpRaider.

The reason I’m going this is because I’m tired of the crappy interface of phpRaider; we, as in my guild, needs something that can keep track of raids on top of phpRaider; and we have to have a single sign-on. I, personally, got tired of having to log into three different sites, to do three different tasks. My new app is designed to allow a simple plug-in-play interface for user authentication and authorization. At this time, it’s fully functional with phpBB3’s authentication and authorization methods.

However, with all that said, there really isn’t much up, yet. Just a bunch of code on the project page and a quick site, with a forum, for posting updating and gaining feedback.

It’s going to be good, I promise. I already have a couple pages functionally complete and I like where it’s going. Very user friendly, quick updates, use of AJAX and old fashion POST requests for edits and fully modular user auth. I’m poring everything I can think of to make the user experience as friendly as possible.

Stop by, say hi. If you have any remote interest in the project, let me know! I love hearing from people. If you’re a coder and like critiquing code, feel free to browse the code base. I can’t guarentee it’s functionality. I just kind of check things in as I go, but it’s all there.

Garithos.com
Swallow Or It’s Going In Your Eye

For a bit of history, a month or two ago, a kid located someplace in Australia (thanks commenter) goes by the name of Ghosti on the Garithos WoW server became desperate for the new flying epic mounts. Only one problem, the training for the mount costs 5k gold; not an easy feat for many players. Determined to get one, he had a plan…

He made a packet on the Garithos server forums: “Help me raise 4k gold and I’ll tattoo your site and slogan onto my ass.” Challenged by the dare, the server players did it.

Now you can see the fruits of their generosity:

Google Video link

I don’t know about you, but I think he got it tattooed on the wrong side, but hey, it’s the 2000s. It might very well be on the correct side (imagination left for the readers)…