We have been struggling to get a team out for the past 2 weeks with a lot of people on holidays, but things should be settling down now. Unfortunately, Casc is gone on holidays and when he comes back, he might be losing his ISDN permanently. This would be a big pity since he has always been so reliable. I just hope the new patch makes the netcode playable enough so that he can at least take part in trainings if he ends up on modem.

Yesterday we played the group leaders illusion. At first they had similar problems to CAF in week 1… two of them on pings of 400. So we changed to a different server and it sorted their connections nicely and put them all on pings of 60. They won comfortably on cpm13, but dm6 was a different story. They had a good lead of 18 or 20 frags, and the game was taking a similar pattern to the first match. Then Bug got an important phone call from work, and the game was paused for a few minutes. I don’t know what happened next, but CAF must have decided to drop a player rather than wait for Bug, and let the game finish 3v3. There were 8 minutes or so remaining I think, and things started to go our way. We made a nice comeback as Lorc and sk began to own. With one minute to go there were 3 frags seperating the teams, and I was sure we would win it. But alas, they managed to keep their 3 points and after beating CAF last week, I expect them to win this division outright.

We got a new member this week - sk (abbreviated from Stormkeep) joined us for CTF when -Sw- folded, and since he’s not in any BW TDM clan, hes playing for us in the BWDML as well. He got to show off his skills against n2s in week2 of the BWDML, in two close games. sk, Jc, Spoonman and dest played for us. Jc was on a very dodgy BT connection, getting a lot of lag and disconnected a couple of times in each game. We ended up losing DM14 by 30 frags, but CPM4 was much closer (very tense for me refreshing gamespy…) We never lost the lead on CPM4, always 3 or 4 frags ahead, and ended up winning 81-79.

Heres the screenshots: DM14TMP and CPM4. Jc will be going on holidays next week, so we’ll be missing our star player for some tough games, but now Vin has ISDN so hopefully that will compensate for it to some extent at least

We had our first BWCTFL game tonight against XPD (postponed the game against Ronins). There was a bit of a mixup with times, with our TDM at 10pm, and our CTF at 9, and we were late getting to the server, and had a makeshift team, with quozl playing q3 for the first time in about 8 months, Spoonman playing his second game in 4 months or so, and Lorcan just getting back into the swing of things after 5 years on a modem :). Thanks a lot to XPD for being so patient and never complained about us being late. We still managed to put up a credible performance, well played to everyone, and if we had more time to develop our teamplay we could have won. It finished 0-3 on q3ctf2 and 3-5 on q3wctf2… although I’m not sure about the ctf2 result as XPD capped right after the timelimit hit, and this score did not show up on the scorebot on IRC, nor did it show on gamespy, but it is on the screenshot, so I’m not sure what happens there. I still can’t find my password to update the f2s site, so I can’t update members and results page yet, but you can look at screenshots here: ctf2 and wctf2.

Lorcan got ISDN last Tuesday, a nice 40 ping to Vishnu. Vincent should have it next week so he can see how well he can adapt his QW teamplay to Q3. BWDML was unusual this week, the worst week we have ever experienced in the league. We played the Croatian clan CaF who had good pings but jerked all over the place and were impossible to it (I wasn’t on the server, this is what I was told). They’re a really good team, and we got heavily beaten on dm6.

For the second map, CaF’s pings went bad… like 250 - 800. After switching servers and waiting over 20mins for their pings to settle, we had to leave the server (had better things to do). The admin was terrible, I can understand that he wanted to give CaF a chance but he went about it the wrong way entirely, being rude to FH, acting like it was our fault when he was just wasting everyones time since it was clear that their pings were not improving. The dm7 game will be played later in the season.

Despite all the CounterStrike we have been playing, we managed to get a good few games in this week. We also have a new member, in Jc, who was in DK for awhile also.

Its been awhile since the last update, and there has been plenty of lag to moan about. Our Barrysworld division is even harder than I had thought it was. I envy Acid and Hat-B with their much easier div. Heres the new tag we’re trialling:

Our WPDML game vs Kudos was postponed, as they had their Savage Cup 4 matches in 1 night. We had another draw against BW - this time against BoG, a team we would have easily beaten on both maps if our connections had been anywhere playable. Still, a draw will do :/. There are still some very tricky fixtures left. To me this looks like the most balanced division in the league, very competitive, and there are a lot of div2 clans that would get 0wned. We play z3 next week who looked very impressive in week1. Frag, POTZW, and nexus were tipped by Bigfoot to finish ahead of us, so I’ll have to assume that they will be difficult. XTC I know are a good clan, but have defaulted both their games so far. cH have also given defaults. That leaves EoA who got raped by nexus in week1, but had 2 very close games against KOTR resulting in a draw. So either EoA were short players or lagged in week1, or nexus are a really good clan who will win the division.

Bigfoot’s released his predictions for season 5 of the BWDML on Quakenation. I think he read too much into WPDML results (we lost to Wizzzards and had a default loss to BoG) and he doesn’t expect us to get promoted.

“Mid-table i think we will see XTC, FH and nexus. These sides are all pretty talented but i think may struggle to put in a concerted promotion challenge. nexus could be the surprise of the trio i guess, FH and XTC i think will be happy though with mid-table. [….]”

Champions - KoTR
Also Promoted - POTZW, BoG
Relegated - z3, cH, EoA

Week 1 was great - we drew with KOTR (predicted champions by Bigfoot). BWDML is immeasurably better than the WPDML, but the server was surprisingly laggy, since I usually have sweet ping on BW clanarena. Again, the ISDN players were suffering, ping over 100 for much of the game. The best thing about our result against KOTR was the fact that we beat them on dm7 despite having well over twice their ping (Lorcan on modem played, while me, Dest and Cascade were reasonably lagged). Up to now, I had always thought that dm7 was a pure lpb map, and that you can’t hold RA without some low ping. It was very encouraging for us to beat them here and shows how far a bit of good teamplay can take you.

I’m really looking forward to next week of the BWDML. We play BoG on dm14tmp and cpm4. It would appear from BW predictions that the worst is over for us, but looking at the results from week1.. the Hungarian clan z3 beat POTZW very convincingly on dm7. Like I was saying above.. it takes really good teamplay to win on this map when you’re at a massive ping disadvantage - I assume z3 were… Hungary is miles away Other unpredictable clans from what I’ve seen so far are nexus and XTC. nexus had a good win in week 1, while XTC defaulted their game.. but their website shows some impressive results (even if they are a bit outdated).

BW league is postponed by a week, giving us time to view our new members Cascade and x0n in action. We had a game against UKSG yesterday, the server was awful, but at least we got to see Cascade play. KOTR replaced BlackHail in our division in Barrysworld, KOTR are a very good clan from what I have heard. More gah servers in the WPDML on Thursday

Our BW division has changed around a bit.. the clans we have now are: POTZW, cH, BoG, EoA, HaiL, z3, Frag, XTC and nexus. I was looking at a few of their webpages, and by the looks of it, XTC could be favourites to win this division (although theres a few clans there I still haven’t seen). Unfortunately, we conceded our first default win ever last night. It was in the WPDML against BoG. It was completely my fault - after having no phone or electricity until a few hours before the match, I was very disorganised and I thought the game was at 10, instead of 9. I told this to Spoonman, and only Bug and Dest showed up. Its a pity because I would have enjoyed owning BoG on these new maps. Ah well, we’ll meet them in BW.

This default loss has reminded me that we need 2 more players, having lost Quozl and Honky to inactivity recently. So we’re looking for two semi-active or active lpb’s that can fire a rocket reasonably straight, but if they themselves are not a fish, they must have a grandparent at least who is.