What an awful time to be a competitive gamer! FPS games coming out without dedicated servers, MMO's proclaiming pvp superiority and then encouraging an alternate means-to-an-end, and guild leaders falling in with the wrong crowd.

Aion...where to start? Well I guess we can talk about where it ended. Ya, we lost a couple guys to botting, but they were clearly people who had no interest in playing the game. People were bored and stopped playing in hopes that there would be a fresh start in a month or two when a.) players reached cap in a larger majority, b.) NCSoft refocused pvp and fixed their failures, and c.) the game wasn't an endless grind loop with no point in sight. Well as people trickled out, it began to snowball. A couple players sold their accounts, a couple more deactivated, Darkane's RL got hacked and they vendored all his shit. Ya that about sums it up. Where it went wrong? I think Socratic put it best. �We get 6 guys together and fly around looking for a fight, then when we find a fight one of two things happens: 1.) We roll them and they go hide behind guards until we leave, and then go back to farming NPC's for AP. 2.) We roll them, they come back with twice as many people and push us out, and then go back to farming NPC's for AP.� There seems to be a recurring issue, and that's probably all that needs to be said about Aion.

So what are we playing now? Well, people have spread out across several games. Again PfB lacks a focus in the gaming world, but people are out there. We have a couple guys playing competitive HoN. Probably the only positive note on the gaming table from 2009. Others have returned to WOW. Not so much by choice...but more for a lack of alternate choices. Some guys are playing on Mug'thol with the Combine crew. Ya I know, how fucked up that our crews are sharing a tag again, but we've all matured in the last few years and most of us don't have any idea of the drama that happened what....8+ years ago?! I know I wasn't around then. Others are playing with the BG9 crew on Blackrock. Vhell had an awesome idea to bring all of the egos together on a single server, vent is incredible. Lawl, dude nt gg lawl fags, nt nt. But anyways, a couple others are playing Warhammer, some are kicking around in Global Agenda casually, but like I said there isn't much of a focus at this time.

So what's on the horizon, SW:ToR is probably what we're most anticipating. But I think a lot of us are ready to be let down. It's not so much a jaded bitterness from everything else we've played, but more that we know the direction of the game isn't specifically what we desire. That doesn't mean it won't be incredible, and if it plays like KotoR in multiplayer with continuous content updates, then I'd say a lot of us will play it casually until there is a better option. I think I can speak for a lot of us, when I say our hearts are set much further down the road though. A competitive setting without all the fluff on the way to cap. There's been talks of interest in Tera, FFXIVXIVXIVXX, and BC2...but really no one is ready to buy into anything at this point. What about you? If you know of something that looks incredible on a competitive pvp front, please stop in and give us the heads up. I'll apologize in advance for the responses I'm sure you'll get.

Dongs