Keepers of Chaos - BBz

Number 1 on World of Warcraft Rankings

Rak -=KoC=- — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 04:45:00 +0800

Character Ranking out of all 88 servers

Character Ranking on the Laughing Skull Server

- 1st Shaman level 60 of all 88 servers.
- 2nd Horde level 60 of all 88 servers.
- 3rd level 60 of all 88 servers.
- 1st level 60 of all the second wave of servers opening a couple days after retail.
- 1st level 60 of the Laughing Skull server with a 10 levels advance.

So many records and a few more I won't bother listing... and thats eventhough we were forced to change server 2 days after retail (due to Archimonde's instability) and started with 22 levels below other people on our server and up to 30 levels below people of other servers.

Yet none of these "leveling titles" were the real goal, the real goal was about being done with this insane leveling ASAP to be able to enjoy the rest of the game without any special pressure. I so hate leveling that going through a week and a half of hell provides me with the satisfaction of finally being done with it.

Big thanks to Denpxc who contributed a huge deal in allowing me to level this fast without totally compromising my RL/mental health ;)

So whats ahead now?

PvPing, helping my guildmates finish their leveling, doing instances when enough of them are level 60 aswell...

As you may have noticed while there were close to no BBz in the top 25 of the server a few days ago, more and more are getting there and some are getting the highest spots.

Pyros should most likely be the next to reach 60 enventhough he started 4 days after the server opened. Zjiv and Cookie aren't far behind and decay and flexx seem to be performing well aswell.

WoW is meant to be really starting at 60 and with the strong alliance opposition we have it should be fun.

I just hope the incoming pvp patch will fix all the issues with kill rewards/death penalty and pvp death respawning location. Else the game may grow boring real fast.

Keeping Banana Boyz small

Rak -=KoC=- — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 04:45:00 +0800

After reaching 100+ members a couple days after the guild was created, it was decided to cut the numbers down.

Anyone below 20 who was not previously voted in was booted. This sets a simple rule for new candidates to joining us: to apply to the guild you have to be 20+. Chances are this recruiting restriction will get higher as time passes.

Why not using the recruiting policy we used when we built Blood?

Well the answer is simple: because we can.

We had set Blood's recruiting policy based on two observations:

1/ AC had monarchies not guilds, and everyone could recruit making recruiting control close to impossible past a certain number of followers. In WoW, we have real control regarding who gets in/not since only officers can add people.

2/ In AC we were the underdog when we started and we noticed that no matter how much we'd win our fights, if the enemy kept coming back with more people we'd end up loosing the fight in the long range. So we came up with a simple tactic: let your enemy swear to you, its one less opponent outnumbering you and one more guildmate helping you on the ground, making it an instant +2 bonus or should I say +3 since you'd also get his XP from the xp chain system... In WoW the situation is completly different. Only members of your faction can join you, so whether they are in your guild or not is irrelevant, they'll be on your side eitherway, plus you get no xp rewards from people sworn in... So that makes it much better to have a tight group of people you can count on than a huge mass of people.

As for the Zerg issue, I'm confident our recruiting policy will still provide us with enough numbers to be able to counter most of these events.

We could have stayed on Archimonde where Hordes were outnumbering the Alliance by 2 to 1. We instead chose a more competitive server for Hordes (Laughing Skull) where alliance has a stronger base than hordes. As time passes we welcome this choice more and more as it provides us with fun fights.

PvP urgently needs a fix though. There needs to be a reward on kills and a corresponding penalty on death. Along with that the respawn location of players needs to be changed when they die from pvp death. IE: they should respawn alive at their Inn tie, that would prevent people from coming back to the battle ground over and over within seconds. If Blizzard doesn't do that, the game will become pointless as it will be impossible to give a meaning to PvP nor to control specific zones.

Banana Boyz staying on Laughing Skull

Rak -=KoC=- — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 04:45:00 +0800

Well its now decided, Banana Boyz will be staying on the Laughing Skull Central PvP server where the action is.

There are several reasons to that.

First with Archimonde being down for two days, we already outleveled our level 20s from Archimonde (I'm 26 on Skull, was almost 22 on Archi).

But the main reason is Laughing Skull offers more competition. Several of the main pvp guilds are playing on this server.

Archimonde was already too weak in Alliance population and too strong in Horde but with most alliance guilds leaving for our Laughing Skull server or some east server, the Archimonde server simply won't be balanced enough.

Laughing Skull has a strong alliance presence, stronger than on the Horde side actually so it will be challenging for us.

There were 43 level 20 to 26 Alliance online this morning vs 33 hordes this morning (and I was the only 26 horde while there were 3 on the alliance side).

Main guild names I saw on Laughing skull on alliance side were The Regulators, Shadow Alliance, The Core, ... and on the horde side: BBz, The Mercs, UDL, DDH, Combine, ... Only a couple horde guilds seem to be considering coming back to Archimonde which really wouldn't help since Archimonde is in desparate need of alliance people. BBz, Mercs, DDH have already confirmed they will stay on skull and most 20+ alliances I polled with my other account told me they were staying aswell.

It should offer us some nice fights. The total population is more and more often in high and I just hope we won't end up having queues like all the other servers due to the raise in popularity of the server. With wow having sold out and made 200 000 accounts in a couple days, its likely that the population playing wow should be multiplied by 2 or 3 by the end of December so population should be pretty tight on all servers as day pass.

On a side note we have registered "Banana Boyz" on Laughing Skull and just registered "The Banana Boyz" on Archimonde as a backup. That should mean these names are permanently reserved on the whole Central PvP zone.

Archimonde server down

Rak -=KoC=- — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 04:45:00 +0800

Blizzard has just added 34 new servers tonight and taken down Archimonde and 3 other servers for 24 to 48 hours.

Not knowing in which shape Archimonde will be when it comes back, we have decided to reroll on the Laughing Skull Central PvP server which came up a few hours ago. Several other important guilds also made that choice. The server population is Mid so its all good.

Theres 90% chances we'll be back on Archimonde but we're preparing the possibility that we may not be able to (ie: more than 2 days down time and still huge problems to get ig).

Banana Boyz Website Opening

Rak -=KoC=- — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 04:45:00 +0000

Banana Boyz (BBz) are on their way back in the realm of online gaming.

Stay tuned as more info will be revealed in the upcoming weeks.

For now you can bookmark BBz website which is still under construction:

http://www.bbzguild.com