Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 1Offi

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Alpha Omega MonthlyIssue 2 April 2010 clanao.com

Interviewwith Blue

AO Euro TeamSeason 7 Report

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 2

Table of Contents

Editorial

Hey everyone,

Whether you’re from the community or not, thanks for reading the second issue of the Alpha Omega Newsletter (now renamed to the Alpha Omega Monthly). To be honest, when I wrote the first issue (if that’s what you want to call it) I did not expect it to get this far. Thanks go to the support of this dedicated staff and our (hopefully) friendly readership; without you guys, this would never have hap-pened.

We are super excited to publish this issue - the month of April has been an exciting one. Filled with content generated by Alpha Omega clan members, this is a truly astonishing accomplishment by everyone on board the AOM.

Thanks again!

ScaldingHotSoup

Staff

EditorScaldingHotSoup

Co-EditorKratos

Layout & DesignKratos

WritersKing of KoopasKratosLeetScaldingHotSoupSnoozer

Quality AssuranceCrowe T. RobotLordvader

Year one, number 2, April 2010For more information please visit us at Clanao.comRemarks and/or questions can beemailed to the following address: alphaomegamonthly@gmail.com

Interview with Blue

Leet’s Column

AO Euro Team

Player of the Month

Screenshots

Editor’s Note

Creator of cp_orange_final

CD Projekt’s The Witcher

Reporting for duty

Player of the Month

Most epic ingame screenies

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P. 3

P. 7

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 3

This month’s featured member is Blue, a long-time Alpha Omega member and the creator of the popular map cp_orange_final.

Hi Blue, it’s a pleasure to have you here for the interview! So how long have you been in the clan, and how did you find Alpha Omega?

Well, I found AO about two years ago. I actually won the Orange box in a raffle at work, so after playing half life and portal, I decided to see what TF2 was all about. I didn’t care too much for a lot of the maps I found, but one or two were a lot of fun. The servers with the lowest ping hosting those maps just hap-pened to be AO servers.

What did you do before you joined here?

Not a whole lot, believe it or not. Years ago when I was a teenager I was part of a Descent 3 clan that absorbed almost all my time, but before i was 20 I stopped play-ing with them and didn’t pick up games again until winning that raffle at work. I still played little games here and there, but es-sentially that was 4 years of non-gaming all together. It is interest-ing because I often wonder what things would be like if I lost (that raffle).

Things would certainly be differ-ent around here, that’s for sure! :)

And now for TF2 stuff - what’s your favorite class?

Spy, most definitely spy. Hunting down targets like a predator stalk-ing prey by swooping in for the kill when they least expect it - that’s truly gratifying. Also, most people don’t like to die, but for some reason they REALLY don’t like to be backstabbed. This makes it so much more delectable.

As spy (or any other class for that matter), is there anything you REALLY HATE?

Not a whole lot, really. I’ve learned to kind of deal with the only class designed to grief spies (pyros) and even if I can’t kill them as easy as everyone else, I know how to out-think them or simply stay away. The one thing that does bother me though is when I join a server and see 3+ spies already on the team I pick. Nothing makes things harder to be a spy than already having other spies freaking out the other team. When the entire enemy team is looking for another spy, you don’t have much opportunity to catch them off guard. In those cases I usually go soldier or engi-neer, since it really isn’t worth it.

Listen up folks, sounds like we’re getting some insider tips here - so if you had to give one tip to bud-ding spies, what would you say?

Despite the lure of the cloak and dagger, if you play Orange like myself, stick to the deadringer or the default watch. It may feel easier to stalk around the large map unseen, but you really don’t do anything 90% of the time. You can reach a shed from the tower with a full deadringer charge and grab enough metal in the shed to instantly refill your cloak. You just have to keep in mind that you are still a part of a team and going AFK while on some random barrel with cloak and dagger hurts your team more then it helps them.

I’ve heard about some spying competitions - what are those?

Well a while back we had a Spy Vs Spy Tournement where we had players use all default weapons and hunt each other on a full serv-er of their choice. It was a lot of fun but it was difficult to get people to actually show up during the time they agreed to play. I think we had to end it a draw because the final 2 players simply never showed up for their title match. Kind of dis-sapointing. I haven’t put together another tournement because of that, but for those who did come and play it was a hell of a lot of fun, and very challenging.

That sounds really cool! Moving on... >

Interview - By ScaldingHotSoup

Hunting down targets like a predator stalk-ing prey [...] that’s truly gratifying

“

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 4

To whom did you have to sell your soul to in order to get the Forum Moderator position? ...Or was it a punishment for your sins :P

Haha, well, I’m not sure. For a long time I was the level headed poster who would .. somewhat mediate conversations. I think you could see Paradise doing this now. After the collapse of the AO aristocracy, there were positions listed and I applied. I was fairly happy to get the job and didn’t get the “leader” tag to go along with it. I like be-ing able to help, but I dislike the disdain and jealousy that becomes focused on you by people who want the position over you. This is actually what lead to the aristoc-racy’s fall in the first place.

Wow - that goes into a whole separate interview - Myself and many other newer AOers aren’t super familiar with the going-ons of the past. Readers can definitely look forward to something like that in the future.

Oh it is a dark and stormy tale of politics and the like. I’ll be happy to share my memories of it later if you are interested.

Awesome! But wait a minute, let me get this straight. You’re a Fo-rum Moderator, Mapper extraor-dinaire, Tournament Organizer, Professional painter, Philosopher, Buddhist, and Olympic Underwa-ter Basket Weaving Gold Medalist of 2008. Have I left anything out?

Haha, well aside from that olympic thing that does encompass most of my life. Art, games and my girlfriend really do fill my days.

Trust me, I can relate, I think in a good way.

Haha good! We’re lucky if we can.

You really have contributed enor-mously to AO’s community, and I’m pretty sure that I can thank you on behalf of all of us!

Hey it’s my pleasure. I really like the AO community, it really re-minds me of my old Descent 3 clan in all the good ways. So I think because of that I want to see it flourish. I try to help in the little manner I can.

Or not so little manner, from our point of view. Speaking of which, how did you get into mapping, and what’s the hardest thing about it?

Growing up, if there was one thing I loved, it was video games. My first game system happened to be a Sega Genesis, simply because my father liked the way the little blue hedgehog looked over the little plumber. Anyhow, I played a lot, maybe too much. My father, told me “If you like it so much, why don’t you make a game?” - that kind of stuck with me. I picked up descent 3 at the age of 13 and im-mediately tried my hand at build-ing maps for the game. After about 5 years of play time and experi-

menting with maps, I had half a dozen popularmaps under my belt, two or three game modes and a slew of custom stuff uploaded to the descent 3 community. Anyhow, when I found TF2 I rediscovered the passion for gaming and that deep seeded thought of “If you like it so much, make it” which really translated over time to “make it better” and I found myself in Valve’s editor Ham-mer trying to do what I knew. I will say though, the Source engine is very deep and rich, and even with my last map being released i was sitting and watching video tutorials on things I had never used before. This even after making half a dozen maps for tf2 and one game mode.

Well, it’s got to have a payoff somewhere. What’s the coolest experience that it has given you?

To be honest, the best part of it is the player’s feedback. I’m not com-petitive enough to want to be #1 on the server or do competition, so I really always loved the adoration that comes with building some-thing that people really like from something they already love.

Orange *is* pretty awesome

Haha thats the feedback that I built for! >

If you like it so much, why don’t you make a game? “

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 5

Oh yeah - what’s your favorite map? *thinks we know the answer*

Yea that might be obvious, but Or-ange. Actually, it was the only map I liked when I first played TF2 be-cause Valve maps, I felt, were too claustrophobic. Even now I can’t enjoy a valve map as much be-cause I feel like I’m being boxed in. Other then Orange though I think I actually play Surf the most. Its big and wide open, but I never could get the hang of surfing perfectly so it is still a challenge for me to get through the ramp course.

Yeah - surf has never been my strong suit. I usually end up jail-camping because I get tired of the endless track o.o

I think thats half the fun!

Ha, yup :) You’ve said you’re re-tired, and understandably so. But if you did get back into mapping, what would you do first?

I think it will be some time until I pick up the hammer again, simply approaching my senior year of college. However, if you see some-thing from me it will be developed fairly incognito. I’ll keep my friend’s list offline while I work so it will be a bigger surprise. After finishing Orange, I had ideas for a sequal to the map (a true sequal, not an up-date) that I thought would be fun, but I’ve only theorized a few things while working in my studio on classwork. No hints on that, but if I do end up picking up that project you won’t hear about it until a beta is ready. Maybe I’ll do something for Xmas or such. Who knows. Other then that, all that stops me from mapping is really time.

We’ll make sure to look for hints that you’re working, Blue maps are always anticipated around here!

Haha, well I would keep an eye out passively, just don’t bombard me everyday with questions about it ;)

And last, but not least - what’s your favorite part about AO?

Thats a tough question. I would say the best part of our community is that people who are apart of it. Our servers are great with custom maps and source mod, but chat-ting it up with everyone everyday is what keeps me truly interested and active. Good leadership attracts good members, and i think we are blessed to have both in AO.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to talk with us!

Anytime! Catch you in-game :) <

Name: cp_orange_final

Author: Blue

IP: 66.90.103.192:27028

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 6

Column - By LeetCD Projekt’s The Witcher

You’re Geralt of Rivia, a badass monster-hunter with a huge blade that is perfect for lopping off body parts. Imagine blending the badas-sery of Blade the vampire hunter and the swordsmanship of Inigo Montoya. He’s that awesome. Not only that, but due to the series of biological enhancements to make him superhuman, he also has no hue in his skin. This semi-albinoism gives you the local name of White Wolf.

The story begins with you at the Witcher “headquarters”, so to speak. You talk to some of the other Witchers and fumble around with the controls for a while until you get the hang of the movement. There are quite a few camera angles to screw around with, the most useful being third person due to the wider field of view.

Once you have this down, you find out that you’ve supposedly been killed by an angry anti-mutant mob a bit of time back in the story. You’ve forgotten everything about yourself, and you spend the entire game connecting clues to your past to find the last surviving Witcher other than yourself.

“How does the game play”, you ask? For the pesky humans who attack you, you’ve got a sword. Swapping between fast, group and strong modes, you must swap fighting styles to properly adapt to the current foe (or foes) at hand.

Some bigger enemies require you to use the strong style, lest you want to face a prolonged or even impossible battle. Others force you to change to the quick style or else you probably won’t even hit the foe. Finally, group is for a lot of weaker monsters, and the fighting is pretty epic since Gerald can do sweeping sword arcs like no man ever could.

More often than not, you’ll come face to face with a creature straight out of the sewers of Florida. And I don’t mean gators. For these non-human enemies, you’ll want to swap to your silver blade. The fighting styles are the same as the steel sword. This game takes a bit of skill when fighting; you have to actually click for each stage of the attack, or else you’ll be hitting with your weakest regular one-hit attack. If you complete a combo, you’ll do a sweet special move that does massive damage and will often kill the foe.

The game is broken up into Acts, like a play. A really, really long play. I mean this thing has seven acts, and after about 100 hours of gameplay, I’m still on Act IV. So, for those of you who like a long RPG game that you can sink your teeth into, this is the one. Like any good RPG, it has level up mechanics, skills of differing power (requir-ing different levels of skill points, namely copper, silver and gold) and a fairly free environment.

Obviously I couldn’t forget alcohol: there’s a lot of it in this game. Nor-mally, you can just drink alcohol for giggles and stumble around town. Eventually you become drunk, which is no fun since you move slow and swing like a inebriated goose. Instead, there are skills that improve your combat while drunk. How cool is that? Go, drunken monkey fist style!

Magic is a gimmick in this game. You *can* level up your magic skill tree, but your sword, although weaker than magic, doesn’t re-quire an energy bar and can usu-ally get the job done all the same. True, it’s fun to blow stuff up with a giant fireball or turn your ene-mies against themselves, but those are just gimmicky reasons to use badly “point-curved” spells. Just stick to lopping off limbs.

The Witcher shouldn’t be over-looked. Although it is long and the extended edition (which is the one everyone should find) is quite large at about 8 gigabytes, I assure you it will be well worth your while.

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 7

After some time playing pub, to-gether with Z4zaa, Kingcornholio, Pluisje, Reshooted, St!nger, Ilaro and SPYderpig we started a com-petitive group called the AO Euro Team. I thought it would be nice to play competitive with a bunch of friends, and it turned out to be awesome. After 6 weeks Kratos, Skyweb and Sexbott (and 1 month later our one and only Belgian player, Brainmaster) all joined the team! We started to play pcw’s (Pickup Clan Wars). We discovered our classes, and made a strong team-line up. We are currently signed in at ETF2L (European Team Fortress 2 League) and we just finished our first season (season 7) in pool 6B.

With tough competition from teams like F*ck Off Team, Myneri-an Magnetic’s and Gathering of Tweakers Team 2, we probably had the hardest pool. We did not play poorly as a team, but sometimes we didn’t have the best line-up all

the time. That was because some people just have other things to do which can be more important than TF2. We won 2, drew 1 and lost 6 matches. 2 of the 6 matches we lost, we played a draw on 2 maps. Our losses were all very close - we just missed certain opportunities at crucial moments, which wasn’t a good thing. But hey, what do you expect from a team that’s play-ing their first season, and is in the toughest pool? We finished 8th place out of 12 teams.

I enjoyed this season a lot. We are just a bunch of guys who like a laugh and who aren’t scared to

lose. We fought through season 7, maybe not with the best scores, but we did all we could and that was enough for us. At The Real-ity X (LAN) we managed to finish 2nd out of 6 teams. We will be back next season with a stronger line-up and we will focus more on training maps which we never play, and which are official maps in the league. We now have a mentor, named The Pledge. He is currently playing in division 3 and he might move up to division 2. But remem-ber, it’s also just about the fun. We grew a lot as a team, and I think we might be able to play division 5 in the future. Unfortunately, Sky-web is leaving our team, because he wants to play more seriously. We might need more people, so if you are Dutch and looking for a team, you can always message one of us.

Regards, Snoozer.

AO Euro Team -By Snoozer

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 8

Players of the Month|ÅΩ| viper^Viper. Just uttering his name in Egypt evokes an aura of fear and respect. And not without reason. By playing Egypt for an accumulated 588 hours, Viper has placed an indelible mark on the gameplay of the server. With a 4.75+ k:d ratio as Demoman, Soldier, Sniper, Spy, and Heavy, Viper can fill any niche required in a game, though typically he sticks to playing Demoman. If you pair Viper with MissE as medic, you have a near-unstoppable combo that invariably tops the MVP list. Fun fact: over the past month, Viper has dominated 1,192 times. He has been dominated a mere 20. Fear the Viper.

Statistics:Ratio (k:d): 5.63*MVPs: 285*Career Awards: 278Players that have a positive k:d against Viper: 4*Players that Viper has a positive k:d against: 578*Dominations: 1,192*12+ Kill streaks: 165*Power Level: Over 9,000

* indicates over the last 30 days

|ÅΩ| asdafA danger exists that slinks among the shadows of Orange, seen only before the killing blow. A seem-ingly friendly Medic stands on top of a ramp, and you approach without caution. Mystifyingly, the Medic has jumped over you, and a split second later, without even enough time to comprehend that in fact, the Medic was a spy, you are dead. As-daf’s knife has found its way into many a back, and his near-immaculate aim with the rocket launcher has given him global Orange recognition. Oh, and he’s ranked #1 in the Orange rankings at a whop-ping 1,279,773 points: what a beast! And, to top off that Sandvich Sundae, he’ll be representing Team Orange as Soldier for the inter-server tournament. Watch your back - if you can!

Statistics:k/d ratio: 2.33*Time on Orange: 718 hoursAirshot rocket kills: 1272*Kills: 56,116Career Awards: 730Backstabs: 676*Caused ragequits: Too many to count

* indicates over the last 30 days

Alpha Omega MonthlyApril 2010 9Screenshots - By King of Koopas

It’s the look on the heavy’s face that makes this epic. Thanks to ThufirHawat for taking this one.

With Valve’s newest update the engy can build multiple sentries. It was only a matter of time...

Displayed here are the most epic screenshotsfound on the internet or sent in by readers. Since I forgot to put down everyone’s name, thanks to whoever took all the screenshots and all credit goes to them.Do you have an epic in-game screenshot? Please mail it to:alphaomegamonthly@gmail.comAll games are allowed!

Pure fucking terror!Thanks to burn_your_wings for posting this one!