SAF_Biffa

Still in fairly rough shape but I've been on the Beta since June, the first ever online group I joined was actually a Mechwarrior clan back in 98 so I've always had a soft spot for anything Mechwarrior related. Mechwarrior is Free to Play but with a non- Pay to Win element that involves buying gear that you might not have the time to grind for. http://mwomercs.com/ Biffa starts a group (omg no!) I'm starting up a group which is the first time I've tried this since the SAF days, but I'm not going SAF/TUG whatever so we can stay in Canon and be part of House Liao and stay true to the Battletech universe. It's a small group at the moment 4-6 but all old players who can be trusted not to be plebs, thought of you guys not coz you're old ofc but because like me the mentality is 'maturer'. Would love to grow it maybe under the TUG umbrella, not sure how Beaver feels about the game or starting up a small group without the TUG tag, dunno but if you're into the game or just like very noisy smashy robots killing one another then this will fill your boots. If there was enough interest here then maybe we could start up a warrior house/mercenaries and switch to TUG as a prefix since we wouldn't have to be 'Canon' then, don't know, but at the moment we're too small to be independant of the main house. http://www.houseliao.com/forum/index.php?/forum/39-blackwind-lancers/ The Blackwind Lancers The Lancers interested me from the table top days back in erm late 70s...or early 80's can't remember but anyway they have a fascinating history. Caught between the Capellan/House Liao empire and the Federated Suns these guys were faced with Annihilation during the succession wars, some of their choices including using nuclear weapons made them very unpopular but the general outline is basically a fated story of love and loyalty. Under the lovestruck but very mad Warner Doles these guys eventually became Elite pilots but due to their history and unpredictability they rarely made many friends. For the purists who are roleplayers we are basically a plague on their house, which I find fun because I'm not really a roleplayer or take much of that seriously. MWO starts it's timeframe at 3050 by that time the Lancers are part of the ill fated St Ives Compact, they've already lost the 1st Battalion in a suicidal defence of Andre. When community warfare finally takes off in the coming months there will be a point to fighting on all these battlefields, the other two Battalions might be NPC so our little group of players will be basically the support elements of the survivors from the 1st. If that's not the case then the 2nd will be Euro players and the 3rd will be North America. Anyway this is where we take up the story, the backstory is explained in this video I knocked out (using a holiday in Lanzarotte) : If you guys can knock up a TUG lance and come and fight with us that would rock also, well Mr Wizard did show some interest initially and I'm hoping he'd like to start up a Euro lance I already have some recruits that he can push around. We have comms both within the house and our own but at present we have no private forums (hint). Due to my EVE links as a Goon we have a certain position already within the house that is both a blessing and a hinderence but heck that makes life interesting too. So download the game it's free and see what you thinkg, would love to hook up with some of you guys and have a few laughs, pm me for any further details like comms etc.

Hey! I waited like a patient puppy and finally got this game, no not 30quid but 9! At the moment on amazon it's just £7.49, omg that's almost what a pint costs nowadays! You can log in and play and burn the odd ten minutes or so and it really is as awesome as I thot, the single player story is great tho a few too many cut scenes and a very linear but fun, the multiplayer is a bit quiet but usually there's between 6-30 ppl on which is fine, had a lot of laughs really recommend it. It seems I've still got a few of the ol skills been playing it a week and already pwn. Would love to stick a shotgun in Wizards face for old time sake!

Hey you Tuggers, I see many of you are pretty annoyed regards dedicated servers. Sad to say that rather than an oversight or it'll be added later it seems this is the way of things for the foreseeable future for PC gamers. Alarmed about this myself, since I'm obviously still stuck in the 90's, I've done a bit of research and spoken to a few of my own contacts and I'm afraid the news isnt good. Spotted here on your forums 'Should we keep our dedicated server??' poll, so I decided to share my thoughts. We all know the growing list of great FPS's that are being affected by the... dedicated servers/game browsers as long as they are totaly controlled by the publisher, you can host from your own PC but we all know that it isn't very desirable or practical! This frustrating policy from publishers and developers isn't as widely discussed as you would hope, forum rants and petitions have been ignored or not even mentioned by the main stream gaming websites. Without sounding cyinical a quick bit of thought makes it obvious why, most of these sites also promote/review console games from the usual you know whos. With PC gamers like ourselves accounting for less than 15% of the gaming market, the original GRAW aka cancellation of GR2 for the PC should have given us apt warning, I think like me we all hoped that it was a silly blip, it wasn't. We all know the details about the PC/Console 'War', I'm not going to mention it just to say that I think we must face facts and admit that this battle was lost a long time ago, just some of us still don't want to accept it (me neither). Like our views we count for shit (oops!) but why has it happened and what are the implications? As we know most dedicated servers put the players in control either because they supported a provider or directly paid for it themselves, they could use the vanilla version of the original game and then add mods depending on how much their members enjoyed them, other business's sprung up supporting the demand and profitted from it, some modders became game producers or atleast showed companies just how good a product they could have made, at the time we all thought we were adding value. Every publisher has enviously watched companies like Blizzard, CPP etc make fortunes with non-modable, rigid, developer owned server game systems with no options, fee based take it or leave it, updating things only when subscriptions start to drop or the content starts to look blatantly tired. The key is money, that's obvious, but the brutal truth is that we are all suppose to accept the way things are and spend all of our gaming money on them, even indie developers blindly still reliant on the big boys tools to produce games will soon have to toe the line and either go bust, get taken over or somehow be granted a license by the big boys club to produce anything that we will ever be allowed to see. It is hard enough already for anything original to be published by anybody new in the business and without a platform other than a PC even doing a demo is dead in the water. If the Evil Empire had got away with it even the PC would have been off limits unless they were 'approved'. Player control (dedicated servers) and community enterprise (modding) is now silenced, dedicated player owned servers (The birth places of creative game development) are no longer the wombs of democractic originality and creativity. What publisher wouldn't want control over every aspect of what we play and what we spent our time looking at? Extending a games life through modding doesn't profit them, there isn't enough control in that, they'd rather you went out and bought a new full priced game, even an expansion doesn't usually interest their shareholders. The coven that is made up of the main corporations have closed ranks, any developer that produces a PC only game is left facing oblivion and can only hope to survive outside the gang and has to be content with niche markets and even more niche sales figures, but once they sucum and agree to produce their title for console they are instantly 'redirected' away from the PC communities. A few years ago I wrote a 17,000 word thesis entitled 'Controlling Creaitivity in the N+ Age' for Psych and his University, N+ meaning after the Net not the grade it recieved (though that would have been something!), what I wrote then spelt out what has since happened to creativity in gaming. I primarily used Amazon.com's control over what authors write as my main example to illustrate what will and has now become of gaming. The sad facts are that we are no longer allowed to tinker with a product we are expected to pay and accept it as it is, this means that soon everything will be produced for the lowest (most popular and so profitable) denominator i.e. an instant gratification geared 14 year old spoilt brat with the mind and inventiveness of an 8 year old. As a modder and a gamer I'm finding it really hard to attach myself to any great game, simply because for a while now there hasn't been one, certainly not anything comparable with GR or Op Flash with their openness and longetivity. The Wii, DSlite etc has broken down the reistance to mindless computer gaming for the rest of society, I now find it strange that the original supporters of gaming (PC Users) remain the last (and individually more profitable) target that they are now aiming to breakdown. Cutting out our game choices on dedicated servers is part of a thorough plan to strangle the market and our options, forcing us to accept what is ported or conform and meekly go console. So let's say everybody went console, imagine a clan website like this one where if the strangulation continues you would have to seek approval to discuss their game on your forums, post something bad or upload an unapproved screen shot and be banned from every game server? It's all quite possible and where would that leave gaming communities like this one? In my original thesis I suggested ways around this crisis for those of us who like to think a bit for ourselves. As a gamer, artist and historian I have my own views but this post is long enough already (typical me long windy posting, I know), but I would be fascinated by what you guys think (especially you older ones) and what you think can be done about it? What about any further impacts on PC communities, modding, tournaments or even your interest now in playing games at all? Article of interest All the best, Biffa Note: Sorry for length and any typos, my spell checker doesnt work for some reason.

Whilst waiting for OPFlashDR to be 'improved' and a few more bugs to be sorted from ArmaII I noticed this little puppy which I missed. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Gamespot There's a demo too, which is short but sooo much fun, I've just played it, was shocked how good it is. Note there's a silly firewall problem when you first play it, you can't set the permissions with an alt tab so it worked for me by switching my fw off till it loaded up. The nice thing about discovering this gem late is.... Game are selling it as part of a 2 games for £25 offer, so for 12.50 you're getting a great game. I haven't played multiplayer but I've read that it's good too. Anyone interested or has any other opinions?

surfer "I look it this way: if OF2 be a better game at least I will be trained to play it by gaining experience in arma2 as both will be very close in its behavior." If only! Found this quote and remembered how much I looked forward to this game a few months ago too. I think the best advice is to hold with OPFDR for a couple of patches and see, otherwise I honestly think this little battle has been won by Arma.

WTH, I mean wtf, come on what is it with this pile of mush? You Tuggers here must have a lot of pent up anger about this awful game, I'm suprised you havent ripped into it far more on these forums, the only patch that will fix this game is gonna be like 800meg to download to fix everything that I can see is wrong with it. I really don't honestly know where to start with it, if I just say that it is totally terrible and just list it's good points because everything else about it sucks: -Single player campaign was ok but too damn short. -Visually it's looks great. -AI seemed smart...sometimes. -Map as much as you get to see looks great. That's pretty much it, I bought it on the day for the full whacking £34.99 and feel totally ripped off. Now I know the world's changed a lot for the worse since the original Operation Flash came out but I really had put a lot of hope into this game due to it's history. Normally modding would be the answer but it appears to have so many limitations that I doubt if it savable, unless you just use the game for creating small op simple missions. Anyway see you online, fingers crossed for dedicated servers, I might actually find some of you out there.

Wherever you are at the moment, whatever the hell you are doing... 41 woot, now that's old. I only realised because a message appeared on the Surge Forums, lol.

Not that I condone any form of drug taking but I reckon this movie is one of the best game movies ever, (and I've seen a few) made me laugh, great song too, so if you don't know who Afroman is or garrys mod or just fancy looking at something to put a smile on your face! Hope you're all good! Biffa/Geoff

Well Wiz there's a big battle going on at the moment in Northampton and you're gonna miss that and it's right by your place. No, not a drive-by! http://www.battleofnaseby2008.com/Main%20Page.html I'm up for paintballing just as long as it's not too close to September...new sprog arrives...besides it would be great to meet some old faces...older faces.

Thanks guys! Working from home doing stuff can be a bit tough regards encouragment and feedback. On the kid count meter Wiz is still the daddy with 4! And sorry JJUK last I heard they're non returnable.

Well this is the reason why I haven't been on much recently~ http://www.preciouscreative.com/ Got to find some way to pay for all these new games. It's only basic I'm no web Beav but I hope you like my art. Now I promise to look at Bully's websites

Why was GR1 so damn good? I miss it so much. JJUK is totally right about CoD4, remember with GR you did actually get better the more you played, infact you got worse if you went on holiday! A lot of games and CoD4 is another example it's about maps, if you know the map and it fits your style then you get a high score, if you don't then you wont! The score works like pinball, you get 5 kills then it acts like a multiplier, aka, air strikes, helis. This makes big gaps in individual players scores, I think its to try to incentivise players to stay alive and not kill-die-kill-die, but it doesn't seem to work. CoD4 is another pot noodle of an FPS, need a fix of run and gun, die and spawn mayhem then pick it up. It's addictive and fun for now, the single player campaign is the best bit imho. Also there is noway I'm gonna give my details etc and pay for an official map pack. Jumping on the MMORPG's money bandwagon for a game that has no real meat in it is ftl. If it's not going to be Fuel then fingers crossed for Flashpoint. For me atm single player F.E.A.R is ftw.

I drove 20 miles to the nearest Game to buy it, held onto the tin packaging for about 10mins suddenly put it back on the shelf and then picked up Fear Gold Edition and Civ IV for 25quid... Fear looks amazing (reminds me of some very old games I use to play and ofc AVP) and I've always wanted Civ IV, I promise to go back to the shop soon and get Fuel, maybe when you guys say it's playing ok with the latest patch.

Well I was pretty sure Wiz wouldn't figure it out quickly, I was gonna make my name FAS_Affib to give him a bit more to go on, lol! Who wins the prize? Bought the game on Saturday and messed about on lots of dif servers getting the ranks then popped over to your server on Sunday... objective complete, who do u think I killed with my first ever bullet on a TuG server??? Chances of that must have been pretty slim to get Wiz in my first second after spawning on the map! Fate rofl. Guess I would have got really pwned if Id joined it as a rookie rank with no perks, still getting pwned but maybe not so bad. Great to play a game and relax tbh but I'm really itching to mod, would rather mod a game that you guys are gonna settle on, is Cod4 gonna be home for a while? You TuGs have a habit of moving on pretty quickly. With so much wall penertration fire, wall hacks are gonna rule in this game, also the perks make it hard to detect cheats, Punk is about as reliable as ever I see. After it was bought out from gamers I really hope they don't sell our trust in it, not that there's much to trust. I'm planning to do a mod around the Franco-vietnam war especially the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, anyone interested or anyone read what I can honestly say is one of the best war books ever (and I've read thousands), it's called The Last Valley by Martin Windrow? I'd go so far as to say I'd refund your money if you don't think it's great. Really want to find a game that fits, hoping CoD4 would be it, but maybe not? I'm out of touch regards FPS's so no idea. Anyway great game, great server, having fun...again!

I read that for quite a while, then my hair started to fall out. Compared to OpFlash and GR/Ogor editing this is a nightmare. If they want the games to last and be taken up by the modding community then it's best not to make things so damn hard. I tried with GRAW a longtime ago and just thought nowai. Technical head, Art head, Tactical head, creative head and someone with a lot of spare time is a pretty rare beast, then there's movie making for intros, ballistic knowledge, writing, 3d modelling, texturing blah...

Nice one Snowy! Had a lot of problems finding the TuG server tbh. Had to use console connect since for some reason it never showed up using in-game browser EVER! Thought it was down or something or my filters were messed up. FYI, press key ~ then type 'connect 193.93.46.64:28960'

Thanks for the nice welcome. I will, well not own you guys but come and join you online and check this game out. I'm actually hoping to do some more modding, but games unless they're classics just come and go so quickly. Been playing some CoD UO, can't believe so many still play it online, more amazingly I can't believe I was actually half way up the score sheets! Hoping CoD4 won't feel to different...I'll try and get it tomorrow. Installed OpFlash, Armed A and almost GR...but not quite.

Erm, to answer your question Snow. SAF, UnDyingUK gets SAF into Wow, some of SAF doesn't like Wow, those that do become addicted, SAF having a lot of international players and Wow has regional servers so ppl lose touch, SAF guild in Wow sucks, Brat, Grog, UD and others stop playing, then there's three left Biffa, Booz, Wizard. They join a new guild called Velocity who merge with another guild called Fear&Loathing, guild is called CoreFusion, 100 members or so and I'm the GM, we become a damn top European guild. Playing time is crazy 5x5 hour raids a week plus. I left last Tuesday 18th, I had a silly arguement with somebody and just thought wtf am I stressing over this, this isn't fun. Hey let's stop playing this stupid game. 'Sun Dawns' etc etc. Cold Turkey. Little did I know that mr Sneaky had come over here, wondered where he had been, I've been making excuses for him for months now. Something about cleaning hid machine and coffee spilling?? It was a fluke how I found the site (via Teamspeak), since I'd done a reformat and had lost tons of stuff. Been playing CoD2, installed it tonight which is also weird...CoD4 I guess for some TUG ownage.

"OMG Whiz what have you done" My words exactly Snowy! It's a disgrace, where's the loyalty? After helping him get all those Wow epics and spending months abusing my position to stop him from being guildbooted. He joins the TuGs, omg, Wiz you're use to winning, how can you? Btw, hey guys.

TWL 4v4 - SAF v TUG (2-0, 2-0) last nights match, I wasn't in it but our scratch squad seemed to have played well. SAF really want to get to it's 100th match and hopefully at the no1 spot by then. 16 hours to report your loss, unless you have a complaint this is way too long to leave it. It's preventing us from challenging for one of the two top spots, as our allies we would be grateful if you could report it. I hate having to ask, but please

Wiz and I we're invited to Preview Lockdown in London this weekend and produce an article for gr.net/agr-s.net. The serious article is here: Lockdown Preview But the alternative SAF photo article feature's Wizzy and his adventures on his big day out in the city: I think you now have to join our forums to view this post but I believe you'll find it's worth it. The title of the thread is 'Wizzy's Big Day Out (Lockdown, London)' it's in 'SAF General' under 'Pic Posts'. You can find our forums here: SAF Forums

As the server says, 'Our Server Our Rules'. Before we ban or kick somebody whoever does it always asks around the rest of the players. On this occassion several of us were suspicious, I for one saw two impossible kills which may be explained simply by lag. Also Ground you're obviously no noob so you'll appreciate that when you run a server you get an awful number of cheats and idiots and if you discussed each one each time and took screens and studied them in detail then that's all you would be doing all night. It's a 50/50 call. On reflection there are very few cheats who would have the neck to complain on the forums of another clans forums after being booted from their server. So in your case, then it is more likely to be down to lag. The impossible kills that I refered to and experienced involved you facing the other way shooting somebody else and then immediatley turning to line up on whichever corner I was about to sneak round even tho from the kill camera (which I studied each time) you hadn't even looked in that direction let alone made visual contact with me. One explanation is you know all the corners and turns on the map that people are likely to appear from but there were only a handful of us on the server at the time. I'm not sure. The logic is that nobody is a cheater unless there is absolute evidence, (nobody is calling you a cheater) so then by that logic, we can't get anybody off our own server unless we find a pile of evidence to confirm they're cheating and after a debate. Now I'm sure the TUG's will have a 'holier than thou' attitude to this but SAF have run servers far longer than the TUG's and know from experience that you have to make close calls, quickly when it comes to guests. The reason's are obvious but I personally would rather kick/ban an innocent player every once in a while by mistake than let our server become a free for all for every cheater and waster out there. Any rational and experience player out there would agree that players always favour servers that are monitored and protected. We at SAF don't run servers as popularity contests we run servers to play on and have fun. We won't be sending your ip to anybody or flamming you. Ground you should also look at peoples servers as homes. You wouldn't expect people to justify who they can and who they can't let into their own homes would you? If/when you owned your own home wouldn't it be your rules? It's nothing personal and if it was a 'bad call' then we at SAF are truly sorry. I would suggest that you find another server to display your 'mad fast reflexes' on since in our view if you are banned then you STAY banned. Besides if you're that good you don't want to be playing against noobs like us anyhow so go and find a server with players as good as you are. SAF_Biffa Co-Leader of SAF

Yup but Biffa just got the rest of CoD and Total War today so DoW won't be looked at much for a bit. I've added another fifty or so designs to the graphics page by the way. But as far as DoW is concerned I'm going to be a bit of Rock and go onto the next sweetie in the shop. DoW is staying on my machine because like Rise of Nations it's definetly worth a quickie multiplayer a couple of times a week. So stick with it but as far as tourney, we would just get the sht kicked out of us, even you UD.

This game is damn good not an amazing strategy game but a lot of fun nevertheless. To get the most out of it you need a good machine since a lot of the enjoyment is derived from the amazing graphics. It's a pot noodle of strategy games but a challenge all the same. Anyway I noticed that a really nice touch is being able to have your own banners and badges, I also noticed that there aren't that many available out there for download, so I decided to make some for us all. These designs are targa or .tga so they can be used for game like Ravenshield as armpatches and many many other games. Anyway here they are: Thought one of the TUG designs look good on the Orks (coz they're bad). Make sure after you choose a design that you adjust the colours to suit and create a unit in the 'paint army' option in the game. You can see the fantastic level of graphics and you can also see just how much detail you see in the game with a 2.2ghz+ machine. These arm patches are very complicated and are taken from Psych's and my avatars but despite the complexity they work in the game and don't effect performance as much as you would have thought. Here's a collection of some of the design's I've made: Here's the download: Bif's Badge and Banner designs I've also created a webpage so that I can add more designs and requests soon. Biffs DoW design page