Clear! *bzzmp*

Good news and bad news. The good news is that the reason this blog haven't been updated lately is because the project has been very slow. You can only do that much with a four-man team, and we haven't got enough people to scrounge up more than that. How is that good news? I've found more people.

The bad news is that these new lads aren't really the most interesting bunch of the lot. Nevermind that it took me several DAYS of replacements-hunting to find a few lost souls, most of them hasn't answered me for several days or suddenly remember that the summer break is coming to an end and that "I sorta forgot that, and now I know I haven't got the time". I've found two guys, Punkbuster92 and LoteZ that have been active enough to actually start the game. On the contrary, I've booted out DoGGo, uWiSH and Zorko for inactivity. I actually found Bravo, the poor fella had had some MSN-problems and didn't knew he could write an email or something notifying me. Well, we got his game sorted out but that was 2 days ago and I haven't seen him since...

And while this project is about fighting prejudice, the FragBite community where I recruit most of the people from, isn't really helping out. I am safe to say that my thread is one of the few, few threads that are actually interesting - yet STILL it keeps getting bumped off the first page within thirty seconds by threads like "What is your prefered sex style?" (and I fecking swear, 90% of those answering are virgins), "Look at this spider I found in my room!", "How do you style your hair?", not to mention the ever-so-intruiging-read "Most Beautiful Female Name" with over 3500 answers. What are they going to do with 3500 posts, discuss how the modern excess of Emmas affect the global market?

But today we actually got the stuff going. I taught LoteZ the basics, as well as Punkbuster92. LoteZ seemed pretty much uninterested, let's see what I can do about that. Punkbuster92 was pretty into it, but didn't have time to stay before we had an Op which was a shame actually. Well, we had one, which was just me and him but that wasn't a 'real' Op, just to show him how everything works. I got whacked by the artillery though and he made it home safe in one piece by piloting the chopper which I taught him earlier. Good stuff.

After that we had a few Ops, h3adache, Quicky and Ices being the players. A raid on a fuel depot went... crap, and it was about then I decided to cripple the enemy artillery a LOT as it simply wasn't fun getting cut up by artillery every bloody time you faced some Russians. They're smart enough as they are, the buggers got reinforcements scripts and the lot. Can barely take a piss in the enemy territory without getting overwhelmed by a platoon of mechanized infantry. On the picture, h3adache being picked up by Ices in the hkp9, after throwing a smoke to signal.

After the fuel depot raid we went over to practise interaction between different elements. The objective was to escort a Tgb1314 (Medic-truck) cross enemy territory. A hkp9 in the skies acting as eyes and a Tgb1111 armed with a GRSP (think Humvee with a Mk19 GL) as ground support. It went shit, as we got ambushed, and ambushed several times in a row. After a few tries I changed places with Ices as aerial scout and after that it went really well. They managed to get there in one piece with the Tgb1314, although the server crashed during the return. I was mighty impressed by how they acted against two Russian squads without me interfering. I was just observing them, giving each other cover fire and performing flanking attacks. Very well executed. On the right picture, h3adache with the Ksp90 (M249) giving covering fire to the flanking Ices and Quicky.

Once the server was back up we just decided to have a blast. I let them try out a jet fighter each in turn while I instructed the other two how to do corners in CQBs. Once everyone had tried out the jet, we just screwed around and had loads of fun to get to know each other a little better. We even talked a bit about having a LAN someday. Although the most interested guys (U_U, h3adache, Stealth, Ices and Quicky) really know each other and me well and we really have a blast I can't think stop thinking that this makes the replacements feel out of place and tossed into something where they feel neglected (spelling?). This is something I will work hard on the next few days.