Killing in the Name

Hi. I guess it's roundfail time again. There's a TL;DR at the end if many words on a page intimidate or offend you in any way.

This roundfail is going to be a little different. I've been having some health troubles, which meant my note-taking was minimal after about the first two weeks, so this will be a tale of two halves. The first half, standard fare Week-by-Week. Second half, well, I haven't written it yet as I put this foreword together so I have no idea what it's gonna be. Probably the tale of some guy sticking his finger up my arse. [Edit by future Rush: Yep. Yep, that's what it is.]

Don't worry, he said he was a medical professional.

Enjoy!

I was Killing in the Name, the Nox in realm #9. I finished under 6k, so one of my worst-performing rounds in recent memory, but I didn't really have my head in the game for a lot of it (sorry realmies!). This round I packed with the hydra, becoming an honourary hydra head for a round. I was excited to get my blop on, but it turns out that the hydra menace of old is not the same beast as the hydra today. Peabrain, originally the 'main head' of the hydra, is a broken shadow of his former self; by the end of the round he was so small nobody was even in range to help him get ops. We even got our magnifying glasses out and still couldn't find his targets. Meanwhile, downrightdave has supplanted him as the hotshot leader of the dreaded hydra - and has transformed into a promising fast attacker threat. Gone are the majority of the blopper heads, with only Grapes of Math carrying that flame - and me, this round, an echo from the hydra's inception. I remember the glory days, back when the hydra didn't even have a name - until I dubbed them thusly - and they were a bundle of pure, unbridled chaos. Nowadays, they are pretty much like any standard pack. I'll have to remember that the next time I spot them all hogging the Shadow League!

Our pack: downrightdave, Grapes of Math, LarsO, Peabrain and me.

We landed with Jaerock, SlyPimp, lokiramza, MattyVanHalen, Slice, Zedijar, Sommarhydda, Korsan and the man, the myth, the legend - ZOOJ!

WEEK 1 - THE LEGEND OF ZOOJ

Our realm was off to a rocketing start with SlyP and Dave playing a strong fast-attack tag-team with some great early hits.

2023-06-08 14:03:33 We are the Cham-pions (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Jungle Hunt (Guydoonster) (#5) and captured 80 land. 2023-06-07 16:26:10 Simply the Best (downrightdave) (#9) invaded Ride or die, remember? (jboy) (#2) and captured 65 land.

SlyP almost fucked up with his hit. He sent out on a hit and realised the #2 FireWalker, You know this ain't no ten second race? (Soup), could hit him... but didn't even check him. Instead, he just straight followed SlyP's hit.

2023-06-08 14:33:57 You know this ain't no ten second race? (#2) invaded Jungle Hunt (#5) and captured 75 land.

SlyP couldn't believe his luck. "This never happens to me," he said, before promptly leaving to buy a lottery ticket.

Then it was Dave's turn to spin the wheel of fortune. But lady luck turned her cheek on him.

2023-06-09 13:12:58 Simply the Best (#9) invaded Family family family family family (margoose) (#2) but failed to conquer any land.

Unfortunately, the bounce slowed him down a bit - but it didn't take him out of the top players and he was still able to provide SlyP with that crucial tag-team support. It also resulted in dave experiencing acute Attacker-Bounce Self-Loathing Syndrome (this roundfail has a medical theme, might as well run with it), which took him a few days to recover from.

Of course, this was all a bit of a sideshow when you've got Zooj in your realm.

2023-06-09 10:54:51 Obviously you’re not a simmer (#6) invaded Zooj (#9) and captured 35 land. 2023-06-09 08:17:18 Mr. Treehorn treats Bots like Women (#6) invaded Zooj (#9) and captured 37 land. 2023-06-09 08:12:30 Zooj (#9) invaded DAH! Supergirl (#0) and captured 24 land. 2023-06-08 07:53:28 Zooj (#9) invaded Luke...it is your Destiny (#0) and captured 26 land. 2023-06-07 21:21:53 Glorious Olympos (#8) invaded Zooj (#9) and captured 31 land. 2023-06-07 16:58:52 Factories Are Overpowered (#8) invaded Zooj (#9) and captured 34 land. 2023-06-07 16:57:35 Masons are Overpowered (#8) invaded Zooj (#9) and captured 34 land. 2023-06-07 15:54:50 Zooj (#9) invaded In the name of Halfling (#0) and captured 26 land. 2023-06-06 14:53:47 Dubhlin (#3) invaded Zooj (#9) but failed to conquer any land. 2023-06-06 14:45:35 O-Big-Wang Kenobi (#4) invaded Zooj (#9) and captured 30 land.

This, of course, is just a small window of time - a snippet, if you will - of the heroism and defiance we all witnessed from Zooj (hepizoj) this round. He was an inspiration to us all. He had his own emoji. People were printing t-shirts that said "I'm on Team Zooj". Did anyone print any Semo t-shirts? Fuck no. Because he wasn't a patch on Zooj! Zooj wasn't even a mute either, he eventually joined our discord after seeing a few council posts and, while he was still a man of few words, I can assure you that every word that did pass from his lips was worthy of being etched in stone. It was an honour to serve with Zooj this round, and may his iconic display of determination continue to inspire us all into next round. When Toothy opens his merch store and starts selling OD swag, we're gonna have Zooj mugs, just you wait and see.

WEEK 2 - MELTING SNOWFLAKES

So, SlyP concocted this wild and daring plan to punch up at the top dog, Mris Sucks (DanTheMan) #1, and knock him down a few pegs. If our realm could snare his Ares off, SlyP could hit him, and also allow the Firewalker in #2 to make a hit on Dan as well. But Dan had already pretty much sped out of range of the dedicated blackoppers, myself included (just two days after blackops went live, no less), so it fell to some of the pure explorers like Zedijar (Ride the Lightning) and lokiramza (I would explore 500 miles) and attackers like dave and a few others to go on a snare campaign. Fortunately, it totally blindsided Dan who was probably fast asleep on a bed of his own laurels when the war kicked off, dreaming of a land filled with ivory towers where fireballs are illegal. And so his Ares was stripped from him like the clothes from his body, and SlyP spanked his bare bottom.

2023-06-12 05:30:11 Hungry Lyc the Wolf (#9) has declared WAR on On the Naughty List (#1).

2023-06-12 08:02:48 Victorious on the battlefield, We are the Cham-pions (#9) conquered 134 land from Mris Sucks (#1).

The hit brought Dan back into the domain of us blackoppers, a domain he is all too familiar with, and we set about re-establishing OD tradition by melting him with fireballs.

Dan reacted as expected and hit SlyP back.

2023-06-12 08:59:54 Mris Sucks (#1) invaded fellow dominion We are the Cham-pions (#9) and captured 124 land.

We expected the #2 Firewalker to take a bite as well but, just like last time when he had the opportunity to hit SlyP, he just was in his own little world and hit someone else instead, several hours later. SlyP chalked it up to being an inexperienced fast attacker.

2023-06-12 10:53:53 You know this ain't no ten second race? (#2) invaded The Great Giana Sisters (nurtho) (#5) and captured 71 land.

Never one to miss a dogpile, Merf joined the party.

2023-06-12 09:33:20 A New Hope (#4) has declared WAR on On the Naughty List (#1).

Dan came down with a bad case of Conspiracy-itis and went to the rules committee on it, since a podcast had just gone out 24h prior where Merf had called for war against him. I can say - and I think Dan accepts this - that from our perspective, we had those plans before the podcast came out and it had no bearing on our decision. But it still made for a spicy show about where 'the line' is on RiolTalk.

Of course, if Dan had built the paltry 30 overpowered Forest Havens required to defeat infinite blackoppers, he'd have been just dandy. DanTheDandyman, even.

He was so close this time too. And fireballing his ass felt pretty good after his goofy semi-sui-and-abandon strategy that fucked me last round.

The war didn't go according to plan.

I feel like I write that sentence quite often these days.

Grapes, who has a degree in maths, miscalculated how much he could safely explore and was going to end up 1 acre in Dan's range, and noticed about 3 hours before it was about to happen. With some last-minute rezoning, however, we were able to beef up his dp and ensure Dan couldn't touch him. He's lucky he was Sylvan; we almost switched roles and had him as Nox and me as Sylvan.

I was also cutting it fine, coasting by well in range about 300dp ahead of his full send.

From our perspective, it felt a bit like we were dangling two big juicy steaks just out of reach of the lyc's snapping jaws. And he had no other targets.

Of course, what we didn't know was that #4 were about to throw themselves right into his mouth.

2023-06-14 12:59:45 Mris Sucks (#1) invaded Darth Jar Jar Kink (GreyKoan) (#4) and captured 94 land.

It was annoying, but we still felt like we'd damaged Dan quite a bit in the war, so it wasn't the end of the world.

Then Dan found another hit and it went from not terrible to terrible.

2023-06-15 12:59:54 Mris Sucks (#1) invaded Fat@$$ (Gatlightning) (#8) and captured 97 land.

But it still wasn't over, because Sly was able to follow:

2023-06-15 13:08:28 Victorious on the battlefield, We are the Cham-pions (#9) conquered 91 land from Fat@$$ (#8).

It was still a two-man race. We still had a chance. As long as no one else fed Dan.

Enter the Firewalker.

2023-06-15 13:11:38 You know this ain't no ten second race? (#2) invaded Fat@$$ (#8) and captured 85 land.

He sent out, in range of the lyc, and massively underdefended against him. We were forced to downgrade him from charmingly clueless to genuine pest. That fuckin' guy!

He could have potentially still survived if he'd dropped spec dp but... he didn't.

2023-06-16 00:07:26 Mris Sucks (#1) invaded You know this ain't no ten second race? (#2) and captured 115 land.

Meanwhile, our Gnome was having a bad day.

2023-06-15 08:59:17 Sadly, the forces of Grey Towers (Korsan) (#9) were beaten back by Opai Warrior (#0).

After the hit Korsan announced in the discord that he was immediately abandoning.

2023-06-15 13:19:40 Gordon Gekko (Swamp Fox) (#1) invaded fellow dominion Grey Towers (#9) and captured 80 land.

We asked him to stick around and help us take down the Factory of Legends, which we'd just started to cyclone, but he slapped that abandon button anyway.

2023-06-16 20:00:18 Grey Towers (#9) has been abandoned by its ruler.

What a waste.

By this point, SlyP was absolutely starving for a hit. He already knew his chances of staying competitive had been shot to hell by factors completely outwith our control, but he could still grab a few hits before he had to deconvert. Unfortunately, when he finally did find a target, he bounced. All our ops were up to date, but Sly said the calculator used an old land spy somehow despite showing the correct one on his screen.

2023-06-17 16:59:53 Sadly, the forces of We are the Cham-pions (#9) were beaten back by Bubble Bobble (Puntti) (#5).

It was a fairly ignominious end to what had otherwise been some spectacular play to catch Dan off guard and bring his win into serious contention and uncertainty. Hats off to the guy, he almost single-handedly salvaged the round from ruin by punching up at a fast attacker that thought he'd already won, and was undone purely by other realms not paying enough attention. Or in the case of the firewalker, paying any attention whatsoever!

WEEK 3 AND BEYOND

Medical Mystery Tour

Around the time Rio was falling off a cliff, I was in hospital with a phantom kidney stone problem. If you dont want to hear medical stuff and just want to read about the round, skip to the next section.

I'd gone home from work in the morning after feeling 'very unusual' to spend the rest of the day working from home, and shortly after I got home I went for a piss that lasted about ten minutes. The amount of liquid that came out of me would put the Niagra Falls to shame. And then an insane thirst set in, and the amount I drank would put any Scotsman to shame. Water, that is. Over the course of the next hour I would piss a dozen times, constantly drinking and pissing and wondering what the everloving fuck was going on. And then it stopped. I called my GP and insisted to a bewildered girl on reception that non-stop pissing definitely constituted a medical emergency, and was able to get a same-day appointment. The GP tested me for diabetes, negative, and just sort of shrugged it off. "Sometimes the kidneys go into overdrive," he explained, as if that explained anything. So I went home none the wiser, and over the course of the next week, the problem would flip on its head completely, until I was barely able to piss at all. This is called "going into retention" and is synonymous with the sound of your kidneys and/or bladder exploding. It's life-threatening if not treated. So, again I had to explain to the same bewildered receptionist that now that I couldn't pee at all, it was actually even more of an emergency. Another same-day GP appointment, which turned into an urgent referral to the urology department at my city hospital.

Unfortunately, at the same moment I was driving towards the hospital, the heavens opened. What's the big deal, you might say, it's just a bit of rain. Well, flashbacks of driving into rivers aside, my city had recently developed an electrical grid problem. The kind of problem that meant all of the traffic lights shorted out any time it fucking rained, causing massive traffic jams all over the place, and it was rush hour for people going home from work. You can't make this shit up. I had an urgent medical issue and every route I tried to take was met with bumper-to-bumper tailbacks of deadlocked traffic.

Eventually I turned off onto some random-ass single-lane country road just praying the satnav would figure it out, and got stuck behind a troupe of about 20 cyclists doing some sort of cycle event in a monsoon.

"Apoplectic with rage" is the angriest phrase I can think of, and it doesn't even begin to cover how angry I was in that moment. Turns out - for me at least - there's a breaking point for anger that pushes through into just laughing like a maniac. Those cyclists must have thought they were being tailed by an absolute nut case.

Anyway, I eventually made it to the hospital, and found the faintly-smells-of-piss-wherever-you-go Urology Department. Which is where I met Rashid. He was annoyed that I wasn't fully in retention when I arrived, but graciously consented to run some tests anyway.

"Lie on the bed there," Rashid said, and so I did. "Now lift up your shirt and tug your trousers down a bit."

I did as I was asked.

"Lower your trousers down a bit more please," said Rashik. So I did.

"Lower your trousers down a bit more please!" said Rashik again. And it dawned on me that "lower your trousers down a bit" was just code for "get your knob out". The first indignity.

I was slathered in gel and an ultrasound test confirmed that I wasn't in retention.

"Roll onto your side now," Rashik said. So I did. The second indignity came without much warning:

"You may feel some discomfort," said Rashik, and it was finger in the bum time. Checking my prostate you see.

To this day I'm still not sure these 'tests' weren't some kind of revenge for turning up at urology not in full retention. Maybe it's considered an insult to urologists or something, so in return you get the ol' finger in the bum treatment.

"Maybe it was kidney stones," Rashik theorised, even though we both knew it definitely wasn't, since I wasn't in excruciating pain. I was discharged and once again went home none the wiser. Is this what passes for medical care in my country? Because it feels a lot like it's just me getting pinged about, poked a bit, then told to get piss off. No pun intended. Unfortunately this was just the start of my medical issues this round, but that's a less entertaining story and best saved for another time.

Ranks and Rankles

Something that has been bothering me, at a very low level for a bunch of rounds now, is how ranks work, and I always forget to bring it up because, like I say, it's such a trivial annoyance - but it seems to happen to me every round, and that's how a lot of the title rankings operate. If you want to be top lumber thief, you'd best be a sylvan or a wood elf, because you cannot compete with those guys if they decide to chase that rank, since theft is based on a percentage of your production. The same goes for ore, or gems, or any resource. But there are issues with other titles too, like this round, where I spent 40 days killing draftees and clocking up thousands of kills, only to have one tiny player overtake me in the final week by farming even tinier inactives while I was stuck killing draftees on more important players. Likewise, fireballs reward players who target explorers (usually non-threats) with big kill counts, to the extent that we almost went to war with #6 again in the final days so Grapes could bomb an explorer and grab Master of Fire - but in the end, we decided to war #1 for the memes. Some titles reward you for just spamming ops indiscriminately. And so on.

The point I'm making is that a lot of titles are skewed towards specific races, or reward you for targeting the wrong players, or are just simply easier for tiny players. Maybe the last one isn't such a bad thing, but it seems to me that you should at least be rewarded or upscaled a bit for focusing on high-value players instead of inactives. Someone leapfrogging you effortlessly after weeks and weeks of rank-chasing is not cool, man. Just ask the dude.

Snare Abuse Can Kill Instantly

This round saw the continuation of snare abuse which I'd highlighted in the previous roundfail, when Wurst's army of snails came for Mithrandir and kept his Ares off for a full 12 hours in order to make a hit. In that circumstance you can justifiably say Mith had it coming to an extent, because he was so efficiency-focused that training spywiz caused him physical pain, but that wasn't the case for poor Loki this round. I'd told him the Fable of the Spyless Mith, and he had decent spies (Zedijar says his spa was 0.8, I thought it was 0.9) when #4 came for him, and again through sheer numbers just brute forced an Ares drop that he was reasonably defended against.

2023-07-11 09:04:39 Jabba The Slut (Mithrandir) (#4) invaded I would explore 500 miles (lokiramza) (#9) and captured 435 land.

And so the abused had become the abuser.

And then the floodgates opened.

2023-07-11 09:32:08 Obviously you’re not a simmer (Rury) (#6) invaded I would explore 500 miles (#9) and captured 375 land. 2023-07-11 09:50:18 Masons are Overpowered (BigBell) (#8) invaded I would explore 500 miles (#9) and captured 383 land. 2023-07-11 09:52:22 Mr. Treehorn treats Bots like Women (Cobber) (#6) invaded I would explore 500 miles (#9) and captured 329 land. 2023-07-11 09:54:14 Icekin (Wurstmeyer) (#1) invaded I would explore 500 miles (#9) and captured 277 land. 2023-07-11 09:55:23 Anagin Drywalker (Shaidar) (#4) invaded I would explore 500 miles (#9) and captured 297 land.

And then Mith came back for seconds:

2023-07-12 14:59:54 Jabba The Slut (#4) invaded I would explore 500 miles (#9) and captured 248 land.

It's good to see that realm sizes will reduce this problem slightly next round, but it remains to be seen if snare is still broken. My guess is: it's still broken.

Loki, the absolute trooper, lost more land in a single day than I think I've ever seen anyone lose and still didn't hit the abandon button. Confirming once again that only cowardly custards abandon, while true Zoojkin fight on.

The Absolute Wurst

Congrats to Wurst on another victory and to all of realm #1 for keeping things spicy all round.

Thanks to everyone in my realm (except you Korsan you big no-wonder-hitting quitter you), it was great playing with all of you guys. The hydra are always fun even when they're running light on the blackops and it was cool to play some Diablo 4 inbetween fireballing noobs with you guys. It was also my first time landing with Zedijar, much to his chagrin; his blood-feud with me had to be placed on temporary hold for the greater good. Maybe he'll get his revenge in round 36, who knows?

Catch you in the next one.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/bz2Ww3w