Clan night stats

Posted by request.  Click for huge.

Of note: OmniscientDeath went 21-32 for a K/D of -11 last week when matchmaking put him on the other team.  He went 97-30 this week in games on Exile when gunning in the Gauss Hog for a K/D of +67 with 68 Gauss Cannon kills.  gtdroptop was -17 in those games with a combined 72 assists as driver to enable those stats.

Octurian Pewn had a very impressive showing this week, green across the board.  Kudos to Mean Mrs Monkey for a non-negative game on Ragnorak.  Jests go out to darknorpo for somehow turning in a -12 performance on Exile when he couldn't get in his Banshee.

H4: Specializations Part 2

We've discussed Armor Specializations before, but here's my quick cut:

• Wetworks: If you love assassinations and creeping around. (FragginURdoodz, TimMAY1023)
• Pioneer: If you want to level up as fast as possible. (CoolerSopranos2, UnsavorySamurai)
• Engineer: If you want to help the team coordinate special ordinance drops. (Beer4Porter)
• Tracker: If you love special weapons. (FishBone10, Masher 24)
• Rogue: If you spend a lot of time scoped in (Sniper, DMR, BR). (gtdroptop, Octurian Poon)
• Stalker: If you get fixated on killing one person. (darknorpo, QuelBelle)
• Pathfinder: If you're always in the gunner seat (OmniscientDeath, MEAN MR MONKEY)
• Operator: If you're always driving (BeerMonkeee, Mean Mrs Monkey)

Picking your Specialization is important because you can't change it until you've fully leveled it up.  There are 8 choices in total, with Pioneer and Wetwork being available to all players at launch.  Purchasing the Halo 4 Limited Edition gets you access to all 8 right away.  Those who pre-order and play by November 20, will get all 8 quicker as well, but probably not until 11/20 (about 2 weeks after launch).

Clan night tonight. 9pm PT. Halo Reach.

Clan night is back on this week, so the Mean Monkeys should probably reschedule their anniversary dinner.  In other news, Halo CE (aka, Halo 1) Remastered has been voted as our next clan game.  Should be available in November.

Clan night tonight. 9pm PT. Left 4 Dead ONE.

By request of MrsM, we'll be playing L4D classic tonight.  Put in your original game disc, not #2.

Clan Night Postmortem

Here are some highlights from last night.  Since we had a bunch of objective games, I didn't filter them out this week.  Also worth noting, even though it's not highlighted in the table, is Mean Mrs Monkey's career best game with 8 kills and +4 spread on Anchor 9 DMRs.  Most people seemed to really enjoy zombies last week, and there is talk of playing Left 4 Dead more than just once a month.  I've put a new poll up on the blog, go and vote to voice your opinion if you'd like to play L4D more or less.

Clan Night Postmortem

Halo Charts has a new Game Aggregator tool that produces some pretty interesting data.  Thought I would share some highlights from clan night last night.  Below is some key stats from our Slayer games (objective games excluded).  Numbers will obviously be tilted slightly for people who were helping the clan while on the other team...

Player Spotlight: Mean Mrs Monkey

Mean Mrs Monkey is one of our most active players, starting in the days of Left 4 Dead and continuing to this day in Halo Reach.  Per popular request, we sat down for a quick interview to find out more about her.

Q1: What's your name in real life?
A1: Kendall

Q2: What is your day job?
A2: Stay at Home Mom and Full Time Student at SJSU.

Q3: What's an interesting thing about you?
A3: I only learned how to play xBox about 1.5 years ago, before I had no coordination for the game.

Q4: How did you get into Halo and/or video games?
A4: I started playing it because MEAN MR MONKEY was playing it and encouraged me to after I got the hang of Viva Pinta and L4D.

Q5: What's your favorite thing about playing Halo?
A5: Honestly...now that REACH is out, I prefer it to all other Halos.  It seems to be a little easier for me to control my player because the jumping is "normal" and the movements are not as exaggerated which is really difficult for me. So just having a more normal play is what I like.

Q6: What's your biggest dislike about playing Halo?
A6: I think my biggest dislike is that I am so bad at Slayer, I try to play and try to get the hang of it but I think most people who are on have been playing since Halo [1] and so they have the game down and I am just running around trying to figure things out....makes for a lot of deaths for me.

Q7: Do you think it's different being a girl playing Halo?
A7: Uhm...yeah...when I play without the clan people are a bit more forgiving of my bad playing or if I betray them....because I am a chick.  But when I play with the clan I think I am just another one of the people playing and I am treated pretty equal...

Q8: Do you wish you didn't have to play split screen all the time?
A8: Yes.  We are going to be getting one of the new xBox's....we want to play on different TV's.  But I think that will be our Christmas gift to ourselves.

Many thanks to Mean Mrs Monkey for being a great sport and continuing to participate in the clan!

Reach Falls in 6 Days

There's some new info posted up at Bungie's Reach page.

• Fiction: In the CAA Factbook there's more details around the fiction of Halo.  One interesting tidbit is a page about piracy and space pirates.  I have to assume this comes into play in the story of Reach.  The ODSTs are also mentioned.
• Noble profiles:
• Noble 1: Carter (S-259), Commander, DMR, natural leader
• Noble 2: Kat (S-320), Lt. Commander, AR/Magnum, girl
• Noble 3: Jun (S-266), Warrant Ofc, Sniper Rifle, chatty
• Noble 4: Emile (S-239), Warrant Ofc, Shotgun, sweet helmet
• Noble 5: Jorge (S-052), Chief Warrant Ofc, Chain Gun, old guy
• Noble 6: XXX (S-312), Lieutenant, AR, hyper-lethal lone wolf
• Ordnance:
• Details around the Fuel Rod Gun, Concussion Rifle, which hadn't been mentioned much before.
• Notes on the Revenant, a Warthog/Ghost cross-over and the Falcon, essentially a flying Warthog.
• All Armor Abilities are listed, including the hinted-at Hologram and Drop Shield abilities.

Mrs. Monkey is our only girl, so I guess a natural fit for Kat.  I can see Porter or BeerMonkeee as Jun, OD as Jorge, and norpo as Noble 6.  What do you think?  Who's your favorite?

HR: Player Profiles - Mean Mrs Monkey

Player: Mean Mrs Monkey

• Rank: Corporal Grade 1
• Games: 63; Kills: 207; Deaths: 627; Assists: 142; Time: 0:08:50; Wins: 25; Medals: 347
• Win %: 40%; K/D: 0.33; K/G: 3.29; D/G: 9.95; A/G: 2.25; M/G: 5.51; Encounters/G: 15.82

Run and Gun Frontline Support, Objective Specialist. Though relatively new to the Halo universe, Mean Mrs Monkey had an impressive showing in the highly competitive ranked playlist with a clan high win percentage and clan low deaths/game in Arena.  She also notably has the highest overall melee percentage, and the most flag kills in the clan.  Usually sticks to the Run and Gun prototype of AR and melee.

Best suited: Short to medium slayer, providing kill support while avoiding fire and prioritizing the objective.  Mean Mrs Monkey excels at all objective games and does well with fireteam slayer support around.

Recommend: Continue to stay out of the middle of firefights.  A low K/D ratio is balanced by the lowest Encounters*/Game (15.82) in the clan.  This is perfect as Mean Mrs Monkey specializes in grabbing objectives, so staying alive and out of the line of fire is ideal.


* Encounters: Total sum of Kills, Assists and Deaths.  Is a strong indicator of how often a player is engaged in firefights in each game.  As a general rule, players with high K/D ratios (near or over 1.0) help the team the most with correspondingly high E/G stats.  Conversely, players with low K/D ratios (0.70 or below) can hurt the team more with high E/G stats, but can minimize the effect by lowering the E/G number and helping the team in other ways (like working on objectives).

Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Halo 3: ODST.

Happy anniversary to Mean Mr. and Mrs. Monkey. If they choose to spend their anniversary gaming, it's their choice of game types.

Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Halo 3.

The Mean Monkeys lost their 360 to the RRoD this week. Because they are the most consistent regulars on clan night, we're going to play H3 tonight instead. I want to play campaign in anticipation of H3: ODST, BeerMonkeee wants to wallow in the matchmaking pool. We're looking for a tiebreaker.

Good Times

Thanks to everyone who logged in for clan night tonight. Was an awesome reminder of just how fun Left 4 Dead can be. There's a lot of play left in the game with the new Survival Mode and the two new Multi-Player maps that are still new to most everyone. Please keep me honest in balancing teams, as it can become unbalanced pretty quickly. If you're feeling picked on, speak up and I'll try my best to equalize things.

Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Left 4 Dead.

Folks have been logging on later recently. Would people prefer I move clan night out to 9pm? I set it at 8pm to try and get everybody as much gaming time as possible, especially for early risers. But 8pm is fairly inconvenient for me, and it's stupid for me to rush and get online at 8pm and then sit there for 20 minutes waiting for the first person to sign-in. Leave a comment.

Clan night tonight, 8pm PT, Left 4 Dead

I'm moving the clan mail to a blog soon. This way, items in these weekly posts will be archived, and you can avoid clutter in your inbox. For the handful of you that prefer the e-mail, I can auto-email up to 10 of you. For the rest, I'm happy to help you setup RSS feeds so that it automatically shows up in iGoogle, My Yahoo, or your favorite reader.

Effectively, the entire clan has moved to Left 4 Dead. It's hella fun. Active players: gtdroptop, FishBone10, darknorpo, OmniscientDeath, MEAN MR MONKEY, Mean Mrs Monkey, BeerMonkeee, QuelBelle, Beer4Porter, CoolerSopranos2