So perhaps the whole GvG debut wasn't quite the path to glory I was expecting, and all in all, it looks like we'll need an awful lot of practice before stepping up for that kind of beating again. It'll come in time, I'm sure, and at present, the plan seems to be alternate weeks PvP and PvE for the Tuesday N00b Club. Our PvP nights are largely Scrimmage and Alliance Battle based, which is an altogether less harsh and brutal kind of way to while away one's evening.

It's still no place for the fragile ego, mind you, and last week saw us giving the old AB a go in very unfavourable conditions indeed. After a bit of a warmup in the hall, it was out to partake of the ongoing Luxon invasion, and as we turned up, it seemed some fluke of statistics or indeed, prolonged skill, had driven the big wavy red and blue 'Front Lines' pretty far into Kurzick territory. While on the one hand, that does mean we're winning, but on the other, it meant we got our first look at the Ancestral Lands map, which is basically a huge fort deep in the Echovald Forest, in which the Kurzicks basically just have to successfully wait out the siege, to win. It makes a kind of sense I guess. In any two way war, which is designed to not end decisively, as these wars simply cannot in an MMO, then the currently losing side needs a big advantage, in order that the whole thing can generally swing back to the middle, ad infinitum. I generally prefer factional war in which there are an odd number of sides, for this very reason. Planetside has three empires, and the constant risk of the Third Team stabbing you in the back makes overextending, and indeed, crushing one particular team, much less likely, given three sides made up of random strangers.

I'm not sure I was quite that rational at the time, mind you, and we did get pretty trampled for much of our time there. At first, I thought it was simply us being outclassed. The Kuzicks certainly seemed organised, and of course, we'd never seen that battleground before. Thinking about the map afterwards, I realised that it was in some part simply down to its design, and have hazy memories of deep Luxon Jade Sea maps offering a similarly easier time of it to our rabble.

Despite the overall rout, the individual action in there was quite fun, and managed to score a good few kills, which is always nice. There were the usual team quits as the hopelessness of our situation became apparently (None of which were in our own guild, I'm proud to say), and of course the usual smacktalk and such, including one very lippy Elementalist who seemed to have eight skills designed to help her run away very fast, and seemingly to give her plenty of time to lollerskate about the place telling anyone who chased her that they were a noob for chasing her. Baffling, but as long as she was enjoying herself, I guess that's what counts.

Personally, I'd like to see our own team of four a different colour set of minimap dots to the other eight folks on our side, which would help us keep together as a unit a bit better, rather than the somewhat disheartening twelve-man zerging about that seemed mostly to be the order of the day. More practice there too, I think.

In an attempt to score some kind of glory at all, our PvE night previous was spent mostly at the Dajkah Inlet Challenge Mission, which seems to be becoming a bit of a guild favourite. Certainly from a Guild Leader perspective, it has a lot going for it. It's reasonably early on in the nightfall Campaign, which means most people can get to it. It takes teams of eight players, which is good for us. It is a set, known and repeatable task, more in the nature of Sporting Event, than Adventuring Heroism, and offers great potential for improvement, refinement, and tests many of the basic PvE fundamentals that the game has to offer. It's also reasonably quick, allowing for multiple goes of an evening; getting eight people to one place, set up and ready to get started on a thing can take more time than you'd think! It offers prizes, in the form of the cosmetic Hero Armour upgrades, along with the more usual cash and loot, and there's even a High Score Table, so you can see you name in lights, which was exactly what we set out to do.

The challenge is to basically kill as many Corsairs as possible, in the time allowed. Killing Corsair Guild Lords extends the time, and you get points for kills. The mission takes place on three different maps, and bonus for us, Map 2 is a copy of our own guild hall, making it a bit easier not to get lost in our case!

We had a number of goes throughout the evening, and each go saw tweaks and refinements to the team as we went. There's nothing extraordinarily challenging in the mission, per se; the fodder is mostly made up of Rangers, Warriors and Dervishes, with occasional caster support, but being on the clock definitely adds a certain element of excitement to it all, and of course the striving to do better next time can be a good focus.

By the end of the night, pretty much all of us had all the Hero Armour Upgrades we'd ever need, but I was starting to see the perfection of the event itself as the new goal. And of course, we got what we came for; The Tuesday Noob Club's name in lights:

I'm so proud!