-> ## News <-

General Activity Rant

Let’s start things off with a rant! Now, not many people really understand the point of the Gaming Nights – why aren’t they a bigger deal or a more important competition. The truth is, they’re not supposed to be a big, fancy competition. The Gaming Nights exist so people can a) have fun gaming with others, and b) count as activity towards merit medals and promotions. In fact, general gaming activity should be being promoted by the Clan Summits – it’s your job to keep your members active and provide them a means for advancement and shinies. Gaming Nights are just one of the ways they can be active on a steady basis. If and when participation or activity is low it’s not really my concern… it’s your members that aren’t being active and Clans need their members to be alive and active for when the more important competitions come into play. Hopefully this rant will serve as notice to your leaders to put more effort into promoting regular activity.

ICTE Hijinks

I had this little idea to entice a few more people to participate in the ICTEs, which will be starting in February. Basically, one ICTE each month will be a Double CF Bonus ICTE. It will change with each month to give a wider range of people the opportunity to participate. So in February, it’ll be the first ICTE of the month, in March it’ll be the second, and so on. I’ll be reminding people beforehand so everyone will know when to expect them. I figure this is a good way to award the people who have been participating a lot lately, while drawing in some extra players at least once per month. Hopefully the other Clubs won’t mind if we kick their ass a bit more than usual.

Call of Duty 4 DJB Clan

A few days ago I made a news post announcing that Quejo and Sklib, and others were making a Call of Duty 4 DJB Clan for the Xbox 360. If you’re interested you should check out said news post, which is conveniently linked to here - News Post!

January Gaming Competition

I announced this at the start of the month, but it hasn’t seen too much competition. I realize team gaming is hard to swing, but if you jump on it now you’ll still have a good chance of placing. Next month’s competition should be a little easier for people to swing. Expect details on that before the month ends. For now a reiteration of the January Gaming Comp:

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For the month of January gamers will be teaming up with a single partner to participate in the Team Gaming Ladder. What this means is that you and your friend (or enemy you want to play with?) signup by sending Shadow an email, CCing the other partner. You'll get added to the ladder and can go out and fight in epic team battles together.

A win will add 3 points to your team's score and a loss will add 1. Matches played by either partner in normal 1v1 (not against one another) will also be added to their overall team score at 1/4 the normal value as an incentive to make sure your partner stays active throughout the competition.

Choose your partner wisely, as he/she will be your partner for the entire competition (barring any outstanding circumstances). Keep in mind that you can still play 3v3 and 4v4 matches. For 4v4 your team can add another team or two random players, 3v3 can just be any random person added and it will still count for your team.

All matches are reported normally via the DB site, but you must also report your special team matches with a form Shadow will link to in a news post. All questions and comments can be directed to Shadow on IRC or via email.

Link to competition page: January Gaming Competition

Further information: News Post

-> ## Projects <-

Project One

I’m currently working on a few projects. One is a handy little guide to the creation of DB-wide gaming competitions. It came to my attention that most people don’t really know what they should do or what needs to be done to run such a competition, so I figured a guide will cut down on me wanting to stab people in the face with stuff.

Project Deuce

The second project, which more of you will probably care about, is about the old Point/Item system we had a longass time ago that was fairly neglected and needed a great deal of work. Fortunately, most of that work has been redone. My perfect system is to have such stuff run through scripts on the DB site, but Jac and the gang have a lot of other work to do first so I’ve devised a manual system for now. I’m not quite ready to re-launch, but you should keep your eyes open for an announcement in the near future. Hopefully this will add to the whole Clan Summits promoting regular activity thing again. It’s nice when the small things pay off.

Project III

The third project resulted from the brains of Chaosrain and loveable Jac. I don’t want to go into too many details yet, as it’s pretty infantile at the moment. Suffice it to say it should add some enjoyable/humorous fun to playing our aging list of platforms. If you own an Xbox 360 the idea won’t be unfamiliar to you. Expect to see something about Gaming Achievements in the future.

-> ## Useful Links <-

Rites of Combat

Brotherhood Servers

Gaming Nights Information

ICTE Information

ICTE Site