Lethal Jeweler 4-16-2012

Hey, looks like the Kill Confirmed Op we signed up for starts at 2:00 PM EDT tomorrow, and it's TDM today at 6:00 PM. I know several of us won't be around due to being at work/school, so anybody who can, go for it! Hopefully we'll see some new names!

Lethal Jeweler 4-13-2012

First thing I want to say is, great job, everyone! Everything went about as smoothly as we could have hoped, from having two competently run lobbies to having all around good support by non-premium members for scoring members. If you check out the op leaderboard, the ranking actually alternates between members of the two lobbies, suggesting to me that for some game types, splitting the premium members and having non-premium members supporting them can be a winning strategy. That said, we owe some thanks and congratulations to our excellent clan mates REALBAUS and Yay Fluttershy; their kills became our confirms. Anyway, before we get to the postmortem stats, check out this video from the op:

Our opponents' attitude was pretty representative of the night. Amusingly, we followed them through a few lobby attempts to form games. We really wrecked most of our opponents.

Now, here's our op leaderboard. 155/26355 clans is nothing to sneeze at, and we're making progress toward that top 100 goal. So, good job Apple Dash and War Musician! Thanks for coming out, everyone who contributed!

What Does Rapid Fire Do on SMGs?

This post is going to be exactly what it says on the tin. Above is an example of the kind of video I used to get the numbers I'm about to disgorge; I looked for the frame in which the first bullet disappears from the magazine indicator in the HUD, then the frame where the last one disappeared, and used that to count how many frames elapsed while emptying the magazine. There are a few guns that varied despite me just holding down both triggers during the test; this is either due to glitches in my capture setup, glitches in my xBox, or variations due to the reloading animations. It's hard to tell, but there were no discrepancies larger than 7 frames on the unmodified MP7, or an average of 0.175 frames per bullet.

The frames per bullet values are pretty self explanatory, and divide the SMGs into two tiers; the PM-9 and PP90M1 shoot noticeably faster at about the same rate, and the rest of the SMGs shoot at approximately the same rate. The boosts from Rapid Fire are similarly tiered; the PM-9 and PP90M1 get a large bonus to their fire rate and, hence, DPS, while the other SMGs all get approximately the same boost, with one notable exception.

The MP7 gets very little benefit from Rapid Fire, and may not be worth using. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a 10% boost in damage can make a difference, but I haven't been able to crunch the numbers in a way that makes a strong case one way or the other. It is definitely less useful than on the other SMGs, though.

In conclusion, here are the SMGs compared a few ways:

 Ordered by benefit they get from Rapid Fire, most to least.

•   PM9        31-34% reduction in frames or 23.8-25.6% increase in speed
•   PP90M1 32% reduction in frames or 24.3% increase in speed
•   P90         22-25% reduction in frames or 19.3-20.1% increase in speed
•   UMP45  20-23% reduction in frames or 16.6-18.8% increase in speed
•   MP5       20% reduction in frames or 16.6% increase in speed
•   MP7       10-15% reduction in frames or 9.5-13.1% increase in speed

Ordered by rate of fire without rapid fire, fastest to slowest.

•   PM9,        3.81-3.9 frames per bullet
•   PP90M1, 3.8888888 frames per bullet
•   MP7,        4.225-4.4 frames per bullet
•   P90,          4.8-4.88 frames per bullet
•   MP5,        4.833333 frames per bullet
•   UMP45,   4.84 frames per bullet

Ordered by rate of fire with rapid fire, fastest to slowest.

•   PM9 Rapid Fire,         2.9 frames per bullet
•   PP90M1 Rapid Fire,   2.91666-3.3125 frames per bullet
•   MP5 Rapid Fire,          3.83333-3.866666 frames per bullet
•   MP7 Rapid Fire,          3.825 frames per bullet
•   P90 Rapid Fire,            3.9-3.92 frames per bullet
•   UMP45 Rapid Fire,      3.9375-4.03125 frames per bullet

The raw numbers are after the jump.

Lethal Jeweler 4-13-2012

Okay, guys, the first Kill Confirmed clan op is Friday, and we happen to have a KC monster in our clan. Let's destroy some chumps, get a ton of tags, and get our gold groove back!

Note: it starts at 11:30 PM EDT and runs until 2:30 EDT. Also, we'll have to switch our normal "No more tags! REALBAUS is going to get a MOAB!" strategy to one where we cap tags very quickly. Maybe we should consider short range weapons? Alternately, premium members rock riot shields and non-premium members wreck face.

Coöp Warriors 4-11-2012

Are you sure that's just a silver medal, Celestia? Seems kinda... big.

Wow. This is frustrating on so many levels. Not only is it our first silver, but we had less than 24 hours notice. Basically, the reason we got silver isn't even lackluster performance; it was 90% of the clan having no idea that an op was even happening. Regardless, as usual, War Musician was doing some serious work, so shoutouts for him! Here's the op leaderboard:

As you can see, Mars, War Musician, Punsy, and I were the only premium members who were there the whole time; John hopped in a little bit after it started, but ImScootaloo had to drop out early and Apple Dash didn't make it until the very end. So I think what this highlights is the need for a) Activision and their minions to get their shit together and post these with a little more notice and b) more active members.

Anyway, the other frustrating thing is that we ended up in 1298 out of some 12700 clans. Yeah, we were less than 30 spots from gold. Blarg.

Also worth noting is that when you write down that you're upset because your My Little Pony fan club didn't get a gold star for playing video games, it makes you sound like a crazy person. So, perspective: for basically getting this together on 20 minutes notice, silver ain't too bad. Also, we blame REALBAUS because if he had premium we'd have like 600 more points.

Internet Ponies are SRS BUSINESS

CLOPPACLOPPACLOPPA

So it's time for some SRS BUSINESS. Mars and I and a few other people have been musing about the direction we want the clan to go, and here are some of our thoughts:

• We like playing with cool people, and it seems like everypony else does, too. 

• We also like winning, especially clan ops, where our IMPORTANT DIGITAL BADGES give us warm fuzzies every time thousands of clans filled with chumps don't get shiny gold ones.

• It seems like there's a core group of players we see all the time, and a pretty big chunk of people we never ever hear from.

• holy moly there are a ton of people who want to join the clan

 So, with that in mind, we started thinking about what we can do to make being part of the clan a better experience, as well as more interactive/community oriented. There are already a few things going on like Mars and me drawing for people who do well in ops, hopefully the highlight reel, etc., but we'd like to see more of everypony if they're interested. So, first things first, if you have any ideas you'd like to share, let us know. Second, we may get a forum going, so we can maybe get more back and forth vs. me on a soapbox.

The other thing about interaction and community building is that we're limited to 100 people, and if the stats on Elite are correct, there are people in the clan who have clocked less than ten hours of playtime, and quite a few who haven't played in almost two weeks. Now, there are a few people where we know what's going on and why we haven't heard from them, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people in a MW3 clan play MW3, so we are going to look at the rosters again in two weeks (Saturday, April 21) and start clearing out people who appear to be inactive. That means that if you don't have any evidence of recent play on Elite, or some other way to let us know that you're still around, you have two weeks before you won't be rocking the [Pony] tag for the foreseeable future.

That said, the end goal is to get more ponies wrecking chumps, so the other part of this is that we'll be letting new people into the clan, something that hasn't happened in a while. We're not set on how we want to do this, but some variation of playing with people to make sure we get along is probably what's going to happen; we don't have a KD requirement, or anything, but it's important to us that the people we play with are cool. Given Call of Duty's player base, I think it's sadly necessary to note some minimum standards of conduct, to wit, don't be a horrible racist/sexist/homophobic asshole.

Just... don't make us feel like this.

Anyway, we should have some more news/discussion on these topics, but the basic thing to remember right now is that we'd like to see some signs of life from our clan mates. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Coöp Warriors 4-6-2012

It's that time again! Sorry for the short notice, but we have another clan op starting in two hours! Hope to see you all soon! We'll update this post afterward with the results.

Not bad.

 So here are the preliminary results! We had 13 people scoring, so it seems like the theme of the night is "not quite as many as last time". Either way, our unbroken streak of gold medals is pretty awesome, so shouts out to everypony who participated! REALBAUS did some real work, so I'll see if I can doodle something for him in the near future.