Morning Discussion

XBOX360 BFBC2 SHACKBATTLE
"PC gaming is for virgin nerds!"

Reminder to all interested, we're playing tonight from 9-11 PM CDT. I'll be on at 8:30 to start collecting friend requests and inviting people to the game. Again, this is going to be an invite-only match to ensure that shackers get to play. We have about 40 interested people, which means it'll be a full game and then some! (Maybe the people waiting to get in can start a side game or get together and terrorize some randoms?)

No H4X0RZ Allowed
My main reason for going to all this trouble is to find a well-balanced game full of people interested in winning (not just upping their K/D ratio or grinding unlocks). To that end, I spent the morning building another spreadsheet instead of doing any productive work at the office. Check it out.

http://www.shackpics.com/files/bc2_360_skill_snapshot_415PNG_2sgird19ldys8301mwab.png
(lol most of you are way better than me)

I gathered everyone's stats from StatsVerse and organized us by what I think are the stats most telling of a person's skill. I sorted us by Skill Rank, then broke us up into generalized groups. I then re-sorted by Rank and Score Per Minute (SPM) to look for any outliers from each group. Outliers were flagged and commented, just in case it ends up mattering. I ignored K/D for now, since it's such a hotly debated stat.

I'd like to use this as a general guideline for forming teams and squads tonight. I'm not going to enforce any rules on who can play with whom unless it gets totally out of hand, but please give this a glance when picking your team and squadmates tonight. Try not to end up with 4 greens, or 4 blues/whites.

You Must Be This Tall to Ride
I posted yesterday that I wasn't planning to let in people who haven't unlocked what I consider the basic tools for each class (ammo kit, medkit, defibs, repair gun, motion sensors, mortar strike). One guy LOL'd me and another posted that I was being too serious. I still think that ensuring a certain minimum level of gameplay quality is what makes shackbattles fun, so here's my modified plan: I'm going to send invites to people whose rank is 5+ first, until I either fill the game or run out of people to invite. Then I'll backfill with newbies. So nobody is blatantly refused entry, but priority is given to those who've vetted themselves.

See you tonight!
biskits (GT = Stobber)