Gene's Home of Oddness

CrapInPants

It's stories like this that bring a smile to your heart. It's the kind of thing that'll turn into an after-school special somewhere. This is a rather lengthy tale of some War3 TFT beta action, so I'm making this an extended entry.

Joe and I had played two arranged team games earlier this last Sunday, and lost. In the first one we got thrown on Islands, a map which I hate and never play on. However, the recent patch reset our map preferences, and we'd forgotten to thumbs-down that map again. The second game was on a new map we'd never seen before, and we got heartily pwned, though we didn't quite know why.

We decided to go for a third game before stopping for the day. Battle.net found us a game and we were underway. As the game was loading, I recognized the names of one of our opponents. PussInBoots. This requires some background.

PussInBoots is widely held (apparently) as one of the best human players in vanilla War3. Some suck-ups even refer to him as one of the Human gods. I wasn't aware of this status until he flouted it after I'd gotten into an argument with him. That thread may not be around anymore because B.net's archives are shaky. He said to me "I may not be the best human player anymore, but I know who I'm better than, and that's retards like you." I insulted him back, but that's not the point. It was the fact that he didn't want to debate the issue at hand, but rather flout that he was a better player.

So it was interesting that this match-up took place. These two events were almost two weeks apart, so I doubt he remembered me. The beta is a unique opportunity because there are so few people and you're likely to play against almost anyone. I figured Joe didn't know who Puss was, since I didn't even know myself until that thread. I decided it best not to tell him, no sense in putting any pressure on or anything. They were human/undead, we were orc/undead. The game broke down like this:

• UD attacks Joe early with skeletons and fiends, we chase him off.


• We creep and creep, but I get nervous thinking they'll attack again soon, so I start heading to Joe's base.


• Sure enough we spot some red right outside his town, I toss up a Scroll of the Beast and we charge in.


• We win the battle quite well, decide to pursue the ragtag remnants of their army as they flee.


• We see UD has a lot of towers in his base, we move onto the human (Puss) and see that his towers are just NOW going up.


• We proceed to beat on his breakers/priests/sorcs and two mage heroes while also holding off the UD's harassment from behind.


• We manage to keep ahead and slowly destroy PussInBoots' base.


• With Animate Dead, fiery catapults and a spying shade, we break through on the UD's base, who then proceeds to blame the loss on PussInBoots.

All in all it was a satisfying game. Joe managed to line up a lot of nice Shockwaves on the enemy fiends. I kept surrounding enemy heroes to keep them from running, and burrowing my fiends when they got weak. The enemy UD burrowed as well, but with the shade, I was able to attack them anyway.

The online record of the game is here, though again. B.net's records are shaky at best. Some days it'll come up just fine, other days it will result in an error for whatever reason. It was a satisfying game, beating two highly ranked players, and arrogant ones at that.

Posted by Gene at May 2, 2003 01:06 PM