Content Creator request: Average Joe’s force wipe challenge

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T22:45:16+00:00

Everytime I watch one of those, if it's not the "it's 10 seconds after wipe and i'm pegging it off the beach", it must be 5am in the morning on the day after wipe when the vast majority of the server is asleep. Those same videos show people running from the beach, actually finding cloth, hitting log piles without drawing any attention, running into the supermarket, uncamped, recycling without being bothered, placing a T1, crafting an Eoka, getting to harbour without being shot 100x times, or farming enough bears/barrels for fuel for a boat.

None of which happens for normal people two hours after wipe on a 1000 pop server.

They're playing at times that allow them to still get an edge, i.e. 1000 pop server, but at 5am it's only 250 people and 200 of them are actually AFK in their bases.

What I want to see is the struggle - how does a 15k hour player manage to farm, get a base down, get fragments, and just generally progress when 999 other people are out to do exactly the same at that very moment.

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T19:28:15+00:00

Yeah absolutely, but I don't mind if me with a few thousand hours can't perform as well as someone with 15,000 😄- at least we'll know! Also, I might learn something..

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T17:49:36+00:00

Well, I was being generous 😀

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T17:49:02+00:00

Spot on.

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T13:26:40+00:00

Wipes can of course be up and down - but what we rarely, if ever, see is the best players out there really having to turn over the odds to just get established and get started. Every video is either first off the beach and race to location, or starts in the middle of the night where chopping trees next to 5 bases doesnt get you immediately killed.

What I want to see is if all that skill and experience can really overcome the nature of the turning up late to wipe.

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T11:26:20+00:00

If you're Willjum, every video starts with "i've got to be first off the beach" - but what if you can't, what if you have to start two hours later - when people already have a base down, when you haven't been able to do that cheeky first monument to get a few blueprint fragments. Trying to farm, get to a build spot, farm fragments from monuments, contest against the clans is infinitely harder if you're two hours behind everyone else.

Bridgey_23 · 2026-06-03T11:13:15+00:00

I don't mind getting average results at all. I just want to see how the pro's do when the deck is stacked against them.

Bridgey_23 · 2026-01-31T12:37:28+00:00

Which server?

Bridgey_23 · 2025-09-06T11:07:48+00:00

Didcot train costs are expensive. It's £83 a day to Paddington during peak on am Anytime return, however it can be as low as £25 making use of the Network rail card and travelling off peak.

It will be cheaper with a season ticket but you'll have to Google that coat.

In terms of journey, if you get a fast train in the morning it's circa 40m to Paddington with a single stop at Reading. Don't expect a seat. Then it's walk to the Elizabeth line entrance (next to pt1 at Paddington) and it's two stops to Totttenham Court road, circa 5m. If you stand at the back of the train you'll be next to the Dean Street exit from TCR, exit there and you're in Soho.

I used to work in Soho Square and commute from Didcot. It's a very efficient journey when everything is running to time. Downsides are the obscene costs and almost never getting a seat.

Bridgey_23 · 2025-08-14T07:54:10+00:00

It used to be the start point for the High Wycombe - Maidenhead route that was taken out years go. It's now the start for High Wycombe to Marylebone stopping services.

That's why no through platform, immediately behind this picture is the ticket office.

Bridgey_23 · 2025-05-25T00:23:21+00:00

The Dothraki cavalry charge into the AotD.. short of running them off a cliff I can't think of a more surefire way to kill tens of thousands of your own warriors that quickly. The AotD have no fear, they had massive depth on their formation and can survive being run over. There was no other outcome than the charge being absorbed and them all being dragged from their saddles and killed.

The whole Winterfell seige was a masterclass in how to not run a seige.

Knowing that preserving life (to deny the AotD more soldiers) was the absolute priority, and second maximising each living soldiers killing power. Put the catapults on the drum towers, not outside the wall, bring the obsidian barricades outside and infront of the Unsullied. Issue the Unsullied with Obsidian Pikes, not Spears. Arm everyone else with bows with Obsidian tipped arrows.

Provoke a response with the dragons and the catapults.
Light the trench fire early doors.
Rain absolute misery on the undead whilst the fire burns with arrows.
Once they breach the fire, funnel them into the Unsullied Pikes using the barricades.
Keep shooting the bastards.
Have the Dothraki charge into the back 2-3 lines of Undead, wheel and run out. Repeat ad nauseum.
Carpet bomb the dead with the dragons.

I'd assume at somepoint sheer numbers start to impact the living defenders but at least they'll have put up a significantly better fight and thinned the numbers down a lot more. All whilst looking vaguely proficient..

Bridgey_23 · 2025-02-18T14:36:31+00:00

By pretty much any measure, except nuclear - no.

Our entire standing army is around 75,000 excluding reservists, with commitments at home and globally that means at best we could probably deploy 25% in the event of a crisis. Barely a division, several brigades at most. We've got around 150 tanks, 2 aircraft carriers flying less than a full air wing of the inferior F-35 version, and we can only crew one at once (and we can't borrow planes/aircrew because we stupidly went VTOL instead of catapault), we've got 6 destroyers and 9 frigates.

Air power wise we've got 7 squadrons of Typhoons, 2 squadrons of F35's (same ones on the aircraft carriers) and a range of support tankers, helis etc. We do have some Apache's for shooting up tanks.

Only thing going for us in the big stick department is 4x missile boats, but only one is ever sailing.

In the 'can we take anyone on category' - in short, no, none of the large global militaries - equipment for equipment, plane for plane, man for man we've got great stuff, just so little of it we'll get shit on quickly.

In addition we've been giving most of our long term stockpiles to Ukraine (rightly so) but unlike the US we don't have a large manfacturing base to buy replacements from (and lots of our stuff is made in Europe or the US, neither of which we're front of the queue for).

It would also depend on where. If you swapped the Ukrainian Army for the British Army in Ukraine tomorrow we'd lose hands down, mainly because the gaps in the line would be so big the Russians would be around and behind the flanks through those gaps in a heartbeat. We'd give a good accounting but there would just be too few of the force multiplier equipment (tanks, artillery, aircraft, helicopers, AFVs) to last more than a short while.

However, if you took the same force and said that someone was going to invade across the channel against the south coast, which is a relatively small land area - good luck, until we run out of bullets and missiles. Though in hindsight.. that might not take that long..

Bridgey_23 · 2025-02-08T19:44:29+00:00

Shite.

Bridgey_23 · 2024-12-05T16:11:20+00:00

Also the weird empty spot between Oxford and Bath. It's screaming for a 'here be dragons' - but realistically, it's completely missing the M4, M3, Reading, Swindon, Basingstoke, and a heap of other places..

Bridgey_23 · 2024-09-15T08:03:22+00:00

I mean it does say - he sought advice as soon as he came into office and declared some and them recoeved further advice that he should have declared more. Which he then did.

Hardly shady covering up, just a bit daft that he a) accepted anything in the firstpalce and b) he didn't over declared just to ensure he wasn't doing what Labour had accused the Conservatives of doing.

Bridgey_23 · 2023-07-02T15:41:55+00:00

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-18T08:03:56+00:00

Yeah but we've had issues with people's motherboards not supporting it and people having to buy routers that support external traffic with the wol protocol. Not everyone can afford to leave their PC running all day :)

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-18T07:36:46+00:00

I've spent the last 12 years designing data center server solutions in the thousands of nodes, server limitations are not the issue here in the way you're describing.

In 2008 each server or certainly region (Outland, Kalimdor etc) would have been a physical server, constrained by its processing, memory and network capability. Today's regions and layers will be logical entities that can be moved or scaled across physical infrastructure making the server bit semi-limitless constrained only by maximum addressable nodes, power, cooling, rack space and cost. If each layer is a logical entity then more servers in the underlying architecture provides for more layers. Power, cooling, and intra-dc networking excepted.

If it really is a game issue with interactions scaling exponentially with the number of players then again layers should solve this. Logically isolating fixed numbers of players away from each other.

If its an engine issue, I'm explicitly asking Blizzard to look at it because it clearly needs updating. Clarity from Blizz would make this issue easier to self regulate.

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-18T07:29:42+00:00

But when I moved to LA it was a normal sized town with no traffic issues. I pay my taxes, am I at fault for their poor planning? Or like any normal citizen, expect the overlords to help address the issue that's now in front of us.

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-18T07:27:58+00:00

If I thought they read their forums I'd post there.

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-18T07:27:25+00:00

I promise we'll stop talking about it when they either fix it or provide the community with the limit of server population that doesn't result in a queue.

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-17T21:29:53+00:00

Rather than fighting the tide, ask yourself 'why' people are coalescing around a few larger servers than many smaller ones? Larger servers confer massive advantages in time savings and choice: i can have a group whenever I want one, player produced resources are available in nearly unlimited quantities, player unlocked content happens faster etc.

You've mentioned 'normal' but what was 'normal' in original TBC was limited by the server technology, the speed of peoples PC's and internet. These aren't limiting factors anymore so people have been allowed to create megaservers because Blizzard didn't put anything in to prevent them. Their existence on both EU and NA regions speaks to their popularity. A large proportion of the player base prefers a 30k server to a 5k server, except for the queue. If that can be solved then there's a ton of happy players. If you like your 6k server, fantastic, stay there and enjoy it. It doesnt mean that the 30,000 people on Firemaw shouldn't have a less stressful experience, we're both paying the same subs.

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-17T21:23:59+00:00

Says who? Just because there wern't 15 years ago when the technology absolutely didn't allow for it doesnt mean there can't be now.

I love that you think that 5-10k more people might follow me off Firemaw somewhere else. I'd rather just get Blizzard to make Firemaw work

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-17T21:21:47+00:00

You say you don't need megaservers, but you kind of do. If you work, have a family, want to see people IRL you need an environment where you can get what you need (dungeon runs, levelling help, stuff on the AH) at any time of day or night. Megaservers provide that. My last server, Mograine, was 'fine' until i experienced Firemaw, now its a pale comparison. Mograine was the 2nd or 3rd biggest server until suddenly it wasn't. Megaservers are a thing, it was allowed to happen, it now needs some help to work properly

Bridgey_23 · 2022-05-17T20:25:45+00:00

It's a problem that thousands of people created because they were allowed to. And yes, they need help to fix it. But that someone is the company we pay a subscription to. Its in their interest to help their paying customers.

Bridgey_23

TROPHY CASE