by Cody "Micajah" Bye



Every seven minutes for two whole weekends, I was in the fight of my
life. Brutality, bloodshed and violence rained down on this world, and
I was a part of it, swinging my twin blades with such fervor that no
man stayed alive for long under my onslaught. I was ruthless and wholly
without mercy. It was one of the most competitive events I've ever
experienced as a video gamer.

style="margin: 10px; border-collapse: collapse; float: right; width: 136px; height: 165px;"
border="1">

style="font-style: italic;">Over 6000 players
competed for the top prizes in the Fury Challenge.

This is a chronicle of my experience during the style="font-style: italic;">Fury Challenge, an
event sponsored by Dell, Nvidia, CyberShotz, Gamerail and a number of
others. The
prizes were eye-popping - Nvidia 8600s, full-spec computers,
in-game gold and vast supplies of CyberShotz - and the competition for
these prizes was incredibly fierce. Over 6300 players competed in the
two event weekends (at least that was the number listed on the href="http://www.unleashthefury.com/community/leaguesladders.aspx">player
rankings) and all of them were vying for a shot at those top
prizes, each of us desperately wanting to outdo the other to grab the
coveted graphics cards and computers. While 6300 players may have
competed in various events in the game, who knows how many others
downloaded the client only to have plans ruin their chances or simply
forget about the Challenge all together? The number of downloads for
one weekend of the beta must have been enormous, and I expect that many
of those who forgot may give Fury a try in the near future.



On Friday of the first Challenge weekend, I fired up my Fury client and
proceeded to make myself an avatar for the event. While I won't go into
details of the creation screen, it's all fairly cosmetic and has little
to do with your actual gameplay - I made my typical ginger-haired
warrior (if you want to hear more about character creation check out href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/9552">my preview).
Unfortunately during the Challenge experienced players were still
forced to go through the tutorial if they were firing up a new account
specifically for the contest. Thus I found myself on Friday afternoon
winding my way through the various tutorial guides and checking out my
avatar options when I should have been swinging my sword in righteous
Fury! All that aside, the set-up for the contest accounts was fairly
smooth and non-threatening. With a Fury client located at every other
MMOG network (Ten Ton Hammer included), people had all the
possibilities in the world to download the game and take a crack at
taking me down.



After making my Destroyer and plodding my way through the tutorials, I
finally found myself in the Fury
Bloodbath. For those of you href="http://wiki.tentonhammer.com/index.php?title=Fury#Game_Types">unfamiliar
with the game, there are three different types of battle
scenarios: Bloodbath, Vortex and Elimination. Bloodbath is the Fury
version of a free-for-all, Vortex is a "Capture the Flag" type game,
and the "Last Man Standing" scenario is covered by the Elimination
rounds. Since I was playing alone and didn't want to bring down any of
the other Vortex or Elimination groups, I opted for the free-for-all
version of the game. Entering the queue, I was actually surprised at
how long the wait time was per game. At a minute per interval, with
load times in between, I was actually spending about 8-9 minutes per
round when I should be popping in and out of those rounds faster than
one of those pesky rodents you'd find in Whack-A-Mole.

style="margin: 10px; border-collapse: collapse; float: left; width: 136px; height: 165px;"
border="1">

style="font-style: italic;">Through skill, guts
and a lot of luck, I ended up being in the top 2000!

Despite the wait, when I actually got into my matches, I was heartily
surprised with the sort of competition I encountered. During my early
beta days, I'd constantly find myself in the top one or two ranks in
every game that I engaged in. This time around, I was riding the middle
of the pack - getting killed as often as I was killing. This was the
sort of competition I was looking for! It was apparent that many of the
competitors in the Fury Challenge certainly took their gameplay
seriously. If you look at the top 20 players on the Player Ranking
board at the Fury website, you'll see that these players won about half
of the matches they entered. This is an extraordinary statistic in any
game where you're constantly competing with a whole horde of other
people! And those players couldn't simply play all Vortex or
Elimination games either (which would greatly increase their win/loss
record). The top players played all of the games almost equally, and
it's astounding to see what sort of percentages many of those top
players came up with.



Unfortunately, being the busy family man, I couldn't spend my entire
weekend destroying other individuals at style="font-style: italic;">Fury so I only
landed in the top half of the entire pack of competitors.
Congratulations to me! I successfuly scored some style="font-style: italic;">Fury gold and a
subscription to Gamerail. Woohoo! While the numbers in the League
Ladders and Player Rankings may be a bit obscure to the non-Fury
player, several
detailed articles give a run down of what makes up the point
system in Fury. If you'd like to see a more detailed explanation of how
things are scored, go ahead and head to the articles and give them a
gander.



My one complaint throughout the Fury Challenge was the need for a final
tune-up on the optimization of the Fury build. While much improved from
what I saw in my initial preview, my computer still hesitated a bit
when the action would center around me. While more than three attackers
typically means a quick death, it is even quicker when your computer
hiccups then spits out your corpse.



In the end, I'd have to say that the Fury Challenge - although not as
big as Auran had hoped - was still a tremendous success. With over 6300
people now versed in the ways of Fury, it will be easy for the
word-of-mouth on the game to spread around the internet and gaming
social networks. If Auran holds regular events like the Fury Challenge,
I can't wait to compete in the final version of the game. I truly look
forward to the last spit-shine and polish the developer at Auran have
prepared for Fury. There have been rumblings that the final version is
even cleaner running and smoother than the Fury Challenge version, so
it will certainly be a pleasure to gank some folks while I enjoy
unadulterated gaming goodness.

---