Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

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.

Over 6000 players competed for the top prizes in the Fury Challenge.

This is a chronicle of my experience during the 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 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 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 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.

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 Fury so I only landed in the top half of the entire pack of competitors. Congratulations to me! I successfuly scored some 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.

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