Happy New Year

 Hey everyone, happy new year. 

Been a while since the last post, I've been busy playing ballista!  This last year was pretty amazing for the scene overall.  We picked up some new members and the game videos have been flowing non-stop thanks to Mirupo and Papasz.  

Official matches are still official matches.  No matter what I do I can't seem to convince people to completely abide to the rules that I set out.. which is expected.  I'm just some guy.  That's fine.  I'm going to write an OM "guide" to being a game-respecting player after this post and see where that goes.  That being said, with the quality of hako we have going I don't really mind too much if OM are a circus.

Hako improved a ton this year; called 20-0 hako games don't happen much anymore.  The newer Japanese players leveled up in a huge way.  Qonn(a super strong Japanese player) normally attends games which I think helps.  We've recruited some new NA players this year and they're well on their way to the top.  Abz(Drekien) one of our old OGs came back and plays regularly too! 

We found a solution to the 4v4 dilemma this year with Rune Fencer.  RUN perfectly slides into the fourth player slot without overdoing it with healing or damage.  I always struggled to create decently balanced 4v4 games and now it's easy!  What a relief.

We're looking forward to trying 5v5 in 2023, using SCH/WHM and another front line job to round out the teams.  Hopefully this works out well so 3~5v5 is all easy to set up in the future.  We'll see.

I ended the year with a new rule proposal targeting the dreaded "run away" strategy that has plagued previous hako groups and now threatens to become a reality in this group.  Essentially we're putting up imaginary barriers around the hako map to prevent any looping.  The map is posted on discord but I'll post something about that directly at another time.  Hopefully that works out.

Anyway, what a fantastic year for ballista.  Two years ago it was hard to imagine any ballista of decent quality happening at all, and now we have this dedicated supergroup.  What a delight.  Thanks everybody and here's to another great year in 2023 :)