RPS Community Update: What You Did in Cities: Skylines, Guild Wars 2, PlanetSide 2 and GTA V

Hi folks!

I'm Scott and I help moderate the RPS community forum. There's some great discussions going on over there but what I'm really interested in is what the members of the community do together - whether that's in games or out of them. Every month I'm going to provide a summary of what RPSers have been up to and how you can get involved.

This month: Cities: Skylines [official site] succession games; our Guild Wars 2 [official site] guild get more involved in PvP; the PlanetSide 2 [official site] outfits do battle in a server smash; and how to join the capers of our Grand Theft Auto V [official site] crew.

First up, it's...

Serial Cities: Skylines

Inspired by RPS' own co-op game played by Alec, Jonathan and Dan (along with similar efforts elsewhere on the Internet), mrwonko has set up a thread to pass Cities: Skylines maps around between fellow forum members. To ensure that things run smoothly, the first post sets down a few basic rules: Things like no mods, having two days to take your turn and to seek advice if you encounter serious problems.

On the back of these basic guidelines, the community has built two beautiful cities: The scenic flatlands of Westvalley and appropriately watery Endless Springs. Thanks to all players documenting their experiences on the thread, we've been able to witness how the maps have grown over the past few weeks, alongside getting pretty candid insights into the issues they've encountered. These range from traffic piling up...

...to blazing crematoriums...

...to flooded motorways...

...to fixing a poop-filled lake by pumping sewage into the sea.

It's been great to watch the small collection of mayors overcome these problems and speed both maps towards (and over) 50,000 population, unlocking more tools as they go. To quote GTD-Carthage:

"Nice work, everyone! We're very close to unlocking Monuments! (I've never unlocked monuments, 122 hours into the game.)"

The cities continue to be developed and I'm sure more will be started in the near future. Although I don't personally own the game, I have enjoyed watching them expand into thriving metropolises.

How to join: You can kick off a new city, join up to play on an existing one, or just see how everything has developed, over on the thread.

Thanks to forum members GTD-Carthage, mrwonko, Canadave and Cei for the pictures.

Guild Wars 2

Although the Guild Wars 2 community has something going on pretty much every week, April proved to be a particularly popular month for sPvP, the game's way of throwing players against each other in a 'structured' manner.

After a year of fighting with random players, the Rock Paper Signet guild established its own custom arena for clobbering each other every Tuesday.

Arenas are usually reserved for specialised guilds due to the resources required to open and maintain one. Despite this, the multifaceted [RPS] has made their own under the leadership of Tweetiti. The arena is open to anyone who wants to play with us outside of special events and you can find it on EU servers as 'Rock Paper Slapdown [RPS]':

To celebrate the uptake in sPvP interest, guild member Denso organised and hosted the inaugural guild tournament on Saturday the 18th. The prizes were gold, weapon skins, gloating rights and a showmatch against yours truly.

There were eight participants fighting in bracket-based, best-of-three, rounds. The fights came thick and fast, with various spectators participating in ‘casting’ the combatants on Mumble.

Some rounds were short, finishing in a flurry of combos. Others were longer, with rivals being unable to build the momentum to burst one another down. It was nice to see such a range of classes too, although engineers definitely shined through.

The last round came down to two such characters who had dominated their respective brackets. The turret-dropping, flamethrowing finalists chased each other around the various obstacles that littered the map, breaking line-of-sight and dropping supply crates like rain.

After showing off some great defensive strategies in the semis before going on the offensive in the final, Inglebard came out the final victor. This was followed by a special showmatch against me, which I conveniently didn't take any screenshots of (although I'm not ashamed to admit I lost horribly).

If you'd like to participate in the antics of [RPS], we're open to all friendly players in the EU.

How to join: Post in this thread for an invite and keep an eye on this thread for upcoming events.

PlanetSide 2

The PlanetSide 2 RPS community has a lot in common with the Guild Wars 2 one: They're very active, enjoy killing other players and both had something pretty special on Saturday the 18th.

While GW2 players were busy with an intraguild event, PS2ers were gearing up for the thirty-sixth ServerSmash. ServerSmash is a fairly frequent evening of chaos, where members of two different servers go against each other in two hours of battle. This is an interesting twist to usual, as you could be fighting alongside players you would normally be against if you just stuck to your home server.

Both RPS factions play on Miller (EU) and Cephas took point with organising and leading our representation there as RockPaperSmash under the mighty New Conglomerate empire. They took arms against their enemies from Cobalt, who played under the banner of Vanu Sovereignty.

On the evening, RPS held the area around Ixtab, fighting hard and securing a clutch capture at the Mossridge Command Center. That proved to be the last capture of the Smash, adding a nice flourish to the end of the match.

It was interesting to see kills between the teams remained pretty even for the whole two hours, meaning victory went to the side who was the most resourceful at capturing and defending their points.

These (and many other statistics) about the battle are available here.

As for who actually won... well isn't it obvious?

To quote regular PS2er fersumengin, who posted on the Sunday after:

"I'm still on a high from last night, this morning !!!"

You can watch a full recording of the stream, with commentary, here. I really recommend it; it's where those great action shots above come from and the commentary makes it
easy for even newbies to understand.

RPS' outfits in PS2 run weekly outings, both as Vanu Sovereignty and New Conglomerate, along with regular participation in ServerSmash and similar events on Miller.

How to join: You can join the Vanu here and Conglomerate here.

And finally!

You may have heard about a game coming out recently called.... Grand Theft Auto V. Although it's a very new title, we've already seen RPS members wanting to play together online and we do have our own crew on Rockstar's Social Club. To quote the thread about it:

"Because of the way GTA Online's matchmaking works you don't have to be friends with people in your crew to play with them, you just go into the pause menu, move to the Online tab and choose to play with crew. You can also make closed crew-only sessions if you don't want the hassle of unwashed non-RPS folk ruining your enjoyment. If you only want to play with specific people, though, you have to befriend them on Social Club - I don't think there's a way to pick specific crewmates to join."

Folks have been making use of both the Social Club system and Mumble to run heists together, along with generally having a good time.

How to join: Log in to Social Club and join the crew from there.