As many of us are still anticipating the release of America's Army 3, the development team continues to give us little bits and pieces to keep us happy.  But is it enough? We missed a few updates in the AA3 world while our website was down; on March 14th an interview with Executive Producer Michael Bode was reveled at America's Army 3 dev blog discussing what distinguishes AA3 from other major titles and how the game will fulfill the US Army values. Its not what most of us want to hear, but atleast its something.

On March 17th (St. Patrick's Day), official word came from the TeamSpeak team that their upcoming release of TeamSpeak 3 would be featured in America's Army 3. "Current America's Army players use TeamSpeak 2 with great success as it offers them the clear voice communication they need for effective teamwork," said Michael Bode, America's Army Executive Producer. "The quality of the TeamSpeak products simply can't be beaten. TeamSpeak 3 is becoming the default third-party VOIP solution on the PC platform. It offers us so many exciting features, and we plan to take advantage of them all, some in the initial release and others later with each AA3 expansion pack." Teamspeak is truely the most used means of communication amongst gamers, but many competitive teams prefer Ventrilo for its clarity and features. How ever TS3 is looking better with every update, maybe more competitive teams will switch back to TS.

Source: www.teamspeak.com

As week 4 of UGL approaches we are beginning to see the gap between the bottom top rung teams increase.  However, this week gives chance to upset on one of the lesser played competition maps: Weapons Cache SE.  WCSE expands on one of the most popular competition maps Weapons Cache.  With this expansion defence is given the opportunity to experiment with some creative defensives; but it usually just comes down to primary and tertiary camps.

Current Top 3 Teams:

1. United Gamers
2. Final Destination
3. Inevitable Defeat

*Just outside: IceNine

Click below to view the match predictions!

Im sure most of you may already know that America's Army has been around for almost 7 years now, the AA series kicked off its first release in the summer of 2002 under the tag America's Army Recon.  Since then they have fired out 27 updates adding 42 new maps with hopes of AA3 in the near future.  America's Army has had its ups and downs, many "old school" players have seen their share of changes over the years...

It seems as time went on, the strong AA community has become something unlike it was before the 2.0 series.  Old time gamers quit, other players just stopped playing...but the biggest is the version spread that came when Mac OSX support was dropped back in 2.5 that left hundreds behind. According to many players, 2.5 was one of the most stable and liked versions. Redsack.com that has been doing a number of statistics for America's Army, below is the AA population spread across a few different areas.

There is lots of activity in 2.5 still, only in the past year has it slowed down with several major clans moving to 2.8. Many players are actually downgrading back to 2.5 just for the simple and fun game play, they have made it easier to get going with this old version by running 2.5 Assist (Deployment Client)..players can download this safe application to get them up to speed with AAv2.5 in minutes.  Besides the player activity, there is even a few communities and leagues going on. DRAAT is a really handy game tracker and community, DirectAction is a new league.  Then a few individuals took it apon themselves to develop some great programs & maps to make things interesting and help people out... 2.5 Assist and mAAp Pack Project.

Week 3 of TWL is to be played on the fast paced map collapsed tunnel. Tunnel is a map where teamwork is tantamount to success and a slip up by one person can cost a team dearly. Getting stuck in a doorway or accidentally flashing your whole team are just a few of the things that c an earn you the title of lvp. Teams must be able to spam at the start of the round, throw synchronized flashes downstairs, adapt after a quick pick and run to extraction while blind. All of these skills are important and can make or break a team's chances of winning during the three short minutes that are allotted for a round. Our guest writers this week are effingee from fc who writes well informed all around awesome predictions and sanitary from i9 who writes exactly what is on his mind without regard for the readers. Lastly, if you are interested in writing predictions for future weeks of TWL feel free to hit me up on xfire username: galakadon.

Click "read on" below to see the predictions

This is a public service announcement to keep you informed of some of the issues we have been experiencing at AA Command.  For the second time in the last couple of weeks we are experiencing some difficulties with our forums.  For some reason or another about 75% of people (including myself) are unable to login/post in the forums.  Along with this issue new users are unable to register because the verification image is not showing as it should.  We have been working on this issue as much as possible.  I thank you for your patience as we deal with this very frustrating situation and i will do my best to keep everyone up-to-date.

Along with this i apologize for now having UGL Week 2 Predictions up.  I would also like to apologize to sixxtoes and chronox for taking the time out of their day to do the predictions.  Unfortunately, while attempting to fix the forums their prediction and my writeup for the predictions were lost.  I'm currently a student and preparing for midterms and multiple papers this week and barely have time to breath, otherwise i would have rewritten it.  I assure you that we will do our best to have our competition coverage back on track this coming week.

Thanks for your support and patience,

12ampage