Year after year CB receives tons of whine concerning numerous cases. Year after year people say we need a new league, a league that replaces Clanbase, a league that doesn't make the mistakes Clanbase makes. This year we finally have such an alternative. Crossfire, in co-operation with Impact-Gaming, organised the second installment of the ETMasters tournament. Many saw this league as a gift from heaven, a reason not to play CB anymore or to flame them even more. In a few points I'm going to explain why I feel Clanbase OpenCup remains the best option for an ET-team.
1) Practicability
When i go to the Clanbase page it takes me 1 click and 5 seconds to get to the mainpage of the OpenCup, I doubt it could be made easier. Clanbase also sends out an email to the leader (and players perhaps as well) on matchday as a reminder with all kinds of proper information (apl, irc channel, time, etc).
On Crossfire on the other hand there is no such thing. If you haven't bookmarked a newspost with all the information in, you are obliged to go searching through the news to find an older newspost. Yes, it doesn't even take a minute but that is not the point. The league should provide an easily accesible page with all the necessary info for her participants. Crossfire doesn't, even though it would require only a small action from the organisers, for example a sticky in the newspostsection or an extra button on the top like there used to be one for CC5. How could somebody who barely visits the crossfire page find out about this cup if there is no easy acces to it? Or how about a teamleader who only registered on crossfire for this cup, if he wants to report the score at this moment he'd have to go searching through the news archive to the second page to find a link to do so.
Clanbase: * * * * *
Crossfire: * *
2) Admins
Concerning Clanbase I can't really comment because I used to be an admin myself and I'm quite familiar with the rules, so I never had the need to contact an admin the past few years. However, I still remember me contacting
Thalakos and 
Donex in the early days before I was an admin, when I had questions. I never had any complaints about both of them, I always got the answer pretty fast. I tried to apply the same thing during my admin carreer and I hope I succeeded.
When it comes to the admins of the ETMasters competition however, I'm less positive. For the past 2 weeks I've been trying to get a hold of the admins. I pmmed
Chosen 4 times, 
eVo twice and Adacore once. Adacore was the only one who responded relatively quick, but his answers turned out to be not exactly in concordance with the truth. Chosen only responded after the 4th time and halfway during the conversation when I actually really needed an answer he went quiet and a short time later went offline. Needless to say I'm dissatisfied with this.
Clanbase: / no rating due to me being biassed
Crossfire: / no rating because my few encounters can't be held representable
3) Recognizing players
Clanbase OC worked with the ETPro Guid, and currently works with the PBGuid to recognize players. Players are also required to use recognizable names compared to their CB names. If a Guid is incorrect a player has the chance to update it at the CB homepage before the match starts. Teams can easily check the APL/guids of all teams in their league/group.
Crossfire lacks this vital function. There is no way to find out if the people you're playing are actually the people who you're supposed to play. You can't look up their guids, because guids aren't used in this competition to recognize players. You can't look up their names because there is no rule that a player has to wear a recognizable name. You can't even trust their clanprofile on Crossfire because players who play a game but aren't added yet can be added after the game without any problem, if they haven't played a game for another team yet!
Your 6th didn't show up? No problem! Just ask a friend or a merc to use the normal 6th guy's nickname. Case closed because crossfire have a rather peculiar way of recognizing players: thats why we force screenshots for reporting scores.
Clanbase: * * * *
Crossfire: * *
4) Sign-ups[/b]
Clanbase counts 253 sign-ups this season, a certain amount of those are already dead so it's not completely representable. But unless it contains more than a hundred dead clans I think it's safe to assume CB OpenCup is still the most popular Cup for teams despite everything what has happened the past few months.
Crossfire counted 149 sign-ups for her ETMasters, considerably less than Clanbase.
Clanbase: * * * *
Crossfire: * * '*
5) Activity
Seeing as this OpenCup hasn't started yet we'll have to use the stats from last season. Last season was pretty disastrous for Clanbase in terms of activity. 65 out of the 232 participating teams (including EC) were scrapped, which is 28% or slightly more than 1 out of 4 teams! Then again, Spring has always been slightly more active than Fall, but not so much that it would change the scales completely.
In the ETMasters on the other hand we have seen 29 drop-outs out of the 144 teams that were divisioned. A percentage of 20% or 1 in 5 teams drop out. One could argue that it's still only matchweek 4, but I believe most of the inactive teams have been removed so even if we would see a raise, it would be a rather small one.
Clanbase: *
Crossfire: * * '*
6) Groups
Every year Clanbase gets tons of whine when they make the groups public. Clanbase is filled with buffoons who have no knowledge about the scene at all is something the Supervisors have to read pretty often in those days. Objectively seen the divisions aren't all that bad although there have been some serious mistakes in the past which can't leave anyone but wondering "How the hell did that happen?". A positive thing is that teams can switch leagues in case they feel they haven't been placed properly.
Crossfire's ETMasters has only 1 Division (technically 2, yes, but the first one is an elite division) so no league switching is necessairy. The groups however aren't really that equal in skill. I've seen groups with teams on top we walked over during earlier confrontations and I've seen groups were teams who'd be at the top of other groups. I'll also never understand why they decided to put all 16 teams in the 8 last groups instead of separating them over all 16 groups.
Clanbase: * * *
Crossfire: * * *
Conclusion[/b]
For me OpenCup remains the best Cup ET has to offer due to the various reasons posted above. ETMasters is a nice alternative but still has too many schoolboy errors too be the perfect alternative for the OpenCup. Especially the lack of a proper way to recognize players is a serious dissapointment. However, it's a pretty young initiative compared to the Clanbase OpenCup so it still has a lot of room to improve.
All I hope is that this won't be completely discarded by the supervisors as the whiney rant of a retard, but that they take some of the points to heart and consider it for a next season.
This is also my first column in a foreign language since a very long time so my apologies for obvious grammar mistakes and incoherent sentences and paragraphs.
1) Practicability
When i go to the Clanbase page it takes me 1 click and 5 seconds to get to the mainpage of the OpenCup, I doubt it could be made easier. Clanbase also sends out an email to the leader (and players perhaps as well) on matchday as a reminder with all kinds of proper information (apl, irc channel, time, etc).
On Crossfire on the other hand there is no such thing. If you haven't bookmarked a newspost with all the information in, you are obliged to go searching through the news to find an older newspost. Yes, it doesn't even take a minute but that is not the point. The league should provide an easily accesible page with all the necessary info for her participants. Crossfire doesn't, even though it would require only a small action from the organisers, for example a sticky in the newspostsection or an extra button on the top like there used to be one for CC5. How could somebody who barely visits the crossfire page find out about this cup if there is no easy acces to it? Or how about a teamleader who only registered on crossfire for this cup, if he wants to report the score at this moment he'd have to go searching through the news archive to the second page to find a link to do so.
Clanbase: * * * * *
Crossfire: * *
2) Admins
Concerning Clanbase I can't really comment because I used to be an admin myself and I'm quite familiar with the rules, so I never had the need to contact an admin the past few years. However, I still remember me contacting
Thalakos and Donex in the early days before I was an admin, when I had questions. I never had any complaints about both of them, I always got the answer pretty fast. I tried to apply the same thing during my admin carreer and I hope I succeeded.When it comes to the admins of the ETMasters competition however, I'm less positive. For the past 2 weeks I've been trying to get a hold of the admins. I pmmed
Chosen 4 times, eVo twice and Adacore once. Adacore was the only one who responded relatively quick, but his answers turned out to be not exactly in concordance with the truth. Chosen only responded after the 4th time and halfway during the conversation when I actually really needed an answer he went quiet and a short time later went offline. Needless to say I'm dissatisfied with this.Clanbase: / no rating due to me being biassed
Crossfire: / no rating because my few encounters can't be held representable
3) Recognizing players
Clanbase OC worked with the ETPro Guid, and currently works with the PBGuid to recognize players. Players are also required to use recognizable names compared to their CB names. If a Guid is incorrect a player has the chance to update it at the CB homepage before the match starts. Teams can easily check the APL/guids of all teams in their league/group.
Crossfire lacks this vital function. There is no way to find out if the people you're playing are actually the people who you're supposed to play. You can't look up their guids, because guids aren't used in this competition to recognize players. You can't look up their names because there is no rule that a player has to wear a recognizable name. You can't even trust their clanprofile on Crossfire because players who play a game but aren't added yet can be added after the game without any problem, if they haven't played a game for another team yet!
Your 6th didn't show up? No problem! Just ask a friend or a merc to use the normal 6th guy's nickname. Case closed because crossfire have a rather peculiar way of recognizing players: thats why we force screenshots for reporting scores.
Clanbase: * * * *
Crossfire: * *
4) Sign-ups[/b]
Clanbase counts 253 sign-ups this season, a certain amount of those are already dead so it's not completely representable. But unless it contains more than a hundred dead clans I think it's safe to assume CB OpenCup is still the most popular Cup for teams despite everything what has happened the past few months.
Crossfire counted 149 sign-ups for her ETMasters, considerably less than Clanbase.
Clanbase: * * * *
Crossfire: * * '*
5) Activity
Seeing as this OpenCup hasn't started yet we'll have to use the stats from last season. Last season was pretty disastrous for Clanbase in terms of activity. 65 out of the 232 participating teams (including EC) were scrapped, which is 28% or slightly more than 1 out of 4 teams! Then again, Spring has always been slightly more active than Fall, but not so much that it would change the scales completely.
In the ETMasters on the other hand we have seen 29 drop-outs out of the 144 teams that were divisioned. A percentage of 20% or 1 in 5 teams drop out. One could argue that it's still only matchweek 4, but I believe most of the inactive teams have been removed so even if we would see a raise, it would be a rather small one.
Clanbase: *
Crossfire: * * '*
6) Groups
Every year Clanbase gets tons of whine when they make the groups public. Clanbase is filled with buffoons who have no knowledge about the scene at all is something the Supervisors have to read pretty often in those days. Objectively seen the divisions aren't all that bad although there have been some serious mistakes in the past which can't leave anyone but wondering "How the hell did that happen?". A positive thing is that teams can switch leagues in case they feel they haven't been placed properly.
Crossfire's ETMasters has only 1 Division (technically 2, yes, but the first one is an elite division) so no league switching is necessairy. The groups however aren't really that equal in skill. I've seen groups with teams on top we walked over during earlier confrontations and I've seen groups were teams who'd be at the top of other groups. I'll also never understand why they decided to put all 16 teams in the 8 last groups instead of separating them over all 16 groups.
Clanbase: * * *
Crossfire: * * *
Conclusion[/b]
For me OpenCup remains the best Cup ET has to offer due to the various reasons posted above. ETMasters is a nice alternative but still has too many schoolboy errors too be the perfect alternative for the OpenCup. Especially the lack of a proper way to recognize players is a serious dissapointment. However, it's a pretty young initiative compared to the Clanbase OpenCup so it still has a lot of room to improve.
All I hope is that this won't be completely discarded by the supervisors as the whiney rant of a retard, but that they take some of the points to heart and consider it for a next season.
This is also my first column in a foreign language since a very long time so my apologies for obvious grammar mistakes and incoherent sentences and paragraphs.
It's just that everybody is saying how much better ETMasters is and how CB sucks and I wanted to write a response to that.
The Leagues aren't responsible anymore for ETTV-coverage. In the past the League-admins requested ETTV-coverage but these days everybody can do/does it. Any other coverage doesn't hold any interest for me, and this is gonna sound arrogant, but I guess this goes for the average ETplayer.
ETTV is a matter of course nowadays, ‘n not something I’d consider ‘real’ coverage.
An easily accessible link to the competition homepage is a must and should've been done when requested prior to the comp start.
chosen has been inactive cause of his job etc, but that doesn't stop you from pmming the admins with +v in #etmasters. both ops and voices are admins. i can speak for myself that i'm always online on irc from 16:00 till 24:00. yet i haven't received any pms from you:[
guids part:
i agree we should have tried to think of a way to make it easier for teams to check one and other. next edition this will be dealt with. for now you can always pm an admin to check if that person is on the allowed list
the rest:
learning experience for the next edition hopefully
with a proper league system etmaster would easily dominate all the other leagues tho:[
That's based on my clanbase experience though.
CB isn't really known by his decision making:]
And you're whine on Clanbase is pretty irrelevant.
im not sure what kind of important stuff your talking about where a +v admin could not help you with, an example would be nice
e: off to bed, continue tomorrow!
Always helps to have people onside.
If you do not feel yourself confident asking an +v admin ... then i guess in clanbase you do it also, i mean, u only ask mundus bartichello or andy or killerboy and when they are not responding you are fucked up, but referees MAYBE can help you also....
In etmasters if someone with voice is not sure about what to say about ur question... should say it: "I am not sure but..maybe...w/e" then yes ask another, but if you count only operator members i think you failed...
Could you explain why you think the ETMasters are better than the EC?
first thing i hear off it tbh
i though the coverage about all the games was for OC summer cup :/