I'd like to share my thoughts on the coverage provided by crossfire.nu for the CIC7 LAN tournament, but first I'd like to explain that I'm looking at this as something of an outsider. Although I played ET a long time ago I haven't actually played since 2005 which does seem a very long time ago now.

I am however a fan of the game, and of objective based games in particular, my roots being in RTCW since 2002. Although I've not really followed the game avidly for a few years now and have little idea who's who these days I found myself with the opportunity to watch some CIC7 games (both my truck and the wife's car broke down on Friday and I had a day off work!). I ended up wanting to watch more and more games as the competition progressed.

As such I loaded www.crossfire.nu into my browser, expecting the website of the competition's organisors to be the central resource for all the information I needed.

No such luck.

I wanted to see which teams were in which groups, to see who was playing well and which matches might be of interest. So I looked for the tables, brackets, whatever represented the structure of the competition. On crossfire.nu they were no-where to be found. Buried in a journal somewhere I found a link to this page :-

http://eventman.ycn-hosting.com/?page=match&action=schedule

Which apparently was actually intended for internal use only and should never have been public. So on crossfire.nu we had no official tables / brackets showing who was playing who. How can that be?

Compare that to Cadred and Tek'9 for COD4 :-

http://www.cadred.org/News/Article/95261/
http://www.tek-9.org/coverage/crossfire_intel_challenge_7-620/playoffs-7.html

Then I looked for coverage, news, updates, and information on what was happening in Enschede. There was a daily news post on the main page, though a bit lacking in detail, and there was a twitter box on the left hand side, but only sporadically updated. Again compare that with the coverage of the COD4 tournament provided by Cadred and Tek-9 :-

http://www.cadred.org/News/Channel/89743/
http://www.tek-9.org/coverage/crossfire_intel_challenge_7-620/Introduction-1.html?page=17

And now that it's over would you like to know who finished where and won what? For ET there's, er, nothing. For COD4 take your pick :-

http://www.cadred.org/News/Article/95450/
http://www.tek-9.org/coverage/crossfire_intel_challenge_7-620/final_standings-8.html

Now, it's not all bad of course. Thankfully the guys at www.gamestv.org came to the rescue. Every match ETTV'ed, a list of recent matches (with score) updated almost as they happened, and a list of upcoming matches and when they were due (albeit the schedule seemed to be changing all the time). And best of all the "live" matches page, where you could see in an instant who was playing right now and just click a link to be watching the game within seconds.

So I got to watch a load of matches, and was suitably impressed with the skills on display.

I watched as Night crept through Axis spawn on Goldrush to cap the objective while the other team were looking the other way.

I watched as YYT came within 8 seconds of meeting tMoe in the UB final.

I watched as Night and his Dignitas team snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the Grand Final, simply refusing to give up and having the sheer audacity to go back and get the flag on Supply after Rockit had supposedly secured it, and defusing plant after plant at the gate, not to mention winning 4 maps straight to take the match and the champions honours.

I watched (and nearly fell off my chair) as Meez was sniped with the objective on Frost just seconds from capping and winning the match for Rockit (and anyone who wants to have a go at him for that imagine what a hero he'd have been if he'd made it, and I for one would've been absolutely delighted for him).

So a great tourney no doubt, and some great matches that will live long in my memory. If only this site had provided the coverage to match the quality of the games themselves.