eVo's AEF

Ok so back from AEF and will do the usual journal telling about the trip :)

Thursday
Set off at about 9.30 am to go and pick up sqzz, deryn (sqzz’s girlfriend), owzo from Newport and then off to Folkestone to get the Euro tunnel and meet up with rAzbo, meez, Pansy, unblind and Adacore. We were supposed to be picking R0SS up on the way as he said he was only 15 minutes off our route, in truth he is just stupid and he lives the other side of London so we told him to fuck off and get a train to Folkestone where we would pick him up from there otherwise we were missing our train :)

Caught the euro tunnel and met up with rAzbo and co in Calais and then set off on our journey in convoy to our hotel in Antwerp. A couple of hours and a few near miss car crashes later and we arrived at the hotel to check in and this is where things really did start to go pear shaped.

The travel agency that Adacore used to book the Impact hotel rooms with had ceased trading it seems and sent the hotel a nice fax cancelling our rooms even though they had charged Adam’s credit card. The hotel refused to match the rate we originally had (I think for 2 rooms of 4 for 3 nights Adam originally paid about 400 euros) and so I ended up having to pay 300 euros just for 1 night and then the same again for the rest of the trip… what a great start to the lan.

Anyway pissed off we headed out into town for some food and beers. We decided to walk the couple of miles to the lan center only to find it closed and everyone gone so walked all the way back again… so far for every beer drunk I think we must have walked 2 miles.. a really shit start to the evening now. Then it seems out of nowhere Overdrive, hope and douille showed up and xylos shortly after, Overdive took us to what would be the equivalent of the student area to drink where we met a load of other gamers, crmbs, leon, most of rockit, the rest of TAG, Eirik and others who I cant remember now. So we got stuck into the drinking, again it didn’t start off to well with Leon popping over to ask R0SS why everyone hates him -,- thanks for setting the mood leon lol hopefully now those who have chatted with R0SS at lan actually realise he is a really top bloke. So we stayed there for a few hours before heading home suitably drunk :)

Friday
Woke up after a reasonable sleep with a stinking hangover :) had a run round dealing with the hotel bookings and headed out for food then off to the lan center. First impressions, very professional looking, very hot :) started doing the usual introductions going round saying hi to everyone we know from the previous lans. Then it was time to figure out where the missing players were, a quick phone call to hayaa reveals he is stuck in traffic in Rotterdam and won’t be here in time for the first game, likewise with my own team (Learn 2 Play) m1lk had missed his train and also wouldn’t be here in time, time to bring in the mercs :-) Pansy for hayaa and Overdrive for m1lk.

Setup goes pretty shit but we start anyway. Impact get off to a flier and comfortably win, pansy potm. For my team it was a different start, we got raped by TAG and to rub salt in the wounds overdrive was using Playmate’s (I think) headset and mouse so was looking pretty in pink haha. Finally hayaa and m1lk turn up and so we have our proper lineups for the 2nd game. Comfortable again for Impact and a 4:2 win vs titanz for us. Next was the epic encounter and surely a close contest. Impact vs Learn to Play!!! After a closely fought battle where I owned R0SS on many occasions and m1lk showed them why he is still one of the best players in the game, lots of name calling later and Impact scraped to a 4:0 win … off now for the best part of the day, the drinking.

Meez went off to the TAG bbq having promised me he would be back to his hotel for a good night’s sleep and that he could be trusted not to take the piss leaving the rest of us to stay at the lan center to have some quiet drinks with me having set a curfew of 12:30 for R0SS and the other players. m1lk however had other plans and suggested a terrible plan to get me drunk so that I wouldn’t care about the curfew, unfortunately he knows me too well and to an extent this worked. Many drinks later It was starting to get messy as you can see by this crazy dance act by R0SS

We then met the Almighty guys including Kamz who was sporting an incredible outfit including his pulled up white socks, made me laugh anyway :) As expected there were no issues with Kamz despite me making clear that I cant be doing with this split personality online offline shit (the reason I say that is because when I started piping up he said “no I’m not Kamz I’m Manj”). But generally speaking the almighty guys seemed like a really good bunch, first time meeting Jinosta and he seemed like a nice lad. But it was getting really late and a very tired Xylos was pissed off and wanting his bed so off we went and after having got food etc we finally crashed out at our hotel sometime around 3am…. oops

Saturday
After an awful nights sleep because R0SS snores like a trooper I finally get woken up by said person stating “paul fuck its nearly 9 get up”, it would seem that some dumbass (me) set their alarm and selected weekdays only, so we scramble off to the LAN center now very late only to find that Meez also wasn’t there, I call Adacore and make him kick meez out of bed and send him to the lan center. We have now forfeited our first map against Gamerz Connection because we were too late, thankfully krosan didn’t forfeit the whole match. Meez shows up, it seems the TAG boys got him fucked up and he was out until 5 AM…….. WTF
With no setup we plug and play and even though goldrush was closer than I wanted we won the map and then took frostbite as the decider to win 4:2. A quick setup later and we finish the day winning 4:0 against Eirik and his team to top the group 4:0. We quickly ship the team back to Adacores new hotel (see this journal for what happened there: http://www.crossfire.nu/?x=journal&mode=item&id=107877 ) and get them off to sleep for a few hours:

Meez defying the laws of gravity and not falling out of his bed


R0SS showing off his ass… thanks for that


And sqzz must have been having sweet dreams, ladies check the size on that!!!!


I then go and pick up m1lk from the hotel, he was still there from the night before and we head to the LAN to play our games. 2 shit games later and we’re glad it’s over :D
Impact then arrive and set up for what would prove to be two epic games of ET. Firstly they play against Belgian Fraternity and were totally surprised by the performance they were able to produce, even though the score showed Impact winning 4:0 anyone who saw the game would give credit to the Belgian team as it was an incredibly close game.

Next however would be the winner bracket semi final, this is a game that with every team I have ever managed we have lost and dropped to the loser bracket. We would be playing against Rockit, a team which was proving to be incredibly strong, they hadn’t dropped a map at that point in the tournament and if you look at the gtv odds http://www.gamestv.org/event/20413-rockit-et-vs-impact-gaming/ they were massive favourites.

As we expected the maps were goldrush (their pick) and supply. Goldrush we attacked and set a very average time of I think 13 minutes and so we knew we really had to pull off a great defence, first stage went horribly and even though we held the barrier for a bit we were left with a long time to defend the bank, that being said we were setup and proving to be able to hold off anything that rockit could throw at us, then disaster happened, sqzz’s pc just rebooted itself in game at a key moment, it seems windows updates forced a restart, then whilst on pause the same happened to hayaa. With 5 minutes left to go we were furious that this could happen, Zerender had just killed xylos with only pistol left and was about to take the gold and sqzz was last man with smg defending the bank, you would clearly argue here that sqzz has a massive advantage but because of the technical error we were in a bad situation. Xylos then suggested to rockit that instead of restarting the map that zerender self kill and we just continue. Very sportingly rockit agreed this was the only fair way to handle the situation, we unpaused and regained control of the situation thanks to a clutch triple head shot on gifty by R0SS. We then continued to defend the bank for the remaining 5 minutes to win the map.

Onto our map and starting with our defence of supply, I think this was one of the best performances of Impact at the LAN, we defended for about 14 minutes and then set a very fast 7-8 minute time, the stats were clear, we very convincingly won this map with Xylos being a clear POTM with a massive 60+ kills for Impact. The duck was broken, there would be no top 4 finish for Impact at this LAN, at worst we were now guaranteed 3rd place. The team was buzzing after the game, hands were shaking and everyone was on a massive high, we couldn’t wait for the dignitas game, we wanted to play it right now, of course this wasn’t possible so instead Adacore and I decided to take the guys out for dinner. We set off on a walk with m1lk and azzor also with us and somehow (azzor was guiding us) we managed to walk through the Red Light district!!!!!!! I must say the girls really are quite stunning, one of the girls tapped on the window to Hayaa… weirdly she ignored R0SS..hmmm… Anyway lets leave the end of my journal for this day and just move on :)

Sunday
The team was up early, all looking forward to the game ahead, we got to the lan center well before our game… well at least some of us did … Meez and Adacore failed at being on time again… that guy likes his sleep way too much. Also now a further disaster, it would seem that someone had stolen Xylos’ mouse so we frantically had to try and find out that matched his specs. Whilst all this chaos was going on Dignitas were getting a nice prac vs BF .. the start to this Sunday was not going well. After a quick prac on frostbite then vs Rockit we started our WB Final vs Dignitas, despite getting glared at for choosing frostbite we were unable to win the map with Dignitas taking it with 2 seconds to spare…. Suffice to say the morale wasn’t great in our camp specifically with Meez so we took a short break before playing supply. This map simply went badly, it wasn’t close, we had no first stage defence and Dignitas just broke through all our defences to set a fast time, one which we couldn’t get close too. This was very disappointing, the team were really down.

As we were playing Dignitas so too were Rockit playing BF, they won and so we would have to play them again, this time on the stage. Off we went to setup and this turned out to be a technical nightmare, nothing went right, the headsets we had to wear to cut out the sound of the shoutcast even though they cost near 600 euros they simply were terrible, half of them failed and both teams were unable to get setup, eventually R0SS and Zerender had to revert to their own headsets and the speakers in the room were turned down. Maps were supply and goldrush, we started on supply, today however either Rockit were a different team or Impact was, we lost supply, our own map pick, simply put we couldn’t set ourselves and we couldn’t motivate ourselves. We stopped for a cigarette break where we all had a chat about what to do and so we sat down for goldrush.

At this point I discussed with the team a different tactic for the goldrush attack, something different from what they were expecting, it worked, we got the tank on the first rush and then we were up for it, we pushed every stage and apart from getting slowed down at the barrier stage we managed to set a very defendable time. Unfortunately our tank stage wasn’t great and we were unable to do much to slow down the tank, again we were left with having to defend the bank, we crept the time down but with about 2 minutes remaining they secured the gold, now they just needed to escort the trunk, we decided against building any barriers and just set out to defend the tank, this was going to be very close, we held on and on and then as the tank was starting to move away an airstrike and then a crucial clutch artillery from Meez saved the day for us, we had stopped their attack and we would equal the match at 2:2. At this point more smoking was needed haha Whilst the players smoked we did a coin toss and Rockit eliminated radar, we were left with adlernest and frostbite, this was a no brainer, frost is one of our strongest maps and so onto that we moved.

Meez had been saving a very fast strafe jump for the LAN which he decided to try now and he beat any of the rockit players into the cp, then he made a frag onto one of their players and built the cp as engi with only second gone, we then moved straight onto the gold and took this, diving low he then died from the impact with the ground however other impact players were waiting to support the attack, Rockit sent all their players hunting but a rifle from xylos damaged 3 of the players and the rest were killed by the medics. The gold all the while was escorted away to set a stunningly quick time of just over 1 minute from start to finish. The players were shouting now and after I tried to calm them down we set out to defend the time, this was comfortably held and we would win and move on to face dignitas again in the grand final!!!!!

After about a 45 minute setup time for Dignitas we got the game going ahead of schedule so that we could fit in between the COD streams, first up radar, one of Dignitas’ favourite maps, and even though I feel we gave them a good run for their money Dignitas would win the map. Next onto our map, frostbite (a map that drago would later claim in an interview we chose because we are not confident that we could beat them on anything else), again we went through the stages incredibly quickly and set a 3 minute time, despite Dignitas taking the gold we were able to setup a defence stage at the transmitter, one that Dignitas could not break in time and we would win the map to make it 2:2.

With an elimination stage we then took out goldrush (our weakest map) leaving them with adler or supply, they chose supply of course. I gave the players some new tactics to try and stop dignitas’ very effective first rush and although this worked we were not able to hold them much longer, again they took the flag quite quickly and again they managed to go through our other defence stages without us really being able to stop them, dignitas would again set a fast supply time. On our attack we were far more successful than our last game but we just hadn’t given ourselves enough time from our defence, we would again lose the map and place 2nd at LAN.

To go back to something Drago said in his interview I would just like to point out to him and his team that we chose frostbite because we know we are better than you at it, not because we are scared to play you at anything else, it might also be said that there is a way to win and behave afterwards and that’s with class and this is not something many people felt you did with your comments in your interview afterwards. Fortunately even though we lost I’m glad my players did have the class to come over to you to shake your hands even though we lost.

Conclusion

As you would expect some of the players were a bit down after the loss but in retrospect we went to LAN and placed 2nd having played all the other top 4 teams at the tournament and dropping only 1 map to Rockit. Sure Dignitas were too strong for us but equally I think everyone in the team has a lot to be proud of at this tournament and I know both Adacore and I are very pleased with the team performance.

I think its now worth mentioning the man who made this all possible, Krosan. You ran an absolutely brilliant tournament, the most professional LAN that I think ET has ever been it, the schedules were always on time, for the most part the pc’s were excellent, the venue was great and I think there are a lot of people who really owe you a lot for what you have achieved here. Thank you to Stephen for agreeing to have ET at AEF and an even bigger thank you for his commitment to keep ET at future tourneys he is running including the next instalment of AEF and also Outpost on Fire, hopefully that happens and I can confirm that Impact will definitely be going again.

Shoutouts:
Everyone in Impact, Learn 2 Play guys, m1lk, azzor, everyone is acsi, rAzbo and the forward guys, pansy, overdrive, hope, eirik, runner, jinosta and co, gifty, winghaven, reload, jaka, anaconda, krosan, Diablo, nohead and everyone else who I almost certainly enjoyed chatting and drinking with. See you all at the next one.