A dull CPC2 journal!

So, I'm back from CPC2. It was a great tournament, with a whole load of really great games, but I was probably too busy to enjoy most of it, unfortunately. Met over a hundred ET players, I guess, and I was even starting to remember who was who by the end of the weekend!

So, the more detailed version:

I got into Amsterdam on Wednesday at about 4pm, went to change my money to pay for the Crossfire cabins, since I was the first person arriving. Literally two seconds after I'm done I get a call from Toss saying it's not needed anyways and he can pay it on Monday! So I hung around the airport with a huge amount of cash waiting for Herbal to arrive. Unfortunately neither of us had the others' number, so I was just starting to get worried that we'd never find each other when he walks through the door right in front of me. We found a train (after asking the confusing woman at the station), and embarked on the epic voyage to Enschede. After a change of trains, a bus then another train (damn maintenance work on the railways). Herbal dragged me to perhaps the dodgiest coffeeshop in the country, he bought a pile of the strongest stuff they had and was totally out of it for, well, the rest of the tournament really...

We got to the venue about 11am on thursday, and spent most of that day moving furniture around and setting up the 44 PCs for the tournament games. Levz had the ET servers up on his laptop, and (despite being the laziest forcibly volunteered server admin on the planet) was still awesome. I actually cannot remember anything about thursday evening, I guess we were just setting stuff up, but maybe I did something more interesting.

Anyway, in at 8:30am on Friday, for zeroPoint vs vigorZ, which I think ended up starting an hour late, after 10am, which wasn't the best start. I'm pretty sure we kept about a one hour delay for the whole of that first day, so if we'd started on time the stupidly tight schedule would *just* have worked. That first day was exhausting though, there were times when there were six different people yelling "Adacore". I think people were far better prepared for setup this time, but the problems with plugging/unplugging the PS2 keyboards and device shutdowns caused by USB rate changes (JUST DON'T DO IT, OK, 125 HZ IS FINE!!!), plus the fact that we had twice as many ET teams at any one time. We finished at a pretty decent time anyway, and with saturday morning scheduled for RtCW I actually had time to relax, so I watched (and dealt) some poker, then chilled with Sheep and some other guys (sorry for not remembering who!) until 5am, which was cool. Oh, and as a note, don't try to talk seriously to teams/players at 4am when they're drunk (hi Licid).

So we got to Saturday. Oh dear. I had my lie in and got in at 11:40 or so, cursing myself for having missed the RtCW WB final, which was scheduled for 11am. Then I find out RtCW hasn't even started yet. Blind panic ensued - I spent the next three hours in a weird state of flux where I was both chilling because I was waiting for RtCW and really stressed trying to sort out both a new version of the schedule for the day and answer all the teams who wanted to know when their games would be. Once ET could finally start I pushed the teams so hard, it was crazy. Even with that the number of really close games going to decider maps meant we never caught up on the four hour or so delay, we finally finished at 2am.

Back in again at 8:45am on Sunday and once again it was slave-driving time. I think I forced impact to play almost continuously from 9am to 3pm, after they finished playing at around 1:30am the day before. Sorry guys! Both TLR-dignitas WB final and impact-dignitas LB final were amazing games, and it was a real shame they weren't in the cinema along with the somewhat anti-climactic final. Anyway - sunday night was awesome, I stayed at the LAN centre chilling with the few remaining admins and team managers until the CoD final was over, then headed back to the cabins where Impact arrived (Raveneye was hilariously drunk, and the others weren't much better). Stayed up chatting until about 3am with Ronner and Cash and some other guys.

Then today, with disasters too numerous to mention them all. In the end I DID pay for the cabins, so I didn't lose another €50 switching it all back to Sterling. Misplaced €6000 cameras, broken tables, campus security, missed flights, car rentals, and a heap of other stuff went wrong. Strangely the end result of this mountain of disasters was great for me and Herbal, as we went with Tosspot and Munchies in their newly rented car back to Amsterdam. Despite Munchie's totally demented driving (go RIGHT around the roundabouts and stop drifting so close to the cars to the right) and Tosspot's directions (Tosspot: "Go right." Me & Herbal: "LEFT! LEFT!!!") we made it to the airport in time for Tosspot's flight and everything went smoothly from then on.

All in all a great event, but more work than I want to do ever again. The next event I do will, I hope, be considerably better organised for keeping things on schedule in the ET tourney with teams' setup time roughly doubled, if I get my way.

Thanks again to everyone that helped with coverage, organising or setting up. Also all the players and spectators I met and chatted to for making it such a great event. Plus the bar staff at WZZRD for giving me at least 5 free drinks because they thought I was working too hard! <3