DuRuS dishes out the Good LAN and Bad LAN awards

CIC7 was the event of the year for CoD4 so far, with some of the best games of CoD4 ever played. With 46 teams in attendance, and €9,000 up for grabs, it was always going to be a great tournament. But now the tournament is over, and it is time to reflect on how it was on an individual and team basis. I bring you the Good LAN, Bad LAN of the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7.

I have taken a look at the different teams, players and other areas at the event, and rated them either good LAN, or bad LAN.

Infinity Skills

Infinity Skills definitely had a great LAN, showing the rest of the world that they were not the online team that people thought they were going to be before the tournament. They beat fnatic in their group stage game of the seeding tournament, and then went from there all the way to the Semi Finals.

Sending out the American side Loaded, as well as managing to beat SPEEDLINK in an epic best of 3 game that went right down to the wire. They were later beaten by fnatic in a very close game that went down to the last round of each map. They were not able to finish in the prize money after losing to Power Gaming but all will definitely say these guys had a great event.

Loaded Gaming

The American team turned up to the event full of motivation as well as the drive to go on and win the tournament. In an interview I did with Juvenile he showed just how confident the team were. But with all this confidence and desire to win, they were not able to beat Power Gaming in the group stages, nor could they get past Infinity Skills in the playoffs.

They were simply not good enough to play against the well practiced European teams. Speaking to the shoutcasters as well as some of the players watching their game against Loaded, it was quite clear that the Loaded players were not experienced enough in terms of the current standard of European CoD4 teams. They had their strats lined up but when things went wrong they just didn’t know what to do. They looked like they were panicking in clutch situations and just weren’t able to pull them all off.

For their over confidence, merging on cockiness, the team of Loaded get my Bad LAN award.  

Duffer

If I turned around before the tournament and told you all that Duffer would drop 30 bombs in the semi finals and the finals, most people would have laughed at me. We all know that he is a good player, but he has never really been the type to consistently hit 30 bombs in big games against teams such as fnatic.

He had the tournament of his life, and really helped push Reason forward to their 2nd place finishing, and almost had 1st. For this superb performance armed with his SMG, Duffer earns himself a Good LAN award.

UStream

Though I was not able to really watch the stream much as we were there, I could definitely tell from the comments that people were not overally happy with the quality of the UStream that QuadV were putting out. With apparent constant disconnections and laggy streams, it was not the ideal situation to show the CoD4 games. The reason for this is not fully known, but most likely down to technical problems.

When QuadV were able to get back onto their main stream they were truly excellent like they always are, with TosspoT and Deman bringing you some amazing casting. But unfortunately when it was on UStream you just couldn’t benefit from that, unless you were in America where it was apparently amazing quality.

mTw

Yet another event comes and goes where we don’t see mTw get out of the groups. They came here with a lot of confidence to play well, and make it far in the tournament. Though they had a hard group with Hostile Faction and H2k, two teams that made it a long way, they still didn’t get out of the groups.

This is simply not good enough for a team with the organisation that mTw have, as well as the way they are playing online. They are obviously good enough players, but are just not able to bring it together at events. Yet again, these guys earn the Bad LAN award.

The Seeding tournament

I like the idea that you use a tournament to seed the teams, but I do think that basing it on one game that is played online is really not the best way to do it. As you can see from the seeds, it wasn’t always the case that the online results matched the offline ones. An example of this, is fnatic losing to Infinity Skills in the seeding groups and then YoYoTech in the playoffs. Though both of these sides showed they were good teams, it ended up with a situation where one of fnatic, Reason or dignitas would go out in the first round of the playoffs and finish 9th/16th, not a position one of these 3 teams thought they would ever end up in.

I believe that for such a high class tournament, the seedings should not be based solely on one online tournament. We all know how different online teams are to the offline versions of them, and so doing this is really not a fair assessment.

The Admins

Lead by Kleinman, these guys were the best you could have hoped for from a bunch of admins. There were enough of them around to sort problems out, and kept on top of any problems. Though there were delays, they tried their best to solve these, and did it as well as they could.

They worked for hours and definitely showed how a tournament should be run. Well done to them.

The Players

Considering the players are PC gamers, they know remarkably little about how a computer works, and what they need to do to fix it. That or a lot of them are spoiled kids who get everything done for them. The amount of times I heard the players chirp up that their sound wasn’t working or their monitors were messed up. Instead of trying to work it out themselves, they stood back, shouted at an already busy admin telling them to come and fix it.

For some things this was fine, but a lot of the time it was such a simple fix, such as plugging the power cable into the monitor so it turned on. If you were at home you wouldn’t shout for your dad to come and fix your sound, you would work out how to do it yourself, right?

Fnatic

Fnatic were the team of 2009 winning a lot of the major events and showing everyone that they were simply the best team around. After picking up Zenith a lot of people thought that they would not be able to get to the same levels as they had last year.

But their performance in the final was absolutely amazing, beating Reason over 3 maps to take yet another victory as well as a cheque for €5,000. There is no way that I can’t give these guys a Good LAN award for their amazing performance.

Fnatic’s Bracket

Yet again, fnatic seem to get the easier bracket. Though I know they don’t do it on purpose, it does seem that they get the easier half of the bracket. Their route to the final was corgz, Hostile Faction and finally Infinity Skills. Though each of these teams had shown that they were a good team and had improved greatly in the tournament, they were not as hard as say the Reason route.

Team Dignitas, H2k and finally Power Gaming were the teams that Reason Gaming had to play to meet fnatic in the final. For this I am giving fnatic’s luck and their playoff bracket the Bad LAN award. For once fnatic need a really hard route to the final!

My LAN Crumble Predictions

When I published my predictions for CIC7 I was immediately hit with a hail storm of abuse saying that Reason Gaming were not going to win the LAN Crumble. With several of the players even refusing to speak to me for the first couple of hours of the event bar send insults directed at me, it was quite clear that they had taken the LAN Crumble award to heart.

However, it is now obviously quite clear that that was a horrific prediction. Or was it? Did by giving them the award take the pressure of them to do well and it in fact gave them the opportunity to prove people wrong? Probably not, but one thing is certain that they definitely did not LAN crumble. So I give myself the Bad pre-LAN award for some terrible predictions.

Vanner

Though he didn’t have the best of tournaments individually with his team, not making it past Speedlink, without Vanner there might not have even been a tournament at all. He got the teams there, pushing them to pay up.

He met the deadline that Stuart put out for the first payment, making sure that the teams had all the information they needed, as well as pushing more teams forward to get their final payments in. What a hero.

"Online" teams

There were a lot of teams that came to the event looking to get rid of their "onliners" tag, and show the rest of Europe that they could play at the top end of the game, and not just in an online game. Teams such as Infinity Skills and SPEEDLINK certainly quelled and thoughts that these guys were online teams.

For this I am giving them a massive Good LAN award, as they were able to come to the event, under a lot of pressure and show everyone that they are certainly teams that compete at the top level.

Team Dignitas

Dignitas didn’t have a great tournament. Yes they did get knocked out by Reason Gaming, the eventual 2nd place team, but where did they end up in the groups? They were joint 2nd on round difference and only just made it through. They lost two of their games, losing to both tMoe and Corgz, meaning that they finished 2nd in the group rather than first. If they had finished first they would have come up against fnatic, which might not have been any easier for them, but who knows? It was always going to be hard for them, but realistically they were not playing their best this tournament considering the strength of that line-up.

The Event

CIC7 was undoubtedly one of the best events that a lot of the CoD4 players have ever been to. The venue was perfect for it, with food on site, great admins, and PCs that were, most of the time, very good and reliable. The tournament as quite late at times, but most teams were OK with it and didn’t complain too much.

Like all events it did have its ups and downs, but there were definitely a lot more ups than there were downs. Here's to the next one.