Waking up today, I noticed that I could admin this game while I tried to get awaken enough to drive to my parents and get some dinner. Cause, I knew both teams were easy to deal with, and that the amount of servers needed to be checked before the game were minimal (2 to be exact). What I found the most enjoyable was to be able to guess the ref password on Kong's tourney server, made it in 2 tries and was happy as a camper after that little feat. I decided to put it in this report even though it doesn't have anything to do with the game, as the game was played on HAL9000 gxmod server, the crappiest mod ever, and a server where I accidentally have forgotten the admin pass, and gave up guessing it after trying it for a minute or so. Anyway, back to the game, I contacted sax fairly early to let him know I would admin the game. Then I joined the Australian team for some practicing on the game server (HALS), and had a couple enjoyable 200 ping games. There are no better ways of spending your Sunday afternoon as a NDML admin, than performing poorly in practicegames with Aussies and Mj on your side. While we played, Muhaha (zbone) showed some life on IRC, and I was distracted from my poorly play and had to do some adminning. Well, I managed to get the UKR team on the server, and got to know what maps they would play on. After a bit of threatning and persuading, we also managed to get rid of some lazy spectators and players who were on the server, allowing the UKR team to get on. The pings were not 100% even, but as close as they could be as AUS had some high pinging players. 200 for UKR vs 200-240 for AUS, that's not too bad! :)

Q2DM3 - 's choice



As you all know, aside from being the worst mod on the plantet, gxmod also is the proud holder of the "worst warmup mode ever" title for 7th or 8th year in a row. That is why I allowed the UKR team to get a 3 min warmup game before the game kicked off, as we really had 15 min to waste before the game was scheduled. After 4 min warmup, the game was about to start. And we immediately saw UKR grabbing the very first quad, I think it was Biplan who blastered sax in the back, and stole his m*****f***ing SSG, which resulted in a fairly successfull quadrun. If I'm not mistaken they also grabbed the first Invul, which set the standard for the game. UKR just ran the powerups very well the whole game through, having up to 3 guys at quad/ssg at once. Blaiz is always about 2-2.5 cm away from the quad whenever it spawned, the worst quadwhore you'd ever seen. This game was no exception, he ran the quad very well along with Biplan and Part1zan who all took quad. Good teamwork making sure the one who was best stacked on health/armor got the quad. Sax and his fellow teammates weren't giving up on quad though, they launched several attacks, some more successfull than others, but they made life hard for several UKR quadrunners at times. Think AUS held rail fairly well to begin with, sD.au (faith), was positioned there, or at least spent a lot of time there. The problem with the rail is that if you're under pressure and not able to get the rail out in the arena to attack quad from behind, it is not really a whole lot of fragging you can do in that corner of the map if there are no enemy spawning nearby. That's why I think faith's fragcount didn't show how well rail was held for a while, there were just not enough spawns to turn into frags. Quite intresting to see how the mapcontrol and spawns work together, a frag by quad means an additional frag or two by rail, guess that's the basics behind a maplockdown, but I've been sleeping in my q2 teamplay classes. Anyway, think UKR did right at focusing mainly on running powerups, with that ping the rail isn't nearly as dominant as it is on low ping. However, near the halftime or so, Smoke decided to take rail and whored it pretty bad for a while. As well as Blaiz did a great job on quad at times, that resulted in a pretty loopsided score. The AUS team were just not in position for most of the game, and when they were, they didn't manage to squeeze too many frags from it, as the quad just dominated the map fragwise. Was a good game nonetheless. Showed once again q2dm3 is a map UKR masters quite well.

Q2DM6 - 's map



UKR are great on this map. Hands down. I knew it before the game, and they just showed how to dominate this map with any gun they had. The AUS players knew this wasn't their best map, actually the opposite, and UKR just loves any map with quad. Anyway, the AUS team was prepared for some beating, and they did their best. It became pretty clear early on that UKR knew how to lock this map down, Smoke at rail did one hell of a job holding the rail area, continously running back and forth between RA and Rail/GL, making sure his teammates were armed and got stacked with armor before heading off for quad, as well as spawnraping the AUS team in between. Blaiz and Lestat held the quad really well, and even though AUS attacked and almost got quad quite often, they were just outnumbered and outgunned by the UKR guys. Not sure, but at times it looked like UKR had 3 guys hanging around in the quad area. Part1zan had BFG I think, allthough he wandered around a bit, picked up quad and cleared out the BFG area again disguised as a blue smurf. Part1zan style. Grish and Sax did show some resistance though, but not even lava is on the losing team's side. This I'm sure mid will agree on, he battled a long time with a -2 score, but managed to turn it into 0 in the closing minute. But however onesided the game was, I'm fairly sure both teams had some fun. And no whining whatsoever is so refreshing, just shows that good attitudes >> skill in my book, so easier to deal with players like that.

Anyway, hard again for the AUS team, but hope they haven't lost all hopes, they have played the two strongest teams in their group, and should be getting more close games in the ones to come. UKR again showed how well oiled a teammachine they are, it's great to see the same guys as last year still going strong.

And thanks to Gravgon for running scorebot! And happy birthday to LaStHeRo and I think i've said it all!