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Author: concrete
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--Written by: dawgpound--
Foreword
This is a summary of my personal experiences through the One Last Bang (OLB) 4v4 TDM UT2004 tournament. Any opinion is mine and shouldn't be associated with any group that I represent. Everything that I have written is what happened to the best of my knowledge. A few mistakes may have occurred (a lot of games were played; sue me if I forget a particular thing). This does not summarize every single game played through the tourney; rather it shows the results and my thoughts on the matches that I participated in. I played with team Obsoleet consisting of ra, combatcarl (cc), elix, gimix, and myself.
Round Robin Games
The event was started more or less on time Sunday night at 8:00 PM EST. Nine teams in total participated in the OLB, and these nine teams were broken up into two separate groups. The first group consisted of the following teams:
- Obsoleet (-o-)
- Team Matrix ([MTX])
- Lords of Brooklyn (::LOB::)
- New Century Gamers (=NCG=)
- Hard 2 Kill (.::H2K::.)
Group 2:
- Geniuz ([Gz])
- Hard 2 Own (-h2o-)
- Digital Speed (]DS[
- Carpe Imperium (Ci)
Since it was a round robin, each team had to play each other in their respective group. So that means I'll cover the four games that we played in the first group. Each map was only 10 minutes instead of the standard 20 minutes due to time constraints. Four matches of 2 maps a piece had to be played within a reasonable amount of time. However, I seriously hope this can be avoided next time due to 10 minute rounds not working out at all for the dynamic of UT2004 TDM.
Obsoleet vs. NCG
Coming into this game I didn't really know what to expect from NCG, but I didn't expect much. I had never really played with anyone on NCG, and I didn't think that their pings would help much either (all of them are west). However, I was really surprised at how well they performed.
The first map was chosen by NCG, antalus. This is known by now to be by far our best map, and the one we choose 99% of the time. NCG displayed a ton of TDM potential during this game with how well they worked together. Granted we allowed them to use a coach during these games, but they still performed very well during this game keeping us on our toes the whole time. The final score was 69-31 in favor of Obsoleet, a closer margin than most teams during the tournament. Add in the horrible ping that these guys got and it makes it that much better.
The second map was chosen by Obsoleet to be goliath. We probably should have picked something else to have a good practice game (maybe corrugation? lol), but we wanted to make sure we got off the tournament to a strong start. By picking goliath, a well-known hitscan dominant map, it was basically impossible for NCG to compete against our lower pings and overall better aim. NCG nevertheless had a good showing for the major disadvantage they had, and the final score of this map was 70-28 in favor of Obsoleet.
I think I have to give the 'most surprising clan' award to NCG. You guys played much better than I was expecting. Well played.
 
Obsoleet vs. H2K
I have never played against H2K as a member of Obsoleet, but have had some experience playing with some of them in the past. One member of the team was one of the head admins of the tourney, and I'd like to thank Concrete for all he did during OLB (UTV especially). I didn't expect this match to be too close and it turned out to be that way.
Both maps were the same as the ones played against NCG, antalus and goliath. On antalus Obsoleet jumped out to a quick start and kept control of the map basically the whole time. The final score was 99-9. On goliath H2K played a little better after seeing how we played the previous map. Obsoleet was still able to keep a distant lead and pull this one out 83-23.
H2K are a bunch of great guys and I'm sure they'll do well in the future.
 
Obsoleet vs. MTX
MTX has been one of the few active clans during the past few months of UT2004 TDM, therefore I have played against them quite a bit. While all of these guys are great guys to talk to and play with, it seems they can't quite get over a certain barrier in UT2004 TDM, and I wasn't expecting this match to be entirely too close.
The first map was (of course) antalus, chosen by us. We locked down the map quickly and never really lost it over the ten minute round. The final score was 104-7 (Screenshot). The second map was chosen to be Osiris2 by MTX, a map that I personally love. It was a nice change from the antalus and goliath scenery. MTX showed excellent teamwork on this map and always had people coming to the powerups at the right times. We just were able to out-frag them most of the time making the final score of this map 76-13.
I hope that MTX will keep playing UT2004 because they have potential to get better.
 
Obsoleet vs. LOB
We had finished our first three matches rather quickly and had a 'bye' round while waiting to play LOB for the final game of the night. Once they were ready to play a good hour or more had passed since we had played last. It was getting late and LOB initially wanted to put it off until the next day, but this wasn't possible due to the tournament structure. A couple people on our team also had no desire to play it, but nevertheless this game was played on Sunday night.
Our map choice was antalus (are you starting to see a trend here?) and we played this map first. We had a hard time getting control of the double damage, and had some trouble getting into a rhythm on this map. But with ra's constant talking and timing we were able to finally pull ahead into a comfortable lead. We were able to hold any kind of last minute attack and won this map in pretty convincing fashion by the score of 53-33.
The second map was chosen to be corrugation by LOB. Combatcarl and elix were fine with this choice, but ra and I (and when No Escape played... basically all of us) are extremely bad at this map. I tend to not like maps where there are two miniguns. Most of the match Obsoleet was leading by 5-10 frags, but with a couple minutes left in the round LOB had a surge and took the lead. We had to do something quick and in our move we weren't able to get the few frags back. Ten minute rounds are extremely gay during a close game, and if this had been a 20 minute match things would have been much different. Of course LOB played well, but in my opinion this map shouldn't have ended like this ;-). Final score 52-48 for LOB.
 
Semifinals - Obsoleet vs. Gz
I've been good friends with most of the members of Gz for a long time (especially stilz who is very sexy). I considered them to be one of the upper tier teams of this tournament even though they had just reformed a week before OLB started after not playing for a few months. They at least proved they were good enough to get to the semifinals of OLB. We weren't going to take them lightly, but we felt very confident about this match. (NOTE: The semifinals and finals were played with regular TDM rules of 20 minutes. This was also the day after the round robin.)
Antalus was our map pick. We seemed to just play one of our best matches during this map, and racked up a ton of frags over the course of this 20 minute match. I'd like to take this opportunity to call out a couple people on Gz, because well... I feel like it. Eli_Somera has improved a crapload over the last few months and has turned into an excellent TDM and CTF player. He outperformed the rest of his team by three times the amount of frags while timing everything and keeping their team together. Props to you Eli, you're turning into a skilled player. And on the other side I'd like to mention that Morph needs to grow up. After about 10 minutes into the match he gave up and started to use shield gun the whole time, which is seriously disrespectful to the rest of his team who were still trying and playing the game. You have potential to be a very good player too... The final score on this map was 160-47 in favor of Obsoleet.
It was no surprise that Gz picked corrugation for the second map after our loss to LOB on it the night before. We mixed up our tactics a little bit (or rather actually used tactics this time) and tried some new things to see how they would work. We timed a lot better, and were just more 'fresh' as this was still near the start of the night for us. I killed many more people this time around, but I enjoyed dying a ridiculous amount as well. This game was basically over halfway through the match. The final score was 165-73.
 
Finals - Obsoleet vs. LOB
In the other semifinal match, h2o came very close to beating LOB in an awesome match. They split the first two maps, and the tiebreaker came down to the very last minute. I recommend checking out those demos if they are uploaded.
So that brought back the match up between Obsoleet and LOB for the finals. So now begins some explanation of our initial situation before this match started. First and foremost, we were missing our best player (elix) who is usually very reliable. It turns out he was in a car wreck a couple hours before the tournament started, causing him to get home after the tournament ended. So our lineup would be the same as it was against Gz: ra, cc, gimix, and myself.
What's that you asked? Oh, yes we did pick antalus again. We couldn't lock down this map nearly as much as we should have, and the match was entirely too close through most of the game. Chemistry was really low and we teamkilled each other multiple times. We had a few good runs during the match which enabled us to get a comfortable lead near the end. I don't really know what else to say about the match other than the final score was 91-62 in favor of Obsoleet.
OH THE DRAMA! The second map is corrugation, and if they didn't pick corrugation all of them would have had to have been high on crack and drunk off their ass at the same time. So we try to make up some different tactics to play against the strategy we saw LOB play with last time on the map. We decide on playing two near the 50/mini area and two near the LG area since they seemed to love that area so much last time. We all ready up and the countdown begins. When the countdown hits about 5, Gimix chimes in on voice to announce that his nose is bleeding. Gimix attempts to play for the first minute or two of the map, and while this is happening we get a complete lock on the map and go up by a considerable margin for how early in the game it is. Gimix's nosebleed turns very bad and he has to leave the computer to go get something to stuff his nose with. But of course the silly teddy bear of a man doesn't disconnect while he goes afk and gets killed many times in the process. CC gets type killed as well while trying to tell them the situation. Needless to say we lose map control, all of us get killed, and we fall down and start to lose by a margin somewhere around 20 within the next couple minutes.
Once Gimix was back a couple minutes later, I knew we could still come back if we just focused. Through the next 15 (about) minutes we slowly and methodically gain back frags and control. After realizing that 90% of the time LOB has at least three people on the lightning gun area, we started to bring everybody to the area. A few awesome runs were made and we finally pull back to within reaching distance of tying the game. With around a couple minutes left CC is able to take a very important double damage and we make a very quick run to tie the game up at 95-95. We keep getting a few more kills and are able to hold them off for the last minute to win the game and OLB tournament with a score of 104-98.
Great games LOB.
 
Thanks to everyone who ran the tourney (concrete, hv, saito, etc.) and everyone who played and made this a success. It was a blast finally playing some real TDM again, and I hope it'll happen some more in the future.
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