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Re: Tournament Reportage
Posted By: vector40 <brandon@berkeleyhigh.org>	Date: 11/3/02 11:27 p.m.
In Response To: Tournament Reportage (vector40) So we headed out from BART (the friendly local subway system) at around noon, to get there by 1:30. We’d registered online a week before, and gotten all of our players added (5 - four plus one alternate) with plenty of time to spare. A representative of the game center kept us informed of details by email; my only complaint is that we didn’t find out what time it would start until Wednesday, which wasn’t a problem for us but might have been for some others who had tighter schedules. All in all, though, the rep was helpful and cool, and obliged my request to email me the consent forms (so we could get ’em signed before the event, instead of having to haul along some adults). We got there . . . oh, perhaps 15 minutes early, hooked up with the event coordinators and checked in. The setup was 2 Xboxen with accompanying TVs, placed on opposite ends of the room; if you had mad behind-the-head-Xray-vision skillz, you probably could see the other screen, but beyond that, no. By the time everybody had arrived, there was maybe 15, 17 players. We were the youngest by far. The place was smallish, and packed with gaming PCs. We squeezed around and found the Xboxen, both of which had teams warming up on them. We watched. Not bad. Not great. Once we had a chance, we hopped on to an Xbox and started to scrimmage with another team. We’d brought our own controllers, as suggested by an email from the center — the reason became obvious once we’d arrived, as most of the supplied controllers sucked the proverbial beanstalk. I, of course, had my gloves and glasses, the usual Halo apparel. Still warming up, we lost the first match, then won the second handily. Then we took a moment to set up profiles on the machine, and let another team flex their muscles. They had controllers too; we took ours with us. By the time the tournament was beginning to kick off, it had become apparent that it was going to be 8 teams, and therefore only two matches to qualify. We played a final practice match and got stomped. Then we were poked and told to get ready; the tournament was starting, and we were first. We cracked our knuckles, flipped for color (we won; blue), and I set my watch (more on this later). Then we started. :: Not bad, not at all. We hadn’t seen these guys play yet, and weren’t sure what to expect. They had some moves. Staying on the high end of the level, they pitched camp on the blue “mezzanine” (our name for the wide, flat area between the two towers, against the wall — the blue one is the high one) or on the blue tower, and sniped us mercilessly, slaughtering us whenever we attempted to storm them. It was a tricky scenario. They held the high ground, and had superior marksmenship anyway, so we always came out on the bottom when we tried to knock them off from a distance. When we tried to get close, they’d have plenty of time to saw us down while we approached. And if we did nothing, they killed us as soon as we spawned. A classic siege situation, and we were stuck, watching them pull away in score. It wasn’t a matter of superior skill as much as superior strategy, and we lacked the key to take it away from them. But we figured it out. At around 20 kills, things began to click, and just as I was saying, “Y’know, a rocket launcher would be handy here,” a foom, foom, foom is heard, and three campers fall ungracefully to the ground. It was the break we needed, and we proceeded to swarm their “area” en masse, not allowing them time to regroup. We knew the difficult was in taking the spot, not holding it; once we were there, we were on even ground. And we were. Getting there before they could return, we were prepared when they started to trickle back in, and the situation was reversed, us knocking them down as soon as they arrived. We didn’t have the practice at it that they obviously did (clearly they practiced that technique quite a bit), but we ground through, and a few of us displayed some really remarkable gumption. Many double kills, triple kills, and heart-stopping close calls later, we were at 49–47, with me bellowing “Get them!” A grenade is lobbed, an explosion is heard, and the game is called. 50–47, us. Jiggling slightly from the effects of the adrenaline, we blinked at each other and tried to fathom exactly how we’d come back from a ~ 24–13 deficit and taken the game. :: Sitting in the lovely chairs the center provided and enjoying some hard-earned water, we grimaced at each other upon hearing the news from our alternate (acting as a general facilitator) that our next match would be against team AK . . . the very folks who’d beaten our asses in practice. We spent the next half hour or so discussing strategies and lamenting our luck, then were ushered back to our places and told to make it happen. This match would also determine advancement: win, and we were going to the regionals; lose, and we were going home. We fired off and quickly determined that we were going to do well but lose. Their strategy was a strike of déjà vu; squatting on the mezzanine, far enough back to keep from being sniped but plenty in control of the map. Defensive playing — we had to go to them, and invariably got spanked before we arrived. The good news was, we’d observed this habit in practice, and during our intermission had formulated some maneuvers to counter it. They sort of worked; suffice to say that we were halfway successful in preventing them from owning the mezzanine. Sadly, they outstepped us again, and as soon as we had taken their spot, they switched tactics, moving all over the map. At this point, the game was very close — we’d repeatedly tied, and at least once beat them by a few points. We kept dancing, and as soon as they drew us off our perch to hunt them down, they were back on top, chuckling. We were starting to assault their eyrie yet again when it happened. Click, click, boom — blink and you miss it — they stole four or five kills in the space of several seconds, and the game ends abruptly, quite before anybody is ready for it. I later found out during an informal debriefing that the other guys have picked up an invisibility/rockets combination, and made a glorious little streak to finish the match. It wasn’t by any means a landslide; I still think we could have won. Our abilities were fairly equal, our strategies were also pretty close; the only advantage they had was better teamwork, which probably came from practice. Anyway, it wasn’t a bad match. My only lament is that we started out on the red side, which was utterly obnoxious, especially since we were the blue team — we definitely lost a few kills from that. Alas. Anyhow, we watched the last match between the two qualifying teams, and ascertained that we almost certainly could have beaten the other team, had we been bracketed against them. Our opponents won, making off with whatever prizes had been offered to the 1st place qualifying team. Then we took off, spent. :: The most useful things I can offer are the strategies we cooked up during practice. Stay In, Stay Out: Know the areas on the map that you’d be good to hang around; also know the ones you shoudn’t be caught dead in. Examples of the latter are the center of the map, the high catwalks crossing the level, and the trench; examples of the former are “shotgun rooms” and the mezzanine. Know Thy Place: For the sake of coordinating your team, it can be invaluable to really understand the map. Part of this is having a good name for different areas, allowing you to refer directly to them, instead of describing it. “Mezzanine,” “Shotgun room,” “Bridge,” “Tower,” “Corridor,” or “Trench” are just a few names, most of which can have “Blue” or “Red” appended to them to indicate which side. Spawn Times: This is a little trick we conjured up on our own. Inspired by the discovery (by . . . uh, someone) that items spawn at set invervals, we clocked the invisibility and the rocket launcher, coming up with 1:00 for the first and 2:00 for the second. Knowing this, we began setting a watch’s timer for 1:00 at the beginning of each game — it would go off every minute, and our designated “Invisible Rocket Guy” (the player whose sole role, more or less, was to get those two items, denying them to the enemy; he had a good way of jumping off one of the stone blocks and grabbing the RL through the floor) would hightail to grab the items. He’d keep track of whether the alarm was “even” or “odd,” thus knowing whether or not the RL had spawned. The Team That Works Together, Advances to the Next Round of the Stupid Winter Season: ’Nuff said. In any case, we’ll be trying our luck again at the KotH tournament . . . until then, adieu.

Message Index

Tournament Reportage	vector40	11/3/02 1:38 a.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	Elan Sleazbagano	11/3/02 1:57 a.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	*Ar-Isildur of *WP*	11/3/02 2:01 a.m.
Only good reportages please...........	skavenger_s7	11/3/02 7:03 a.m.
:: waits patiently :: *NM*	Jester	11/3/02 2:34 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	vector40	11/3/02 11:27 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	Elan Sleazbagano	11/4/02 12:35 a.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	Uriel	11/4/02 12:50 a.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	Swordsman	11/4/02 8:50 a.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	CYBRFRK	11/4/02 9:21 a.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	Dr.Haggard	11/4/02 11:20 a.m.
Players Council on timing ...	Jester	11/4/02 3:16 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	vector40	11/4/02 4:59 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage and other Excitement	Benjamin Jacobs	11/4/02 6:01 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage and other Excitement	vector40	11/4/02 8:41 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	Jester	11/4/02 6:23 p.m.
Re: Tournament Reportage	vector40	11/4/02 8:37 p.m.