UKTerrorist

ESWC Diary

Once again I'm heading abroad, however unlike Clikarena, this time I intend to keep a diary. Not sure if I can keep it as detailed as my World Cyber Games, Korea one.

So where to begin. This event was arranged some time ago and I was asked by ESWC to run it because iGames were not allowed to due to their commitments with WCG. So I ran a UKTerrorist event that also counted as a ESWC Qualifier. The winners of this were Four-Kings Intel, 4K^Tillerman and omg!Astz (now aT). These 7 players will be joined by two UK Quake 3 players to make up the UK team for this event. I believe in total from the UK we have Myself, Doug, Stu, Harvey, Shaq, Tillerman, Astz, Dreg, Blokey, Simonb, Zommy and Daishi going. The last 3 however will only be arriving on the Tuesday.

Sunday

I left my house early today for the supposed 2:25 hour trip to Enfield Town Station where I was due to meet Dreg to stay at his house overnight. Also at Dreg's house praccying was UK Quake favourite, Blokey. After a fairly dull train journey, which involved being charged extra at Victoria for a train journey I had already made?!? I arrived at Enfield Town Station. Ah this is a good place to point out my Picture Journal over on ESReality.

After a fairly dull evening of watching the two Quake 3 supremos battle it out over the same 3 maps over and over again I was finally able to get on a computer and begin the write up of my journal... the end.

I will add to this when there is more to add...rather not bore you all with the details of my Chicken Dinner.

The night itself was awful as i'm not used to sleeping in London, especially next to a busy road with the window open and no double glazing. So a very noisy, sleepless night.

Monday

Right, so the first proper day of my journal then, also the first chance I've had to use a computer. We left Dreg's house taking a taxi to Stansted airport arriving at about 11:00. At 11:35ish we met up with Doug Wright and Iain Girdwood (TillerMan) at UK arrivals, they had flown in from Edinburgh. Then it was another 30 minute wait until Stu Harriman, Paul Shackleton and Marc Mangiacapra arrived.

At this time we kept checking details of our flight for the departures but strange there was nothing listed for Poitiers, infact quite the opposite, every single flight apart form Poitiers was listed. Anyway we had to wait for Astz the Unreal Tournament 2003 representative. His flight was pretty much delayed but, perhaps stupidly, we thought that the Poitiers flight was also delayed so there was nothing to worry about. Finally Astz strolled in, right hand in a bandage, at around 1:30pm with our flight due to take off an hour later. Then we strolled upto the Ryanair Poitiers checkin at Zone E only to find there was no queue and we had just 5 minutes before they closed checkin. We could have quite easily missed it.

So then it was a simple checkin (they didn't check my confirmation number) followed by a short train to the plane. We arrived at the gate just as they began letting the small children on the plane. Everything worked out fine from here on out, 1:20 hr fairly dull journey to Poitiers airport, followed by baggage claim. Then we were meant to be collected by a coach at the airport, but alas, no coach. So a quick lesson in french and aggression followed by a 20 minute phone call and a 2 hr wait and our minibus arrived.

Poitiers it has to be said, is dead. There is practically nothing here and transport is very limited. At the time of writing there has only been one minibus taking people everywhere they need to go. So good ol' fashion walking has come back into the fold. Anyway the building itself is very impressive, registration was extremely well organised, all players quickly received passes for the week and free t-shirts,

At this point I was told that I did not have a hotel room for that night. So I was planning to sleep on the floor of the UK Q3 players' room. We waited at the tournament venue for about another hour before finally deciding to trek off to our hotel which we were told was "further than you can walk" away.

After about 5 minutes of walking, we got bored, and just stood around for a while as Stu dished out the insults to everyone. Then we continued on our quest which was rudely interupted by the same minibus offering to give us a lift.

I arrived at the hotel and was once again informed I did not have a room. Though strangely, as luck would have it. There were 5 single beds in the Dreg and Blokey's room, including an extra bed they had thrown in there.

Next on the agenda was free food. There was a rather posh restaurant nearby which seemed to have some deal arranged with ESWC players. So I turned my 'Guess badge' around and strolled in with everyone, where I was treated to a 3 course meal. We hung around in the restaurant drinking coffee/whatever else they had until around 11 before going back to our hotel rooms. Fairly dull I know, but plenty more nights to get wasted :). Sadly was another rather restless humid night for me.

Tuesday

Woke up fairly early after very little sleep. Had the typical continental breakfast followed by a 25 minute walk with Dreg to the venue itself. At the event, there were a few players scattered around, CarMac from ESReality seemed to be particularly hyper. We followed him up to the press room which is where I am now. I am due to meet Gamers.nu Arbee sooner or later.

Well it's now Wednesday, and after a long, dull and boring ceremony I can now put boredomville of team practicing behind me and look forward to what this event has to offer...besides free stuff.

I spent the majority of Tuesday moving around looking for a guy from Gamers.nu named arbee, who was supposed to bring a laptop, digital camera and all his equipment with him. I was also meant to be moving out of the one-star hotel and into the 4 star hotel that night. The problem was this guy was nowhere to be found, i've never met him before so i'm not completely sure what he looks like, but if he is here we would have ran into eachother at some point in time, either in the press area or viewing the various teams at the event. Sadly without him i'm rather stranded in the fact that I cannot upload any more pictures or do much of anything except write this diary. So looks like all you have plenty more to look forward to yet.

The highlight of yesterday was the opening ceremony at around 5:00pm last night. The ceremony itself was all in French so we had to wear these headsets that had a translator hurridly translating into english. As usual with these sort of events it was just speeches thanking their sponsors, their staff and players etc...

Nothing much to mention about the opening ceremony really, not as spectacular, or as long, as the one at WCG but as far as speeches go this one was a bit on the dull side. There was nothing in the opening ceremony at all to liven it up, no performances, no jokes (well not deliberate ones anyway). There were a few translation errors that were cleared up later. The biggest of which was with regards to the CS teams that had to play on the stage. Obviously if people are commentating on the game then the French teams or anyone that understands French have the advantage. So we were informed by the very dodgy translation that all players were going to wear a helmet, so this would not be possible. The thought of this at first was rather amusing, 5 players side by side all wearing helmets. Anyone remember that old advert with the lady wearing a helmet in random areas, something about a medicine or sweet that would help you breath more easily I believe. Anyway it turned out according to a French member of staff we spoke to later that it was not indeed a helmet that the players were going to wear buy more of some hefty headset, you know the type people wear on helicoptors when reporting on travel news?

After the opening ceremony we were led to this buffet. This journey itself was rather amusing, literally a line about 10 minutes long of around 800 people just walking into this theme park and into the buffet. The buffet had obviously never really accomodated student gamers before. The food varied from the quite nice and plain chicken to the huge range of fish, some edible some not so edible and even some food I hesisted to smell, let alone eat. The plus of this buffet was that they also served alcoholic beverages. Even to children who were clearly underage, but then i'm not quite sure what the drinking laws are in France.

Once we arrived back at the Palais des Congress we had the opening game between French side aAa and mTw.se (HLO) to look forward to. This game, for whatever reasons, was delayed for an hour. Once the game did start 4 rounds took place, mTw.se winning all of them, before the forcechasecam went off, most likely due to the script the event was using. After this everyone was rather fed up and left the area, I heard later that mTw.se went on to win this game.

Myself, Harvey, Daishi, Dreg, Blokey, Stu and Marc then spend a couple of hours at the bar drinking and playing pool. Not much to mention apart from Harvey managing to pot the white nearly every shot. SK.Element came by later just asking around if anyone had a room they could lend him?!?, now he may well be one of the best CS players in the world, and the very reason for one of the top teams collapsing recently, but he's not worthy enough of just asking people for their rooms.

I think eventually after a phone call from Harvey to bds himself Element was wired the money to stay at the 4 star hotel for a while.

Right so here's the interesting bit about yesterday, it did previously cross my mind that having 5 beds for what was supposedly just two people was rather strange. Not like a well organised company such as ligarena to make that sort of blunder. Especially considering an extra bed had been added to the room especially to allow more players to stay there. Myself, Dreg and Blokey arrived back at the hotel at around 1:00am. We unlocked the door and went into our room only to find that not only were 5 other people sleeping in the room, but also our stuff was not in the room. We turned on the light, probably out of cruelty, to find that these weren't any ordinary 5 players that had ruthlessly taken our room in our absence, but were SK.swe (HeatoN, Pott1, Fisker, Brunt, Ahl) favourites for the CS competition and probably the best team in the world today. Naturally not much of a conversation took place, as potti their team leader informed us that they were just told to goto this room and there was nothing there when they arrived.

At this point I knew that I would not have a bed this night, and right I was. The two quake 3 players had been moved into a room of 2. I guess it makes sense and our stuff was in there. We went to our room, discussed why at that point in time we didn't like SK.swe and decided (or most likely the beer inside us did) to do something about it. We knew that when we had left the SK.swe room we had not locked the door. So with a camera in hand, we opened the door (pitch black) took a photo with the flash on and went or ran back to our room just down the corridor. Sad? perhaps, but wait until you see the picture from the real SK Insiders :D.

Wednesday

Fairly dull day so far, woke up around 8:00am had breakfast with a few members of the staff (browny points?) and went to the venue. In a minute I am going to watch our UT2K3 competitor show why he should have been seeded for this event, lets hope his skills can match his ego :).

Well what was looking to be the worst day so far probably turned into the best day. Astz was the first person from the UK to play as he squared up against the group's 2nd favourite mTw|Crush. Not expecting to win Astz started well going 4 - 0 up before deciding to engage instead of running away at every opportunity. Sadly this aggressive style of play, which works for players like Fatal1ty, did not work for Astz and he lost his first map fairly badly 20something - 5.

The second map Astz was much more cautious on DM-Compressed. Astz played intelligent, running when low on health, engaging his opponent when and where he wished to engage, and ensuring he picked up the majority of the power-ups. I believe he won this tight game 13 - 7.

Despite this tie of 1 map each Astz was still eliminated from the competition as he was defeated by 2 other opponents and eventually succumbed to an unexpected defeat at the hands of an unknown competitior. Overall from Astz I expect that he learnt a lot from this competition and I have no doubt in the future he will continue to improve and be a threat to anyone who plays against him.

As you are aware, I had still yet to find Arbee from gamers.nu to begin our coverage of the event. I didn't really know what he looked like, so after 2 public announcements I managed to get hold of him. It turns out he was someone I had seen around the area plenty of times. He is even in one of my photos, the one with HeatoN in. *sigh*

Once i hooked up with Arbee, we treked to the hotel and back so we were now in a hotel of 4 beds between 2 of us and we went back to the venue. He had (for the gold gamers.nu members) around 69 of the best pictures of the top CS players in the world on his digital camera. Nothing really much to say about him, except he really doesn't comprend english sarcasm that well :)...but a very cool guy generally.

On the Counter-Strike side I wont bore you with all the results of this week, as Protex has already done that on the main news page. The game on the stage between GamersX from the USA and zX9 from Norway was fascinating. Especially this new 'Heartbeat monitor' which they're using. It shows the oppositions beats per minute, especially through the intense moments. The fascinating thing here, was that the american's beats per minute rose at one point up to 180, whilst at the same time the cool, calm, calculated Norwegians was on 80 beats per minute. And despite this the americans still won the game!

Later on that day, whilst I was switching to a different hotel, TillerMan DREW with probably the best Warcraft 3 player in the world one map each. An incredible result for him to achieve, especially since this is his first LAN competition since Clikarena where he lost both of his games and bombed out. I'n only hoping that he can now string a few more results together to get into at least the semi-finals of the event and this result does not goto his head. I have no doubt he'll do well though, he is a very calm, emotionless rock.

It was about at this point when Fatal1ty arrived. Now I was standing near to Fatal1ty thinking "hmm...i should really say something to him" but then what do u say to a guy that's made $$$,$$$'s from gaming, has his own brand of mousemats and has starred in a few MTV shows? "so fatal1ty...pro-gaming huh?..how's that workin' out for ya?"..didn't really fit. Anyway I shook his hand took a photo for esreality and left it at that for now. Actually Arbee knows him fairly well so I'll probably speak to him later.

Not much more to say about Wednesday except that it was the best day so far, the tournaments seemed very organised. A shame that Dreg and Blokey went out so early but nothing much that can be done about that.

That nights after meeting up with Simonb from Independant Gaming Productions fame we discussed what we were planning to do the next day and finally went back to the hotel. Bed at last...thank god almighty.

Thursday

So much to say...so little time. Well because we had no real reason to get up early today, as the CS games were meant to start at 3pm we slept in until around 10am.

The Possessed Shower Story

Now I consider myself an efficient user of a range of showers. This one however, would've felt more at home in The Exorcist. The shower was up on the wall (like most are) and I turned on the water to begin fiddling about with the temperature to get it right. It was fine for about 10 seconds, then it suddenly spun around, soaking the whole bathroom area with some sort of spreading...thing. It was also freezing cold at the time, and I couldn't really find a way of getting to it to turn it off. Then it somehow spun itself off the clip it was on and hit me on the head. The possessed shower finally hit the floor and just as it was about to grab hold of it, it spun around once more spraying me in the face with freezing cold water.

So I can only wonder about this shower, possessed...or just...coincidence. Either way the bathroom is soaking wet with no proper draining system, at least the maid will earn her do's.

Could a day that started so well really be that great? well we missed breakfast, we thought for a minute we might make it for 10:30am so ran for about 5 minutes, carrying backpacks, in the boiling hot sun, only to find it closed at 9:30am. Myself and arbee then went to this intriguingly named place called 'Snack' and asked for a sandwich. We were given a salad. Less said about the carrot covered salad the better.

The day itself progressed ok, the CS game against EQ started much earlier than scheduled and there's no need to point out all the results to you as they're on the main newspage. 4K lost the game and as usual went into a bad mood, which made life all the more pleasant. Then they managed to come back against 5th seed Eu4ia to split the group 3 ways with each team having played 2, won 1, lost 1. The organisers decided that the best way to proceed was to replay the group.

Four-Kings Intel knew that once they had found their form they would be very difficult to beat. They took convincing victories over Eu4ia again and EQ meaning that they now qualify from their group in 1st position. Sadly the other UK competitors have not done as well, with Blokey, Dreg, Astz and now TillerMan all being eliminated in the group stages. There is an interesting situation developing in Quake 3 at the moment, where Cooller, accused of throwing a game at WCG2k2 to ensure Zero4 was eliminated from the tournament, might repeat this by losing a player who has already gone out. I personally cannot see this happening simply because everyone is currently expecting it. I guess we will see.

Tonight there is meant to be some sort of music festival for 15 euros, but judging by the music i've heard so far, it's going to be fairly dull, could be another night of alcohol and pool...

Writing this from the Friday morning now. The music festival yesterday was not quite as bad as we were expecting. We got the coach at around 9pm, arriving there a few minutes later. About 50 players were dropped off in this empty car park and the coach drove away. Now you have to appreciate the humour of just 50 players, no admins, no organisers, just standing around in an empty car park at night wondering where this music festival was. Eventually I think we sheepishly made our way to the entrance and then just followed the music until we arrived at the event. Like other music concerts there was a typical set at the front massive amps etc...This event was not only for gamers though, many others paid 15 euros to attend. The music wasn't really that good, there were about 20 very out of place people, amongst the few hundred that were there who were dancing at the front. Everyone else was just laying on the grass drinking beer (expensive beer) waiting for something to happen.

At around 11:00pm everyone that spoke French suddenly got up and left with no explanation. We followed them about 10 minutes later and came to this light show. The show was, unfortunately, in French, but was still pretty cool. Stu will disagree with me here with some ****s.

After the light show myself, Harvey, Daishi, CarMac, Simonb and Astz decided to find a bar and drink some cheaper beer. The rest of the 4K cs team went back to their hotel to prepare for the tough games they had tomorrow against GG (on fine form), Neph (beat them at ClikArena) and fzer0 who had beaten Titans from Norway.

The bar we went to the other night in the 4 star hotel was closed, but SK.swe and others were hanging around there so they joined us as we went to this other bar inside another hotel that had music and a swimming pool, very impressive. The best thing about bars in France is that there are no rules regarding closing at stupid times like 11:00pm. So we were drinking with the SK.swe team until around 2:00am. Well, that's not quite right, the SK.swe team, under the direction of bds were not allowed to drink more than one beer each. The discipline those guys have is really phenomenal. After the SK guys had gone to bed, and the non-drinking CarMac, we stayed there for a while longer.

Harvey during this time had gone to buy some cigarettes, and when he came back he saw a guy hitting a woman 5 or so times in the face. So he told the bartenders, who told a few of the regular customers, who chased after the guy. Didn't see any of them again, but saw a police van outside later, so I guess something must've happened.

Anyway myself and Simonb got back to our hotel at around 3:00am, as Simon decided to have a shower? (waking everyone in the hotel up).

Friday

Wow, so much happened yesterday that I can hardly remember it. I think I woke up at around 10:00amish and was probably at the Palais Des Congress by 10:45am. Breakfast consisted of the usual chicken sandwich avec Coca-Cola. Which is pretty much the only food you can buy around here, so they charge you heavily.

I spent a few hours with arbee in the Strategic Partner room doing some work for gamers.nu, then we went down to the Counter-Strike tournament area to see how the games were going. Four-King Intel's first game was against nEph, though sadly not a game I could spectate as I was busy filming the SK mousesports game. The occaision cheer from their event was enough to satisfy my curiousity.

I stayed in this tournament area doing filming and just chatting around for most of the day. I watched the other 2 4K games which ended in draws, ensuring that 4K went through into the single elimination phase of the competition. An interesting situation did develop after the 15 - 15 tie against Austrlian side, fzer0, where by GG had 6 points, 4K had 4 points, fzer0 had 1 point and nEph had 0 points. The problem was if nEph made no effort in their game against fzer0, and let the Austrlians beat them easily, then fzer0 would be level on points with 4K and might well have a better round difference assuming GG, on great form, defeated 4K.

The pressure was fairly high for a while and a few complaints were made to admins etc.
What happened that afternoon was that 4K were playing on the stage at 9pm, so went back to the hotel for a while to get something to eat and relax. The admins then realised that there could be a tie between 4K and fzer0 on 4 points meaning a replay would have to be played that day. So, without telling anyone, they changed the time of the game to 5:00pm. The first I heard of it was when I was just wondering around and a 'Last call for clan 4K' came over the speakers. I spoke to the admin, argued about the situation and that it was the admins fault whilst Astz ran off back to the hotel to get the 4K players. By the time I had finished arguing with the admin, 4K turned up anyway, so they decided to play the game.

News came in seconds before this game started that nEph had tied with fzer0, meaning that 4K were definately through to top 8 and had to play either GamersX or zEx from the USA.

Went back to the players' hotel after this, got another free meal, then came back to watch the game on stage between mTw.se and team9. Both teams are top 3 SEL teams so this game was supposed to be good. Sadly it wasn't, not much to mention except how much everyone hates Vesslan?, when he suicided everyone, including the French commentators, just couldn't stop laughing, which probably affected his game a lot. Team9 eventually won this game quite well, ensuring their spot in the final few.

After this game it was about 10:00pm, so went drinking with Harvey, ElemenT (under bds' supervision), Daishi, CarMac (coca-cola), Simonb and Astz again. Got back to the hotel at around 2:30am. Think now could be a good time to stop drinking, woke up the next morning feeling that something was wrong, I had a lack of concentration, sore throat, and a lack of focus really, strange, anyway it's Saturday night tonight, so this will be the last opportunity. Ciao