UKTerrorist

Intel Masters - Full Report

The Intel Masters competition has been hyped up for some time now, I remember first getting wind of it back in October just before I went to Korea. It was never really officially announced, I just got some RTCW player to send me a copy of the e-mail he had received regarding this event.

Intel Masters History

The history of Intel Masters is quite complex and at one stage no-one really knew who was involved. Intel obviously wanted to run their own gaming tournament simply because they believe they have conquered the business world and want to get a piece of AMD's gaming market.

Intel approached several companies to run the event for them, not going to name who but it really should not be that hard to work out, before finally getting the main organisers of the Roweb Lan Parties.

As far as I am aware the clans chosen for the event were done so by eSports-Pro's Paul Meakin who mainly picked the teams from the recent Games Domain Online Championship event. The clans chosen for the Counter-Strike competition were:

• Infinity-eSports
• Does Not Compute
• ClanONE
• Omg!
• erm:cs
• Uninspired
• North And South
• Illuminati

News about various details of the event began to trickle through, rumours of custom maps and other odd rules spread like wildfire until on the 20th November the official Intel Masters website went live. The website contained plenty of new information regarding exactly what was going to happen. Also around this time PCGamer, PCZone and no doubt many other forms of media began promoting the event. Even the BBC website did an article about the competition.

Few events have gone to the extent of getting a celebrity down to host and Chris Barrie of Red Dwarf and Tomb Raider certainly sounded suitable. It was clear that the emphasis was being placed on media and spectators, they wanted the show to be packed. With a huge Imax cinema at their disposal who wouldn't?

It was not until the 7th that the first map of the event was released, barely two weeks before the event itself was due to take place. The feedback almost immediately from playing the maps forced the mapper (my apologies for not being able to remember the name) to make a few changes. He changed the bomb spot and a few other details and on the 12th/13th released the second version of the map. There was not much difference but perhaps it was a little better compared to the first version.

I find it very odd though that a science museum so insistent upon anti-terrorism measures would want a terrorist/counter-terrorist map based upon their location.

I played this map a bit on one of the Infinity-eServers and it looked nice, I did not know if it was accurate or not but it was clear a lot of time and effort had gone into it. However, when you model a map after a real location you have to account that the architect never planned the location to have a gaming map based on it, so unlike other maps it is not evenly balanced.

Shortly before this a simple Q&A article appeared on the Four-Kings website which revealed some more information. Due to time constraints there were to be two groups of four and a knockout stage using maxrounds 7 was to be implemented. At WCG we had to limit it to maxrounds 8 and even that placed too much importance on the pistol round. I have not seen maxrounds 7 used since the UKCSL days.

So already the event came under a lot of criticism - if it had not been for the large amount of prize money the event would likely have been boycotted. Soon after this Nick from Intel Masters posted a piece explaining why all the decisions had been made and that it was basically beyond his control. Another interesting factor of this event was that no one ever seemed to be in control of anything and always referred you to someone else online.

In the build-up to the event rules changed, Intel caved under the pressure and said that the usual professional maps would be used as well as the custom science map. However there was no word on the maxrounds rule until late on. They also changed their rule on substitutes and allowed up to two per team, but the prize money would not be changing.

On the 12th December, nine days before the event was due to take place, they released the final layout. Including the seedings:

1. Infinity-eSports
2. Does Not Compute
3. ClanONE
4. omg!
5. Unseeded
   
6. Erm:cs
7. Uninspired
8. Illu
9. North and South

The maps were released and included a mixture of usual and custom through the group stages, Aztec in the semis and de_sceince in the final.

The day before the event I heard from Greg Edwards that the plan was now to use maxrounds 12. Whether they announced this officially or not I cannot say, however it was starting to look like this was going to be a good tournament. Top teams competing, Clan ONE, Uninspired both looking to challenge Infinity-eSports for the £5,000 top prize. Erm:cs, ONE and IES had been practicing at various VGA LAN centres the week before obviously giving them a slight edge, it would be interesting to see how this rubbed off. All in all quite a chequered history but things now finally seemed sorted for a great event with many CS players coming down to watch.

What I have not mentioned so far are the spectator tickets and VIP passes for the event. These had to be collected for by sending off an e-mail to PCGamer. The VIP Tickts had to be won.

21st December 2002 – The Intel Masters Competition

I woke up at 7:00am (a lie-in compared to my 3:00am start for CPL EU Quals) and was due to meet UKTerrorist star-player Jack "b0p" Grimsdell at Crawley station on the train at 8:59am. We were then due to meet Ian "Duellist" Cairns at Victoria station at 9:45am and Eagle outside the national science museum between 10:00 and 10:30am.

Chatting to b0p on the train was quite interesting, it's weird as the only thing you can talk about with another CS players is CS. I could barely believe he was just 15, he looks a lot older. We met up with Duellist on time and got to the National Science Museum at 10:20ish, Eagle was nowhere to be found, so we assumed he had already gone inside rather than wait outside and we wondered in.

The Science museum is pretty big, I must admit to day dreaming my way through most school trips to museums and not being at all interested in the other stuff. Duellist seemed a bit giddy at all the big wheels and ancient mechanical stuff. The phrase "kid in a sweet shop" seemed to be quite appropriate.

The Science museum were quite strict on baggage, they searched our bags at the entrance (not that efficiently) - "do you have any sharp objects?" "No" "OK, move on."

Later down the museum we had to hand our bags and coats in at a cloakroom. That was a bit annoying but understandable and we made our way through to the welcome wing. If you had played the custom map at all you recognize it immediately. It looked much like the map I would really like to congratulate the mapper for his accuracy, if they was any difference I would say that the map made it look a lot bigger.

We wondered around for a while before being informed we had to wait until 11:00am until we could be allowed upstairs to see the first show. It was while sitting down waiting that I met up with Coderz, probably one of my best mates online, he had come down the night before and stayed in a hotel. Coderz does not always impress me with his ingenuity but he had 4 different player passes. He had gone up to the same lady four times and said he was four different people. He had passes claiming he was in clans like Illu, omg and even tR. None of the admins checked to see if Twisted:Reality were actually attending the event.

After this I saw Greg and Dan (Dartagnan and Danfrag/lucking) and found the players marquee area, quite nice, free food. I strongly believe free food makes the players enjoy the event much more as long as they don't take advantage of it. I was informed at this stage the event was running around 2hrs behind schedule and I-eS were currently 11 – 1 up against omg!. The rest of I-eS came down shortly after that and then when they went back up again I simply sneaked up with them. I would like to state now that throughout the whole event including the extra VIP party afterwards I did not show anyone a single ticket or pass. The name of the game here was simply to talk your way into anywhere you wanted to get to.

Once I got up to the players area I saw many familiar faces, DK finally into the adminning scene, Oppie with the 4K RTCW team, even Brorjace who's been strangely absent for a few LANs - nice to see him back in action.

Looking at the setup it seemed fairly decent, blocks of six computers always useful if one goes down, however there was no separation between the spectators (people standing around) and the players themselves. You could sit right behind the player talking to him the whole time if you wished. Also fade to black was not on, and you were allowed to talk when you’re dead. This is something they definitely should have sorted before the tournament.

All in all the tournament did not seem to be going too badly, which is what I thought until I spoke to DK. DK is never one to hold back his thoughts on anything... at all... ever. I won't repeat exactly what he said for obvious reasons, but basically when he arrived slightly late that morning they had not even finished setting up the network and were running way behind. The event was being plagued by continuous computer problems and everything was just being delayed further and further.

After watching Infinity-eSports win the 2nd half against omg! I went back downstairs with Stu 'lil' Harriman to look around and see what else was going on. To put it simply, not a lot.

We had to talk our way back upstairs and were allowed into the back route of the Imax cinema to watch the first show hosted by Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie. At the World Cyber Games I got to see a lot of these shows and because of that this did not really compare, but for a newcomer I guess the shows could be quite entertaining. The main problem is that these things are directed at the target audience of the spectators off the street and the hardcore gamers. For me I found the whole thing in general, especially the commentating a bit too "n00b-friendly" for my tastes. At first they explained all the terms from "n00b" to "rocketfagz whore"? Something tells me that the commentators from TSN who were flown in from the U.S were mainly into Quake 3.

What was interesting when they were commentating on the game between I-eS and omg! (on demo by the way) was the terms they had changed. Terrorists became the "Spy team" the Counter-Terrorists became the "Security Forces". The "spy team" had to plant the "hacking kit" which could be prevented slowly if the "security forces" started unhacking it or if they had a "anti-hack kit". I'm not really mocking it, well perhaps a little, but I can see their reasons for not wanting to use the proper terrorist terms.

Most of the commentating was not actually on the game but seemed to be explaining what was going on the whole time. As I looked around most of the audience were gamers themselves and would of known how the game works, but every show they were always explaining.

The shows themselves typically consisted of a ten minute introduction followed by a video clip of one of the games (you know those intros that come with the games) and then about 30 minutes of watching one game or another. The problem with this was that because of the technical problems of the tournament it was so hard to watch a live game, so the audience usually ended up watching demos or later on in the day watching people from the audience simply playing on the computers on the stage. I feel sorry for the poor commentators who flew so far to commentate on this, it was a bit unfair on them. Not really anyone's fault just the result of several technical problems.

Doing the first show Stu found it fairly amusing to be watching himself in first person mode on such a big screen, also the way the commentator pronounced Harriman. I noticed that the Imax cinema itself was about 1/3rd full, which strikes me as strange because many more people would have attended but the tickets would only let you in to one show. You could have been told get more tickets every hour for the next show.

When this one had finished we went back out into the player area to find out the next game had still not yet started. In 3 hours they had managed to play 2 games and they had been trying for the last hour and 20 minutes to get the next game started. Was this all technical? Or did poor organisation have anything to do with it?

Once the Uninspired versus erm:cs game had been played (erm winning 13 – 7, much to their delight) Infinity-eSports were told they would still not be playing in the next game so had a while to wait yet. It is hard to believe that their plan was to play only one game at a time. Especially with the time constraints.

I believe that they should of accounted for the setup time and other delays when planning out the schedule for the tournament. Perhaps including Warcraft 3 limited their computers a bit too much, either way it was a serious problem and the time was not their friend.

It was during the next show that James (Lithium) phoned me and needed to get in to the event. So I met up with him and basically we did nothing for ages. We met up with Sujoy while trying to find the player area without having to go up the main escalator. We eventually found it only to be stopped by a security guard. Fortunately he understood that me, Lithium and Sujoy played for Infinity-eSports and had not received our player passes for the event yet and let us in.

It was at this stage that the event organizers had decided to change the format of the event due to lack of time. They changed the Counter-Strike tournament to 8 team single elimination. Everyone was pissed off, especially erm:cs who had managed to beat Uninspired earlier. I would say they lost out more than anyone else. Omg! certainly benefited from it all and luckily for them took advantage of that later on in the event.

It was at this stage I some people started jotting down a few comments on my notepad, this quickly caught on and I came out with about 20 or so, here's a couple:

Teppum - "Fucking Wank, I could do it better blindfolded"
Protex - "Disorganised shambolic farce"
Some erm guy - "Pratty PCs"
Donkey - "f**king Intel Masters is shit, myers rocks"
Tmc0r - "thup guyth"
FSK - "Wanky Computers!"
Unknown - "S**t overheating computers, not enough planning went into this, Tepp is penfold COOL"
KhAoS - "The organisers are f**king jokers"
Messiah - "It has been a highly education day out, fun for the whole family. Just a shame if you're a gamer who came to play in a tournament for money then you’ll be disappointed cos its s**t!"

As you can see aside from a few rather bizarre comments this tournament really wasn’t going according to plan. I remember a few of the CS players begging Sujoy to sort it out and run the event. This was shortly before Sujoy and Xenon did a couple of interviews.

It was also around this time that my boredom hit rock bottom and I did some exploring. I managed to find a secondary route into the players area meaning you would not need to go past any of the usual security guys who wanted player passes. It was simply a disabled escalator taking you up to the second floor and then you simple go down the steps into the area.

At this time I was texting Antmoo on my phone everything that was going on at the event, sadly there was not that much to report so apologies for the lack of coverage.

Eventually the games started to be played, Does Not Compute outplayed North and South 13 – 3, Infinity-eSports ripped apart Illu 13 – 1, ONE beat erm 13 – 1 and shock of the night was omg! defeating Uninspired 13 – 1. No one is really sure quite how omg! achieved such a feat but they certainly had a very good game, or perhaps Uninspired were still shaken up after losing to erm:cs earlier, either way a great result for omg! The area seemed to be emptying around now, a lot of people just got bored and went home.

After this set of games I met up with divvur and went to go see another show, but this was not the ordinary show, instead they had random people from the audience playing on the computers at the front of the stage and the commentators covering that. The problem was a lot of them had not changed their names from when the women were using them earlier and the commentators kept saying their names which got the UK womens team more and more annoyed. Also certain people deliberately trying to annoy them did not help (Team-UK | tmc0r *ahem*).

It was after that show that all the people just hanging around the player area were booted out to the players marquee. Usually I would moan about something like this, but actually the hospitality was quite nice in there. We were given food and drinks, we watched the HLTV game of I-eS vs dNC (13 – 0) and it was generally OK. At about 7:15 we were allowed back into the museum for the special VIP party. They did not even bother to check that a) Everyone had VIP tickets b) Everyone was 18+.

Intel Masters VIP Party

I would not really call the event a party just the people that happened to still be there at 7:15pm onwards getting rewarded with free food and drink (alcohol). The food was rather fancy sort of stuff, not what you expect at any of your mates' parties. Luckily you did not need the VIP tickets or proof of age to get in.

At this event the UK girls team were meant to be playing the PCGamer writers on the main stage. However for one reason or another this just did not happen. This meant that the UK women's teams were just waiting around for ages doing a few interviews from 8am – 11:00pm, I feel sorry for them.

I was sitting with Divvur, Duellist, b0p and Protex ready to watch the final between ONE and I-eS, apparently ONE had a few problems setting up and as everything was rushed to get the game started on time I am not sure that all of these problems were properly addressed.

Anyway the game started and I-eS quickly assumed control showing everyone that they were putting their experience of this map to good use. They dominated the pistol round as Counter-Terrorist winning easily, then they took round after round without a response from ClanONE. Several rounds came close, but as much as everyone claims I-eS only win because of their teamwork, the individual shooting demonstrated was usually the deciding factor.

I think ClanONE believe that the commentator was giving away their positions a few times, I did hear him say a few thing which he perhaps should not of, the main problem here is that the commentator was watching the game in real time spectator mode and not through hltv with a delay like how should have been. However he was generally cautious.

In the 12th round ClanONE rushed a stairwell with all five and broke through I-eS' defenses to take their first last and only round as Terrorist. Now it was Infinity-eSports' turn to prove that they could accomplish a similar result.

Infinity-eSports got fairly lucky on the pistol round, I can't remember how, I'll have to watch the demo. They won the pistol round and the next one easily meaning they won the game. After this they played on for another 10 rounds simply because there was a big audience there. Neither team was really interested and just wanted the game to end so they could go wherever it is that they wished to go.

Right after the game had finished I went up onto the stage to talk to the guys, Chris Barrie was interviewing the commentator I believe on why he thought Infinity-eSports won so easily. No-one on the stage was paying that much attention. Greg Edwards seemed especially pissed off, and from what I heard he left the event without even saying goodbye, could explain a lot given recent news of his removal.

After the CS game I did not stay to watch the RTCW or Warcraft 3 games, I believe 4kings won the RTCW and Tillerman the Warcraft 3 event. I went back down and had a bit to eat (some rather weird food) and spoke to the usual people for a while before leaving the event by myself at around 10:00pm to get to my brother's 20th party that night.

Thieves

As most of you are probably aware, and I have not yet mentioned this, accusations of stealing have been flying around everywhere. So who was responsible? Everyone already knows about James (Lithium) who had the guts to unscrew a PC and remove the graphics card. I don't honestly believe he did this for the card but more as a joke. Would he have kept the card if he had gotten all the way home? Perhaps, but it was not like he tried to hide it too well. As for all the arguments that have followed, who knows, but basically yes the rumours about Lithium's endeavors are fairly true. But he is most definitely not a hardcore criminal. This was an incident blown out of all proportions, and should any talk of this should be taken with a pinch of salt.

As for the NOLF games, as I looked there was a box of the "no one lives forever" game. This box was completely unguarded and about 10 copies were scattered around the desk. They looked like giveaways for the teams to be fair. I am not going to name who exactly took up to 10 copies and put them in their bag as Christmas presents, he definitely knows who he is, but needless to say yes some people did take some copies. Thankfully most of the teams simply gave them back when asked, I believe this is because they simply weren;t aware they weren't giveaways.

DJOscar

The night before the event I had been sitting in IRC chatting away when someone spammed that this guy from csradio would be prank calling a few CS players, so I joined the channel #cs.radio and tuned in to see if it was anyone I know. After about two hours I had really gotten into the channel, Oscar was a great DJ and knew exactly how to carry the audience.

During that Friday show DJOscar did several crank phone calls two of which were to fairly famous UK CS players (Greg Edwards, Doug Wright).

DJOscar phoned Greg up (pretending to be from Intel) and informed him that Clan One couldn't compete at the Intel masters competition because of rumours that they cheat. At first Greg started getting fairly pissed off and explained that One are a LAN team and cannot cheat. Then someone told him it was a guy from IRC and he said "f**ck off ya c**t" and hung up the phone.

Later that night when Oscar phoned Doug, being Infinity-eSports, no-one told him that it was a crank and Doug started panicking that Infinity-eSports weren't allowed to play tomorrow.

Anyway the point being it was rather funny when Oscar met these two people in real life. Nothing happened, but you can imagine the humour in it all :).

Intel Masters - Conclusion

Looking back on the event there's so much more they could of and should of done to improve the event. They seemed to be lacking in every factor except prize money. I will give the admins some credit as a lot of those problems were technical but they should definitely of checked out the computers beforehand to ensure that everything was working fine. If they did not have time for that then they should have found some way to ensure that something like this would not happen.

It also seems to me that the admins were giving the teams too much time to setup. Maybe again this was all a result of technical hitches, but still when you only play 7 games in 8 hours, there's a problem somewhere.

Restarting the tournament after games have been played is definitely not acceptable. That was plain unfair on the teams that have already played and won a game. They may have been short on time but they should have been able to play 15 games in the 9 hours they had left available to them.

There were some good things about the tournament. Chris Barrie made a fairly decent host, he did not quite cater for the hardcore gaming audience but did really well under the circumstances he was faced with. Free food, this is always a plus in any LAN gaming event. The location itself was pretty good, middle of London, and the gaming area made for good use of communication and setups. What they very much needed was like a big wall chart was viewable to everyone to see what was going on. A lot of people, especially the spectators, just came watched some games then left, even paid £5 for this privilege.

Obviously I'm biased but this is also taken from a majority of people that were at the event: If Intel were to hold another Masters competition, they should pick a different location and let a company like the VGA, Multiplay, or another company with a lot of experience in running gaming tournaments do the event.

Also seriously consider the exact location and plan for who you think will be attending, especially on the spectator side. Overall I think this event will be remembered for the bad points rather than the good points which is a shame considering the amount of prize money that was at stake. If Intel continue to support gaming events in the UK then hopefully we can expect to see them learn from this experience and develop their methods in the future.