Rogue

Thus ends MonsterLAN XIV - Back and redder than ever.

Coming into the event I spent a couple of days in Melbourne for work stuff and was working like crazy at home. As a result of that I think, I ended up with a very painful cough and a rapidly degenerating voice box. By Friday night I could barely speak at all without collapsing into a coughing fit and ripping my throat to shreds.

Follow up:

Despite being a little ill, from my point of view I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth regardless. For me ML was once again periods of high stress interspursed with a couple of moments of joy.

Don't get me wrong, the admin team put in another fantastic effort with everyone chipping in to do as much as possible; so massive respect and much love to the crew, but I feel like we were being stretched to breaking point trying to do everything by a very needy LAN.

The slight dejection on my part comes from knowing I could have helped to perk things up a bit I think if I wasn't chained to the damn server desk. In the past I've been able rush around in the 20mins before scheduled kick off for a tournament, then trigger everything and within a couple of minutes I'm free to get up and stretch and maybe walk around to mingle a bit. Not this time.

At XIV, despite us not doing anything different, I was almost constantly bombarded by people having problems or questions. This left me with a feeling that if I left to go mingle then some n00b would trundle up with problems like

"My entire team can't turn our computers on and our clothes are on fire, I can't remember which server are we in and our match was supposed to start 20 minutes ago can we wait 6 hours till I'm ready?"

half way through a round and without me there to handle it they might just wander off and come back in another half hour to reap further havoc. No doubt this was due to a massive volume of new attendees to our little shindig, but no less debilitating as a result.

And then if it wasn't bad enough having all that happening, the stuff which I'm meant to be able to handle decided not to play fair either. Things were quite peachy up until just as the COD2 comp was about to begin at which point they inevitably crumbled (as all great plans do the instant they come into contact with people). Yes that's the first comp of the day, yes that's only 1pm on Saturday. I know.

COD2 had been forced to delay starting by half an hour to desperately try and get team ohned into the comp as they only arrived the very minute we were about to kick off. So there goes the schedule, but hey it's single-elim so maybe I could make up some time given a few quick wins. I could have said "No, go to hell, you should have gotten here 3 hours ago." but I'm there to be conducive to people playing not to be a crazy comp nazi.

With COD2 I'd started using the Project Ares Mod to attempt to assist our competition play with the auto-ready (go live) it has, but the damn thing was more trouble than it's worth so I ended up just scratching it and doing it the old school way (by hand). This was all dandy except I was having to do it across six different servers simultaneously which got extremely confusing.

Also with the extended player base we dropped in some switches that should have been fine; except we didn't anticipate a dozen leech freaks to come and all sit on the one table together, then sit there and leech the entire dag-nam event. Which quickly saturated the poor little switch we ran for the row, and annihilated the bandwidth for everyone there. CherryPopper leapt to the rescue and dropped in a second switch to divide the row into two little sections with independant paths to the backbone thankfully, but in the meantime the handful of gamers on the row were playing in the COD2 comp (naturally), and suffered some lag hits as a result.

Luckily team Klutch came to my rescue by being extremely good at the game and actually having a clue. They quickly and efficiently got into their servers, disposed of the enemy, and didn't complain. At least they didn't complain directly at me, and if they did then they managed to not let me know who they were so I couldn't direct my wrath with accuracy. And thank goodness for seeding, since it meant the quality teams (or at least those who had played the game before) knocked off their opponenents quickly as well. This left us with a very speedy COD2 final in which Klutch were devastating (as to be expected) and we came in on time, albeit only 30 minutes remained before UT2004.

Now I had expected UT2004 to be the easiest comp of the day in all respects. Patch/server wise it's stable as a rock, UTComp makes it dead easy to run, and it's been out so long that 90% of gamers understand the fundamentals. How so very wrong I was. >

With any recent patch there are inevitably problems. In our case this was symptomized by server crash without trace or notice. We got through every single game in the tournament up until the final without fault or failure. But when we switched to the final map then the pain began. All was well until the teams were locked in overtime when the crash occured. Not good. The natural reaction is to simply replay it. This also crashed near the end. Then I dropped the freeplay servers from heater and put the final on that alone. This also crashed. Seperate servers, different times. The only thing that can reliably explain it is that the patch has somehow affected either the map or the way UTComp handles the assets in the map.

At the end of all that I had sixteen angry gamers crowded around me yelling and screaming and spluttering and just generally pissing me off in good measure. I tried to suggest a few options, like playing the final on a different map on the main server with smaller limits (Dawn, 10 minutes, high overtime drain) fitted in around the other comps, but it seems they found it far more entertaining to get melodramatic and make my life painful. A great many of them seemed to be blaming me for it personally as if I sit there evilly plotting on how to fuck up my own servers deliberately. Yes of course, I enjoy getting screamed at by a dozen psychotic n00bs hopped up on sugar and caffeine and thus attempt to figure out a means to achieve that on a daily basis. I find that really rounds out my day. Thankyou ever so much.

What I really found amazing though was that some of them even seemed to think it was so unacceptable that it didn't work as anticipated that they were no longer going to play. Like a boycott or something (although it reminded me more of a hissy fit) which would in some way achieve... well what it would achieve was never really explained - since I thought the entire idea of competition was to play the game to the best of your ability with the aim of winning and having a damn good time in the process. Then when I explained that it was entirely up to them if they wanted to do that as individuals or a team but that regardless I would be replaying the final in some shape or form (whether they were there or not) it only seemed to make them more upset. At this point I was already way beyond my bullshit acceptance limits and had been feeling like crap all day thanks to my butchered throat, so was not in any mood for such nonsense.

To be fair it was only two or three who wern't going to play, but it's this kind of crap that makes you wonder why you do it all in the first place. I'm here to help. I'm trying to make it possible for fellow gamers to compete at the highest level they can achieve in a fair and balanced way. The contest of skill and will and all that. Yet when things go tits up I get lip instead of understanding. I get anger instead of patience.

There is one way to handle that. In the future I could simply have some kind of notifier as to who is the team captain of each team. Something as simple as a badge or a hat or something would do. That way it's one person from each team coming to me to report scores, voice concerns, or discuss anything else. Two angry people I can deal with, 16 angry people swarming around me like the admin den is a fucking ant hill and I'm a piece of fruit I cannot deal with without losing my temper.

Only letting the captains converse with the tourney admin means a couple of things;

1. I look like an arrogant prick because I won't talk to anyone not a captain.
2. People remain clueless because they're captains don't talk to their teams even when that's the point. They just don't, despite it being their damn job. Communication skills FTW people.
3. I don't snap and stab some geezer in the jaw with whatever is at hand we they start giving me a hard time.

So it's still fairly balanced at this stage. I'm mulling it over though and perhaps there is an alternative which I havn't picked up yet. We'll just have to see.

Eventually the more level headed members of the two groups (Engels Inc. and [TC] for those playing at home) came back to me and said they were going to replay it. It was played on another map, [TC] won, the instant the score was reported I just punched it in , updated the standings, then hit the close button - I had other comps to run. To hell with fanfare for such a shemozal.

Then it was time for the evening break, with a title fight, dinner and smacktard planned. But after 20 hours of dealing with people I was a little strung out and decided to scrap the title fight which I had been planning as a surprise anyway. I was going to run Quake IV duel servers during the day with Q4Max and stats management. Then I would have been able to just pick the top players from the server over the course of the day and invite them to fight it out for some sweet giveaways and respect. At that point however I was swearing more often than speaking real cohesive sentences so decided against it. Instead I tried to chill for a few precious moments and down some much needed food. Later on we just gave out the prizes to random people anyway, which I was more than happy with as It maintained our credo of gaming for fun and prizes for randoms.

And can I just say; Sweet merciful pixel juice Search for a Smacktard worked perfectly!. The only thing which didn't happen as planned was we forgot to fire of the music we had for it.

Lupin busted out the fantastic Stepmania comp around then too, which worked a treat and was fantastic to watch since it's far more of a static spectacle than any of the PC games we run (as CherryPopper has said). I think it's definitely a keeper, right up there with dodgeball.

BF2 was a bit of a blur. I came to the event assuming I wouldn't be playing and thus hadn't touched the game for months. As a bit of a blessing I ended up working defense on team KR3W (albeit badly), so my poor form was carried by a few of the other players working hard on offense. I don't know whether it was the Red Bull pumping through my veins, or the fact that Lupin and Boxy were helping me run it while I played; But after we came through and won I was feeling fantastic (although my throat still made me look like a cancerous smoker every couple of minutes).

After that things start to get a little hazy. I remember running CSS for hours. It just kept going and going as I knew it always would. I remember the servers transitioning to other maps at the end of half time instead of staying where they should have, thus forcing me to punch them back to the real map and trigger a go live instead of just triggering a go live. It was rather painful.

I remember teams on mass simply not showing up to their server and not responding to my wails of despair over the mic; then a member would randomly appear and ask what was happening with the CSS comp, completely oblivious to the fact I had been asking for them to join their server for half an hour.

I remember people not knowing when the matches were live despite 15 seconds of solid text spam and three restarts. Here's a tip people; When the server has big flowing letters screaming "LIVE LIVE LIVE" bounching back and forth then it's live. Don't ask. Just assume..

Also if you keep TKing and generally being a fool because you think it maybe possibly perhaps isn't live despite that because one of your teammates we've been waiting on for the past hour isn't in yet because he's reinstalling windows and you want me to restart the match when everyone else is waiting to start the next round and your opposition team are getting angrier and angrier... you can safely assume it's not going to happen. And that you're a crazy person.

Props go out to Silent Death for extreme patience with the opposition by the way. At any time they could have asked them to forfeit yet they didn't. So yay sD.

I don't remember much more than that about CSS. I'm pretty sure it's 4 or 5 hours of my life I'll never get back, possibly a mental block or something.

So that left me at 6am. And we all know what happens at 6am. YEARHG! It be time for the swashbuckling fun of Air Buccaneers! YARR!

The server was confusing as always, yet we ended up playing with maybe half a dozen people and as many again bots scattered between two teams. Much fun was had with Skullshot, Lupin, and myself manning the great battleships and roaring around the skies; randomly burning, boarding, and blowing up everything we encountered - even ourselves. Ahhh... good times.

- - - -

Props go out to the members of Dark Lan Clan for their stellar work during setup, many of the admin team were stuck off site with other duties but when we arrived a great deal had already been achieved and most of you lads worked well and earned your right to hang out at ML on the friday night.

As always my heartfelt thanks go out to all the people who come to ML on Friday to help (really help I mean), you guys make life so much easier for us, so thanks again.

Respect out to Boxy, teh Flyz0r, holmsy, jihad, and all the rest of the floaters who put up with my moodiness and horrendous cough throughout the proceedings.

A big thankyou for everyone who turned up. And a welcome to those for whom this ML was a virgin experience, we hope you had a great time and will be back in September.

- - - -

Now unfortunatly I'm still quite ill, and possibly will remain that way for next few days at least. A good nights sleep has done wonders for my general wellbeing although nothing for my memory of things past.

Peace out.