Sn1pe Warman has 12 chronicles

1. Cod4 Tourney @ Cyber Ops
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on Apr 24 2008

   Ah, finally my story comes. I will start the night before... It was a Friday night and luckily all of my other team members were online, of course we made a party and started getting our skills back up to tournament level play. (Which we had no idea what it was) While in our party we were completely dominating. All of us were at the top after nearly every match. We were feeling pretty confident, I mean if we can dom people all over the world how hard could it be to beat a few guys from Iowa right? Wrong. Completely wrong.
   Saturday morning I got up and got ready. I had to pick up another teammate and give him a ride there. It was about 10:30a.m. by the time I arrived at Cyber Ops. I saw Sicipio and Nester on the couch warming up, so I joined them. From what I could see they were ready to go. I took my eyes off there screen for a little bit and took a look at the competition. I almost peed my pants... . Almost everyone there looked like they were either at my skill level or above it.
   At around 11:30 the tournament got under way. There was some intense competition from the start and some close games. The worst part of the day was waiting to play. Double elimination at best 2 out of 3 for each match wasn't a good idea. My team waited around 5 hours to play our first match. When the time came we were anxious and nervous. The match was extremely close at the beginning, we were neck and neck the whole time the first round. It ended up as a tie at the end from a nice grenade from the other team. We played a shorter round of the same map with a lower score limit and beat them. Our second round we went into Search and Destroy and almost everyone was playing bad except for Joe. He was pwning. He had 11 kills and 2 deaths at the end. Without him we wouldn't have made it very far .
   After winning our first match we got a little bit too determined. We felt we could win and didn't talk any strategy. As our second match came around we were arguing during it and got destroyed. (did I mention we waited 3 hours in between our first and second match?).
   For our final match of the day we were pretty tired and kinda just wanted to go home. It was around 9:30 when we got eliminated. I'm not going to go into detail of our losses just for the sake of keeping the BAD past, past. Anyways, we ended up losing and left CyberOps with our heads down. There were way more great players than I expected and after the day was over I became a better player.
   I heard that they didn't crown the winners till 1:30am! Just a tip for next time... If a tournament is going to last 12 hours have a bigger reward for the winners! I feel bad for them!

   
   

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Sn1pe Warman has 4 comment s on this chronicle.

1. Boobacca
   Posted On Apr 26 2008

   Thanks for the compliment. You had a nice group of young men comprising your team. You're all more than welcome any time.
   
   We're working with the local Army recruiter on sponsoring our next COD4 tourney, hopefully to be held towards the end of May when school lets out. They were going to help with advertising it, printing up announcements and supplying pizza/drinks. We're still hammering out the details, but we began our discussions with them during one of our last Halo tourneys. Sounds like they do this with other game centers across the US and it usually works out well for both. I don't know if there will be an age restriction (I'm sure they're after eligible candidates), but if there is, we'll be sure to let you know. If it's an all-ages thing that would be best.
   
   We appreciate your participation and look forward to seeing your group progress even further next time around.
   
   You could always come up and practice against the little boys from the Pwnagers. They're not too bad for 8 years old!

2. Sn1pe Warman
   Posted On Apr 25 2008

   Yes, it makes better sense now. Sounds like you guys sacrificed alot to hold this tourney. For that I am thankful
   (Very nice set-up btw )

3. Silent Bob
   Posted On Apr 25 2008

   We admit we severely underestimated the time it would take to play out double elim given the number of teams we had. I thought your team did really well. There were some teams up there with serious skills, that's for sure. We told everybody at the beginning of the day that it was going to be a long tournament, so we appreciate your patience and persistence.
   
   I appreciate the feedback. We certainly would have liked the pace to be quicker, but the mixed mode play plus double elim made it difficult to control, especially when some matches went out to the 3rd game. Had our radio ads stating it was double elimination not been running all week, we could have easily changed it so single elimination a couple days before the tourney with the click of a mouse by updating the website. We were hindered in part by imitations of the software. COD4, unlike Halo, demands that each player have his/her own separate XBox 360 & TV, whether on LAN play or play over LIVE for a multiplayer match. Had we been able to double up people on one screen like we do for Halo tourneys, the time would have been cut in half. We made every effort to rotate out the last group quickly and get the new group going after each bracketed match was decided.
   
   Your group, because of the random seeding, was one of the last to play their first matchups, thus the longer wait than most.
   
   Once the winners bracket started to shake out and we got the losers bracket filled, we were finally able to completely eliminate some of the teams from contention.
   
   It was a test of endurance, that's for sure. But not just for the players. My brother and I were up there at 08:00 in the morning getting things ready for everybody, and he and one of our employees were there until 3:00 am cleaning up.
   
   As far as more money to the winners, the short answer is "no". We only take a percentage of the entry fees to cover our expenses, and what we took didn't even begin to cover expenses. We lost several hundred dollars (yes, you read that right) running this tournament.
   
   People who play in tournaments don't look at things from a business aspect. I don't expect them to. But here's a quick little lesson anyway. We have lots of overhead: employee wages for those helping run the tournament (we poor owners get paid last or not at all; that's the cost of doing business), advertising costs (radio ads and live remotes aren't free, folks), lost revenue from having to turn away regular customers during the tournament because so many systems were in use, electricity, depreciation on hardware, cost of software, XBox LIVE gold memberships, rent, and so on and so on.
   
   So if we lose money, why do we run tournaments? Simple: to increase overall awareness of our game center (in the first year to two years of a new business, that's called "branding") AND get new people introduced to the concept of a game center, anticipating that some of those people will patronize our business for something other than a tournament.
   
   It's the people who come up to pay to play, our "regulars" who help us to keep our doors open so that can offer tournaments from time to time. Without them, we simply couldn't afford to throw money away running tournaments all the time. Make sense?

4. BEN
   Posted On Apr 24 2008

   Hey, it sounds like you showed some serious patience and still had a day full of gaming, so I suppose you can complain
   
   Those live tournaments bring out the players though, huh? Anyways, thanks for reviewing the tournament and are we going to see you on May 3rd at Bostons? We Better