Friday, February 16, 2007

Guild Wars: Tournament Pairings Released

The official site doesn't have it but leave it to the fans.

As, I said, XoO has three guilds out of the 277 participating (Might even be more depending on a few things I'm hearing about.). A few things:

  • That's 138 matchings with one team getting a bye each round.
  • With 277 teams that's likely 8 rounds (or the base 2 log of 277 which rounds up from 2^7 or 256.) although it might be less with the four elimination rounds of 16 teams.
  • Over 100 American guilds are participating. That's over 36% or a lot more than what's currently represented on the ladder.
  • At the same time, only 19 “Asian” guilds are participating. Presumably they've combined the Korean, Japanese, and Taiwan regions due to lack of turnout.
  • I'm guaranteed to see what these “Special Transmogriphy Potions” are. Of course, so is everyone participating.


The XoO matches:

Reign of Xen [XoO] challenges Trained Professionals [Tp]


RoX challenges Tp which means the first match is on Tp's hall. Then the second on RoX's. And the third match will be played in the hall of whomever loses the second battle. In other words, if home field advantage holds, then RoX will play on Tp's field twice. But if they away team wins then they'll play twice on RoX's. Other scenarios end on the second match. A weird way of doing it but important to remember.


RoX concentrates on other things than GvGing so they're not on the ladder. Yet. They've been pretty solid in scrims from what I hear. And they'll no doubt look to practice more.


Tp on the other hand is ranked 386 with 1023 rating from 57 wins and 47 losses. That's something like a quarter of a point per game. But, basically, they're a solid if mediocre guild that plays a lot and hovers around the .500 mark.


They should make for a good test for RoX. But I can't say I know much about them at the moment.

Spirits of War [SoW] challenges Xen of Onslaught [XoO]

This is probably the best of the XoO matchups in the first round. Spirits of War is an old, tested guild (They're also, like XoO on the restricted list. But what happened with XoO was that we had our developer member switch to another division. Basically, as long as they're not on the tournament roster, though, it seems to be okay according to the rules. Spirits of War no doubt did soemthing similar.). Currently, they're 283rd. With 1049 rating in 135 games for about a third of a point per game.


The Mothership is ranked lower at 505th with 1011 rating. But they've the most active GvG division in XoO with 249 games under their belt – it's just they've only won 128 of them.


Statistically speaking, they're the underdogs here, but a tournament isn't the same as the ladder – this is going to be two (Admittedly second or third tier) teams that know what they're doing playing a best of three. Should be fun.


Last but not least...

Onslaught of Xen [XoO] challenges Greedy Monkeys [mon]

The Ox is my guild, by the way. And we're actually ranked higher than the Mothership at the moment with a 1012 rating (Was a bit higher but we had a bad night the last time out – trying things out, testing new builds for the tourney, not caring about the rating, just the experience, ran into some hate and some connection problems, that sort of thing. Of course, you could say the same about Main, too.) which puts us at 495th. We haven't played nearly as much though with only 133 games to our credit. Of which I've played in...10 or 12 maybe.


The Greedy Monkeys are a bit of an enigma. From what I can tell, they're primarily a PvE guild and haven't done much PvPing. They don't show up on the ladder (either of them) although I can find references to them as far back as a year ago. So, it's likely they're not very experienced at this sort of thing which, you know, bodes well for my guild. But they could just as easily be guesting a bunch of ringers, so we're not going to be expecting a cakewalk here.


Still, it looks like we'll have a good matchup to start with. Now it's time to start thinking about round strategies and guild halls and which builds to run and all the other high-level metastrategy I eat with a spoon and a smile. Not sure if these matches are going to be televised or not (138 matches on the obs mode would be a bit much) but I hope so. This is really the biggest tournament ever put on by the developers and given how effort teams had to put into registering, the tournout's great. That's 2700+ people from 45 countries who are going to be engaging in the sport of nerds over the coming weeks. Intense. And, you know, expect to hear more about it all.


Other matches I'll have an eye on:

The “It's all about the name” bracket:


The “Old Friends” matches:

The “They're ranked high, they must be good” ones:

Posted by Sausaletus Rex at 8:54 PM

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