Celestial Tournament: The Final Aftermath

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

- The Hollow Men by T.S. Elliot

As I was afraid, it looks like scheduling issues are going to keep my team from actually playing in the eight and final round. It's an open question right now who's going to forfeit to whom although I think both sides involved would be fine with taking a tie or a double-loss at this point. And, again, it's the awful scheduling format of this tournament that's giving us difficulty – we even tried to use the weekend to our advantage but couldn't. In the end, I know it's not for a spot in the final 16 or anything the tournament's organizers really care about but it was important to me. I was afraid, going in, that this tournament would be a disaster and although it wasn't the flaming wreck I expected it to be, it was, by and large, a disappointment. The scheduling sucked. And there's really no getting around it because if this tournament had been a little better planned out or handled, it needn't have. As one of my teammates said, we spent much more time worrying about what time we were supposed to play than what we were going to be running and who'd be playing which role.

I think, in the beginning, everyone focused on the roster. Originally it was going to be 8 people, no substitutions, you needed to have at least 6 show up and could replace the other two with henchies. And I and others, rightly, cried foul – there was no way over a two month tournament schedule that just eight people could reliably make any and every match. The roster was expanded to 10 and, further down the road, we were given the opportunity to add in more people and the limit of henchies in a team was raised to further ease scheduling. All in the hopes of actually getting matches played, no doubt. And make no mistake, if the roster had stayed what it was the tournament would have been an even bigger disaster than it was. However, I think the focus on the limited roster blinded everyone to the more subtle problem of scheduling. With just a bit of thought, the community could have offered up a lot of helpful solutions – like regional brackets or divvying up teams by timezones - but once the tournament was underway there wasn't much to do except mess with the fallback times. And, of course, whine.

As it is, we're at 12 points and probably not going to rise much higher or fall lower than our current 108th overall. That's barely in the upper half of the bracket which I think is about right for 4-4 with 4 games actually played. We went 2-2 in those games (One of which, for personal reasons, I missed). So, yeah, mediocre .500 record overall.

I might be a bit more upset than usual because Main XoO and RoX, the other XoO divisions who entered the tournament, also had forfeits this round. That leaves Main at 5-3 with 15 points. Like OoX they actually played only 4 games although they went 3-1 in those matches – and they still think they could have won the one they dropped. RoX will be at 3-5 with 9 points. I'm not sure how many matches they actually played but I know they forfeited several because they couldn't get enough people.

On another note, [EW] beat [MH] 2-1 to claim the overall top seed for the elimination rounds. Good for them but my old friend Narc's in Mostly Harmless and I was really pulling for them. The match reports help, too, even though they don't have the latest one up yet.

Anyhow, since my guild won't be moving on (Not that, realistically, we ever expected to although when we were in the midst of our default spikes we joked that we might be able to forfeit our way to the top.) I'm left with the question; was it worth it? It's been two months and a lot of cerebration and heartache since I signed up for this so, was it the right thing to do? Well, if we're going by the games we actually played, no. We had four no-shows, two games against teams running with henchmen (one of which we won and one of which we lost), and two games that were steamrolls (one against us and one for us). The round seven come from behind win was probably the best but, again, scheduling issues meant the other team was only playing with seven people and it feels a bit cheapened in retrospect. If we're going by prizes, well, I'm probably in line for two or so potions and, yeah, I'm thrilled by that. What I'd have to rely on would be the amount of practice and training put into the tournament. And there, I'm not sure if we wouldn't have been just as well off to concentrate on just playing a lot of ladder matches for all the good it's done us. It seems, now, that a lot of people in OoX are burned out. Myself included, really, although maybe I'm just feeling let down by recent events. But people are going on breaks or leaves of absence and it's not like we had all that many players to begin with.

As for whether, in general, I think the tournament was a good thing to hold, well, I do. It was, as predicted, something of a fiasco but we always knew it would be. And for all the hard times I and others have given Mr. Gills and all the other organizers, I'm sure they worked as hard and as diligently as they could to pull together this tournament and give the community something in the wake of the delayed ATs. It's been far underappreciated, as such efforts usually are, but it's important to remember how large an undertaking this tournament was. There've been some good matches and, no doubt, the elimination rounds are going to be a sight to see. I wish they'd gone a little better for me, personally, but if you'd asked me a few weeks before the tournament, I bet I doubted I would even play.