Celestial Tournament: More Thoughts on the Last Match

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've come to the realization that last night's victory over the Signet of Ultimate Doom wasn't quite the upset or thrilling come from behind victory that it might initially appear to be. Instead, I think OoX fairly well dominated all of those matches.

We lost the first game but only because we had a very poor first few minutes against a heavy pressure build. We weren't sure what to target, we had people out of position, and we paid for it by taking a lot of deaths and being forced off the flagstand. But once we turtled and figured out what was causing us problems, the other team never really threatened us for the rest of the match. Our build, a 2xWPRM thing, isn't very loaded on defense so when we pushed we'd take deaths especially on our heavily DPed Monks and that would stall us out. But we knew going in with a build like that we'd incur plenty of deaths – we hand our Monks a cigarette and a blindfold before every game, just to be on the safe side – but we killed them much more than they killed us. It was only their control of the flagstand area and our inability to push out a flag to recharge our sigs that really prevented us from making a sustained push out of our area. And come VoD with all their NPCs still up and our morale so low, we took a pounding. But we still hung in the match and nearly pulled out a win from those first ruinous moments. The two games after that, we plastered them up and down the map. They couldn't deal with our split, they couldn't stand up to us in a heads-up fight, and everything that went wrong for us in the first match went right.

Which is not to say anything against our opponent. They fought well and they were down a player. But what I'm trying to say is that OoX, while not amongst the elite guilds, is no where near as bad as we might look on paper. If you look at our ladder record, we're not very impressive. We struggle to get to .500 and fluctuate between rank 500~1000, much like Signet of Ultimate Doom. They were in much the same boat until a recent string of wins. Going into the match, we figured that meant they'd stumbled upon a pet build that they'd been using to climb the ranks. When we saw the map was Burning we were pretty sure we were right but we weren't expecting the mass of Thumpers we encountered.

But, getting back to OoX, that rating is deceptive for a few reasons. The first is that we play late nights PST time or, in other words, into the wee hours EST. That means we play the PST guilds but we also play the heavyweights from the EST who are die-hards and stay up late. There's very few nights that go by where we don't run into a heavy weight – either an actual guild, a low ranked smurf, or a host of good players guesting for a poor guild. Our level of competition is much higher and the metagame we play in is much more cutthroat than at other times. As well, we like to experiment with new builds. We seldom play the same build more than a few nights and we're always tweaking it. That's good in that we get a lot of practice with different builds but not so good in that we're constantly getting used to new roles and tactics. So not only do we tend to play good teams we also tend to raise our own difficulty level. Add to that the fact that, for the most part, we don't tend to have eight members from OoX on to play consistently. Oh, we turn out for the tournament games and everyone puts in their practice time but, fact of the matter is, we're an older guild and we have other commitments like work or family and, so, each of us only has so many hours on so many nights in a given week. Our core rarely plays together and instead we have to guest people over from other XoO divisions. We try to get people we trust but it's just not the same as when we have seven or eight people from OoX – the results are generally good then.

But while we have our flaws, we also have our strengths. We experiment with different builds. Most of our players are very flexible and can run multiple roles competently. Our problems are less about knowing what to do and more about not being able to do it.

With the tournament, we've stepped up our practice time and done heavy scouting of other teams and their build. So, at this point, we're a very tested team. As I said, we're probably not going to be cracking the top 100 any time soon. But I think, once the AT system gets under way that we're very well equipped to succeed in that environment.