For the past 3 weeks, some Australian players have been taking part in a 'Nations Cup' tournament hosted by Clan Base. ~25 nations registered teams and were divided in to 4 (geographical) divisions.
I'm captaining the Australian team made up of players from kp10, WAR, vA and =3=. We've played 3 countries now and are ranked 4th in our division.
Due to being the only country entering from the Asia/Pacific region, we are actually in the division with the South American nations. It makes for fun times with a 15 hour time difference to most of SA. We've been up in the early hours of Saturday/Sunday mornings to play the South American's late at night (for them).
So far we've played Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. We've been playing on servers hosted on the west coast of the USA which generally gives our players a ping of around 250ms. South America generally ping about 50-100ms lower than that, so it's not too bad.
The match against Colombia was the first competitive international match and it showed with us drawing the game. The rules for the tournament dictate that the result is determined by the number of maps each team wins. Each match only consists of 2 maps so draws are possible, and quite common. Had the rules said the total number of rounds won across both maps added together determined the winner, we'd have won that match
Next we played Brazil. Brazil were the favourites for division and consisted mainly of players from syh (who placed 2nd in the North American FTW league... AKA, very good players). Despite being a lot more competitive than everyone expected us to be, we were still defeated by the Brazilians.
Last weekend we played our third match against Argentina. They are currently ranked second in the division and are also favoured to come close to winning the division. By this stage we'd played a few games together with our new team and knew a little more about playing internationally against very decent teams. We finally claimed our first win in the tournament.
To carry on past the divisional stage, we need to place 1st or 2nd in our division. To do this, we need to win both our remaining games (against Venezuela and Chile).
Why am I telling everyone this? Why not?
We've been posting a few of the demos around on various clan forums and people have been watching them quite a bit. Maybe someone here will find watching a few matches at the international level interesting and it might give you an idea of what kind of team work and players skills are out there.Most of the games are actually broadcast at the time of playing using GTV. Players can tune in to another server where they watch from the perspective of a spectator (GTV camera operator) 2 minutes after the action occurred. As the final rounds draw closer, there might even be a few shout casts running.
These are the screenshots and demos from the Argentina match. I will look at posting more soon...
Screenshots
http://clankp10.com/images/random/shot1509.jpg
http://clankp10.com/images/random/shot1510.jpg
Demo
http://www.clankp10.com/downloads/match ... 1.casa.rar
http://www.clankp10.com/downloads/match ... .abbey.rar
