So we attended HKLan#4 this weekend and since there was little to no coverage of the event on the news sites for some reasons, I’ve decided to make this blog post about how the event went, from my point of view.
~~~~The trip to lan~~~~
So basically my lan-experience started the night before lan, as wantz and I stayed up playing gathers till like 7 in the morning, because that’s just how much we love games and we were pretty excited to be going to our first lan together with this new lineup, with the objective of proving that we’re the best team in Denmark.
At some point we finally end up going to bed and about 6 hours later it was time for me to get up, as Lars(h0lm) would be arriving soon to pick me up for one of our, by this point, classical road trips for lan.
One of the things I love about going to lans recently is that Lars just loves lyrics in musics so much, so he always has a new cd for the trip to lans, full of songs I’ve never heard of and that he has apparently heard the shit out of – he tries to not sing along all the time, but he’s lipsyncing all the way, if he’s not giving stories about when and how that song ended up on the cd – good entertainment value and I learn stuff I would never know if it wasn’t for this – pretty much the perfect going-to-lan package!
We stop at our favourite McDonalds to get some nice sugary meals to really get our bodies ready for a good few days of lan, yeah!
No funny incidents (not a single near-death experience, going to lans isn’t what it used to be) on our way to lan, except for just when we arrive and some kind of alarm goes off in the car – apparently it was extremely keen on telling us, that we only had 50 kilometres worth of gas left, dunno?!
~~~~Friday at lan~~~~
So, fridays at local lans are pretty much always easy and for the most part pretty boring if you’re topseeded and actually we had an even easier group because we were seeded 2nd instead of 1st, so not much action in these games 😀
The midseed in our group was team GamerZone, who we didn’t really know, but we went into the game with our serious-faces on, just in case they were capable of surprising us. Didn’t happen though and we completely shut down the CT side of train 15-0, with their top fragger being on 5 frags. T pistol also went our way and from there we played 4v5, as FeTiSh decided to go watch some other games instead.
To get some good action out of the day we booked 3 maps pracc against VeryGames and actually that gathered probably the biggest crowd of spectators of the day.
When pracc was done it was about time to get some sleep, as it was 2.30 and the 2nd groupstage was set to begin @ 10 am. This was when we first learned that apparently danish byoc-lans have shifted towards being more focused on techno-parties all night long instead of playing games – somehow FeTiSh manages to sleep right through it, but some of us have ears and didn’t get more than a couple of hours of sleep – lovely! Also, what the fuck is wrong with people who decide to stand right fucking next to a bunch of people who are clearly trying to sleep and just shout as loud as they can to say something completely random to people sat several rows away!?
Anyways, not the first time we’ve been at lans with nearly no sleep – normally it’s just because of delays, not because of techno – so we should be fine, the other teams aren’t much better off, except for the ones that arrived early enough to get set up for sleeping in the nice actual sleeping areas where the noise apparently wasn’t as bad.
That’s another thing I don’t understand. This is Lan#4 for these people and still I received the biggest OMGASH-face from the crew when I said that all the sleeping areas were completely full and we were going to sleep by our seats – half of the people at the event hadn’t gone to bed at this point, so how it could come as a surprise that their sleeping areas weren’t big enough I do not simply can not comprehend.
~~~~Saturday, groupstage 2~~~~
We get up at like 9 am to get breakfast and prepare for our next group games, which were going to be against GamerZone(the team we beat 16-0 the day before), echoFX and FLYVERNE, which is a mixteam with our beloved ex-teammate pur1ty and the danish superstar of the past, Krogh.
This is when another thing I don’t understand happens – the breakfast buffet was emptied in half an hour, so everyone except Kristoffer(gravity) has gotten up too late to get anything but white bread and butter (which they decided to still take the full price of 5½ euro for, vnice), so we starved untill about 1 pm, when they finally managed to open up their shop again to sell food.
Anyways, about the games:
First game was against GamerZone and after the veto it ended out on de_inferno on which we lost the knife-round and after starting out really well, they managed to take a string of rounds, so we got 7 rounds on the terrorist side – not a bad result as such, but not impressive against a team we beat 16-0 with ease the day before either. We take the needed rounds on ct almost as easily as the day before on train though, and if I remember correctly we actually won 16-7 with a final score of 21-9 after playing out the rounds, might be a bit wrong though 😀
Next we face off against echofx, who I think has an average age of about 15½ so we expected to be challenged only on aim, if at all. They had just beaten flyverne 16-1 though, so we knew they couldn’t be too bad and they for sure proved that. I can’t remember if we won the pistol or the 2nd round eco, but they eco’d us after that and simply owned us on the folloing ecos and the first 2 buy rounds, so we actually went down 8-1 on CT side of dust2 after them executing some surprisingly good flash-strats and simply popping heads like a team full of little NBKK’s. A quick rearrangement and some more focus and we took the next 16 rounds and decided to go look at other games, so the match was reported as 17-13. Big cadeau to echoFX for being the first team at the lan to actually put a bit of pressure on us, had they gotten another buy round or two we might’ve started to worry, also no other team at the lan got more than 2 rounds on T-side against us on d2 (even VG got less than echoFX did actually, lol).
Our game against FLYVERNE ended with a WO for us, as they didn’t really want to play because of severe hangovers and purity gone AWOL, this was pretty well timed with the cafeteria opening again, so we got in the massive queue and after 35 minutes of waiting finally got some food and cola, om nom nom.
~~~~Saturday, groupstage 3~~~~
So, this is when the exciting games are supposed to happen, at this stage there are 2 groups of 4 teams: Xaya, CPHWolves, GamerZone and SMACK! make out the one group and in our group we have SpeedGaming, Hogwarts and Derailed as our opponents.
First game is against the lowest seed to make it this far: Hogwarts, who has a bunch of players that are probably going to be names to watch out for by the end of the year, but at this point they should be no problem for us and we did win that game 25-5, so turned out not to be.
Next game was aganst Derailed, who we know has at least some really good players and after starting out really badly on CT side we did manage to make some kind of a comeback, but even though Bo did put up a good fight, winning a 1v2 in a deco and getting pretty close to winning a 1v5, we didn’t manage to get our game going and generally we all just made little mistakes all the time. Combined with some of their players making some pretty big 3- and 4-kill rounds it just didn’t work out for us, and we lost 13-17, putting some pressure on us for the last game against speedgaming. Rizc posted a short recap of the game with some lan-footage on youtube, if anyone’s interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI4wuSRtllo
At this point, us losing to derailed wasn’t the biggest surprise of the lan, even though it probably should’ve been. Xaya, who had received the 1st seed had already showed they weren’t on form when losing to the mix team mixizer in the 1st groupstage friday, and continued to underperform now when it mattered the most and lost no less than 22-8 against GamerZone (left the server @ 16-8).
This meant that both Seed#1 and Seed#2 were in a must-win situation before the last games in the final groupstage, us against SpeedGaming and Xaya against CPHWolves. I would lie if I said, that we didn’t feel some nerves in the minutes before we started, as we had lost maps against SpeedGaming before, so we had to step up compared to the derailed-game to secure the rounds we needed (20 rounds would put us through as #1 in the group and just a win would make us #2, anything less and we’re out 5th-6th).
The veto goes down and they veto the maps we beat them on in the eps 3rd place game, so we end up on de_dust2, which is a map we feel very confident on against them, so I think we pretty much all knew we had to screw up badly to not get 2nd, but getting 1st required some good play from our side! We delivered just that and even though we started out pretty shaky, by losing 2nd round after winning pistols, then winning 3rd round and then actually getting pretty pressured in the 4th round, we got our game flowing and dominated the half 12-3. The CT pistol was won almost flawlessly as well and we continued our domination, to win the game 23-7 and securing the 1st place spot and therefore was should supposedly be the easier opponent for the coming semi-final.
In the other group though, the surprising results kept rolling is, as Smack won 16-14 against CPHWolves and the last game between Wolves and Xaya ended 15-15, which meant that Smack went through as #1 and Xaya/Wolves would get 2nd place, depending on round differences. This is when Xayas decision to leave the server against GamerZone turned out to be one of the biggest lan failures of the year – 3 more rounds in that game and they would’ve gone through as 2nd, instead their lan finished right there, with a bitter 5th-6th place and some mousemats as their only consolement. Not exactly what you wish for, when you’ve received seed#1, got 4 managers behind you and a journalist following the team. Was somewhat funny from our point of view though, seeing how many people had said xaya would definately win the lan o/
~~~~Semi-final~~~~
Xaya out and Smack number 1 in the other group meant that CPHWolves was our opponent in the BO3 Semi-final. The veto got done and the maps were gonna be: dust2, train & inferno, in that order. This time we started out really well and they were the ones to deliver a little comeback, which saw the first half end up with the closest possible score, 8-7 for us on T-side on this very open map. In the second half we won the pistol without them getting bomb down so we were really surprised to see an early buy from them against mp5’s and and a few famas’s, but with an incredibly well-timed mp5 push at long and some good famas action in the other end of the map we secured the round and from that point on we perfectly countered anything they threw at us, completely shutting down the half for a 16-7 win on dust2.
Time for their map of choise: de_train, where we won the knife round, which allowed us to start on the much-favoured CT-side, where we got off to another bad start, being down 2-7 at point I believe, again we managed to pick up our game and the scoreboard showed a 8-7 advantage for the Wolves, when the first half was over. Not exactly the result you’re hoping for on the CT side of train, but with some momentum and the knowledge that our Terrorist game on train can really dominate teams, if they don’t make some big counter-moves we we’re somewhat confident that we could end this game as a 2-mapper.
The half actually felt somewhat close, but we consistently clutched and won rounds 2v3, 3v4 etc., so in the end we won the map with an impressive 9-2 T-side, even though our normal fragging-specialist, Bo ‘wantz’ Vestergaard, was, in his own words, sleeping through the entire match, and for the first time in as long as I can remember bottom-fragged a good T-half from our team.
GG to Wolves, even though they got dominated during most of the game they showed some really good play on their T side of train and there’s certainly hope for their future performances, if they stick with it (and together, lol).
~~~~FINAL TIME~~~~
Yay, time for the final! This time SpeedGaming decided that vetoing dust2 was the way to go and after our shaky play on nuke against derailed, we felt it was better to not take the chance of getting a bad start on that map and let that get into our heads, even though it’s probably the map where we know the most about how SpeedGaming likes to play, which is why the maps for the final ended out being tuscan, inferno & train.
Tuscan was for a long time not a very strong map for us and some of the SpeedGaming players have had it as a favourite map for a long time, so both teams knew, that they pretty much had to win this map to stand any chance of beating us on 3 maps. I can’t actually remember a lot of the game, apart from the last few rounds before the overtime (where we had 2 map-points) and the actual overtime, so I’m just going to conclude, that we didn’t exactly top-perform, but after 12 hours of intense gaming and with little to no sleep the night before that, it wasn’t really to be expected. Credits to SpeedGaming for some really good work on kitty, countering our splits though.
In the 29th round we read their setup perfectly and got the bomb down and really were in a position, where we should’ve won the map right there, but some bad positioning from me and MBE delivering some really good (and somewhat lucky, some negative bastard might say) spams through the boxes and they did a good retake. In the last round there was some minor miscommunication about the placement of the bomb, so when it came down to the 1v1, gravity just got caught by an opponent he didn’t think could be where he was so quickly and lost it.
The overtime wasn’t pretty, we literally threw away the first 2 rounds of T-side and then proceeded to win the 3rd one. First round of CT side saw us trying to pick b storage with an awp, which is something we never do, turned out that was a bad plan and they got 2 quick picks on us and got the bomb down on B easily. Somehow the remaining 3 from our team just went in there and got the frags down and Lars did one of his trademark smoke-defuses with instant death following the completion of the defuse, to get us the round. The next round was won pretty comfortably to make the last round of overtime another map-point for us, and what an intense round that turned out to be!
Long story short, gravity and I ended out in a 2v1 against gla1ve, who had just picked up the bomb with 11 seconds to go. He got a good flash off and got the bomb down as we rushed him after being unflashed, Kristoffer didn’t get the frag with his deagle and jumped in front of me while I was spraying through the corner of the site-boxes, which meant I got the frag on Kristoffer first, thought I had won and, only after checking the scoreboard and realising I hadn’t, proceeded to spray my last 7 bullets on the box to get the frag on glaive and defuse the bomb.
Many yells of happiness followed, as we pretty much knew this lan was won at this point, even though of course we still had to not fail on the last 2 maps.
A short cigarette break later we were ready to go live on our map of choice for the match: de_inferno.
We lost the kniferound and started T side, which is normally pretty strong for us, and even though they played quite differently from what we expected (maybe because the one round they tried to do what we mainly expected, we pre-naded and got a really easy opening frag?! ;D), we managed to get like 7 rounds on T side and headed onto CT knowing that they had to step up a lot if they wanted to make this comeback. They didn’t and we got the first 5 rounds without much trouble, when they finally made some resistance and got a round. We quickly answered with winning the next round, to make it 13-9 for us and put them on a semi-buy, in which they actually managed to get big site and this was where Bo decided that he didn’t want this to get any closer, so he clutched the 1v3 and got the defuse, which, if I remember correctly made them eco to try and win out from there. 15-9 for us and again they get big site with a good split and they get bomb down, but once again they had to face Bo at his best (which is for some reason often when he hasn’t slept more than 1-2 hours per night for a couple of days, don’t ask me why as I simply don’t understand it) and he once again clutched a round with enemies on all sides of him, which allowed him to defuse the bomb while yelling something like “OPPOSITION PLZ”.
Actually this was a pretty weird moment, as we weren’t nearly as happy as when we won tuscan, still though, smiley faces and hugs were had and after the GG’s were exchanged we did the standard happy talkings about everything that went well and especially about how glad Lars was about throwing smokes in a particular ct-round on inferno, which I am sure will be in the movie that rizc is making about the event, which should be out in two or three weeks from now.
~~~~Goodbye~~~~
And now I’ll get some sleep, after what was probably the one of the most tiring saturdays of lan ever – several groupstages is a brilliant format, but god damn it, it is tirering to play that many games in a row 😀 GG everyone and cu at 30P-lan next week, hopefully for our 2nd lan win at our 2nd event with this new team.
<3
