FrosteR's i44 Blog

Now that I am home I've written some words about my time at i44 and in the UK. Before you read this blog, please make sure to +1 my Google+ page and add it to your circles and follow me on Twitter!

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Thursday:

After getting up extremely early (around 05:00) and having to get the train at around 06:15 I arrived at Schiphol Airport 1 hour and 30mins before my flight at 10:20. However, faith decided to be against me and mine and toxjees flight was delayed for an hour, until 11:20. Then around 11:50 we finally got on board and left around 12:15. Which meant we arrived around 2 hours later in Liverpool. After arriving at Liverpool we had to wait for Mart, our content manager in TCM. His flight came from Tallinn (Estonia). Me and toxjee sat around a bit, got some food and some things to convert our power plugs into the English ones, because for obvious reasons, English people always need to have things different (different power plugs, driving on other side of the road, no euros.. etc!) After Mart arrived Jim (Xman, manager of TCM) came to pick us up by car and we immediately drove to Birmingham Airport to pick up paradox and luboshmir.We arrived at the LAN rather late, around 20:00 if I remember correctly and we helped to set up the PC’s CCL gave us for the event. After that we went to the hotel and got some well deserved sleep after a long day of travelling.

Friday:
We woke up rather early, got some food and went to the event. The rest of my team just hung around a bit and I was the first one of my team to do the 1on1 shootout for the PCWorld stand. Anyone could play against me and if they managed to get just 3 kills in 2 minutes time (on mp_killhouse) they would be entered in a draw to win (I believe) a 1500 pound PC! Obviously a lot of people wanted to give it a shot but only 1 person managed to get 3 frags against me, a guy called Eric Brown, if I remember his name correctly, so well played to him and everyone else who gave it a shot (like LLL ono, who failed miserably, noob! :P). After that we took turns in playing and everyone spent like 1:30 or 2 hours doing shootouts and we managed to get a nice list of people who could win that PC!

Around 17:00 I played a quick mix (online) to get warmed up and used to all the settings, my new awesome Cyborg Glide mousepad and my amazing Tritton PC510 headset. After everything was sorted we started our group matches at 21:00.

We played against Creative (18-6), is. (23-1) and MADF (20-4). All very comfortable wins which managed us to relax a bit and get used to our stuff and fix the last few flaws in our tactics. After the matches we went to the McDonalds I believe and after that we went to bed.

Saturday:
We got up quite early because we had to play our last groupmatch against VYE, which we saw as the hardest opponent in our group, however we still managed to win quite comfortably with a 17-7 scoreline, mostly because we played on mp_crossfire, one of our strongest maps, if they would have eliminated crossfire the outcome might have been closer. Then shortly after the groupmatches our first match in the playoffs got underway, this time against RQ.
We continued our strong performance from the groups and managed to beat them 13-1, finishing the match rather quickly in our favour.

Our player booth with BF3 at i44, PC and monitors from BenQ/CCL were sick too!

Round 2 in the playoffs will be spoken about for a long long time, I’m sure most of you have already read everything about it but I will explain it again. Basically, we played against a team called ‘’Check the drivers’’, who had one player renowned for being a cheater, (chrisw0w, or ‘’kayos’’ as he was called during the event). We managed to get a 9-5 scoreline in our favor on crossfire, already doubting if some of their players were clean, when Chrisw0w decided to turn on his hacks (or toggle off less?) and get literally 2 or 3 smokeshots every single round, completely raping our team and ending up on 34 kills, beating us 13-10.
They came over to our booth and started acting all cool, some bad words were exchanged after which it resulted in a fight between me and Chrisw0w, with Craig breaking it up even though he had a broken arm.. :D

Obviously after the match we didn’t trust it AT ALL so we asked the admin to get his demo and review it, which we all did. With about 30 people standing behind us in our booth, we watched the demo on one of the PC’s with a free downloadable wallhack, to be able to see better if he cheated or not. Long story short: we laughed our asses off because he was so incredibly obvious.

Check out this youtube video to see what it looked like (remember this is just one round, he managed to pull off smokeshots like this pretty much every single round) chriswowfraps.avi

Basically the cheat he used means that it doesn’t matter where he shoots, he will kill someone in his view, he could basically should the sky and still kill someone. As you can see on the video he kills paradox (the scope) even though he misses him by 10meters, then shoots the rushing SMG (Luboshmir) on the right hand side of the screen, again shooting like 20meters next to him.., then the 3rd guy (germaine) in the café, missing him by a few meters yet still killing him.

After reviewing the demo a few times, the admins decided to kick him out (literally kick him out, security escorted him out of the hall and he wasn’t allowed in anymore), and I believe he is banned for all future insomnia events. His teammates were allowed to stay but the team was disqualified, giving us a default win and allowing us to continue playing in the upperbracket.

Next up was the Phantasmagoria mix, we started off on crossfire and we managed to play it like we usually do, beating them comfortably with 13-9. Then we went on to play crash, which didn’t go that well for us, we lost too many rounds and couldn’t pull away from them, which eventually meant we lost our first map in the tournament. The 3rd and deciding map was strike, which has always been one of our weaker maps, but since germaine joined our team we have gotten very strong on it. We managed to get 9-0 ahead on attack I believe and they simply weren’t able to pull that back and we won very easily with 13-5, something we didn’t expect after losing on crash.

This win meant we would be in the upperbracket final, our opponent was Dignitas who had just beaten in infused in 3 maps and loads of overtimes.
Map 1 was mp_crash once again, we had learned from our mistakes against Phanmix and we improved some things on both sides, I don’t remember the halftime scoreline but we did pretty well on attack and played solid in defence, resulting in a 13-8 win. The second map was Citystreets, we continued our good form from the first map and managed to win it comfortably again, 13-7. After this match it was still a bit early I believe and we spectated some matches of other teams before we went to the hotel.

Sunday:
Sunday meant final-day! We were surprised to find out phanmix had managed to beat Team Dignitas and Infused so we would meet them in the finals. After waking up we set up at the main stage (about 40 minutes late.. :P) and got some breakfast meanwhile and eating it on the main stage, like a boss.. :D. Then when everything was set up we could get underway. (for the viewers), Phanmix on the right, Deman and Pansy in the middle, commentating the match and my team, TCM Gaming on the left. With quite a few people watching our game, and probably a lot more on the online stream (including my parents in their hotel in Milan, where they were on holiday), my sister, her husband, my girlfriend and a lot of my friends in gaming. All supporting me and my team!

The match kicked off on (surprisingly their choice of the map), mp_crossfire. Which our team is kinda famous for to win it against nearly everyone, so we were confident to take the final in one map. However, things went a little different. We never managed to get into the game and they kept winning rounds. Personal highlights for me were a 4man in the melonroom at B, including a 1on2 clutch and a 1on5 clutch, at a 7-12 scoreline, with the bomb planted, I ran around like a maniac in the melon room, killing 4 people and making sure the 5th guy was too late to defuse the bomb, managing to keep my team in the match for at least another round.
Unfortunately phanmix decided to take the next round and we lost the first map 8-13.

Shortly after we had to pick our map of choice, which was a hard choice. We could pick strike, as we had beaten them quite easily with 13-5 on it earlier in the playoffs, or we could pick citystreets, on which we are a lot stronger than on strike usually. After some discussion we decided to choose citystreets because we figured it would be harder to play as a mix and we are better on it personally. This choice turned out to be a good one, managing to get 6-1 up and winning the defence side with a good 8-4 lead. Getting a lot of entry frags every round with paradox on the scope and a lot of stop nades. With me and lubo taking it aggressively with the SMGs, constantly getting in their face and stopping any possible rush they could do.

The attacking side went even better, we managed to get control of pretty much the entire map and left them no chance to rotate from one bombsite to another, winning every round on the attacking side and finishing the match with a 13-4 win. So, the insomnia44 LAN is over and we have managed to grab the first place and the 1500 pounds that come with it.

Monday:
The trip back home was alright, we had to wake up first at around 06:00, because Jim came to pick up Paradox and Luboshmir to bring them to their aiport, and then around 11:00 he was back to pick up me and toxjee and brought us to the airport in Liverpool. Our flight had almost no delay (only like 20 minutes) and we landed around 17:00 in Holland, immediately taking the train home.

Thanks to:
I want to thank everyone who supported me and my team this weekend, our managers, Jim, Craig and Mart, who did a fantastic job making sure everything was organised extremely well. Also thanks to our sponsors Mad Catz, Cyborg, TRITTON and Multiplay. Special thanks to CCL and BenQ for providing the PC’s for the weekend!