Posted: 19th February 2009 by Ted Ottey in eSports & Gaming
Tags: CEVO, GotFrag Tournament
Due to my crazy schedule at the moment which includes all sorts of unpredictable and unforseeable events we’re just going to take the week’s CoD news and drop it all into a single post, this one! We have CEVO-Pro week 5 matches tonight and Monday as well as the upper bracket finals and lower bracket semi-finals in the GotFrag CoD4 tournament, and finally a little “state of the community” roundtable I participated in a few weeks back after the cancellation of NERV. So sit back as I break it all down.
CEVO-Professional Week 5:1 & 5:2
The big news in CEVO-P at the moment besides Panemic narrowly hanging on to the 1st place standing with a higher CPI is the current mod situation. If you haven’t heard, there are a number of people who don’t like DAMN mod. In fact, Pandemic and MoB have threatened to forfeit their matches if they have to play on DAMN. Cool huh? I think the most interesting thing about the whole situation is the community as a whole generally wanted to try to DAMN and now there is this whole notion CEVO and CAL forced it upon them. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter if they forfeit their matches or don’t play them, because that’s what they do anyway. Seriously, for CEVO-P matches to actually be scheduled before 6PM EST on the deadline day someone must have parted the red sea, seen the second coming of Jesus, and finally played the released version of Dukenukem Forever! I don’t know why professional teams can’t schedule ahead of time as it would make everyone’s lives a lot easier, especially the casting companies, but they can’t or won’t. Moving on, however, these are the matches and my predictions pending they ever get scheduled and played.
Week 5:1
MoB > PtL
x3o > Hostile Faction – MOTW
Pure > Dynamic
MoBdeep > Backslash
We have an interesting 4 matches supposedly scheduled tonight whichwill probably end with Pure and MoB both claiming fairly comfortable wins over Dynamic and PtL respectively and two closer matches between MoBdeep and Backslash. Starting with MoBdeep and Blackslash, I think we’re goingto see a close match on both ends with the advantage going to the more prepared team. MoBdeep just came off a pretty solid win over Hostile Faction where Backslash narrowly managed to pull the win over PtL. While Backslash could definitely pull out the win here, I think Gomez and the rest of MoBdeep will take it. Moving on, the match between x3o and Hostile Faction would look to be a simple one to predict, x3o should take the win. For some reason, however, Hostile Faction likes to play all over the place. They go from beating MoB and narrowly losing to Pandemic to then losing to Backslash and MoBdeep. I don’t care if you’re “underestimating” your opponent or not, it’s bad and it makes predicting matches harder. I’ll go with my gut and say x3o still manages to pull out the win against a Hostile Faction team that will actually look on their game.
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Posted: 14th February 2009 by Ted Ottey in Website News
Tags: Site News
Despite all the exciting matches and upsets this week, things have been pretty slow around here. When I first launched this blog I had a lot of feedback with a number of people volunteering their time and skills. Unfortunately, I think some people thought this was going to be some full blown news site and were perhaps disappointed with the kind of content being produced. I tried to accommodate this by changing my original plan to include bi-weekly posts for CEVO and GotFrag. While only a week has gone by, I’m afraid to say I will be changing the content format again.
Over the past few days traffic has been decreasing steadily, hitting an all time low Thursday when it should have spiked back up for both the CEVO and GotFrag news posted. Between the two combined posts yesterday (CEVO & GotFrag) there was a total of 14 unique hits for the CEVO post and 6 unique hits for the GotFrag post, totaling 20 unique visits for Thursday. I don’t really have a problem with traffic numbers, but what I do have a problem with is wasted time. These numbers are way too low to warrant bi-weekly news posts and it is not fair to those who volunteered their time writing predictions. Therefore, I will be switching things up for now to have one post per week for both Thursday and Monday CEVO round matches as well as one weekly post for GotFrag. The GotFrag weekly posts will go up every Tuesday while the CEVO weekly posts will go up every Thursday. Due to the fact I already relesed a post Thursday for CEVO, I will have a post out Monday for those matches so they are not skipped over.
If traffic increases I will be more then happy to go back to bi-weekly news posts and possibly more. I would prefer not to have to spam links all around the community to get hits, but I’m not sure how else to do it. So, I ask all of you who already come on a regular basis or semi-regular basis to get your teammates/friends visiting. In the meantime I’ve made a few small technical updates including an updated version of wordpress, sharing options at the bottom of each post, ads inside the left column to pay for server expenses, and a few other SEO upates to try to help with site traffic. As always, I am more then happy to hear your thoughts/opinions/flames so feel free to contact me with anything.
-Ted
Posted: 12th February 2009 by Ted Ottey in eSports & Gaming
Tags: CEVO
Things are starting to quiet down as the drama that presented itself earlier this week finally fades away for a few days. Fortunately, however, things are heating up in CEVO after a number of intense matches with a plethora of unexpected results. Thankfully, with CEVO and GotFrag running parallel this evening, there seems to be no shortage of exciting matches.
Round 3:1 Recap
Pandemic > Hostile Faction – I predicted this to be a close match and indeed it doesn’t get any closer than 16-14, except maybe in overtime. The only tragedy was the match unfortunately was not casted. While Hostile Faction may be upset they lost in such a close match, you have to give the props to Pandemic for pulling out the narrow victory.
MoB Gaming > Pure – MoB did an amazing job downing Pure last round as their defense was simply outstanding winning 13 rounds for a win. Pure, on the other hand, are now in all sorts of trouble as not only did they lose to MoB Gaming, but also to MoBdeep for their week 3-1 match that was played Monday evening as well. Pure, along with MoBdeep, MoB Gaming, Hostile Faction and Dynamic all sport the less then desirable 3-3 record. Not to make the situation worse, Pure now sits 5th in the standings behind both MoB teams.
X3o > MoBdeep – Before pulling off the upset win over Pure, MoBdeep almost pulled off an upset over x3o. If my memory serves me right from what I was told, x3o was down something like 8-15 and managed to tie the game and eventually win in overtime. Despite the loss, MoBdeep played extremely well and x3o once again proved why they are still the team to beat at the moment.
Dynamic > Pushing the Limits – My prediction the frenchies would come through with their first win was destroyed Monday as Dynamic edged out the narrow 16-13 win over a demoralized PtL team. Hopefully PtL can find some magic and pull out a win in the next few weeks as another team dying in CEVO-P would be very problematic for the standings.
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Posted: 12th February 2009 by Ted Ottey in eSports & Gaming
Tags: GotFrag Tournament
The GotFrag CoD4 tournament is thankfully going as expect as I don’t think anyone could argue with the current top four teams in the upper bracket being where they are tonight. While the general opinion in the community about the tournament seems to be relatively positive, the best of three map set for each match can get tiring at times, especially for the broadcasters. Tonight, however, I don’t think it will matter much as both upper bracket matches are between teams I wouldn’t mind seeing play all 3 maps of a best of three set.
Upper Bracket Round 4 Preview
MOTW: x3o vs Pure E-Sports
Ted’s Prediction: x3o > Pure E-Sports
Se1Ko’s Prediction: x3o > Pure E-Sports
siMpLE’s Prediction: x3o <?> Pure E-Sports
Ted: Hey this looks extremely familiar! Although I have already predicted x3o to defeat Pure in CEVO, a best of three map set almost makes this a completely different ball game, maybe even a game not played with a ball. On both sides of the spectrum you have two teams that have not only beaten every team thus far, but done so without losing a single map. Keeping with this trend, I expect to see x3o and Pure win their respective maps in two very close matches, advancing to the final map. Although Pure will get the option of picking the final map from the two remaining maps left in the map pool, I will stick with my gut and once again give x3o the edge to win the set. The more x3o plays the better they seem, first beating Pandemic and then pulling off an amazing comeback against MoBdeep. This match will be all about those important 3v3, 2v2 and clutch situations we always talk about. Fortunately for x3o, Rob is a master clutcher, “1v2 no problem, 1v3 cake walk, 1v12 easy peasy.” (Quote via a comment on a GotFrag news post, not to be taken srsly.)
siMpLE: Another battle of the juggernauts here. x3o still undefeated in CEVO, and despite PURE’s poor preformance on crash, they are still a big contender in the leagues. I’m not sure what the map choices are but I see this matching ending 2-1 as well with an OT match where it can really go either way depending on how hard they have strated for the tiebreaker.
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Posted: 9th February 2009 by Ted Ottey in eSports & Gaming
Tags: CEVO
Disregarding the insanity the last few days have brought for one minute, CEVO-Professional continues tonight with the final group of matches on Crash after an exciting first round last Thursday. Additionally, we also saw a close match between x3o and MoBdeep where MoBdeep narrowly lost in overtime to the still undefeated x3o yesterday for their week 3:2 match.
Round 3:1 Recap
Pandemic > Dynamic – Despite the 12-16 loss to x3o on Monday, Pandemic bounced right back with a solid win over Dynamic. For Panemic, this victory simply solidifies their position behind x3o in the standings as pending the outcome of Pure vs MoBdeep, they are currently the only team with a 4-1 record. Unfortunately for Dynamic, sage and company are now sporting the all too common 2-3 record with both MoBdeep and MoB Gaming. Hopefully they can rebound this week and start to even things up as both MoB teams continue to have a rollercoaster of different results.
Hostile Faction > Frag Dominant – I guess FD finally decided enough was enough and to just die, which really sucks to be honest. Besides sporting a very talented and diverse roster FD was the only other team besides Pandemic remaining from season 2.
X3o > Pushing the Limits – My frienchies were again denied their first win of the season Thursday as the seemingly unstoppable x3o ran right over them. In all fairness though, x3o did just beat Pandemic on Monday so a loss here was kind of expected. What is really depressing, however, is that a team that qualified into the professional division by going undefeated in the placement tournament hasn’t even gotten a single win yet.
BackSlash > MoB Gaming – BackSlash pulled off the upset Thursday evening over a MoB Gaming team continuing to look more confusing by the minute. Despite having two players lagging throughout the match due to reliability of wireless internet, BackSlash seemed generally in control as they dominated the second half of the match to propel themselves to victory. In MoB’s case, the past is behind them, and their focus should be on tonight’s match.
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