Power Gaming

Just thought i'd give an update on our team's progress so far leading up to ECL2 which takes place this weekend! As we've been a team for around a month now, we haven't entered many tournaments. The three worth mentioning would be the ConsoleGaming SteelSeries Tournament, the Vanity Pay2Play tournament and finally the Consoles.net Pay2Play tournament.

We won the ConsoleGaming SteelSeries Knockout tournament 4-1 on maps against Royalty Gaming in which we started with a 1 map deficit having came from the Losers Bracket.

The Vanity Pay2Play tournament we lost 3-1 to Royalty Gaming in the Winner Bracket, which sent us down to Loser Bracket Round 3 where we played the malaman shank and won 3-0 to move into the 4th round.

The consoles.net tournament we're still in the semi-finals where we need to play teamORANGE squad who were formerly known as TCM until they were released from the organisation 2-3 weeks ago.

Although our team formed in March, we were able to get 2nd place in the decerto.net rankings with Royalty taking first and mythix behind us, taking 3rd place.

taken from decerto.net

Anyway, enough of the online stuff. As most of you already know, ECL launched the first edition of the Pro Series last weekend at the Gadget Show Live event at the NEC, Birmingham. The 2 titles that were played, was Halo Reach (Saturday) and Call of Duty: Black ops (Sunday).

On the Saturday, the 4 teams that battled it out on halo was Power Gaming, Fnatic, TCM and Thermaltake. After the group stages had passed, there was no surprise in seeing a Power vs Fnatic grand final - a taster of what was hopefully to come at ECL2. With myself having a  limited amount of knowledge in terms of the halo scene, you tend to mainly base your opinion on anything you come across such as the ECL2 predictions etc, and from guessing which team was more likely to win, the odds were definitely in favour of Fnatic as people were basing their predictions from the previous SOCIAL LANs held at josh's house. Looking at some tweets, the usual confidence act was being produced from certain Fnatic member/s, and funnily enough after all that was said in those tweets, Fnatic didn't live up to their own hype and failed to deliver in a situation where it mattered in which Power went on to destroy them 4-0 in the final (played lads!) and showed why they're unbeaten in Europe since summer '09. From what I heard, Baxter apparently snapped the chain around his neck and threw it on floor in a monumental moment of frustration. 

Moving onto Black Ops... the 4 teams that attended were Power (us), Fnatic, infused and Royalty Gaming. We finally got underway and played infused at around 11:30 on the Sunday morning after some unexpected delays which set back the black ops schedule by 1-2 hours. First map was CTF Firing Range which i'd say is probably our strongest CTF map, and although we took it 4-1, I still expected infused to put up more of a fight. Next up was Demo Summit. Again, I didn't expect us to win it so comfortably, but we did, and we took the map 2-0 to win our first group game.

Our second game was against royalty, who were given 1st seed aswell as being voted as favourites alongside us. The first map was CTF summit, and having lost to them previously on this map online in the vanity p2p, we knew it\'d be fairly tough in order for us to win it. They started off with the better spawn, and managed to take a 2-0 lead going into half time. Second half we failed to capitalize on the better spawn with both sides capping 3 flags each to make it 5-3 as the final score. Second map (Demo Havan) was close, with both teams winning their attacking rounds but due to us having outslayed them so we picked attack for the tiebreaker, in which we won in order to make it 2-1. The last map we won in a comfortable fashion, taking the S&D 5-1 and winning 2-1 on maps overall.

Picture of the Power squad vs Royalty - taken from www.fnatic.com

Before we played fnatic in the last group game, it worked out that because Fnatic had already won 3 maps without playing their final group game, they were tied with Royalty on maps so the last team to advance to the grand final would be decided on head-to-head results meaning that our group game wouldn't be needed as Fnatic had beat royalty in their 1st group game 2-0.

For me, it couldn't have been a better matchup as there was definitely some rivalries that had to be settled. One of them being with Swanny after he had a brief stint in a team with doped, gunshi and me back on modern warfare 2, winning DutchGameCon (LAN) with us before he was forced to depart the team. Also with me obviously  having won pretty much everything there was to win on MW2 with Doped and Gunshi, to now being on the verge of playing against them... it definitely felt weird. Without going into the match in detail, it was a best of 5 series and the first map was extremely close with us winning the CTF by 1 flag. The demolition (2nd map), was similar to our match vs royalty, with it going into the tiebreaker and with us having outslayed them, we picked attack once again and won to make it 2-1 and 2-0 on maps overall. The third map was S&D Cracked in which the gamemode itself is probably our weakest gametype aswell as Fnatic having a slight reputation for being stronger on non-respawn gametypes (S&D). Fnatic went on to win the map 5-3 and without the 4th map having even started, everyone in our team knew the win was pretty much guaranteed with the 4th map/gamemode being CTF Firing Range. We previously beat  fnatic on the map/gametype (online though) 10-2/11-2. We went on to win the map with a scoreline of 7-2, and won the grand final 3-1 on maps overall. Altough me and the fnatic team are all on good terms, there's no better feeling than when you beat your ex-team/teammates aswell as winning our first event under the Power name!

The delays aside, the event was surprisingly good and can definitely see the Pro Series making an impact on the LAN scene!

As always, was nice seeing the familiar faces aswell as some new 1s (especially the power crew).

Massive thanks to everyone in Power supporting us, giving us the chance to attend aswell as a big thanks to our sponsors, primarily SteelSeries for supplying us with headsets for the event and also BigFoot networks.

If you aren't attending ECL2 this weekend, remember you can watch the stream live @ www.justin.tv/ecltv

/overlydepressingblogthatwaswrittenat4am.