SauerLeague #5 eCTF Recap – Unlimited Raging

Hello friends, after last week’s awesome insta ctf tournament, it was eCTF’s turn to shine. This time we had everything: high quality thriller games, surprises, rage, happiness and most of all: fun. I have to admit that effic is my favourite mode and this time it was really hilarious. So let’s see what happened.

Seeding all-vs-all
The first round as with the insta ctf tournament was the seed round. The map choice was the community favourite called xenon. YES that was a joke. The purpose is to rank teams based on collective frag count. The finalists of the previous eCTF tournament (w00p and sp4nk) were not part of this process, as they automatically got seed #1 and #2. It is important to get good seeding as you then have the advantage of first map pick. Looking back, the results of this round don’t surprise me at all. I was really happy to see: 1) a mix team with fixxer on it participating; and 2) the big newcomer in Sauer’s competitive scene ‘sync’. Razvan and don joined Yggdrasil’s clan and this was their first tournament appearance. Finally, another more than promising mix team joined the fun. Their team members were the well-known frosty, notas and echo-echo, all hoping to snatch a bit of glory from the top clans.  They had this brilliant idea to use clan tags and names of oldschol clans and their players.

The Elimination Stage
Going into the first couple of rounds we see the first sync game in the tournament against the 200IQ team (Fixxxer / Satoshi / ZCrone). Sync won rather easily with 8-5 on forge but 200IQ turned it around in the next two games and moved on to the next round where they would face w00p. On the other side we had !s] (DarkFire / Milch-Mann / Tamin0) vs noVi (Alli / pix / Cedii*) which didn’t have their strongest line-up. Unfortunately for them, !s] shook them off without breaking much of a sweat and went to the next round. The frosty/notas/echo mix team beat DK (hamon / r4 / Würger) and advanced to the next round, while DK had to continue in the loser bracket and face sync.

Also, the most exciting and overall just a really amusing game was the civil war between sQ members. I had the honour to be part of this. We managed to start the tournament with 2 full teams (Redon / Tay|Z / Brecht & shuzo / Rotti / Zarah) which we balanced in order to have fun. The first game was on fusion, a newly added map. But boy did I have a terrible connection. So many lags. The first game ended with my team winning 6-2. Maybe because shuzo didn’t know the map or maybe my lags helped me in some situations, we will never know the truth. Second game was on forge and honestly it was a totally different story. The game was close from the start, fought point by point but we lost 8-7 and had to resort to a tiebreaker map to decide the winner. My brilliant idea was to play overtimes for hours and block the whole tournament until everyone leaves and we win the trophy. Sadly my idea was considered silly and we moved on. Our tiebreaker was played on redemption and again it was a close game from the start. Luckily this time my team won. A very friendly civil war with a lot of laughing. After this game friend shuzo had to leave so sQ2 had to forfeit amd noVi got a bye in the loser bracket.

At this point the tournament was starting to pick up pace and the quality of the games just kept on spiraling upwards. In the loser bracket, sQ managed to beat DK 6-3 and noVi beat the 200IQ mix team 7-4. In the winner bracket the first big game was between w00p (Honzik1 / lagout / Alluro) and !s]. Both teams didn’t have their ideal combination of players in my opinion but that didn’t hurt the quality of the games at all. I believe especially w00p has good depth in their subs. !s] made a spectacular start on twinforts and won 10-5. Unfortunately for the challengers, they couldn’t quite keep up the pace in the next two games on forge and reissen where they lost 8-5 and 5-4. On the other side of the bracket sp4nk, showing up with what many deem to be their top line-up (starch / Rexus / hades) faced the ‘history’ mix team (frosty / notas / echo). Much to my surprise sp4nk marched right through the mix team of two current and one former sp4nkie and moved on to the semifinals to face w00p for an early first final. At least this is what we thought.

On the loser bracket !s] managed to beat sQ on haste and continued their journey to face the history clan which had kicked out noVi. It was a really good game on reissen. I believe this map favoured !s] because darkfire is a flagrun machine. !s] managed to beat the mix team and we had the first rage of this tournament (watch the last four minutes here for A1 Sauer drama). In winner bracket it was time for the semifinals. All of them were so close! The score was always just 1 point difference. I definitely recommend (re-)watching those games. w00p started really well on reissen by beating sp4nk 6-5. This game was just brilliant. w00p had a 5-4 lead until the very last second of the game when sp4nk scored and tied the games. Epic epic epic! The second game was on redemption and sp4nk was under pressure to tie the games. They successfully surprised w00p and scored a quick 1-0. The whole game was going point by point until sp4nk took that round. The tiebreaker match was on forge. Another tight game, where it was w00p‘s turn to win again by 1 point and proceed to the final.

sp4nk‘s journey didn’t end then and there. They had to face !s] to decide who is going to the big final and get a shot at revenge against w00p. This game has proven to me that !s] is here to stay. It’s the third big clan these days. The map was forge. Both teams were scared. In the first 2 minutes no one dared make a mistake. Then the !s] scoring machine started. At this point !s] had finally put their best player on the field – Gangler – and thus added even more quality to their game. !s] took a  lead of 2-0. sp4nk had a quick response for that and managed to convert it into 3-2. Short story short the score was 7-7 and the game went to overtime. Both teams had the enemy flag and it was all about who’s going to return the flag first. The game had to go to a third overtime to decide the winner. At some point both teams returned their flag, but it was !s] which scored the decisive flag literally in the last seconds. At that point we saw some more rage(quits). Understandable in my opinion, after such a fierce fight.

The Grandfinal
The big final was a best-of-3 set again. If !s] managed to win the first bo3 set they would have play another as they had reached the finals from the loser bracket. All maps were yet again incredibly close. First map was haste. Risky option in my opinion, that’s why  !s] started really well and gained a 2 point lead. w00p had not yet spoken their last words, they managed to tie the game and force it to overtime where!s] took the lead again. Luckily for w00p they were able to score the equalizer and after two more overtimes they took the lead and kept it for good.

The second and last game was on twinforts. !s] set out to a really good start, scoring the first flag. Another close game where for large parts of it they had the lead by 1 point. It was only in the last 3 minutes that w00p managed to up the tempo and took a short lead for the first time on twinforts. In the end they managed to stay one flag ahead in the last 37 seconds until the game ended and thus w00p won yet another title. I would like to thank everyone who played, notas for the stream and congrats to w00p!

Moment of Glory: Tamino on twinforts. He killed the enemy flag carrier, the enemy support player, returned, and then scored a point. Great tournament performance by him!

I hope you guys enjoyed my writeup! How did you like the tournament? Seeing how most games were super-close, do you think the skill gap between clans has become smaller?

Anyway, see you next time friends and don’t forget the ffa tournament this Sunday

Links
notas’ twitch stream: click
SauerLeague website: sauerleague.com
Challonge Bracket: click
SauerLeague discord: click
SauerTracker Reports: click