Having probably tested more in three vs three matches than any other participating team in the week before the cup I felt quite confident and was looking forward to a good performance of the first "pure" Swiss team. Maybe I was ignoring a bit too much that we had to endure some quite bad testmatches but I always had a good excuse handy when I searched for the reasons... At the beginning Someoneelse and me played still in a different room than Masi...few days later i tried to play in Masi's lab, but after some hours i found myself almost rolling on the floor laughing because i couldn't believe how badly i was playing with the Linux-/mousesettings there - my only aim in these matches that day was to deliver the tail-light to *Modem*wan which i not always managed to do... So it was clear that Masi had to come into the room where I normally was playing but he was sceptical since he had made a poor experience with Sun-mouses a while ago...Hardly he started a client there when he already began to grumble about the non-linear behavior of these mouses with fast moves...I had never realized it, i just got used to it and that's probably why i performed so badly with his "Windows"-mouse in his lab. He tried to change his turnresistance/turnspeed and when we continued testing, i thought everything will turn to good as he seemed to perform ok, only to find some minutes later a player in my team with the nick 'MasiOnSun' which shouldn't disappear... So we decided to meet us early enough on Saturday to let Masi enough time getting into shape with the lame Sun-mouses and when everything would fail, leave us an emergency plan which consisted of Masi moving to his familiar lab and the loss of communication should be made up for with a permanent phone-line! Things weren't looking really good at Saturday because less than one hour before announced cupstart there were still rumors that 'MasiOnSun' has been seen playing on different servers...and then suddenly Masi wanted to head off to his room, but Someone was able to calm him down and delay his moving till after the first rounds: if we would keep on losing he can change location later this day when we will get paired against weaker teams where communication isn't that important...(Who could know that we won't get paired with weak teams) Afterwards we played a warm-up against an unholy liaison of priests & zombies and were exactly hot in the right time as we finished right before the announced starting time. Slowly cooling down we eventually got our opponents and i was happy we got an relative easy opponent in the first round since we hadn't fixed our tactics/positions, but when i was checking irc for members of the Lagland Circumnavigators i couldn't find any member of them... Finally they showed up short before the first matches were finished but then they told us they hadn't any binaries yet and their 3rd member was still missing. So we got a walk over in the 1st round. Score: 1-0 Status: cold When next pairings got announced i was a bit surprised that priests already had to play LW. Besides we had to play against The Icecube Team and we're still not sure about our playing style, oh well... We played first the away-match...and the little tactic we had was immediately destroyed...unable to dogfight properly in horrible Norwegian jam, we suffered - only moments after Iceman's 'GO GO'-yellings - our first ball loss. After some more ballruns of the wrong team and even more suicide attacks from our side for desperate safes, we lost with about 1300 points difference - I didn't know before one team can lose that many points in only 12 rounds.... Being sure things can only get better, we switched to our server and though we didn't lost any ball we were soon behind...Our seldom ballruns either got saved through U's top-speed-through-bulletstreams-hitting-exactly-ball-flying or simply weren't put in by our incompetence for conquer the last 3cm below 20sec before everybody of them died. At least this enabled us to win our home match with a two-digit score difference... Score 1-1 Status: mortified When the new pairings were put up, i recognized their pairing-system mistake which wasn't really serious at that time because of the planned five qualification rounds and i simply mentioned that they should keep the five rounds, if they will continue with their modified pairingsystem... So we got paired against the White Zombie Bears and the weaker 1 point teams vs the other weaker 1 point teams... Feeling quite sure that we will win this one i went to their swedish server and at half time things went still like expected as the score was drawn. But after a lost ball in the 7th round because of misunderstanding, not everybody was used to the swiss-dialect i was using often in the heat of the battle, we lost our rhythm and instead of calming down and believe in our strength at home, we went out for a full attack in the last round which failed miserably since suddenly i found myself alone alive in their base with our ball in deep shit and one life left. I died somehow and waited to appear on the base to fly straight to the near treasure - but what's this!?! I appear on the base with the biggest distance to the treasure! I _never_ had to suicide from this position before, because i always had a base nearby the treasure in the last couple of weeks!!! So i hesitate a split second before deciding to fly into my own bullets and a single frame before hitting the shot, we lost a ball in the last round once again, which hurt this time much more. 600 points difference to make good now, sigh. Believing in our strengths we knew a victory was still possible and switched to our home leg...things started good as we dodged them out in round one rather easily and in round two i managed to destroy our *1st* ball in the cup (the cup was about 5 hours old...). Round three featured Decimator punishing our awaked hope and sloppiness with a ballrun, but i was able to put in a passed ball in response a round later once again. Round five was kind of funny: Facing Adamel and Gremlin alone in the late game attacking our ball, Gremlin soon decided to introduce himself to our treasure and Adamel felt a bit sad having more life than me and corrected that immediately...so we started to dodge and try to trick each other with both at zero life...but about three minutes later Gremlin must have been bored with his treasure-date and felt asleep as his client send some sleeping-status signs, but Adamel and me continued unconcerned...finally Gremlin must have suddenly begun to snore loudly since Adamel eventually persisted in ignoring a bullet of mine. Maybe he had even fallen into sleep as well because the Zombies seemed to be in sleeping-mode now: the following round i destroyed another ball and Someoneelse did the same only one round later. But the noise of all these ball-destructions must have throw the bears out of their hibernation, two rounds and one unlucky lost ball later, the game was 86-86!!! Uhh this treasure-scores suck. Facing only three more rounds and again 600 points to make up for, we lost our peace of mind and were unable to put in an easy must ball once again...in the end we even lost our home match! Score 1-2 Status: disgraced Back on irc i abruptly noticed that the last of the remaining two rounds was cancelled. Now it was clear that we had to win our last match to make top8 and i feared, kth-people will continue to make wrong pairings and started to talk to madmaxie but after a few lines he just told me to speak with Adamel...ok, no problem...i started again to explain the whole thing to Adamel, but after confirming he was listening he never replied again! Doh! Meanwhile pairings were up and my fear became truth...they kept pairing better teams vs. better teams and worser teams vs. worser teams within same score (So e.g. 1 score pairings were Local Wusses vs. Dodge This and Lagland Circumnavigators vs. DaimiTeens although the latter was even already played in the 2nd round of this cup!) Having the faith that we could do better than we did against Zombies and Icecubes, the Rusty Old Mens have to be the victims and so we were going into this Norwegian laghole again to try to show them the way to the exit-door of the cup. In round one Masi hadn't realized yet that we're playing away. He took down Kogi in less than a minute so he had enough time starting a chat with the spy which followed him soon. But Obi would rather seeing us chatting, so he went for a 8/0 ratio in round two to equal scores again. In round three we feared the wrath of the Obi-Wan way too much so we completely forgot Masterspy who successfully destroyed our ball. But we managed to come back in round four and five and score were about equal again. The Obi-Wan wasn't agreeing again and was heard yelling "KNUT SKJERP DEG". This was a pretty intelligent move, while our norway-dictionary-task was totally paralyzing our machines because it was unable interpreting this tactical instruction to Kogi with a 0 byte norwegian/german-dictionary-file, Obi had no problem to put the ball in. Still not knowing what was going on, we were unable to react to the drastic performance change of the Japanese Immortal and lost with almost 600 points difference again! One more time we moved to our home server with a huge pressure to succeed...but Someone showed us in round one how to take down these wusses and after a closer second round i could quickly sneak unnoticed with their ball away and even before their spy was able to kill somebody or die, the third was over with us already almost 400 points in the lead. After a worser 4th round Masi lead us back to the path of victory by quickly hijacking their ball before they were ready to defend it and after losing only one more round till the 11th while let slipping a couple of their balls, the deciding last one started. But typical for the whole cup everything went wrong in the 12th round as our ball walked away for a visit to the opponents treasure. Score 1-3 Status: out Unfortunately all the following swedish-like whinings about the sucky pairings to Preacher were of no use, as he strangely seemed to know that kind of whinings best and therefore was immune to my pushings...I had to accept that a lost ball in the last round in all three matches definitely cost us our head, but after playing a friendly-away-match against the _4th_ ranked G.A.S which we won with about 1000 points difference, we knew at least that it was all about unlucky pairing and we deserved a spot in the top8... So that was the last TeamCup in this millenium and though we failed to win a single played match i had much fun like in the previous cup and therefore i still would like to thank you guys for organizing! Props: - Priests for dominating and winning the cup finally - KTH people for organizing this cup - Adamel for coding the great live-updates of the running matches on the webpage Slops: - Dodge This for scrubbing out of Top8 - Preacher & Adamel for not replying with a single word till the preliminary-round was over. Hey you announced using "Spellcaster-System from VAKK-Cup" (in fact a co-production of Flower and me) - Me for shooting myself 17 times in only _three_ matches. - Masi for even one more "Masi -5" stealing therefore the suiciders-trophy and pushing me back to rank two. /Spellcaster Team Dodge This (9th)