[DoW2] WAAR vs NonSense Match Report

Almost everything conspired against us not to play this match last night.

The match was scheduled for 8pm UK time, but a message from NonSense asking us if we could play at 11pm threw us a bit. Especially when they said, "or not, 21 is fine". We eventually reasoned that, they being Polish, meant 9pm in Europe, which is 8pm here, the original time.

It was really hard to get clarification from them, though. We joined their listed IRC channel, where they were nowhere to be found -- indeed, the people in that channel had no idea who they were. They also couldn't be found in our channel.

A message on the ESL match page appeared just after the time the match was supposed to start saying that the match was "Now I guess. We're waiting in the lobby." This was even more confusing: they game doesn't have a lobby!

Eventually, we managed to contact them through the incredibly poor messaging system which is Games For Windows Live (part of the Dawn of War II experience). More fun ensued: they had hosted a public game, which meant it kept getting filled up with other people from the internet while we were trying to join it.

A hundred or so NAT negotiation errors later, we all managed to be in the game, and begin with Argus Desert Gate. Which was listed to be the second match played, but whatever. Anyway, we stomped over them on this map. However, they dropped when they saw they were losing. Presumably in defeat, but the rules required us to file a protest, so we have. Anyway, we were in good spirits going into the second match, which was to be played on Capital Spire.

Now, let me take an aside here. While I mildly dislike Argus Desert Gate (I much prefer open plan maps to the blatant "lanes with walls" maps like these two), I detest Capital Spire.

So anyway, we lost the second game. Also, you have to love some of the network coding for DoW2. About 50 seconds from the end of the game, everyone saw that I had "crashed". Well, personally, I saw that everyone else had crashed. Why couldn't the game just pause and wait for me to reconnect? Anyway, we knew we'd lost anyway, so had no problems with handing over the victory.

So we had to play a decider game. After looking all over the ESL website (ESL: you need to organise your website a bit, it's ridiculously difficult to find stuff. For instance, searching for "decider" yields nothing, even though I know it appears twice in the rules themselves!) ... anyway, after looking all over the ESL website, I discovered that the decider map changes weekly. This week it's ... Capital Spire. *Grumble*.

About halfway through the third game, one of their players crashed. The scores were undecided at that point, so we restarted it, as was our perogative. Unfortunately, we lost the fourth game.

What do we take away from this? We need more practice, certainly. There are certain maps we always do well on, and certain maps we don't. Also, there are groupings of players that don't work so well together: I noticed a lot of unupgraded power stations last night, and I play a power-heavy game. That said, I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes too.

UPDATE: As I stated, we filed a protest (as the rules state we must) due to them dropping the first match. An admin has stated the following:

Hi We are Angry Robots,
hi NonSense,

Play one round more, as decider, map from decidermap list. Winner wins the match with score 2:1. I'm sure that you can find a suitable date for both teams on your own :)

Best regards,
Sendil, ESL Admin

So we haven't lost yet!

Update Again: After crashing during a match we looked like winning, we restarted and lost.  Oh well.