Madness? This is Arena..

Overheal

http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/31037-aAa_wins_Blizzcon_amid_massive_controversy

The World of Warcraft tournament at Blizzcon may well be one of the last major WoW tournaments of all time. But it will go down in the memory as the most infamous events in the game's history after against All authority 's controversial victory.

The French team, led by ex-SK player Alexis 'Enigmz' Martin looked like massive favourites going into the final match. They had gone unbeaten throughout the tournament and had already beaten their final opponents, compLexity Red, 3-0 in an earlier round. But it was the American-based team who made an excellent comeback, winning the first best-of-five despite being down 2-1. Coming from the lower bracket, Complexity had to win a 2nd set, however, and it was there that the controversy began.

With momentum now on their side, Complexity took a 2-1 lead and were in pole position, needing just one map to claim $75,000 USD. They went all out, killing aAa's warlock while their own priest just barely surviving with around 1000 hitpoints. Complexity naturally celebrated a 3-1 win, Blizzard's stream captions showed them as winners and reports say that the players even had the cheque in-hand.

However, Enigmz had the Blizzard referees review the match. It was revealed, after some time, that the aAa player had been killed three seconds after the 20 minute time limit expired. By Blizzard's own rules, that technically meant that the result would go to the team who had dealt the most damage. In other words, aAa were back to 2-2 instead of being eliminated, despite CoL's celebrations.

The players sat back down at their computers to play out an incredibly tense 5th game. aAa played a defensive 'draintrain' style game and eventually won the final game on Ring of Valor - a mere four hours after the match began. Although many fans were unenthusiastic about the slow, defensive style of play which was rife at Blizzcon, this will surely be the most talked-about chapter in WoW's history.

Much outrage about the 3 second skill being discounted. But 4 hour match? wth?

Dustaz

yeah, i watched a couple of matches in this waiting for the sc2 and all of the games i had the misfortune to watch were intensly boring and way too long

Overheal

There's been a couple discussions about this on their forum but they've all been deleted. Basically Col:Red lost an earlier match in the set because the Time limit was 20 minutes but the match was called at 20:40, which is when they tallied up the Damage totals and awarded it to aAa. At 20:00 in the same match, CoL:Red was the damage leader.

So what this seems to be is a double standard, in the last match they awarded the win to aAa because they held top damage at 20:00 even though they lost their Aff. Warlock @ 20:03 and the admins continued to let the match play out until roughly 25:00. This is despite the match commentators and even on-screen captions of Blizzard's declaring CoL:Red the winners.

TheDoc

WoW being an "e-sport" was just blizzard throwing its brand name around.


It is a dreadful game to watch as a viewer and to be frnak, WoW pvp is ****ing dreadful and I don't see the player skill being the winner, to me it is more the class imbalances and comps that win, not the players.

And then viewing, seeing the same comps over and over and **** all invention or innovation, good riddance, it will free up more tournament time for better games.

Dermighty

I tried to watch a match but turned it off after nearly ten minutes of back and forth between the two teams, the commentators were also terrible.

TheDoc

Leroy Jenkins commentated at Blizzcon like twice, he was renowned, for not having a ****ing clue.

He was no better what so ever as a commentator, found he literally knew nothing.