Addendum: In this original press release, I stated "Several members of -e.i- were sufficiently outraged that they vowed to slander both my name and that of the Myth World Cup in the public arena.". This was an overreaction to several veiled statements made by Col. Kurtz and Miltiades of -e.i-. They have since clarified their statements to indicate that they never had any intention of taking the affair public, and certainly would not engage in any activity that could be called slander. I wish to retract this statement, and extend my sincere apologies to -e.i- for besmirching them in this way.

- Butcher

Hello, everyone.

As many of you know, I run the Myth World Cup, which is an order tournament for Myth: The Fallen Lords. Yesterday afternoon (New Zealand Standard Time, my time), Altus Praeses and Evil Incorporated faced off in a match as part of the second Elimination Round. The winner of this match would advance to the quarter-final, and the loser would be eliminated from the tournament.

The five games of the match were played, resulting in a 27-27 point tie. A tiebreaker game was subsequently played, which Altus Praeses won, giving them the match. Evil Incorporated were eliminated.

After the match, I replied to a few email messages and went home. When I arrived at work this morning, I found a large number of very nasty messages waiting for me. Many members of Evil Incorporated (henceforth referred to as -e.i-) were unhappy with the outcome of the match, and accused me of partisan judgement during the match. I am a member of Altus Praeses (henceforth referred to as .ap.) and was playing for them during the match, and this has led -e.i- to the conclusion that judgements were made unfairly against them.

Several members of -e.i- were sufficiently outraged that they vowed to slander both my name and that of the Myth World Cup in the public arena. I am understandably dismayed at this, and that leads to this email message. This message is being sent to the members of .ap. and -e.i-, the MWC Council, the entrants in the Myth World Cup, many Myth news sites, Bungie's Tournament Circuit manager, and other interested parties. I want to present an impartial view of the facts, in order to head off any PR disasters.

In order to avoid a massive spamfest like the recent battle between Ancrik and Blade of Thorns, this message is being blind-carbon-copied to all recipients. Anyone with comments on the issue is welcome to reply to me personally at cbutcher@atlas.otago.ac.nz.

If you're not interested in the details of what happened, stop reading here; I don't want to waste any more of your time with this matter. God knows it's taken me all morning and most of this afternoon to sort this out.

Newsies are quite welcome to post this email as long as the entire text is unmodified. I suggest you don't put it on your front page, though :)

--

Going into this match, I was genuinely concerned that a debacle like this might result. I was apprehensive at first about playing for .ap. in a tournament that I was myself running, but my previous experiences (vs #CP#A in Round 1) had reassured me that there wouldn't be any serious problems. Still, I was only comfortable playing with the proviso that everything would have to be by the book; the rules weren't to be altered or bent unless there was no other alternative. Any other course of action would leave .ap. and the MWC open to accusations of partisanship.

The match was scheduled between .ap. and -e.i- for 9pm EST, Saturday the 19th of September. About half an hour before this time, the teams met up on bungie.net in Covenant, where -e.i- had been practicing. Mundrid and myself were the only members of .ap. present, and this was very worrying to us. I contacted the rest of .ap. by email, and Panamon replied. He stated that he was unable to connect to bungie.net; the rest of his Internet services were all fine, including Web access to www.bungie.net. I asked him to try several things to fix this problem, but none of these were successful.

At this point, .ap. had two members on bungie.net, and one who could not connect to bungie.net (but who could play by TCP/IP). -e.i- had (7?) members on bungie.net already. I spoke with -e.i-, and asked them if any of their members had a static IP address. Phos said that he did, and he also had a fast Internet connection through GA Tech. After some discussion, Phos agreed to try and host a TCP/IP game on his machine to see if Panamon could get to it. He did so, and Panamon was able to connect to his TCP/IP game. I waited on bungie.net until the designated time (which hadn't arrived yet), seeing if any more .ap. would turn up. At this point, I was agonizing over whether or not to try and play on TCP/IP; the rules state that games should be played in unranked bungie.net, but I have ruled in the past that ranked bungie.net will suffice, as will TCP/IP.

Suddenly, Wintermute and Danteshade of .ap. turned up on bungie.net. They reported extreme difficulty in connecting to bungie.net, requiring multiple connection attempts. At this stage, I decided in my capacity as tournament organiser that bungie.net's servers were not going to be reliable for the duration of the match. Since we had a TCP/IP host available and willing, I informed the remaining -e.i- members on bungie.net that we were switching to Phos's game. Looking back, this decision was the correct one; the bungie.net servers are still inaccessible nearly 24 hours after this time.

Inferno and Seizure of -e.i- expressed their displeasure with this decision; -e.i- had (7? 8?) members online at that point, and they felt that if the game moved to TCP/IP, it would be difficult for them to rotate their members each game. Such a rotation would be necessary if they wanted to let all 8 members play, as the MWC rules specify a maximum of 6 players on either team in any given game.

I told them that bungie.net's apparent unreliability was a larger consideration than the ability to rotate more than 6 players through the team. At this time there were only three -e.i- left on bungie.net (Seizure, Inferno and Jedi Val), and I believed then (as I believe now) that if we had tried to move the game back from TCP/IP to bungie.net, we would have lost a large proportion (if not all) of the players. And since half of -e.i-'s team was in Phos's game at the time, this wouldn't be in their best interest either. I jumped back to Phos's game, after repeating the IP address to the last few -e.i- on bungie.net.

So, (15?) minutes after the scheduled time, most of the players were in Phos's game. All five .ap. players were there, as were four of the -e.i- players. Over the course of the next fifteen to twenty minutes, -e.i- players entered and left Phos's game continually. Phos, CityHunter, Seizure, Inferno, Jedi Val and Col. Kurtz were all there, making a full team of six possible. However, Seizure, Inferno, Col. Kurtz and CityHunter continually appeared and disappeared, trying to connect to bungie.net, which meant that the full team was never there.

Phos told me in private messages that his team were insisting that the match be returned to bungie.net (he personally was quite happy with TCP/IP, but that's not important). Before making a decision on this, I first checked whether it was possible to connect to bungie.net. I tried six times to connect, and each time received no response from the metaserver. I returned to the game and told -e.i- that I couldn't connect to bungie.net, so we had to play via TCP/IP. CityHunter of -e.i- confirmed that he was also unable to connect to bungie.net. So, -e.i- agreed to play via TCP/IP and the games begun.

-e.i- won the first game 7-2.

The Saint of -e.i- arrived and after some arguments, was eventually accepted into the -e.i- team, Inferno leaving the game.

-e.i- won the second game 7-2.

I don't recall exactly, but I think that -e.i- adjusted their team between the second and third games as well. Obviously TCP/IP wasn't a total barrier to -e.i-'s team rotation. The only person in their eight-member roster who didn't get to play was Darkstalker. I don't recall seeing Darkstalker, either on bungie.net or in the TCP/IP game; it is possible that he was on bungie.net and didn't get to play, however.

-e.i- won the third game 11-1.

During the fourth game, Phos's Myth application crashed. Since he was the host, this resulted in a host disconnection. From the film, it is possible to determine that the disconnection occurred somewhere around 6:50 remaining. At this point, .ap. was leading five balls to four, and had 33% remaining to -e.i-'s 34%. -e.i- had three wounded berserkers and three myrmidons left, but had lost the majority of their spiders. In any event, the game wasn't clearly won by either team. Certainly not the "-e.i- is winning solidly" that -e.i- has alleged in their email.

As I stated before, I had resolved to play this match by the letter of the rules. The rules (which may be viewed at http://www.mythcodex.com/presents/worldcup/rules.html) quite clearly state:

Disconnection Rules
===================

  + [two situations that don't apply to this]
  + If the host of a game is disconnected during a game, the host's team
     forfeits the game and scores zero points. The opposing team is awarded
     maximum points for that game.
  + In each of the three above situations, if the opponents are feeling
     magnanimous, they may elect to replay the game once the disconnected
     player returns (or before then if necessary). However opponents should
     not feel pressured to do so, it is entirely up to them. 

After Phos restarted his Myth application, we all rejoined his TCP/IP game. It was now up to .ap. to decide whether or not to allow a replay. I decided not to have any input on this decision, and leave it up to the remainder of the team. The decision was not to replay the game. Time pressure, distaste at -e.i-'s behaviour up to that point, and the fact that -e.i- had benefitted from Phos's hosting a lot in the first two games were the main factors in this decision.

As Wintermute said in a later email conversation, "Live by the sword, die by the sword". In hosting the first three games, Phos had the benefit of a perfectly stable and lag-free connection. It's not possible to judge how much this benefitted -e.i-'s play, but in the first two games Phos was the captain of a six-member team and had nearly half of the units (41% and 48% respectively) under his sole command. These games (Territories on If I Had A Trow...) are particularly harsh on players with even small amounts of lag. By hosting the games, -e.i- had a small benefit and took a very small risk of a large punishment.

In any event, the reasons for .ap.'s decision aren't important; only the fact that they decided to decline the replay. As the rules state, we continued with the match, into the fifth (and final) game.

The fifth game (Capture the Flag on Like Heads In A Blender) played out; in this game, the scoring is dependent on how close an 'assault force' gets to the enemy flag. In this game, .ap.'s assault force fell upon the -e.i- warriors and killed them on the -e.i- bank of the river. Thus the -e.i- assault force never made it to the opposite side of the river. Under the scoring system (as specified in the rules), this results in 0 points.

If this was the case, then the final score for the match would be 27-25 to .ap. The -e.i- team were very unhappy with this, and tempers flared on both sides. In order to forestall the growing swearing match, I told Phos to shut the game down and that I would meet him on bungie.net. As it turned out, bungie.net was still down and so we talked via ICQ.

Phos said that -e.i- disputed the scoring for the final game. He stated that the remnants of their army (three thrall and a journeyman) made it to the enemy bank, and that this constituted an assault force. The rules state:

+ An assault force is defined as a force that stands a chance of defeating an
   enemy defense force. Ghols do not count as an assault force. Thus one
   warrior is not an assault force, neither is eighteen ghols and a warrior,
   but fifteen warriors, ten archers and thirty thrall would be. The
   tournament organisers will make decisions as to what constitutes an
   assault force if it becomes necessary.

At the time, .ap.'s defense force was twelve thrall and a journeyman. I pointed out to Phos that three thrall and a journeyman did not stand a reasonable chance of beating the defense force, but he disagreed, stating "They would if I was controlling them." It was obvious that we were at an impasse, so I decided for the sake of friendly relations to give -e.i- the points for crossing the river.

My primary reason for granting these two extra points was that this brought the score for the match to 27-27. In situations like this, the rules state:

+ In each match, the team with the most points advances. The other team is
   eliminated. In the event of a tie, the tournament organisers will assign
   a tiebreaker match.

So, I assigned a tiebreaker game (the word match was a typo). This game was Territories on Creep on the Borderlands, 12 minute time limit. My choice of this game has also come under fire; witness the comment by Miltiades of -e.i-, "Butcher, it is rumored, decides a tiebreaker is in order and picks Creep/Territories. Didn't .ap play that in the MOR tourney finals, not too long ago? Must've been just plain old bad luck that he chose that one."

Miltiades is quite right that .ap. did recently play Destruction Eternal on this game and map for the final of the Dwarven Cannibals' tournament. However, this is not the reason for my choice of tiebreaker map. Far from it.

During the Qualifying Round of the MWC, Blade of Thorns and Ancrik managed to tie a match 13-13. This wasn't a problem in the Qualifying Round, but I hadn't considered what should be done if this happened in an elimination situation.

This match was played on the twenty-sixth of August. A few days after that, I discussed the possibility of a tiebreaker match with my real-life friend Oli Studholme (aka Boblet), and we decided that Creep Territories would be a good choice. We also decided that in order to make it a test of teams' unpracticed skill, the exact game wouldn't be announced on the rules page.

Looking through my email archive, it wasn't until the ninth of September that .ap. started practicing for their game versus Destruction Eternal. I can confidently state that I never considered the possibility that there would be a conflict of interest here. I didn't even realise that the tiebreaker game was the same until about fifteen minutes before the tiebreaker was played, when I told my order (on Hotline) what the game would be.

The tiebreaker game was played. In a long sudden death, .ap. was able to contest for a few vital seconds with a warrior, in time for reinforcements to arrive and take the flag. The final flag count was 4-2, giving the tiebreaker game to Altus Praeses.

The match has been played and it is over. To quote Ananab Tilps' review of the match,

"It will take the ap team a full week of showering to remove the stains they got when they reached way up their collective asses to pull this match off. After e.i. built a 25-5 lead, both e.i. and ap felt that the match was over. But the technology that giveth also taketh away, and a host drop in a tight game turned the tide of the scoring. Two great teams played six great games!"

--
Butcher
Tournament Manager
Myth World Cup 1998
http://www.mythcodex.com/presents/worldcup/