Veteran's Challenge - Feedback & Talking Points

BrotherVerenor, on Nov 19 2012 - 15:26, said: These city/field maps. I greatly dislike them. Burn them. With fire.
On a more serious note, I loved this tournament. Can't really tell you exactly what it was about the tournament that I loved so much, just loved the whole thing with the exception of the maps. My team and I participated in the tier 6 challenge and made it to the top 16 so I'm pretty satisfied with our performance.  If we're gonna share war stories however, I'll toss mine in there as well. My team's round robin matches were fairly dull with the exception of a few close calls, but round 1 is where it got really interesting. We went up against G_SKUL (I think that's how they had their name) and managed to win our first round but lost two rounds consecutively which, admittedly, was mostly my fault for getting too ballsy. After the second loss we switched the tanks we used around and were able to pull off two more consecutive wins, allowing us to advance to round 2 (I guess getting one shots makes a difference :P). Round 2 was fairly strange and went smoothly. Round 3 we ended up facing Newland which completely threw us for a loop with a 5man tier5 scout team (Chaffee//Chaffee//Chaffee/t-50-2//VK2801) to which I had chimed in that the only way I could see us not getting smacked around would be to castle in a corner or alley watching both entrances by the cap and hope we could pick them off as we spotted them which, in the first game, went semi-smooth and ended with a satisfying victory. The second game we did the same thing, albeit on the opposite side to varying degrees of success and barely managed to scrape out a win (a few lucky shots won it for us). Then the following match, they decided to turn it around. They were done with that plan and adopted a generic tier 6 plan, kv-1s's and a t2 LT. There isn't much else to say other than we got beaten. Quite badly too. If you were to ask me how we lost three consecutive matches in a row and thus being knocked out of the brackets, I'd probably reply with 'I got so many low-damage roles it was such bullshit', but in all honesty it was just that we were outplayed. They managed to catch us out on the move where we were unable to get accurate shots off or just focus fire better than my team, but they beat us in the end. That's the end of my stories, enjoy.
If any of you Newland boys read this, good job. Congrats on making it to the top 4, despite how mad losing 3 consecutive games make me, those were some fun matches.
I'm going to have to completely disagree with you here. True, RNG plays a bigger role as the player count goes down, but losing one tank early on does NOT mean you've lost the game. There were multiple times in both the 1st round where we lost our tank first or even two tanks in one scenario, and we still managed to win the game. It all boils down to three things. 1) Your caller. 2) Knowledge (Map/Game/Etc). 3) Execution. At least, that's my opinion.
My input on the tournament itself however as far as what I'd like to see improved upon are two simple things. The maps and the times. As stated at the beginning of my post, I hate those maps. Not really sure what else I'd prefer, but I hated all three of them despite only playing two (Siegfried is a horrible map if you ask me). The times were a big issue for my team, with some having college, others work, and others just living on the east coast, the times were really messy. Also, am I the only one who thought the fact that it took 2 hours for each round to be finished on day 2? At least it didn't take as long as it used to in order for the tournament itself to finish.