Ural Steel 2012

vect, on Sep 19 2012 - 22:28, said: The main issue I had with that whole situation was that the "rule" they used was not included in the rules they handed us the night before the tournament started (which is in my opinion is far too late to be handing out rules in the first place, but that is another issue altogether). I think that almost everyone from the NA servers had a great time in Moscow in spite of the last-minute travel arrangements, "interesting" food, and the less-than-ideal-but-not-completely-terrible tournament. I for one loved getting to meet and hang out with everyone from W-A-R, -G-, ACES, WGA, the EU and RU servers, and my clanmates from RS as well as seeing the Kubinka. I also did enjoy playing in the tournament. Most of our opponents were very gracious in victory or defeat. I remember the guys from OM - Whitebeard coming up after our matches, complementing us on our use of the JP2 (we were the only ones to use a TD at any point during the tournament afaik) and how close our matches were.
I believe that the NA teams had the ability to compete with the best (as demonstrated by -G- beating RED Rush once and us beating Z-Gra once), but the chances of us actually winning the whole tournament were rather low. The main reason (i.e. our main disadvantage) for this in my opinion is due to the lack of experience at what I would call "e-sports level" tournament play in an e-sports setting. I can't speak for certain about any of the other players, but I know I've never played at a big tournament like this before and I would guess from meeting the other players that almost all of them would be in the same boat. I brought my own mouse (and I would have brought my own headset if it wasn't busted) because they said we could. I don't remember hearing anything about being able to bring a keyboard, but that could be me mis-remembering.
As far as mods went, Farquad told me that the German team (aka not the Russians) installed the zoom-out mod on every computer that they used, so everyone who used those computers afterwards just happened to have it on there already. Most people saw the zoom-out mod used on the main stage computers and some people assumed that the Russians installed it, but I did not see either team install the mods, so I can't say for sure.
Other teams (Chinese I believe) definitely brought their own chairs, I personally did not see any monitors or computers being brought in to the competition at any point (I did see RED bringing out the computers that they won though).
P.S. glad you made it home Farva
P.P.S. Very glad to hear that there might be more stuff like this for the NA server