WSVG Toronto Recap Part 3

Day 3, after waking up at 8am to make sure I wasn't late I only got to the Fan Expo to be greeted by people saying "you can't go in, only exhibitors at this time" and a lineup of like 500 people.

We finally made it inside after talking to like 3 different people and explaining our situation, somebody understood. So as we got in, we asked one of the admins if the games had been postponed a bit since people were having a hard time getting in and they said "yeah, hold on." A minute later, an admin and the WSVG director walked up to us and asked if they could have a minute of our time. They pulled us over and sat us down on one of the bleachers and the conversation went something like:

Admin: Hey guys, there's been a dispute brought up regarding your last match with MoB Turtle beach. I'd like you to know that we think you're a great team, and this is not something we take very lightly. This isn't something we discussed for a few minutes, we were up until 5:30am trying to make a decision. So we said alright, what was it? They asked us if at any point during the day yesterday we used a scorpid pet, we said yes. They asked us if we had gone out and tamed it ourselves, we said yes. They asked us if we had levelled the pet, we said yes. They asked us what made us think it was okay to do that and this is something that's been a little misunderstood.

Godfather made it sound like we had asked 20 people until we got the answer we wanted to hear. No, we walked in the building, we asked the first guy doing team registrations what pets hunters have and he said they start with a boar. He also pointed us to the Blizzard rep on-site and said he's the one that would be able to make that change. We asked the Blizzard guy if that was possible, he told us that he can't make the change now and that if WSVG wanted to get that done, they'd have to submit a request to Blizzard and it would be looked at. So then we went back to a WSVG admin and asked him if we could tame a pet since there was no scorpid provided. He said he didn't know but he'd find out for us. He went to the back, asked his manager (or whoever), then came back and said "yeah, go ahead." There was no he said she said, we asked 1 person, who then asked their manager or whoever's responsible for these things, who said yes. The messages were all relayed and it all seemed legit.

Back to the conversation with the director; he said ok, and agreed that is what happened since the admin obviously backed us up on the issue and said we asked and he said yes. He then said "that's the thing, you guys asked if you could tame a pet, not if you could use it in an arena." At this point, it really seemed like they were fishing for something to get us on. Yeah, we didn't think of every clause and have the admin sign a written consent to allow us to tame a pet... did they want us to? The forum post on the WSVG site that writes about the ruling says:

"Earlier in the tournament, Yea We Lift asked head WoW admin Chris Pipher if they could tame a pet, but did not specify that the request involved leaving the arena and replacing one of the provided pets."

For anyone that understands the game in the least, our question would be enough for them to realize that we do in fact have to leave the arena to tame a pet and that taming a pet requires replacing one if you already have 3. I guess we didn't make that very clear though, since we're clearly dealing with a director that knows absolutely nothing about the game. Not that I really expected otherwise, he's a businessman running his company.

Then he brought up the IRC deal. He said they have 3 separate conversations recorded with Hamchook talking to one of their PR guys on IRC asking about the scorpid. This was true, the little details that most people seem to leave out about this is that Hamchook didn't ask if we could tame one, he didn't think we would have to. He logged on and asked what pets would be provided, and if there was no scorpid, would it be possible for the WSVG to put in a request to Blizzard to get that changed. The director seemed to agree with that as well, since they obviously had read the logs.

Then he brought up the fact that we had levelled the pet. He asked us if we had put a decent amount of time in, levelling the pet. We said yeah, before matches we often had 40-50 minutes of prep time, where he flew just outside of Shattrath and killed some mobs. At that point, the director and the admin said they needed a minute to discuss the situation. When they came back, they started up with the "well, we think you're a great team but as a league we have to ensure fair play, etc, etc..." and Hamchook got a little fed up with the fluff and asked straight up "So what's gonna happen now? Are we getting DQ'd?" The admin said no, he said Godfather didn't want to handle it that way, he wanted to see a rematch played with the rules followed. So he said we'd have to replay the match with a boar instead of a scorpid. We said ok and we were pretty motivated to beat em again as we were pretty pissed at the time.

So we went back to the same comps, Hamchook was given a new login and he had to set up his new hunter from scratch. Once that was done the rematch was underway. We used our usual setup and they came in with the setup they used in the 3rd game, resto shaman/paladin/warrior. We knew we could beat them even without the pet, against most good teams, the pet would be dismissed for most of the match anyway so we were somewhat used to dealing with that. We knew we would have to play almost flawlessly as it would take an extra 20-40 seconds to get them down to the point where we could land a kill. The first game, CC was perfect. Between novas, scatters, freedom dispels and polys out of LoS, their warrior barely scraped me for the first minute of the game. Their shaman was out of mana and from there between a CS, fear and silencing shot on the pally, we got a kill and won the first game.

The second game was controversy round two. We played a solid game and got their shaman down to just a few hundred life, I pushed a little too much for a kill and got caught in a bad spot so when he didn't die, I was pretty screwed. We were told we had 5 minutes to prep for game 3, but it seemed like there was something going on at the other team's table. Supposedly, the admin had seen someone reach over and touch one of the player's keyboards on two occasions. They discussed the issue with Godfather, then they came over to us. The director (same guy from the morning) said he had witnessed unfair play and filed a dispute on our behalf, he then asked us to give MoB the same courtesy they extended to us and replay the match. We agreed and said let's play.

The rematch went almost the same way as the previous one, we got their shaman really low but we just couldn't finish him and I dropped before he did, so we were back in the same spot, 1-1. Game 3 I don't really remember very well, I think I got caught and purge spammed at the same time so I took a really heavy burst of damage early that I couldn't fully recover from. So it was 2-1, we talked about it a little bit, said we've come back from worse and got ready to play. Game 4 was looking really good, we had them out of mana and I got a solid drink off that put me up to ~4k mana. Their warrior switched over to our mage mid-game, Chook told Fugie to iceblock if he had to and that he'd land a kill soon. I heard that and said the same thing, Fugie had used his iceblocks though to break fears/HoJs earlier in the game and said that it was on cooldown, something I didn't hear so I stayed out of LoS, expecting him to block. So with that miscommunication, we lost Fugie. A few seconds later, their pally dropped and it was down to a 2v2. The only problem is that everyone was drained, myself, hamchook and their shaman all had under 1000 mana. Scatter+trap on the warrior helped us get some breathing space and get a few drinks off, but the shaman just wouldn't die. He sat at under 40% with 0 mana for a really long time. Eventually, the warrior got his trinket back up and after he trinketted a trap then resisted my MC, and at that point I had almost nothing left to keep Hamchook alive for another 20-30seconds.

So we ended up losing the hard fought series 3-1, and with that we hit the end of the road at 4th place. Even though the last day wasn't really what we expected, the tournament as a whole for us was a huge success. We went in there with modest expectations and our main goal was really to have fun, something we definitely did. After a shaky day 1 we came back and played really well throughout the rest of the tournament.


Some random thoughts and shoutouts I'd like to make:

First I'd like to thank everyone that was there supporting us. Pink Tabard, I said it before, you guys were awesome and I hope we see you at the next WSVG. Nuthar, Tunor, Gwen, Superdood and his roomate Ed, Makoplux & company, it was awesome to meet you guys and thanks for the fanbase you provided at the event. Same goes for everyone in #bg5 on IRC, everyone that msged me to say congrats when I logged on, all the blog posts about us, its really crazy to have so much support. Thanks to Raddy and Ming for all their articles and linking to this blog as well, I doubt too many people would be checking it if it wasn't for them. :P

Another thing I want to clear up is the WSVG Admins. They're not idiots as most people seem to think, haha. They play the game and they know it well enough to run the show. They did a great job if you exclude the mishap with the dispute, but that wasn't even their decision, it went way over their heads. Anyway, thanks for running a great tournament and I'm sure we'll see you guys at future events.

I think what happened this weekend isn't so much a bad thing for WoW as an eSport. As long as the league and Blizzard both realize that there are still lots of things to improve on, it's a success. I'd expect to see scorpid pets available for hunters at LA, hopefully some race changes (gnome warriors, gnome warlocks, dwarf hunters), something done about the helm enchants half the casters used, something done about shadow priests having divine spirit and a more detailed set of rules.

Godfather, I watched your video, and I appreciate hearing your side of the story. I really have nothing against you, and I agree that you did what any manager worth his salt would do. I wasn't the happiest camper when we had our little talk right before the rematch and I'm sure you understand that. I wanna thank you for your sponsorship offer and we're looking forward to some more rematches in LA and London. :)