Empires Summer Scrim League Game 4 - 11th July 21:00 BST/ 16:00 EDT/ 13:00 PDT

I don't even know the details of what occurred. It's no one's fault, not Spike's, not anyone's.

It's just a bit of a blur to casually join your team's TS a little bit early to start derpin with your Canada bros only to start getting pelted with questions moments later as if you had all day to plan this shit.

I'm cool with lending a hand with organization, I just need to make sure that I keep myself in the loop next time. I've been a bit busy with some unrelated things in the past few weeks and I was just looking for some brainless fun this weekend.

[YOUTUBE]XG5GOH2CO1k[/YOUTUBE]

 

You shouldn't have been thrown under the bus at all. It's fucking ridiculous but I think I may be partially responsible. Your team seemed to be worried about strategy and I said look to veterans like Candles and ImSpartacus if you get lost during the game. I really didn't expect your team to misinterpret 100% of what I said.

I still think it is Spike's fault. It's his team, he should be responsible for making sure people actually show up to this shit and having an attendance list.

 

You had an attendance list and PredatoR helping you out. I'm not even sure what SPIKE did to help out.

 

I almost want to ask if we can throw this one out.

So here's my side of what happened. Last night, I sent Spike a few messages saying that I would be going to IKEA today and I might not make the first round (IKEA being 110 minutes away from my house plus another hour to browse their selection and then some more time for miscellaneous stuff while I'm in Portland). Spike sends some messages back a few hours later saying that he can't really make it either. I wake up, I see his response, I assume that he has something sorted out and don't think much of it.

Fast-forward 3.5 hours, I get Lawliet's mass-message that the scrim is starting in an hour. I check my friend's list and see who's online; A-z-K is offline, Spike is offline, Lazybum is also offline (which doesn't affect my team but I did find the coincidence a bit striking). I ask MooJuice, who's helped Spike do squad allocation with previous matches, if maybe he's organizing it. Turns out that 40 minutes before the start time, XRay has 10 players and MooJuice wouldn't be able to attend either. I realize at this point that there's zero organization on XRay's side and things started off going downhill. I go back and forth between Lawliet and Moojuice, seriously considering just calling it off from lack of players and organization, but MooJuice tells me that he can get enough players. Eventually, MooJuice tells me to talk with Spartacus because he needs to go himself, so I message Spartacus who has no idea what the hell is going on. So I guess Spartacus got in touch with Trickster and Lawliet and did his best to sort things out.

20 minutes away from my house, Trickster's wondering where the hell I am and tells me that XRay pulled in a lot of players and ringers last-minute, so I tell him that I'll be there soon and he says he'll save a spot for me. I get home, get to my computer, and Trickster tells me that the spot was taken. So I decide to wait it out and figure that there'll be enough time for me to put together my new coffee table and side tables. 10 minutes later, Trickster's telling me that XRay got shitstomped and that I need to get in the game. At this point, it really hits me that even though the game got off the ground, the lack of organization earlier was going to kill it because XRay wouldn't have a fighting chance. I hop into TS, decide to give it my best anyway, and that was the end of it. Spike comes on and says that he had to go celebrate a person's 60th birthday party.


I don't want to place all the blame on any single person. Spike told almost no one that he wouldn't make it, A-z-K wasn't there to try and pull it together, I was only able to use my phone and couldn't be there to organize, MooJuice had to bail 10 minutes before the start and Spartacus was volunteered to organize it with almost zero knowledge about the situation and next to no prior experience in organizing a scrim team. Then XRay was full of players who hadn't played in the team before and didn't know the Teamspeak info or how things were organized, and the entire thing became a shitfest. Literally every leader and backup leader was unavailable or had to leave. If I had been there, AzK had been there, Spike had been there, MooJuice didn't have to bail, or XRay had most of its proper team there, it'd've gone a lot better.


Still, I want to give props to Moojuice and Spartacus for doing the best they could with a bad situation (although MooJuice shouldn't've put Spartacus on the spot like that), Quebec for being good sports about it, and Lawliet and Trickster for helping XRay pull their team together. However, I honestly think that after this one, if a team simply cannot pull themselves together 15 or so minute before a match, it should just be called off and turned into a public pug. I personally believe that it would be better for us to not scrim at all instead of having a round that's guaranteed to be a curbstomp.

 

Those matches were really shit, but whatever it's just some video games. Who even cares about the league score anymore.

 

[YOUTUBE]ZO5moK04VCY[/YOUTUBE]
[YOUTUBE]JbaLqRXBJ-Q[/YOUTUBE]

Commentated games.

As for what Candles said, and the fact that Spike has already told me he's not available next week either, and the fact that I probably only have another 4-6 weeks to run this after which I should be back at work, I'm going to be considering a restructure of X-ray. I'll let people know the end result once I've spoken to the right people.

I don't want to start calling people out on the forums, but instead I'm going to give an example of what I did when I was in charge of a team (in the previous scrim league) 6 years ago and I couldn't make a game. These games were every week and I knew I couldn't make 2 games in a row because of the ski trip. The first game I gathered literally everyone I could and built up a plan for the game. The plan itself was far less important than the time I took to designate who was going to be in charge of what in my absence, but it was a great way of getting everyone involved and opening up a dialogue with my team. After this I realised how valuable it was to do this and started doing it even when I would be attending the scrim. For the 2nd match I was going to miss, I couldn't do the same thing because I was still in France with little internet access, but I got some and spent a while just delegating the key tasks to specific people within the team, as well as speaking to every single member on the team to let them know of the situation and how things would be running.

And honestly, that's what I feel is missing here. There's far too much reliance on steam groups and just putting up events that you expect people to see, not enough on actually making sure that you have every single member of your team on your friends list, speaking to them all individually and making them feel part of your team. Because that's what I kind of see here, despite the incredible play that Xray pulled off last week. I see Quebec as a team, with members who genuinely feel part of that team. I see Xray as a lot more of a formal agreement in which people are expected to show but outside of the games, there's not a great deal of dialogue going on, and that's going to bite you in the long run as Quebec get more and more comfortable playing together.

 

[YOUTUBE]8Wpgk9Hs4rc[/YOUTUBE]

 

Watching Trickster&Slades commentary I happen to realize that base bitches will always remain unsung heroes.

 

I think we called it out in one of the earlier games (1 or 2 I forget).

 

Next time I'll record my perspective.

 

[youtube]au2qmWmrVlg[/youtube]I wonder if it will indeed go to 1080 with borders.

 

What's with the completely unrelated preview of the video.

 

I googled "stack" and wanted to put up the 5 part rubber disc stacking child toy, but it was too small. Then i noticed this result and got this giant shit faced grin on my face.

 

I also didn't notice that you sneaked in at 125, caught on tape.
You ruined our pure EPIC squad.

 

Wait, so this match actually happened???

I read its postpone by another week because of something with lordz?
Was that just a joke? D:

Iam so sad, I had all the time this weekend D:

And no usual notifications from Scar/Xray