Everybody get off the tracks, the Munoz train is comin’ through! Toot toot!
It’s been stuck in the station for a long time. New trains came out with fancy things like air conditioning, friendly conductors, and gamer-friendly double-wide seats. Even if you came in on the CPL train, if you’re a professional gamer, chances are you abandoned it months ago. This culminated in the $10,000 Source BYOC tournament, which was the smallest bone ever thrown to a large community of people.
The worst part is that the Source tournament was the highlight of the event; the BYOC would have been almost totally deserted if the Source teams weren’t there, and World in Conflict and F.E.A.R. didn’t really carry the day. Putting those games at the forefront would have been like making Screech the lead character in Saved by the Bell. Some things are better left in a supporting role.
By adding two versions of CS and Halo 3, the CPL Winter looks like it’s back on track. Finally.
Halo 3 is a big deal, but the CS situation is more interesting. Not only will both versions have a seprate tournament, but the winners get to play each other at the end. They’ll be playing on Dust2, Nuke, and Mill for both versions, and the winner is determined through the match scores.
You don’t run into this situation often, but it’s both a great idea and totally meaningless. Most great ideas have some kind of noticeable impact. Fire was a great idea. Even small things like Post-it notes were a great idea. The tournaments are going to create a ton of buzz, and for that it’s a great idea. The CPL needed something to breathe some life into it, and as first steps go, this is excellent. The problem is that it’s just a grudge match. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Which means more to professional gamers: first place at a $50,000 tournament, or an ensuing match worth absolutely nothing played against a team that doesn’t even play the same game? Think anybody will practice on the other engine with even the smallest chance that it would cost them an important round in the Finals?
You see the problem.
No matter what happens in that final match, it won’t even begin to solve any of the issues plaguing the 1.6 and Source communities. If the 1.6 team wins, they’ll say 1.6 teams are clearly better because they beat the Source players. In this case, the Source community will talk about how the games didn’t mean anything, the Source teams didn’t practice 1.6, it doesn’t matter because the CGS uses Source, etc. There would be variations of the same argument if a Source team won.
If people are looking at this exhibition for definitive proof or evidence about which game is harder, which players are more talented, or anything along those lines, they need to keep looking. It’s going to be one set of matches between two teams with nothing on the line except pride. And they’ll both have just finished earning the real prize. It’s the virtual definition of a let-down game, like when the Bulls get a hard-fought win against the Pistons, and then inexplicably come out flat the next week and lose to a laughingstock team like the Atlanta Hawks. You build yourself up for the big games, and sometimes that means a small setback in a winnable match because you’re not mentally prepared for it.
So, I’ll be more interested in the real tournaments from a competitive standpoint, but that doesn’t mean the exhibition won’t be fun. I’m 100% sure that I’ll enjoy watching it; I just hope people take the match for what it is: a single exhibition match with nothing but bragging rights on the line. And I’ll be avoiding the GotFrag forums for a couple days, or else I might get an aneurysm because I think 90% of the posters won’t bother with such details as sample size and motivation.
As for the event itself, now we just need to get the CGS teams to show up and hope nobody minds flying on Christmas Eve.
(Whoops.)
