TS Season 7 Preseason and Qualifiers

September 18, 9:30pm EST

Map: ut4_orbital_sl (timelimit 20!)

Invite Preseason

HOME	AWAY
1. iCu*	8. pnk|
2. MF	7. oK
3. -high5	6. /eVo/
4. Pound Cake	5. [-5150-]

Invite Qualifiers

HOME	AWAY
9. Work In Progress	16. !Tc.|**Intelligent Tactics in Combat
10. Seal's Venezuela	15. Indica Sativa
11. [b00bs]	14. Nice One Team Brazil - n1.
12. -high5 Team B	13. i7.Immortals 7

Main Preseason

HOME	AWAY
17. wTf| What the Frag	20. pretorian+
18. HooSIER Clan	19. Last of a Dying Breed

Main Qualifiers

Open Preseason

HOME	AWAY
29. Pride	44. [AnK] - AnarKia
30. |CORE| CLAN BRAZIL	43. GnB|
31. RuDe.cL|	42. [1up]**
32. GlaD.SA	41. [LCDLC]
33. Inmortals Warriors	40. Silent Killers
34. Nice One Team Brasil - n1*	39. AiM
35. The Brave Warriors	38. *Qs|
36. [sC]	37. ReverseReaction

Please post match results in this thread: http://www.ftwgl.com/content/ctf-qualifiers-preseason

Sorry for the inconvenience - we will have the proper systems up as soon as possible.

Season 7 is upon us. Click on the news header to see all the match ups.

Rules have been updated and posted. They should reflect the new website (though some things are still in development and updates about these modules will be forthcoming).
The only major change to the rules is that TS is now only 20 minutes long! Make sure you adjust your time limits!

We also have an updated config that you can download. Navigate to the configuration files above.

We will open map voting within the week, and a full map list will be posted shortly thereafter.

CTF Season 7 Preseason and Qualifiers

September 16, 9:00pm EST

Map: ut4_casa (Respawn Delay 14)

Invite Divison Preseason:

HOME	AWAY
1.iCu*	6.[-5150-]
2. Get Legit and Dip!	5. wTf | What the Frag
3. Pound Cake	6. /eVo/

Invite Division Qualifiers:

HOME	AWAY
7. Times Six	14. Get Legit and Dip!*B
8. pnk	13. i7.Immortals 7
9. [b00bs]	12. Nice One Team Brasil - n1.
10. -high5 CTF Team	11. Work In Progress

Open Divison Preseason:

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are pleased to annouce the start of Season 7.

Singups and registration will close Saturday (9/15) at Midnight (12:00pm EST). Schedules for qualifiers and preseason will be posted shortly there after. You WILL be playing on Sunday (9/16) and Tuesday (9/18).

Make sure you sign up by Saturday or your team will be unable to compete. Rosters will lock at a later date.

You will see an updated Rules later on this week. There are no major changes, only some minor rewording and other revisions to reflect the capabilities of the new website.

This season will be played with 4.1.1 until a competition ready 4.2 is released.

FTW Bomb statistics on [-5150-] and GlaD, interview with Xixion and Solitary

Check out how these teams perform and view their own styles of playing.

As some of you may have noticed, high5 was taken down by [-5150-], and now we're at the Finals stage of the summer bomb tournament!

I took the liberty of interviewing both team leaders to get their perspectives on a number of things, revolving around the gametype, the people in their teams, their practice regiment, and general feelings towards the match, as usual i'll try and stay as unbiased as possible and give you guys something to read or just glance over.

I'll start with [-5150-]'s team stats throughout the FTW Summer Bomb bracket up until now.

Team [-5150-]

As you can see they've played a lot of rounds, h0ltes, sLayeR and Xixion are their core 3, and they seem to win more as Red. 5150 seems to have a slightly deeper roster, or at least seems to rotate their players more often, having daash and xixion as important subs in matches allowing their teammates to get match time minutes in.

I had a few words with Xixion and I'll get right to it, this will sort of appear as a chat conversation type format, if you'd prefer something different in the future please just PM me here on IRC!

FTW: Sweet let's get this started then

FTW: first of all, how did your scrim go?

Xixion: we won due to some good teamwork and the other team wasnt very coordinated

FTW: cool cool...

FTW: What are your general feelings towards competing in Bomb mode?

Xixion: i honestly love it, it's my favorite mode to compete in, but my main goal in competing is winning, reguardless of the mode!

FTW: Do you feel like your team, and your opponents take it just as seriously as other gametypes such as TS or CTF?

Xixion: yes, we train at least 5 bomb scrims daily, and are really focused towards winning this tournament

FTW: well you sort of answered my next question... hehe

FTW: What does your team’s practice schedule look like, and how many players are normally a part of it? Adding on to that, do you scrim the same opponents? or anyone that's available?

Xixion: we usually try to find high skill opponents, but if we cant find any we'll take anyone willing to play against us

FTW: Do you usually talk about the match after it happens, what went wrong/what worked?

Xixion: nope, if we lose, we all disconnect from teamspeak simultaniously, and if we win, we say gg then go to sleep

FTW: Interesting...
Do you find that you have a preference for Blue or Red when playing Bomb? Which one do you think your team performs better as?

Xixion: not really, we have good tactics for both sides on all maps, it usually depends on how the other team performs on a particular side

FTW: You have a rematch coming up, coming down from a 2-0, do you think you’ll make any significant changes to your team’s style or will you guys maintain how you played previously? The game seemed extremely close, even if the end score was 2-0.

Xixion: we plan having a better lineup, the first match vs them we didnt have our best 2 players who are very key to our team, this time we will have them. I think if we play the same with our real lineup we will be victorious!!

FTW: What players specifically?

Xixion: Hemp and brizz

FTW: Or better, what is that ideal lineup?

Xixion: we use different lineups for both sides of each map, some players are better defenders, some are attackers. But the ideal lineup is hemp, brizz, h0ltes, slayer, and me.

FTW: Sounds like a solid team. Do you have any comments/critiques of the league in itself? Do you wish certain aspects were different?

Xixion: only complaint i have is that a team has to win 2 maps, it should be the clanbase system, where if one team wins one map, and the next is a tie, the team who won one map should be the winner, no more maps after that.

FTW: Good stuff. Any final thoughts, or shoutouts?

Xixion: shoutout to pir8, l0l. and glad sux, we're gonna win

FTW: Well that wraps it up, Good luck & have fun in the finals! :)

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Team GlaD

Team GlaD's stats:

As you can see they also have a very strong trio, Kenny, Solitary and Grim. Their total rounds are almost half of what [-5150-] have played, but their win %'s are significantly higher.I took the liberty of interviewing Solitary as well! :)

be warned, this one might be a bit longer...

FTW: I'll open this up with a rather vague question...

FTW: What are your general feelings towards competing in Bomb mode?

Solitary: The bomb gametype is fundamentally broken in Urban Terror. I think until the developers fix bomb, it shouldn't be played in competition.Small things that should be present are missing, a bomb defuse/plant sound and being able to stop planting. There is a combination of small things that make it undesirable to play.

FTW: That's a very interesting perspective, at the moment you guys are obviously a top-tier bomb team, making it straight to the final through the main bracket, so your feelings towards these details make a lot of sense to competitors.

FTW: Do you feel like your team, and your opponents take it just as seriously as other gametypes such as TS or CTF?

Solitary: We always take matches seriously. Obviously there are times when you are missing top players etc, but you still need to take the match seriously if you want to win. Theres only been a very small number of
times we have been deflated due to our opposition playing very well that we have not been able to take the match seriously. But that is more to the performance of our opposition than to our lack of focus.

FTW: Were they just really funny opponents or were they just more organized?

Solitary: Definately more organized, like MF on turnpike during the TS quarter finals this year. They absolutely dominated us, despite us starting with good leads both maps. But even when losing we tend to remain very focused because you can always come back.

FTW: Yeah I can relate to that feeling, I find myself more focused if I need to catch up rather than trying to stay ahead, but there's a fine line between catching up and being dominated.

FTW: What does your team’s practice schedule look like, and how many players are normally a part of it?

Solitary: We honestly haven't had any real practice schedule for a few seasons. This is mainly due to real life circumstances and scheduling of our members. I'd say during the regular season we will scrim once a week if
possible, usually about 6-8 guys online. During this bomb tournmament though we havn't had any practice. I think the last time we really practiced regularly was during season 4, when we won both TS and CTF titles at the same time. We were probably scrimming every day at that period of time. This last season was pretty good too though because GlaD*A and GlaD*B usually had enough members on at the same time to always scrim atleast once a day. Haha kinda a lengthy answer :P So yeah no real schedule, just whenever people feel like training :P

FTW: Scrims and the ability to get a consistent roster throughout a season seems to be the bane of most top end teams, not allowing extreme depth in their strategies... Do you find that to be true on your end as well? What do you think people could do to improve or nullify this constant incident/factor?

Solitary: Well maybe not depth of strategies, because most of our strategies are fixed and based on positioning but roster depth is a big thing for sure.Having players who embrace a backup role will help you win, there is no question about that. But having players on the roster just to fill random positions isn't a good practice. Slackin and Ohmega are prime examples of players who have filled the backup position and understand their role and have played and contributed in big matches for us. Even previously during the period of time we Area [51] Gaming we had players who embraced the same role. And again if these players are active, they will help cultivate activity for your team to scrim and practice etc.

FTW: Very good insight. Do you find that you have a preference for Blue or Red when playing Bomb? Which one do you think your team performs better as?

Solitary: Haha honestly we are so focused I don't think it really matters to us. As to which side does better on certain maps, I'm sure there is a correlation there, but since we play both sides it doesn't seem to matter. We just try to win as many rounds as possible on which ever color we are playing as.

FTW: this question is weird but bear with me... I took the liberty of checking GlaD’s stats, and match history, I noticed that nherd and Mysterion were there and active when the league started, and then
Mustang came in for mysterion (he subbed 6 times!), and eventually you guys played Kraken and z00fle. Did this reflect positively on your team composition, or would you prefer to have a pre defined set of players who are always there during practice and matches? Like Solitary/Kenny/Grimz plus two other players that were there for all 10 sides as well?

Solitary: It doesn't matter to us, we tend to play the best line up possible. There are some weeks players are absent too etc. It just so happened the match Kraken and z00fle played we were short and they happened to be online at the time. Haha no real planning taking place :P I wouldn't say it faltered our team at all, we are used to play with different players and thrive on it.

FTW: Very well... What is your desired lineup for the final? I'm predicting Kenny, Solitary, Grimz, ? , ? ,?(sub)

Solitary: Hmm hard to say at this point, we are having scheduling conflicts for Sunday and may have to forfeit, so we are looking to reschedule for now. But ideally I would say any combination of Grimz, myself, Kenny, Kraken, z00fle, Nherd would be good. And if you're a big time idealist, you can hope Estelminio decides to play bomb haha

FTW: Interesting, you guys are going up for a rematch with 5150, are you thinking about changing your approach to playing them, or just stick to what you did in the last match?

Solitary: Our approach to playing any opponent is always the same. We won't treat them any differently. We will go in with some sort of a plan and adapt if need be.

FTW: Great stuff, solitary, thanks for taking the time to interview. Any final thoughts or shoutouts?

Solitary: Just a shoutout to all current and former GlaD members.

FTW: except Blacky.

Solitary: Blacky too haha :)

FTW: Very well sir have a great rest of the evening :) and good luck in the finals! hf

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Match date: 19th August 2012, Sunday at 3 PM EST

I'll edit in the details such as maps/gtv info once they are available!

until then this is the match page:Match Link

http://www.ftwgl.com/node/1008671
http://www.ftwgl.com/node/1008671
http://www.ftwgl.com/node/1008671
http://www.ftwgl.com/node/1008671
http://www.ftwgl.com/node/1008671

Last night there were four contenders to the FTW Summer Bomb title, and now there are only three.

Team high5 defeated team Work in Progress last night in a Loser's bracket derby to face the #2 team coming out of the Main bracket, team [-5150-].

High5 started out on the red team on Kingdom and took a swift 10-3 over WiP, once High5 took blue side, things were a lot closer, the map still ended 7-6 in favor of High5. WiP being a map down, began playing abbey on the red side. It seemed like high5 were just the better team to defend, mimicking the first half on kingdom, 10-3 once again.

On the second map Fonducci really brought himself back from the apparent slump on the first map, top scoring both halves, but unfortunately WiP fell short once again, going down 6-7 in the second half of abbey.

Instead of pointing to specific key players, I will just aggregate all of the players/total kills so you can make your own formed opinions.

As you can see, team high5 will be moving on to face team [-5150-], and the winner of that match will face team GlaD in the final!

If you'd like to see the screenshots please check out the Match Report

And a direct link to the demo can be found here: Download Demos

For the following matches & specific dates keep an eye out on our upcoming blog posts and we'll keep you informed!