This weekend Cadred's Amonsilas brings you live coverage from The Reality VIII's Team Fortress 2 tournament in The Netherlands. First of all: a tournament preview.
The Reality VIII has nearly 700 participants and takes place at Drachten, in a northern province of The Netherlands. This edition is the first where they offered the Turn Up & Play (TUP) tickets for their event, which brought one of the strongest Team Fortress 2 teams from Europe to their event. The event will start at Friday and lasts until Sunday afternoon. The tournaments start early on the Saturday morning, the (semi) finals will be played on Sunday.
Although Cadred only covers the Team Fortress 2 tournament, The Reality also hosts a Call of Duty 4, Counterstrike (1.6 and Source) and several 1v1 tournaments like UT2004, Fifa 09 and Track Mania Nations Forever. An overview of all tournaments and prizes can be found here, although the page is currently not available in English language.
Team Fortress 2 tournament
A more detailed preview with groups, fixtures and more will be published tomorrow evening. For now we can only give you a preview on the three team that are favourite in the TF2 tournament. These are of course not the only teams participating, but the chance that one of these teams will win the tournament is very high.
The TF2 tournament will have a cash prize of 600 euro for the winner, if 10 teams sign up for the tournament. In addition the winning teams receives a 12 month private gameserver and six 12" case-fans. The runner-up is taking six Gigabyte graphic cards home and the third team gets several small hardware products for each of their players.
Trademark Gamers
Former Ubersexuals became a top team in the scene quickly after they formed last October. This European team consists of seven very talented players from England, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Norway, coming from former highly ranked teams like Excello, Knights and k1ck. As said the team has been been considered one of the best for quite some time now, but a little less than two months ago they lost one of their main soldiers Erik “Appe” Karlsson to their direct rivals at Team Dignitas. This has of course affected their game play in a negative way, but only shortly after Appe’s departure they recruited RubberJohnny as new soldier from clan00. Only last week we learned that Karl “weqo” Terävä will leave the team after this weekend’s LAN event. Trademark Gamers (TmG) has recruited former clan00 scout “aves” to replace him in their roster, to great disliking from clan00's "ekse".
From the three top teams attending The Reality VIII, Trademark Gamers is probably the favourite, although with a small margin. I think it will be a matter of their individual performance during the event. As far as I know TmG has not attended any Team Fortress 2 LAN events yet with their current line-up, which may make them feel uncomfortable in any way. If their players manage to keep their performance on their regular level though, their teamwork will follow and I think they should be able to take all of their opponents.
Trademark Gamers line-up:
Duncan "dunc" Wraight
Jaakko "Haza" Pelinappula
Mikko "snap" Tuominen
Ricky "sommie" Eriksson
Karl "weqo" Terävä
Marius "skre" Taraldsvik
Team Coolermaster
Although Team Coolermaster (TCM) have been together and playing on the highest possible level in Europe for ever since they left Weapons of the Rebellion and joined Coolermaster’s multi-gaming organisation, they are currently not what they used to be some time ago. The main cause for this issue is their roster instability. TCM has had several key players join and leave the team over the last few months, which definitely cannot be stimulating their teamwork and overall coordination. Nevertheless TCM have always been able to prevent any other team to join to take their spot in the top four, which implies that they still belong there.
On this LAN Team Coolermaster will have an advantage over the other two teams, because of their experience with (LAN) finals and playing in a different environment. The team has already attended several TF2 LAN events like Multiplay’s i-series and the PC Gamer Showdown last fall. They know how it works, they know how it’s done and they know what it feels like. This can give them an edge over for example TmG when they end up playing the important final match while a big audience is watching only a few meters away from their seats.
Team Coolermaster line-up:
Tom "light" Steele
Thomas "para" Klosgen
Ahmad "Byte" Fansa
Paul "Evil" Doyle
Neil "TopGear" Partridge
Matthias "Zerox" Kuehl
Vale
Last but not least there is the Belgian Vale, also known as former Team Druidz. Druidz folded late January due to internal struggles, but reformed under their private “Vale” name a little later, with more or less the main line-up. At the reform they added demoman Numlocked, the German heavy/soldier Riemu and Haunter to their roster, the latter left TCM to rejoin his old team. Although Vale is not yet playing in all the official tournaments and leagues, they are considered to be at the same level as they were before the fold, somewhere at rank 5-6 in the Top 10 of TF2 teams, just below the top four of giants.
Vale’s story will be an interesting one this LAN. A part of the team already attended The Reality’s last event in October ’08 while the other part is new. Their medic Springer has to leave the LAN on Saturday for personal reasons, but will be back around dinner. As a replacement Vale has asked former TCM medic Alberyayo to be his substitute. This means Vale will play with Alberyayo during the groupstage and maybe even one or more playoff matches. In matters of skill this should be no problem, but the team’s teamwork might drop a little to this last-minute substitute of a key player from their team.
Vale! line-up:
Epothon
Exoronic
Springer
Dr Justice
Alberyayo (substitute for Springer)
Related: The Reality website
Originally published on Cadred.org on Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:28:48 +0000 by Hidde van Manen.
Archived from The Reality VIII: teams preview as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of Cadred.org's TF2 coverage. All rights remain with the original author and Cadred.org; reposted for historical reference.