After almost 4 months covered by various 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 disciplines, the 2020 AOElympics have finally come to an end. The biggest AoE II tournament ever in terms of participating players (575 players forming 43 national teams) and matches, was won by Brazil. Congratulations to them!
The full medal table looks like this:
Place | Country | Gold Medals | Silver Medals | Bronze Medals | | Total Medals | Prize Money |
Brazil | 12 | 7 | 3 | | 22 | $1575.00 | |
Norway | 9 | 2 | 1 | | 12 | $1260.00 | |
Vietnam | 8 | 9 | 1 | | 18 | $1050.00 | |
4 | Russia | 5 | 7 | 11 | | 23 | $857.50 |
5 | China | 5 | 3 | 2 | | 10 | $682.50 |
6 | France | 3 | 6 | 1 | | 10 | $525.00 |
7 | Germany | 3 | 3 | 1 | | 7 | $385.00 |
8 | Taiwan | 3 | 0 | 0 | | 3 | $280.00 |
9 | Mexico | 2 | 6 | 8 | | 16 | $210.00 |
10 | Poland | 2 | 4 | 2 | | 8 | $175.00 |
11 | Spain | 2 | 2 | 2 | | 6 | |
12 | Czech Republic | 2 | 1 | 2 | | 5 | |
13 | Chile | 1 | 4 | 6 | | 11 | |
14 | Italy | 1 | 4 | 3 | | 8 | |
15 | Finland | 1 | 1 | 0 | | 2 | |
15 | Slovenia | 1 | 1 | 0 | | 2 | |
17 | Sweden | 1 | 0 | 0 | | 1 | |
18 | Argentina | 0 | 3 | 3 | | 6 | |
19 | Australia | 0 | 1 | 1 | | 2 | |
20 | Austria | 0 | 1 | 0 | | 1 | |
21 | United Kingdom | 0 | 0 | 3 | | 3 | |
22 | Romania | 0 | 0 | 2 | | 2 | |
22 | Slovakia | 0 | 0 | 2 | | 2 | |
24 | Ireland | 0 | 0 | 1 | | 1 | |
24 | Turkey | 0 | 0 | 1 | | 1 | |
24 | India | 0 | 0 | 1 | | 1 | |
24 | New Zealand | 0 | 0 | 1 | | 1 |
27 nations managed to get at least one medal and while Russia only became #4, they collected most medals of all teams (23). For all brackets' results, click here.
I want to thank the two sponsors: Pinztec and the donor who wants to stay anonymous, all of the participating players and people helping out behind the scenes: @Michaerbse (registration/seeding), @nimanoe (general admin things) and @robo (finances, forum creation and permissions) mainly, with some temporal assistance by @Akkal, @Fatihaydemir38 (recorded games, scheduling topics) and @Ruki<3 (promotion in China) and also @Chrazini, @TheMadCADer and @Henkdesupernerd for being involved in updating some maps. More people were involved in giving feedback about rules and settings and the map pool. Thank you to you too.
Although we did not have any big Twitch streamer cover much of the tournament, many players had fun streaming their POV or games of their countrymen/-women. So many small streamers indeed profited from the content.
I want to point out 2 streamers though: NachoAoE, who helped with promotion and enthusiastically streamed a lot of the matches including Latin American players in Spanish, and @Black Adder, who probably streamed half or more of the whole tournament in a professional way, no matter how few viewers he had and how badly DE behaved.
This was also the main goal and spirit of the tournament: To have as many people and players involved, doing what they love to do.
Lastly, I want to add that apart from 3 cases, where restoring was problematic because of patches, hotfixes and general common crashes of DE, there was no big negative incident, only the usual scheduling wars, because of big time zone differences, which sadly resulted in too many unplayed matches and I am aware and sometimes even sad that some brackets ended unluckily, but in the end an end had to come.
Some people changed their plans or were no longer available, since this summer was not as projectable as any other recent one in most countries, some even got sick or had to take care of relatives. I hope that we still could bring some happiness into their lives.
Players generally (with very few exceptions) behaved well and there was no sign of cheating in any way.
We will soon contact the team admins to give us details on how to send their prize money and, as stated in the rules and settings, it will be their task to distribute it among their team’s players the way they prefer.
Because in the end the placement of Vietnam and Norway was affected significantly by some AW, following a suggestion of team Norway, we are planning to host a Bo5 showmatch (using AOElympics maps) between the two teams soon, to see who is the true #2. If you want to donate (should not be more than $200 in total) towards that, please let me know.
My 3 biggest new experiences or realisations are:
- I experimented with giving people a lot of freedom for sign-up, changes to teams, scheduling etc. For some it works well, but also for many players not that well. Some players will schedule just saying "Hi, when can you play?", "Can you play tomorrow?", although the topic says: "Please post all of your available times", or even schedule for 3 weeks and still not find a time, but if you tell them, "you have to play today", they will do it. Not completely sure what the best solution is yet for big team game tournaments.
- I had conversations with many players. Almost all of them were good conversations. Only a few of them were upset because of some problems, but most were solved rather easily in the end. Generally, getting to know more of the players and getting insight into their discussions and thoughts was a good experience.
- Because some old, traditional maps had a few problems and also because Forgotten Empires, and all the other later expansions added to the game, some maps had to be and could be updated. This made me learn a lot about map scripting and I can now comfortably create playable and visually pleasing maps myself (though still far from the level of Chrazini, Zetnus, etc.). So for the Double Cup I was involved in all maps' creation and finalisation which resulted in many new and beautiful maps, as well as connection to many map creators.
See you around and in the next tournaments!
(First the Double Cup, for which we are still depending on donations to raise a prize pool, but I also have other projects in mind. All of them will be different, something that other people don't do.)
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