December LAN Announced! $100,000 Dreamhack Hannover

[Liamsmalley7]

Not sure if somebody has made a post for it yet...

The Grand Melee

The best place for The Grand Melee brackets, streams, standings and schedules all in one place!

www.start.gg

"The Order of the Sheep is proud to announce the presence of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition at the DreamHack LAN event taking place in Hannover from the 15th to the 18th of December 2022. Played on the 9 villagers start game mode (also known as Deep Waters League mode), “The Grand Melee” main event will feature 8 of the best players in the world battling over the title of Grand Melee Champion as well as a total prize money of $100000."


Qualifiers
In order to join The Grand Melee main event, players will battle in the qualification phase on the weekend of the 3rd and 4th of December 2022.

So then, 6 players qualify from the qualifiers, Liereyy and TaToH seem to have been invited for their performance in RBW Legacy

 

[i_no_english]

Hyped!!!!!

 

[LeoMontero]

sweet, but i want regular start, not 9 vils.

plus, please someone host a TG LAN TOURNAMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[damdres]

Beautiful!

 

[nimanoe]

Looks great, looking forward to going there :D
Anyone know who Order of the Sheep is/are?

 

[dogao]

I was hoping the qualifiers would have prizepool as well for the people reaching late stages since it's 8 players event only....

 

[i_no_english]

On Liquipedia it says for both the qualifier and main event:

• Seeding
  
  • Bracket will be drawn randomly.

So we can have Hera vs TheViper in round 1 of the qualifiers !?

 

[longinator]

On Liquipedia it says for both the qualifier and main event:

• Seeding
  
  • Bracket will be drawn randomly.

So we can have Hera vs TheViper in round 1 of the qualifiers !?

For the qualifier its copy & paste without fixing it. From the handbook, seeding for the qualifier is this

Players will be seeded using tournament performance for the top 48 and using ladder ranking
for the remaining players.

 

[Huehuecoyotl22]

Anyone know who Order of the Sheep is/are?

I don't know either. I could not find anything available about them except their Twitter account which was just created. The staff are mostly GL people. We should have more information until the qualifier.

I was hoping the qualifiers would have prizepool as well for the people reaching late stages since it's 8 players event only....

I hope so too. I just joined the admin team today and did not know anything about the tournament until 5 h ago, so it's almost as new to me as almost all of you. But we are discussing it and I hope it will happen.

 

[DracKeN]

I was hoping the qualifiers would have prizepool as well for the people reaching late stages since it's 8 players event only....

Agreed. I think sometimes it can be at least justified to have prize pool focused heavily on the top spots (usually not). Redbull was already really bad example, 60k to 1st place and nothing to either qualifier.. But 100k tournament where entire prize pool is split among 8 people - that's just silly.
That's the only thing though, it's amazing that AoE will be part of Dreamhack and the tournament settings looks really exciting.

 

[Black Adder]

Regarding obvious visa issues (which has already kind of been talked about the announcement being late even before it came) kind of bold to call it "best players in the world" (unless they happen to be European) The prize pool... Well, it's already been mentioned, but again, I wonder why still anyone thinks anyone cares about the community with these events in the first place :d It's one after the other.

Gl&hf.

 

[plfan]

Just checked liquipedia and maybe someone could say something about that rule:

• Resources equivalent to minute 2:30

In Memb`s Warlords we have normal ammount of resources at the begining, right? (honestly I'm not sure about that).
Doen it mean that on The Grand Melee players will have more? Seriously, I am confused right now :D

 

[siestes]

The resources at the start of the game will be closer to what was used in DWL. Overall, it's as close as possible to reflecting the state of an RM game at the 2:30 minute mark.

 

[T-West]

In Memb`s Warlords we have normal ammount of resources at the begining, right? (honestly I'm not sure about that).

When doing the maps for Warlords I looked at both Wallhalla and DWL. Wallhalla did not make any adjustments to the starting resources, whereas DWL subtracted 30 Wood, 100 Food, and 2 Sheep (so had 6 Sheep instead of 8). For Warlords we went in between and decided just to subtract 30 Wood. Personally I prefer avoiding the situation where the Chinese start with negative Food.

Ideally the bugs with xs scripts not transferring correctly to spectators would be fixed so we could do adjustments on a civ-by-civ basis (e.g. not removing 30 Wood from the Huns, or perhaps starting the Chinese with 11 instead of 12 Villagers). I think it's still a pretty open question what the "ideal" resources are for the 9-Villager start. I've also seen suggestions about adjusting the Dark Age Scout LoS, or removing the Houses and instead giving the TC more pop space, which I think would be worth testing.

 

[siestes]

At the end of the day, the game is balanced around the standard 3 villager start, every other type of start will come with its shortcomings and caveats regarding balance. We will mitigate those as much as possible so that the experience is smooth for everyone.

 

[King_Marv]

what i really not get is why there is no tournament for semi good players. The same 10 players get tournaments over and over again. Why is that nobody from those big hosts takes 5000 $ from those 100.000$ or 200.000$ to fund a TG tournament or 1v1 tournament for 2000-2300 players with same settings than the main event. Not really healthy for the player base if same people get all chances and all other get none.

not really interesting to watch the same over and over again.

 

[Giuseppe551]

OGN has done just that the past the past couple years, and it's really good (https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/World_Rumble). Of course those aren't "semi good" players, they're top tier semi pro players. If you're talking about the level below that, then it should be obvious why people don't host tournaments for them: no one would watch or care.

 

[King_Marv]

OGN has done just that the past the past couple years, and it's really good (https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/World_Rumble). Of course those aren't "semi good" players, they're top tier semi pro players. If you're talking about the level below that, then it should be obvious why people don't host tournaments for them: no one would watch or care.

I talk about that OGN level .. semi good players top 200-50 spot in the ladder

And people will watch if it’s entertaining. People watched t90 low Elo games for years. Bf gameplay from memb . Also people like Moonfaller, Jonslow etc get good viewers when playing 1v1.

And if you consider that there is no difference for the top S tier tournaments if you have 100k prize or 95k prize and with that other 5k you host something for the rest. What would that be instead 40.000€ for first place he gets 38.000€.

 

[LowEloNobody]

what i really not get is why there is no tournament for semi good players. The same 10 players get tournaments over and over again. Why is that nobody from those big hosts takes 5000 $ from those 100.000$ or 200.000$ to fund a TG tournament or 1v1 tournament for 2000-2300 players with same settings than the main event. Not really healthy for the player base if same people get all chances and all other get none.

not really interesting to watch the same over and over again.

Doesn't dreamhack have a $5000 community tournament?

 

[Potkeny]

Doesn't dreamhack have a $5000 community tournament?

Isnt that community tournament a "bring your own computer" thing, which is not realistic for most people?

 

[King_Marv]

Doesn't dreamhack have a $5000 community tournament?

I have no idea but that announcement only has the S tier infos.

Isnt that community tournament a "bring your own computer" thing, which is not realistic for most people?

But considering this … it’s useless.
Hannover is 700 km for me and most other 2100+ players live outside from Germany. Almost nobody will make it there

 

[Lokalo]

not really interesting to watch the same over and over again.

Well I can somewhat understand you, especially that lately it feels like if you want to follow/watch all tournaments you won't have time to play yourself or do anything often apart watching... But at same time right now competition is huge, for example Tatoh just won RBW and didn't get into top8 in Warlords. Overall is is a huge competition right now and especially with many different maps as per Warlords and there are many people watching, so even if I can understand your stand on this, but saying "not really interesting to watch" is just false if you check viewer numbers.

Also with more tournaments and bigger competition some players have more motivation to reach that level and overall to train and stay in shape.

I talk about that OGN level .. semi good players top 200-50 spot in the ladder

And people will watch if it’s entertaining. People watched t90 low Elo games for years. Bf gameplay from memb . Also people like Moonfaller, Jonslow etc get good viewers when playing 1v1.

And if you consider that there is no difference for the top S tier tournaments if you have 100k prize or 95k prize and with that other 5k you host something for the rest. What would that be instead 40.000€ for first place he gets 38.000€.

Well again I see your point and it might be amazing, I mean 5k out of 100k indeed doesn't change that much. However for example let's take Memb, he already organising lots of tournaments and I doubt he wants to do that in his little spare time. I think bit of an issue with this is that yes, money wise it wouldn't be big, but to make it proper tournament/coverage it would take similar amount of work/prepartion as for big one and viewers would be definetily lower than big tournament. And that might be totally possible to do, just don't think main organisers like Memb would do it as he already doing more than people can or should ask him to do and overall more worth to do S tournament if he can get funding.

I guess T90 titans league kind of has that idea what you are talking about, except that it still is for ~top50 players, but at least that seems similar direction.

And people will watch if it’s entertaining. People watched t90 low Elo games for years. Bf gameplay from memb . Also people like Moonfaller, Jonslow etc get good viewers when playing 1v1.

Well I watched only very little of Moonfaller, so not sure about him, but there are multiple reasons why people watching something, but not sure if your assumption that because of it they would watch tournament of 2k. Some people will watch anything their liked streamer play/cast, although there are usually some very specific reasons why people choose who to watch. I think low elo games is popular because most community is quite low elo and can relate or feel for once "even I'm much better!". I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure viewers of JohnSlow are arena players and I really think many like it of how he manages to win games in such high elo despite being so slow and not even using hotkeys for simple things like ungarison. There is some vibe like, if he is so slow and can have such high elo, maybe I can have too.
For example I dislike bf games of Memb, but many people like it, although I really love his 1v1, but one of reasons why I like it is he is similar rating to me, a little bit lower, but I still can relate a lot, that adds a lot for me while watching.

Anyway we back into an issue, that yes, biggest streamers if they would make such tournament of 2ks probably would get decent viewer numbers, but I don't think there is much reason for them to do tournament with 2ks instead of pro players. While if someone with low viewer numbers trying to do 2k tournament could have decent success, but it most likely would still be more of a tournament for players, while having meh viewers.

 

[Hunyadi_]

I'm starting to think people don't like RM anymore or something. Is it really that hard to sit through a couple of minutes of what is actually some pretty important gameplay? Early game scouting including the search for resources and the lay of the map which influences walling and building placement are all very important aspects that influences the rest of the game

 

[LowEloNobody]

I'm starting to think people don't like RM anymore or something. Is it really that hard to sit through a couple of minutes of what is actually some pretty important gameplay? Early game scouting including the search for resources and the lay of the map which influences walling and building placement are all very important aspects that influences the rest of the game

Yeah, I'd rather skip it. There is still several minutes of absolutely nothing interesting happening with 9 vil start, and when you are watching 10-15 games a day, 2-3 minutes saved each game is meaningful
As someone who truly dislikes EW start, I love 9-vils start.
I think the iteration for the dreamhack LAN will be even better because it partially solves the scouting issues etc.

 

[ninja14]

what i really not get is why there is no tournament for semi good players. The same 10 players get tournaments over and over again. Why is that nobody from those big hosts takes 5000 $ from those 100.000$ or 200.000$ to fund a TG tournament or 1v1 tournament for 2000-2300 players with same settings than the main event. Not really healthy for the player base if same people get all chances and all other get none.

not really interesting to watch the same over and over again.

Sorry Marv but noone is stopping anyone from getting into that top 10 or top 20 players. Its the individual player's own skill which is the key here.

In games with a big enough scene yes you have tournaments for tier 2/3/4 teams/players. AOE scene is too small to have money tournaments for tier 2/3/4 players.

What's happening here is quite natural for a game with such a small scene. I would not expect anything else.