Return of the Clans has come to a close. First and foremost, congratulations to tournament champions Aftermath for their strong performance against GL in the finals! aM played exciting, aggressive AoE throughout the tournament, and while a couple of teams put up a strong fight against them, ultimately no one could take a series from them. The second-place finisher GamerLegion also deserve congrats for their performance in an extremely competitive tournament, as do semi-finalists White Wolf Palace and Deceptive Baguettes.
I'd also like to congratulate Combi Team and Annotoph, winners of the Surprise Team and Rising Star awards, respectively.
Credit where it's due
I think RotC was an overwhelming success in terms of number and quality of signups, viewership numbers, and, most importantly, entertaining games. There are many people who contributed to the tournament's success, and I would like to take a moment to thank some of them.
First off, the tournament could never have achieved what it did without Huehuecoyotl22. When I first talked to Huehuecoyotl22 in mid-December of last year asking for advice about hosting a tournament, all I brought to him was an idea to have a 3v3 tournament with some rough plans for a map pool and civ/map draft. He took this vague idea and turned it into the hugely successful tournament that it was. We are lucky to have him in our community, and I am grateful for all the work he did for this tourney.
Our other admin, Nova, also deserves a ton of credit. In addition to his work as an admin he has been prolific in casting the tournament, not to mention the fact that he is responsible for the tournament's great graphics, such as the tournament logo, banner, map animations, etc.
RotC featured a diverse group of maps, and I am grateful for the map scripters who created them. Particular thanks goes to TheMadCADer and Huehuecoyotl22, who were there to iron out the kinks in the maps and address anybugs unexpected features as we discovered them.
This tournament was covered in a variety of different languages by a group of casters too large to thank individually. These streamers provided a venue for people to spectate the event and drew attention to the tournament. You can have a tournament with all the exciting matches you want, but if no one watches it it's hard to call it a success. My gratitude goes out especially to those who casted the earlier stages of the tournament as well, laying the groundwork and building hype for the later stages, but ultimately I'm thankful for everyone who covered any part of the tourney.
When Hue first suggested a format allowing for up to 64 teams signing up, I thought that we would need at most 32 slots for a tournament with, by the scene's current standards, a relatively unimpressive prize pool. Hue turned out to be right, as he was so many times in running this tournament, when we ultimately saw 58 teams sign up. This highlights the next group I'd like to recognize; the players. Throughout the tournament the level of play was consistently high, and we saw some teams that clearly put a lot of work into strategizing for the maps and settings, leading to entertaining games and, in some cases, some substantial upsets.
And finally, I'd like to thank the viewers. Simply put, the viewers are the lifeblood of the community, without whom there could be no substantial competitive AoE scene.
Feedback
The other reason for making this post is to ask for feedback on how the tournament went. I'm interested in hearing from anyone who was involved; players, casters, viewers, etc.
If you would like to provide feedback somewhere less public than this thread, feel free to DM me here or on Discord at enmipho#7011
Below I will bring up a few aspects of the tournament in detail and talk about what I learned from them. This is mostly for people interested in the tournament - you don't need to read it to give feedback! If you do read it and your thoughts differ from my conclusions though, please do let me know. Also I see because I was a bit late with posting this thread there's been a lot of feedback in the Announcement thread, I'll be sure to check that out.
Takeaways
Map Pool:
Boars/Laming:
Prizepool:
I'd also like to congratulate Combi Team and Annotoph, winners of the Surprise Team and Rising Star awards, respectively.
Credit where it's due
I think RotC was an overwhelming success in terms of number and quality of signups, viewership numbers, and, most importantly, entertaining games. There are many people who contributed to the tournament's success, and I would like to take a moment to thank some of them.
First off, the tournament could never have achieved what it did without Huehuecoyotl22. When I first talked to Huehuecoyotl22 in mid-December of last year asking for advice about hosting a tournament, all I brought to him was an idea to have a 3v3 tournament with some rough plans for a map pool and civ/map draft. He took this vague idea and turned it into the hugely successful tournament that it was. We are lucky to have him in our community, and I am grateful for all the work he did for this tourney.
Our other admin, Nova, also deserves a ton of credit. In addition to his work as an admin he has been prolific in casting the tournament, not to mention the fact that he is responsible for the tournament's great graphics, such as the tournament logo, banner, map animations, etc.
RotC featured a diverse group of maps, and I am grateful for the map scripters who created them. Particular thanks goes to TheMadCADer and Huehuecoyotl22, who were there to iron out the kinks in the maps and address any
This tournament was covered in a variety of different languages by a group of casters too large to thank individually. These streamers provided a venue for people to spectate the event and drew attention to the tournament. You can have a tournament with all the exciting matches you want, but if no one watches it it's hard to call it a success. My gratitude goes out especially to those who casted the earlier stages of the tournament as well, laying the groundwork and building hype for the later stages, but ultimately I'm thankful for everyone who covered any part of the tourney.
When Hue first suggested a format allowing for up to 64 teams signing up, I thought that we would need at most 32 slots for a tournament with, by the scene's current standards, a relatively unimpressive prize pool. Hue turned out to be right, as he was so many times in running this tournament, when we ultimately saw 58 teams sign up. This highlights the next group I'd like to recognize; the players. Throughout the tournament the level of play was consistently high, and we saw some teams that clearly put a lot of work into strategizing for the maps and settings, leading to entertaining games and, in some cases, some substantial upsets.
And finally, I'd like to thank the viewers. Simply put, the viewers are the lifeblood of the community, without whom there could be no substantial competitive AoE scene.
Feedback
The other reason for making this post is to ask for feedback on how the tournament went. I'm interested in hearing from anyone who was involved; players, casters, viewers, etc.
If you would like to provide feedback somewhere less public than this thread, feel free to DM me here or on Discord at enmipho#7011
Below I will bring up a few aspects of the tournament in detail and talk about what I learned from them. This is mostly for people interested in the tournament - you don't need to read it to give feedback! If you do read it and your thoughts differ from my conclusions though, please do let me know. Also I see because I was a bit late with posting this thread there's been a lot of feedback in the Announcement thread, I'll be sure to check that out.
Takeaways
Map Pool:
One of the ideas of the tournament was to remove Arabia completely. I've thought that in many of the past few tournaments Arabia is often seen as a "neutral" map, a game 1 map that should be roughly equally familiar to both teams. The map settings in RotC were consciously made to move away from this idea. The intent of the map settings was that different teams have different strengths, and should be given an opportunity to play to those strengths. The map pool was made up of roughly one third open maps, one third closed maps, and one third mixed/hybrid maps. The ban-heavy draft was done with the intent of letting game 1 be played on as close to a "neutral" map as possible, a map that either team had every opportunity to pick or ban, but decided not to. Overall, I was fairly happy with the map pool and settings. One thing that can be improved on is making the lobby settings as homogenous as possible across different maps. E.g. if at all possible, if BF is in a map pack and should be played with shared exploration, make shared exploration a part of the map script so teams don't have to remember to adjust lobby settings between games. Same with team positions (though I'm not sure if that's possible) etc.
Boars/Laming:
One experimental setting this tournament had was making laming boars or other boar-like animals (elephants, etc.) illegal. Though this lead to a couple of unfortunate situations where players forgot or didn't know this rule, overall I was happy with it. I do think that it doesn't make sense for every map in the pool, BF being an example of a map where the rule isn't a great fit.
Prizepool:
Realistically, the $5k USD prizepool for this event was small relative to other TG tournaments with so many big names playing. We did not reach out to Microsoft for funding, as we judged that our odds of being accepted were remote, due both to how quickly the tournament was thrown together (planning started ~3 weeks before the announcement) and other factors regarding the format I won't get into here. On the one hand it would of course have been much better for the tournament to have been planned further ahead, as this would have heightened our chances of securing funding, and certainly if I'm involved in future tournies I will try to plan them further ahead. On the other hand, though, had we pushed the tourney start date further back it would likely have conflicted with BoA and undermined its purpose of giving teams some competitive stakes to play for together to de-rust before bigger TG tournaments later this year.
Last edited: