Team USA Cycle 2 Hontour weekend Disaster

Thought everyone involved in this whole debacle deserved some sort of a response from us, so here goes nothing. 

First off I think it’s probably best that we start off with an apology to everyone for letting them down this weekend and not being able to complete our matches.

Secondly I think it’s fair to say that HoN’s competitive scene will be entirely dead after HTS2 & Dreamhack Winter come to an end. If you don’t believe that then you should probably just stop reading now. It’s no secret that my focus has been switched to Dota 2, I barely pub and show up (sometimes) exclusively for my HoNTour matches. However I have not given up on HoN. I still like HoN, it’s a fun game and playing competitively for the past two years has been more fun than anything else I could imagine. Most of this is just fluff before I explain the events that occurred this weekend but I thought you might want to know where my mindset is individually.

Jumping to the events preceding this weekend – Immediately after losing to team Xcet in the winners bracket I contacted our most likely opponents of TMSR and told them of our upcoming weekend. Which included not only HoNTour but also Big Point Battle (Stay Free was one of the invited 8 teams) as well as the NA MLG Dota 2 League Qualifiers. 

So looking at our raw schedule:

	Saturday	Sunday
12:00pm EST	BPB bo1 – Hontour bo3	BPB*if we won - *Hontour* bo3
1:00 pm EST	BPB bo1 - *hontour* cont.	BPB*if we won - *Hontour*cont.
2:00 pm EST	MLG bo1 - *hontour* cont.	MLG bo3 – *Hontour* cont
3:00 pm EST	MLG bo1 – Hontour bo3	MLG bo3 cont – Hontour bo3
4:00 pm EST	MLG bo1 - *hontour* cont.	*Hontour* cont
5:00 pm EST	MLG bo1 - *hontour* cont.	*Hontour* cont
6:00 pm EST	MLG bo3

What a schedule, nearly impossible right? Pretty much Big Point Battle day 2 would have to be sacrificed but that’s ok because the odds of us making it that far honestly weren’t that good. DOABLE

After talking to both Handsken and Moonmeander on Monday we were able to reschedule the first Saturday match to Friday at 1:00pm EST and the second Saturday match to early Sunday morning at 9:00am EST.

On Wednesday the individual from JoinDota who invited us informed me that the Big Point Battle had been rescheduled to Sunday/Monday. I told him at first that we would try and make it work but instead decided it would be best for us to just give our spot to another team.

So let’s take a look at the new adjusted schedule w/o BPB:

	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
9:00 am EST			Hontour bo3
10:00 am EST			Hontour bo3 cont
11:00 am EST			Hontour bo3 cont
12:00 pm EST			Hontour bo3 vs. Pew
1:00 pm EST	Hontour bo3		Hontour bo3 vs. Pew
2:00 pm EST	Hontour bo3 cont	MLG D2 Qualifier bo1	MLG d2 bo3 ezwin
3:00 pm EST	Hontour bo3 cont	MLG D2 Qualifier bo1	Hontour bo5 vs. SG
4:00 pm EST		MLG D2 Qualifier bo1	Hontour bo5 vs. SG
5:00 pm EST		MLG D2 Qualifier bo1	Hontour bo5 vs. SG
6:00 pm EST		MLG D2 Qualifier bo3	Hontour bo5 vs. SG

Sunday looks disastrous but it does appear do-able based on a few things. The bo3 vs. Pew needs to end early and the MLG bo3 needs to be quick as well. We also would probably have to use our 30 minutes of extended time before the SG bo5 and start around 3:30pm EST.

As you all know Sunday did not go as planned. So what really did go wrong that prevented us from finishing the schedule as planned?

1.       Moonmeander was late for the agreed upon 9:00am match.

a.       They claimed they had a Tankafett ready to ring 5 minutes before the timer ran out but never once mentioned his name or that they would need a stand-in in replace of Moon who simply overslept. With 20 seconds left on the timer they asked for 5 additional minutes to find Moon.

2.       We were forced to play TMSR at 12pm EST by a questionable admin decision by Inklin

a.       In the winners bracket final of Cycle 1 our team was 1-2 minutes late for our match and we were not allowed to re-host the lobby because “Chessie had already left to go “house-hunting” at 10pm CET in Amsterdam”

                                                               i.      Everyone knew this was a lie as it was his last night in Amsterdam and he wanted to go party, which is fine. We were late, congrats.

3.       We lost the first game against TMSR (I’m going to blame the RNG 2 minute invis rune which has ruined plenty of games over HoN’s history)

a.       This made us 30 minutes late to our MLG match, which made us 30 minutes late to our match against Team XceT

4.       We were unable to simply forfeit  game 1 against Team Excellent and start down 0-1 

In the aftermath of all of this I had some time to think about what we should have done. The right thing to do would be to forfeit the HoN or Dota match and commit to one of them. But the penalty for forfeiting HoNTour matches is just too damn costly. We did our best in a rough situation and that’s that.

Before people say our Dota match wasn’t worth anything we actually qualified for the MLG NA Dota 2 League if we place top 4 in, which is likely, we will earn a spot at a LAN in Florida where we’d have a chance to compete for 10k 1^st place 5k 2^nd place and a spot at MLG Columbus against all the big name Dota teams across the world.

Anyways thanks for reading, I know it was long. Feel free to leave comments below, avoid anything racist or homophobic.  Feel free to tweet at me @ppdDota!