Congratulations & Thank Yous!
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This comes in a bit late but I felt it was a good thing to have a conclusion message of some sort. The tournament had its share of positive and negative which I will delve in later on in that post but I'm happy I got to host it with Shadey. It was a nice way back in hosting tournaments on NW and hopefully the first of many. But first, let's congratulate the three teams which made it to the podium that Sunday evening. 
1st. Proud Boys
Movement - Fwuffy - Shadey - Ledger - Marquez - Python - KORE - Rune - Jammo - Fralla - Golden
Winner winner, McDonald Dinner. Proud Boys' domination at the top continues as they pick-up their third win in as many participations. The team lead by Movement and Fwuffy is undoubtedly the hot prospect of this moment and showed once more why they had to be feared by all the other teams of the circuit. For future tournaments, they will definitely appear as the heavy favourite and the team to take down. But for now, they enjoy yet another trophy!
2nd. Plebs
Bagins - DOMI - Ivan - Obelix - Mike - Elsse - Voluble - Nero - Hypno - Stark - Steinmann
Plebs was another serious title contender this European Groupfighting Tournament and it's no surprise to see them reaching the podium for this edition. Their road throughout the brackets was a bit scrappy at times, but Bagins and his men showed-up when required and gave their grand final opponent a ran for their money. The rivalry between these two seems now clearly established and there is no doubt that Plebs, now re-branded as Poosy, will be aiming at taking that number one spot out of PB's hands as soon as possible. Congratulations on your silver medals chaps.
3rd. Cazadores
Tigere - Heinrich - Bunter_Igel - Gerher - Wolpi - Rikkert - Anubis - Tiberias - Troister - Higen - Tommy
With a new line-up composed of French and British reinforcements, Cazadores had some questions marks above their heads coming in this tournament. They answered most of them as they secured a well deserved third place but their faith could have been sailed way earlier in the competition as they fell down earlier than expected in the lower bracket. However, tough situations also often reveal the true quality of your squad and far from sinking, Cazadores took things back under control as they made their way back through the lower bracket. There goes our bronze team, well played!
Also a big thank you to all the teams which attended this edition of the EGT and contributed to making it successful. I was especially impressed by Animals' performance and will be looking at what they can do for future competitions. Extremely pleased that the KGL was able to gather a team as well as seeing the debuts of Giant Killers and Sith Lords. And thankful for our usual suspects CCCP, TBE, Kamikaze and VergeVerte (Infame) coming back for yet another tournament.
Can't help but mention that this tournament wouldn't have been possible without Shadey. He was the one who brought me back into hosting and due to my busy schedules close to the tournament's start, did most of the work, graphics, paid the servers and did set them up, did the updates and talks with teams in order to make sure this event was as successful as possible. His qualities as a host are second to none and I am happy that our community can count on such an asset to provide professional and fair competitions in the future.
Big thank to Fwuffy who also did a lot of the work behind the scene, helping us in different areas such as the ruleset and also advising Shadey when I was away. Always glad to be able counting on someone of your stature.
Last but not least, thanks to our referee's team which showed-up (mostly on short notice) and contributed to making this tournament possible. Godfreid, Lone, BlackBeard and Bobertini, you guys rock.
As for the tournament itself, there are obvious improvements which we'll be looking at making for future tournaments. Some of these were out of our hands like the double-elimination format which wasn't our format of choice but one we had to opt for because of the number of teams.
- Making sure both servers are available at least 30min beforehand (aka no events being played on them right before the tournament's start) so we don't have to rush the 'set-up' phase.
- With a different format, the 'lags' issue should be mostly solved as what caused the bad server performances early in the tournament was the limit of 100 slots being quickly reached on the upper server, something which won't happen if you use the regular format and sort out teams in groups and on two different servers from scratch.
- Avoiding one arena being left empty while some matches could be played in the meantime.
The chat was massively overlooked and ended-up being pretty cancerous but this the case when you gather 100+ players on a server, most of them having past grudges and rivalries - when they simply can't stand each other - or just loving to troll (hello VV). It's a fact that the admins cannot take care of that while referring matches and it was a utopia but to think we would manage to handle it. In future tournaments of this format (everything being played on a night) I don't think we'll aim at being as restrictive in the rules, as there is simply no point doing it if you can't take of it properly on the tournament's day.
The rule on tag and name will stay and got respected by a majority at the start. The rule on GUID will only stay if we are 100% to use scripts, else we won't bother with it.
Overall the tournament was still competitive and I feel we were successful at avoiding shady business and unfair decisions or rigged brackets. Most teams finished in 1h15/1h30 of playtime which is the perfect timing for a tournament, and it wasn't excessively long for the last teams either. Once more, thanks for joining us and we hope to see you in our future tournaments!
