The Inter Open Cup is still running, so maybe it is to early to make a feedback thread, but as unfortuantly we lost our games yesterday it is over for me already. I have some thoughts I want to share about it and don't want to wait 2 more weeks and let my feelings about the tournament fade before posting.

First of all, I want to thank robo for orgaizing this tournament. It has been huge fun to play and maybe even more fun to prepare strategies for it. Thank you. Thank you as well to everyone who was involved.

I think you have done the AoC community and I want to ilustrate why I think so. I know it started with the idea of making the Intermediate lobby more popular. To be honest, I do not see that happening as most players still play MS or NPL. But I think having a tournament for the 1300-1700 players is great.

Reading on the AoC-Zone, you can see people saying that the top players might be tired of having to many tournaments latly. You can read that AoC is dieing because lower players spectate more then they play. You can read top players complain that it is hard to find games because there are so few new players improving and reaching their level.

And then there came this Inter Open Cup. Players with 1300-1700 haven't had many tournaments latly and aren't tired of them. We LEOs did participate in some tournaments (Nomad 2 and Clan Masters), getting kicked out by Teams like NaBs but still having a lot of fun, (to those who don't know us we are all <1650). But there are almost no other teams in our rating range or even below playing in pro tournaments.

But playing in tournaments is a great thing. You for with a team, you comunicate, you develop strategies. You have some guarateed games at a given time were you can meetup with your frineds without having to wait ages for a game. You have a higher feeling of competition and want to improve your skills and teamplay to advance. All of that is great fun.
But having fun is not the only benefit. By playing like that and preparing for that, I am sure you improve your skills a lot as well. I cought myself playing much more the last weeks then I eved did before and improving my rating from ~1550 (both 1v1 and Tg) to ~1630 (both 1v1 and Tg).
In preperation of TG strats I compared my build orders with those of my allies. That had some nice results as well. For example we found out that my boom on bf with both players booming was much stronger then the one of a teammate. It appeared that he did wheelbarrow to early when he couldn't afford it (and some other things). Having noticed that we discussed which build orders to use and that improved his boom a lot. I think we hadn't noticed it without the frame of tournament preperation.

And that is why I think it is great to have tournaments for players in this rating area. It is fun, it gets them to play and it gets them to improve. Of course it doesn't attract viewers like pro tournaments, of course pro tournaments should outnumber low rated tournaments (noob teams are allowed to participate there anyway and I think more noob teams should play there as well). But concidering what you can read on AoC zone, having tournaments in this rating area regulary might be exactly what is needed to keep the game going strong.

That is why I hope there will be more tournaments in this rating area to follow. I like the idea of tournaments played on a single map (I never played the map nomad before the nomad tournament) and would hope for a arena 3v3/4v4 tournament. I'd also love to see tournaments with pro tournament settings to follow. Let us noobs prepare homemaps on maps played less often and award teams that try something new by preparing them.


So, thank you again for hosting the tournament.