Random Prizes: Expanded Hostilities

MFO has posted the winners of the random prizes, 5 t-shirts donated by BHG, 3 gold stars for MFO donated by MFO, and two silver stars donated by PCA_Frogman and PCA_bydesign.

Go check and see if you're a winner!

Discussion is ongoing still for the T&P Ladder at RoN U, here. Staff signups are here.

And the All Aztec Tournament now has 32 players, good enough for 5 rounds of tourny. Now if everyone shows... *keeps fingers crossed*. And a prize has been announced, though I don't know if I want a free heart removal. :P

Tis only a small update tonight...

RoN Universe T&P Ladder

A few of the fine folks over at RoN Universe are putting together a T&P Ladder, and are calling for input here.

Once things are settled on the ladder format, they are going to look for volunteers to organize and run things, after that, I believe games will commence. So click on over and get involved.

I've glanced down at the little counter at the bottom of my blog here, and found I'm over the 1000 hits mark. Yay me! :P Actually, links from the Strategy Catalogue, the Infidel's game links page, El_Capitan over at Out4Blood's RoN Strategy blog and being linked to the front page of RoN Universe added quite a few to my readers. Thanks everyone for the links, and for reading!

Keep on blogging.... er, Rising!

Tournament Rec'd Games

_RCF_Morrigu has uploaded 32 games from this past Expanded Hostilities tournament. You can find them here, they all have "EH" before the description. Enjoy, and thanks muchly to _RCF_Morrigu for uploading.

In other news, KRG_Redfish's All Aztec Tournament has 24 people signed up. A number of players from Expanded Hostilities are there, including: FSF_Sicilian; El_Capitan; TWC_Pride; Raider; BC_Tascan; AU_wolf; KRG_Hasufel; KRG_Jups; P2TrioT; and li'l ole me. There are probably a few there who smurfed the EH tourney as well. :P

That's all for now!

Tournament Results!

Well, today I wasn't able to log on to talk to people or see the results as they happened, but I do know the winner of the tournament.

Congratulations to DaRq_Vorfidus for winning Expanded Hostilities! He walks off with $250 dollars in prize money. Seeded 13th, the swath he cut through the players included Randy (seeded 17th), PCA_Frogman (seeded 1st), AU_bird (seeded 9th) and ROSA_SHIMAKO (seeded 11th).

Tascan, an unseeded player, won second prize, $150 dollars. A surprise in the tournament, on the way to the finals he defeated PCA_yuu_rerise (seeded 8th), One Tough Raider (seeded 12th) and FrustrationLife (seeded 6th). Not a bad giant killer. =)

It was cool to see many of the well known players in the RoN community playing, as well as quite a few up and comers to watch.

Now, if they'd get the rec games uploaded, we can download and dissect them. As mentioned before, RoN Universe, MFO and Anarchy Unlimited have recorded games from the tournament. At RoNU and MFO, look for the ones with July 24th as the date, and July 25th at Anarchy Unlimited.

El_Capitan has interviews with Semi- and Quarter-Finalists at Out4Blood's RoN Blog, perma-link is here. And now, in a late edit of my post, the Finalists are interviewed as well.

I hope more recorded games will go up, since I was told that was a requirement. :P It will be nice to watch how people played. Personally I could use a bit of help with my game, so download it and critique away.

As a parting note, a huge thank you to those running the Tourney, especially Zhou, for the work in keeping the games going. A big shout to BHG for their support (and prizes), and to MFO for organizing the whole shebang (and their prizes). Don't wait too long before hosting another, alright?

As always, keep on rising!

Premature death of Rise of Nations...?

After talking with a few folks in the lobbies of Room 9 and Room 8, I got the distinct impression that not a few people believe that RoN is pretty much finished, that Big Huge Games is going to move on to something else.  The lack of patches or updates stands as silent testimony to this possibility.

StarCraft is still one of the most popular games being played, often with more people concurrently online than the entire population of any of the top ten MMORPGs.  And StarCraft is several years old, and many people probably cut their teeth on it in the RTS genre.  But, Blizzard has shown much more support for their games (Diablo, WarCraft, StarCraft) than it seems BHG does to RoN.

While I personally don't believe that RoN is going anywhere soon, there are a few things that concern me.  There were 176 people who signed up for Extended Hostilities, yet many did not show up for their matches.  I had three byes, before playing my one game... Are people quitting the game?  Or was the fact that signups started one month before the tournament took place?

And, there's a large, glaring bug in RoN:T&P that has not been addressed yet, as far as I can tell, that of the Red Fort causing Out of Sync errors.

I'm going to pay much more attention to the news coming out of BHG, to see if I can sniff out what the current direction RoN is taking, whether it's done and they are looking for a new game, or maybe if we'll see something in the next six months or so...

Keep on Rising!