Multiplay i28 LAN Preview

[Baldrick]

With just under a month before Multiplay's Insomnia28 LAN complete with £5000 BF2 Tournament, we take a look at what is instore for the competitors.

In just over 28 days Multiplay UK's i28 LAN begins at Newbury Racecourse, UK with up to a maximum of 1100 competitors, who will compete in tournaments for various games, from Dance Dance Revolution to the UK finals for the World Cyber Games, and of course the £5000 Battlefield 2 Tournament, where the winners walk away with £3000 and free entry to i29, the next Multiplay LAN. However, if you are hoping to compete then there is a need to sign up fast as less than 100 places remain for this event. The Battlefield 2 Tournament has been again sponsored by EA and this makes for some nice prizes; £3000 and free entry to i28 for the winners, £1500 for the runners up and £500 for 3rd place, which you would expect to see taken by i27's victors Team Dignitas who will send their full squad, Reason Gaming and NoFear Gaming, though their will be some stiff competition in the form of MPUK and Conflict.
The tournament takes the place of a group stage followed by a single-elimination knockout competition starting at the quarter finals on Mashtuur City, then onto Gulf of Oman and Strike at Karkand which is the map for the final. The competition will be played on the latest patch for BF2, which looks like it will be 1.4, so it will be interesting to see how these changes effect the style of play seen here, and I managed to talk to the tournament admin Wubster to ask him some questions.


First off, can you introduce yourself and tell us what is your role within the LAN?
I am Wubster, my role at the Lan events is to try and ensure that we run a good quality Battlefield Tournament. Together with my team of admins (Usually Boffbowsh and Tom) we get the teams sorted out, make sure they know the rules and try and get them into servers ontime for matches to start.

Looking at the signups for the i28 bf2 tournament you can see a lot more "big-names" from the UK scene compared to previous events. How will this effect the seeding for the competition, especially as some of these teams are i-series virgins? Do you take online performance into account or purely previous i-series success?
There are indeed more teams signed up for this event and i do notice some larger clans coming along, its great to see that finally we are getting the recognition to pull these teams to the events. The previous event drew a huge following of BF2 to us and with the same prize money being offered by EA Games we see yet again more and more teams wanting to be involved. Seeding is always a fun job to do, it is based not only on how they have done at previous competitions but also on the admins
knowledge of the teams from online play. Dignitas will of course get seeded 1st place

The Multiplay site says that the tournament will take place on the latest patch, but as we don't have a timescale for the release of 1.4, how do you weigh up the patch vs practise time for teams, for example, if the patch is released three days before the competition, will it still be used?
Patches are always a pain for tournaments, If it is released three days prior then we would talk to EA and see which patch they preferred us to use, i would expect the newer patch as already it has proven to run more stable on the test servers. We do appreciate that patches mean people have to change tactics quickly to overcome the obstacles that it has brought to the game, however we also find that teams adopt very quickly, meaning there is no loss of competition. The 1.4 patch does look to have made some very good improvements especially for server stability which was the biggest problem for us. Content wise... well you would have to wait to see what the public say on that one

The maplist is the same as previous i-series Battlefield 2 competitions, how did you decide on that initial maplist and why have you decided to stick with it?
The first ever tournament we run was done by a draw of the hat type approach, although it was amusing and fun to do people prefer to know what maps they will be playing, i guess so they can just practice those maps and not all of them. The choice of maps we have now were basically chosen from the community, we wanted good balanced maps that would mean every game would be interesting, we took a couple of maps straight out as we knew the community really didn't like them. The final being
karkand, reason, its a great map to watch, both teams have the chance to really attack and really get into defence. Where as other maps there could be lock outs on both sides this map means you can only be blocked out on one side of this map. All finals have been really close, making it superb to commentate and watch.

The knockout stages are single-elimination, why have you chosen this rather than the more favourable double-elimination?
The BF series of games has traditionally always followed the "World Cup style" to the competition. Double Elimination would not be able to be completed in one weekend, as matches take up to an hour from start to finish, so we knew that couldn't be an option, not with over 20 odd teams turning up. World Cup style allows each team to play at least 3/4 games and get to play some of the larger teams that they normally woudln't get a chance to play.

Is there anything else you would like to add?
In closing we would like to thank EA Games for their continued support at the i-series.

Once again, BFGeeks will be providing you with coverage from the event.