Well... what a harrowing day it has been. For those of you who haven't been following events very closely, here's a capsule summary of the day's happenings.

Today was the fallback day for Week Three of the Qualifying Round. There were 59 matches scheduled to be played at various times of the day. Unfortunately, something went wrong with bungie.net... our best guess is that several processes on the loginserver went rampant and decided to start eating CPU and memory.

This meant that logins were very slow or completely impossible for a huge majority of people. The buddy and order tabs stopped working, and the find command became unreliable (not working or not finding people that were online). Rooms crashed repeatedly, and ghost games started proliferating. Room changes were non-deterministic and orders found themselves getting split up when changing chatrooms.

In short, it was a living hell for people trying to run an organised tournament on bungie.net. However, I think we coped reasonably well under the circumstances, and a lot of people did play their matches with varying degrees of success.

Because such a lot of people were unable to make it onto bungie.net, it would be grossly unfair to start enforcing forfeits due to non-attendance. We did award a few forfeits, but only to orders who were known (or inferred) not to be continuing in MWC99. If your order was forfeited out today and you were actually trying to attend, contact us ASAP.

So, what happens if you didn't play your match today? Well, a new fallback time has been assigned for you on Monday evening. We earnestly hope that Bungie will be able to fix the problems with the metaserver when they get in to work on Monday, and things will go smoothly on Monday. If the metaserver is still misbehaving, then we will try again on Tuesday. HOWEVER, this is not a license to miss your fallback time on Monday! If the metaserver is working and orders don't turn up, we will start declaring forfeits! Be there.

We realise that the new fallback times have been assigned very arbitrarily at short notice and that orders may have trouble making it onto bungie.net on a weeknight. We are very, very sorry for any inconvenience that this causes, but we have to get the results for the QR sorted out very soon so that the Double Elimination seeds may be calculated. If your order absolutely cannot make it to the fallback time by any means, let us know and we may be able to fix things.

Once again, you can contact us by email or on the MWC99 Forum if you wish to discuss anything.

[06/20/99 21:42 CDT | Butcher]

Over the last three weeks, we've had quite a bit of feedback from teams over the maps to be used in the Double Elimination ladder. We've also thought over our original choices, and some new third-party maps have come to light.

So we've made some changes to the maps and games to be played.

• R2 Venice Allies swaps with R6 Divide Allies.
• R3 Divide Captures is changed to Keep Across The River Territories.
• R4 Dark Canyon Assassin 14 min is changed to Captures 16 min, and switches places with R4 Untamed Allies.
• R5 Creep CTF is changed to Smells Like Death In Here (game to be advised).
• R7 Calm Territories is moved to R6, replacing Lichen Unto Death Captures. In its place is Caer Cadarn (game to be advised).
• R7 Dark Canyon FR is changed to Great Divide Assassin.
• R7 Desert Assassin 16 min is changed to Desert Territories 12 min.
• Grand Final: Winter Territories is changed to Creep Territories.

Note that no changes have been made to the coming week's games. Good luck practicing them!

[06/20/99 05:09 CDT | Butcher]

Sometimes, a player's computer can crash while loading, causing them to appear still to be in the game but be unresponsive. We have amended the rules so that this is sufficient grounds for a team to request their one free restart per match.

This ruling is not retroactive, so it does not apply to match GA16 between KoA and OMAG (although this match is the reason why the rules are being changed).

Good luck with your games this weekend!

[06/19/99 00:28 CDT | Butcher]

It seems that we need to point out a clause in the rules, as most teams don't appear to be aware of it.

If you eliminate your opponent in any game that has flags or balls in it, the game is scored as if you controlled all of these objects.

In other words, you don't have to worry about killing your opponent before you tag all the flags in a game of Territories. If you eliminate them, you get points for all the flags.

[06/18/99 02:25 CDT | Butcher]

Because quite a few people have complained that certain information is hard to find on the MWC99 website, we've decided to turn this page into a 'portal' that lets you access more content faster. Let us know what you think of the changes.

You may have to hit shift-Reload to flush your image cache of old news headline images.

[06/16/99 22:08 CDT | Butcher]

Finally, we have managed to clear out our backlog of submitted match reviews and put them all up on the website. This means that a lot of orders' threat ratings have been updated as a consequence of the reviews. Check out the new reviews!.

Anyone is welcome to review matches. Just follow the submission guidelines... we'd love to hear from you.

In other news, MWC99 staff are looking for somebody to manage the Highlights section that will kick off at the start of the Double Elimination ladder. This person would watch some or all of the films for each round, and select a Match of the Week, Team of the Week and Play of the Week, possibly writing some or all of the featured articles.

It's a big undertaking, definitely 10+ hours a week in the early rounds. If you are interested, let us know, and tell us what your picks would be from this week's matches, and why.

[06/16/99 07:56 CDT | Butcher]

Rastlin of the Madrigal Chamber of Commerce has conducted an interview with a few of the MWC99 staff, which you can now read on our website. Enjoy!

[06/15/99 20:45 CDT | Butcher]

The rules concerning DE advancement and seeding have been changed to reflect the use of the new average-points value.

For those of you too lazy to read the rules, here is a brief summary of how teams are ranked for DE advancement and seeding. The following rule ranks two teams relative to one another:

• The team with more match wins is ranked higher (ties count for 0.5 of a match win).
• If both teams have the same number of match wins, the team with the higher average-points value is ranked higher.
• If both teams have the same average-points value, the team with the higher QR seed is ranked higher.

This is used in two ways; firstly, within each pool, the top four teams by this method advance to the DE ladder. Secondly, the sixty-four teams that advance are ranked by this method to determine their seed for the DE ladder.

The Teams by Rank list has now been updated to use this ranking. That means that once you remove the thirty-two teams who don't advance to the DE ladder, the ranking on this page is equal to the DE seeds that will be assigned.

[06/15/99 20:15 CDT | Butcher]

To cope with the recent spate of forfeits, we have created the QR average points value, which measures a team's average point total over all matches, not counting any matches that they won by forfeit (but counting matches that they forfeited). Teams are now ranked by this value on the team list.

The rules for which teams advance to the DE ladder, and for DE seeding, will be reviewed in light of this change after the Triumvirate has had a chance to talk it over.

[06/15/99 00:29 CDT | Butcher]

We here at the MWC99 are pleased to announce that Diamond Multimedia have joined the ranks of our sponsors. They have graciously contributed three Viper V770 Ultra graphics accelerators, utilising the NVidia Riva TNT2 chipset to provide the fastest 3D acceleration available anywhere for your PC. These cards have been added to the first (x2) and second place prize pools.

[06/15/99 00:13 CDT | Butcher]

Over the last several weeks, the teams competing for the Cup have competed against each other in a series of exhibition matches played across the land, from Covenant to Rhi'anon. Until now, they have been kept away from Muirthemne, where the grand stadium that will house the Opening Ceremonies slowly takes shape.

Reporters from the Madrigal Times were today the first outsiders allowed inside the tightly guarded walls, and we have their exclusive report.

Check out this, and other articles, in the latest breaking news from Muirthemne and across the land.

[06/14/99 23:35 CDT | Butcher]

Matchups for QR Week 3 have been posted on the website, and teams are being notified by email even as we speak. Every team has to play a match against the last two teams in its pool this week, completing the round-robin Qualifying Round.

Once all of the matches have been completed, we will be able to determine which sixty-four teams advance to the Double Elimination ladder (see the QR and DE rules for more details) and the Myth World Cup proper will begin.

This week, the warriors will be separated from the villagers. Play hard, play fair... and win.

[06/14/99 23:29 CDT | Butcher]

Results for the second week of the Qualifying Round have been entered into the website. We are currently processing roster changes for teams, and once these are complete the matchups for Week 3 will be mailed out.

Please note that matches GH25 and DW24 aren't really forfeited; the teams in question (SM, SK, ID and ~?~) haven't sent in their results yet, and we got tired of waiting. Once we get the results we'll put them up.

In other notes: nobody has raised any serious objections to the proposed forfeit scoring, so we will be implementing that later on today.

[06/14/99 21:45 CDT | Butcher]