Big wrap-up of the 1. European Narrative Team-TTS-Event

Finally, after three months and with one week of N4 in our hands, the 1. European Narrative Team-TTS-Event (ENTE) is done. I really have to thank everyone participating in this to make this happen and turn out as such a pleasant experience! Special thanks go out to AssaultUnicorn who volunteered to write the narrative for this event and delivered a great story, to Whyrocknodie who not only supported the great Gokudo Intervention Group, but also helped me a lot with TTS-issues and made some maps for the event and to Badlazzor, Cabaray and Ayadan, designing great maps for the event! But besides these great guys, I have to thank all participants for all the patience, for all the discussions and for all the willingness to do some extra games and fill in gaps where they appeared. It was a real pleasure to organize this event and also play in it. The idea to get together players from all over Europe, let the metas clash and find out, whose playstile may be the best and have that fit into an interesting lore, seemed difficult first, but turned out great. From Denmark to Spain and from Spain to Russia, 42 players came together.

 

With a great run in the first three rounds, Bisounours scored enough points to start the last round without any danger in their lead. The New Slav Meta could secure their second place well and finally show that Bisounours was not invulnerable. Close to that, the spanish team “Ens la pela!”, the german team "Half Human, Half Cookie" and the lithuanian guys from LDK fought intense for the first three ranks.

 

In the end, some teams secured their results with a broad range of good players, as Bisounours with two players in the top 6 in the individual ranking, while Karolis (1), Minass (2) and Perzan (3) managed to peak out in their overall well running teams. Only Karolis managed to score all possible 12TPs! A closer look on the played factions and their relative success, shows a dominance of TAK, followed by Varuna with only one player in front of Tohaa. It needs to be noted that some Byes due to not scheduled games bias some results here, but not in a bigger manner. 

 

 

Besides the fight for the first place, a great dynamic evolved around the midfield with clear victories in one round and bitter losses in the other round, but also with tight games around similar skilled opponents.

From my point of view (the survey is still ongoing and I have not checked the feedback there), the event was quite fun and a nice success. Nevertheless, some adjustments would be done for further incarnations. While maps need to be designed more carefully and more diverse, some terrain-rulings may need to be handled differently in the future. One big issue besides this always was the long timeframe per round and maybe for the whole event. Hopefully we will never again have to run this in a lock-down/Covid-19 context where some people are under lockdown, some have to work even harder then and others are still able to play real games and go on holiday. So in the future, two weeks per round may be better to avoid loosing focus. An other option could be to shorten things to three rounds, but with the high variety of possible outcomes in the team-scores, a fourth round was the better way to secure a clear victory. Personally, having one game every three weeks left enough time to do all the other things needed to be done in life and in the hobby, so the pace turned out quite good.The process to schedule the games between the teams may be the bottleneck here, since it takes some time if you want to squeeze out the full tactical potential here. I am not sure if this was used everywhere in that way, but the potential here felt quite good and made some decisions during the event and during list-building more interesting. So I would use it again in the future, even if I would limit it to TTS-events where map-conditions are the same for each team and a bit more time is available to do the teaming process. 

The best thing about this event was the contact to new and interesting people, new views and a lot of new experiences. Not only I was given the opportunity to play against a lot of skilled players (Minass, SOK, Ayadan,...), every contact was really nice and makes new games and future events necessary to keep that active. But all the other players I had no chance to face are still on my list. This really encouraged me to do some travel, once Covid-19 is better controlled and meet all of them for real!

So thank you very much for this experience and hit me up with some deeper insights, thoughts and ideas for the future! As already announced, I am planning a three-week event on an individual base to face the opponents everyone wish for and test out some N4 things here. Stay tuned for news about this and further events and stay safe!