sR.css CAL s7 Update

When the season started, I was going to post match updates after every week of strafeRight.css’s CAL Season 7. Well, after two weeks of preseason and now two weeks of the regular season past us, here is an update. Unfortunately, after 4 total weeks of matches, we have only played once. Our other 3 matches have resulted in forfeit wins.

Our first preseason match was on de_season, a brand new map that a few of us had never played on before the match. It was also the the first time we had played together since the beginning of November, so we didn’t know what to expect, but we still thought we could win. Our opponents for the match were PhazedOut, a team that I had heard little about. We started on the defensive side in the first half, with YankeeDeuce and Dukefrukem in bombsite B, DNvCross guarding Middle, and Tyrant and Tears in bombsite A.

We started off well, winning a majority of the rounds. (It’s been a while, so I can’t remember offhand. When I get home I will look over the demos again.) Towards the end of the first half, Duke started lagging like crazy, teleporting all over the place. We finished the half leading 10-5.

We switch over to T’s to begin the second half and wait on Duke to connect again. His connection is still horrible, laggin all over the place. It was actually quite funny. Since we had never played de_season before, we just pugged it, our strats being, go A, go B, do whatever. Our T side was pretty awful, and we ended up losing the match 13:17. We didn’t do too bad though, just made a few stupid mistakes, so I thought we would be in decent shape heading into the regular season.

Our second preseason match was on a semi-new map: de_strike_rc3. Strike was supposed to be finished for CAL Season 3, yet it is still not completed for Season 7, having been redone multiple times by at least 4 mappers. We played moot?, a team that I have never heard of before. We got the match scheduled, I changed the server configs so SrcTV would stay up, and we were waiting in the server for the other team. They never showed up though. They contacted us and said they had some family troubles and needed to reschedule. I thought it was odd since there were 13 people on their roster.
We weren’t able to get a time though, so we did not play the match. Since it was preseason, there was little reason to try and find a time we could play anyway.

So on to the start of CAL-Open Season VII. Week One was played on de_cpl_mill, which as everyone in strafeRight should know, is the worst map ever made for source. (The only ones that come near it’s badness are de_villa, de_3rdstreet, and de_4thstreet) We were scheduled to play That Was Easy, who had never played in CAL before. Once again we had the match scheduled, were in the server, and nothing. No shows. They also forfeited their Week Two matchup.

It’s now Week Two – time for everyones favorite map, de_dust2. We were matched up against infexXxious, who had beaten PhazedOut 18:12 in Week One. So I thought it would be a good match. They contacted us and scheduled it for last night at 9pm EST. For the first time since midway through Season 5, we had 6 members online ready to play. We played a little 3v3 while waiting, hoping they were just late, but once again, the other team failed to show.

We are now sitting at 2-0 with two forfeit wins, and we are going to have to make them up if we want to make playoffs and get moved up to CAL-IM next season. We missed out on a moveup to IM last season because of our 2 forfeit wins that we never made up.

Next week’s match is on de_nuke, which has been a mixed bag for our team. Last season we were down 2:13 going into the half, then won the match 16:14 by dominating CT side. Season 5 we were blown out both matches on nuke, failing to stop the offensive side when we were on CT. Prior to that we won on nuke by taking 5-6 rounds on offense and holding our opponents to 3-4 rounds on defence. Hopefully we can get our T side strats working and continue to shut teams down on CT.

That’s all I have for now, hopefully next week I’ll be able to give you a real match report. Once I get home I will be sure to update this with more details about the match we actually played. Not too sure on when I will actually be getting home though.