For the record, I spend about 50-60 hours per week in the office for my job, not to mention additional time during nights and weekends. 6pm - 1am GMT is 12pm to 7pm in my time zone... I don't even get home from work until 7pm.

As I stated in a previous post, life has been exceptionally busy as of late. I simply did not have the time to keep up with this. In fact, I think I only managed to play BoP twice in the past few weeks (once being disconnected due to my internet connection taking a poo on me).

Edal, I'm sorry man. Looking back, I shouldn't have signed up for this one. I'll accept responsibility for not being present on behalf of the UK team. More important things took priority over the past month. Sometimes, it's just the way it works.

See ya around guys.

edit: if you saw me playing Beatles Rock Band, well, it the only game my GF likes. ;)

The Irony of it all is...
 

...that all of a sudden plenty of new motivated sim players are showing up every evening. I would not be surprised if some of them got more interested in flying sim because of the tournament.

If only Edal would have kept it going a little longer...

MACADEMIC

For the future
 

I think it would be better if there are voted officers for each side and they set schedules and strategies for the fights.

I've started a whole new thread about starting a new tournament, go throw in your 2 cents cause it's important to get the design right.

We could have done scheduled matches, but it takes days for that many people to post on this forum. Team USSR could have formed its own RAF faction and done plenty of matches with no scheduling.

You were there for quite a while on the last day, along with white rhino, but neither of you were officers. The ones who played last week were the absent ones.

I'm going to unsticky this thread now since the tournament has been canceled.

Kudos to Edal for trying this...but I think it's failing was the game's inherent unbalance towards Russian planes. At the start there were a lot of matches going on, but I think the UK players, whether they realised it or not, just got fed up of being owned by superior LAs. And of course newer game releases give the perfect excuse.

Just my $0.02, to help any future tourneys avoid a similar fate...

If the LA is superior why was the Ace of Aces final two Spitfires?

+1

and the uk-team had a biiiig advantage on cta with their p47.
they won the airsuperiority over italy with their spits too...

Mirgervin used an LA5 (I think - could have been a 7) all the way up to the semi-finals. And pretty much every match I played was against an LA. Spitfire vs LA is manageable, just, in 1v1, but when it's more, the Spits get owned.

You give me another reason why the UK team enthusiasm dropped off so sharply while there were so many USSR players always wiling to play?

You guys won the air superiority mode the first week, not exactly getting owned there

Where the spitfire didn't work was in airfields - but the p47 was completely unstoppable in that mode. Hurricanes would have worked better also.

The main difference in airfields was we spent quite a bit of time preparing, making sure everyone could land la7's, memorizing the runways and obstacles on the stalingrad airfields.

That was why team UK lost morale mainly, I think. Once team USSR had the b-17, maybe it seemed hopeless. Involving the b-17 ended up ruining the whole thing.

Mirgervin could have chosen to fly the LA5 in the final, and if it's so superior, as you claim, he would have. The fact is, what little turn advantage the LA has is neutralised by the Spits firepower.

All the USSR players would have flown Spits or even Hurricanes if they had to, just to get a game. The UK team didn't want to play from the beginning and that showed by the fact there were only one or two on regularly, excluding Edal, right from the start.

This thread is kind of beating a dead horse at this point, time to move on

Check the "ladder discussion" thread, I've written a prototype ruleset, about 1 page, based on what has been suggested so far, check it out and post comments, suggestions for additions/subtractions, and so forth.

Starting the formation of teams now would help get the rules done. Teams of 3 or 4, the only restriction being possibly no two team members ranked top 8 in the same leaderboard mode, for balance