On the 28th of August Interplanetary 2016 ended and so it did the ITS Season 7. The ITS ranking page showed I had 10 tournaments logged and ended 13th in the UK, which is good. I did spend most of the time on 10th place or higher in the UK, which I am happy with. In my opinion the ITS rankings are not completely accurate and easily manipulated, but more on that later.
I have actually attended 13 events since start of the season and only one of those was non-ITS. Nine times out of twelve I have ranked in the middle or better. I won one tournament and I also had a second place in another. Most of my placements seem to be between 5th and 9th for events with more than 10 players.
I believe most events for me were Win-Win-Loss, and while I don't have the numbers I think most of the time I faced one of my mates, James (Murkage) or Matt (s0tek), in the last round. Overall I think it was a pretty good season, I had some great games and few with pretty terrible luck.
Best performance - This one is quite easy, I had some really good games in the season but the best thing I done was traveling over 200 miles to the South of England and showing them how we do it here up North by winning the tournament!
Worst game - One game from the first Harlequins event comes to mind, where focusing on the wrong target cost me the game, or the second Harlequins where not doing nothing cost me a game. At Infinity Expo 2016 I played two people who would not stop passing ARM saves. Though the one game that will stick in my mind the longest has to be the last game of the Northern Open 6, literally winning the whole time and loosing to the last three Orders!
Favourite army list - I think I played Caledonia for all of the ITS events and I had some good competitive lists but my favourite is from Gribbley Gaming where I took 11-12 Morat Hackers! It was just very amusing and I want to try it out more often.
Season 8 Plans
After giving it some thought I decided for the new season to focus less on the competitive side and play more of my other factions. There are two main reasons for that:
Firstly, I spend most time time playing Infinity either on events or practicing for events. Which means I play Caledonia a lot. I love playing it (its my favourite faction, no surprise there) but it leaves little time to play the rest and I own six more factions. I could be competitive with all but I don't own as many units for those as I do for Caledonia, which limits what army lists I can build. While I could just buy more, I want to play with what I already have and try some fun lists this time around.
Secondly, as I mentioned at the start I don't think the ITS ranking system is accurate enough. I think the ITS is a great thing overall but it has flaws. Some events are not logged accurately or at all, and it takes long time to fix (my mates have been affected by this is more than I have). Non-tournament games can be logged on the ITS, which in my opinion should be a separate ranking system at best. I don't know if CB wanted the extra money or its just a way to give people not going to tournaments a way to rank, but escalation leagues or friendly games are not the same as competitive events and so should not be treated the same. I doubt people use it intentionally to better their ranking, but if we really wanted to we could just buy a whole bunch of codes and enter results to make us look better. I don't know why that is even an option. Not to mention it feels like the more events you play, the worse you make it for yourself. I could probably play one event mid-season and if I beat the top ranking player, I'd probably end up ranked higher than going to as many tournaments as I go to.
That all might have sound bit more negative than intended but don't get me wrong, I still love going to tournament, I really enjoy the ITS missions and I think CB is a great company. However, going ahead I want to focus more on playing for fun and the hobby side of the game rather than trying to rank as high as possible on ITS.
That is not to say I am giving up on competitive side of the game. The UK Masters will happen later this month and I plan to do my best on all the qualifier events the next year also.
So what does it mean for this blog? Not much to be honest. My event articles will have a different flavour as there will be a mix of fun and competitive. I'll still post regularly about all things Infinity and Caledonia in particular.
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