WC3L Finals? Always the season highlight for me! SK Gaming taking part? A must! Oberhausen? My hometown!
So, without any hesitation, my plans for this weekend were settled, and I arrived at the location half an hour before the first games. "Altenberg" is now a museum and there is also a sort of disco there, but originally, it was a factory.
To get there, noone needed much knowledge of the local area. The main station was right across the street and the center of the city is only maybe 1km away, either. Three hotels are located less than 1km away from it, and I know that at least SK and MYM used two of those.
On day one, I went there by car (even though I live just 2.5km from it), on day two, I took the bike. When I first got there, my impression after the arrival was "wow, this is different". In the last seasons in Cologne, the event was held in a congress location, everything had more of a business-atmosphere.
This location was huge, for starters. There were several halls with different things in them.
After entering, you came to a smaller room with a snack/gaming equipment shop.
From there you were lead into the "racing" hall, a pretty big hall with a sports car exhibited in the middle and four racing "seats" - I don't know how else to call them, they were like big seats with steering wheels and pedals in front of large plasma TVs with "Need for Speed" running on them. By the way, on the whole location, there were plasma TVs all over the place, showing the games or just some static information.
In this hall, unfortunately there was one more thing at the time of my arrival: A lengthy queue.
Behind this hall was the main hall, the largest one at the event with seats for at least 300-400 people, a large stage with an interview corner and a moderation corner and in the middle the huge screen for the audience.
Before I could enter there, though, it took me about 20 minutes to get my id card for the event (I mentioned the queue before).
I later found out, though, that admission was pretty loosely handled, I saw people getting in without paying the entrance fee and other people, who were obviously just visitors, walking about in the press and players area, which was located on the upper floor.
Upstairs there were two rooms for the teams and one for the coverage teams. Two teams in each room (4K and SK in one, WE and MYM in the other) were sitting in line opposite the other team, and there was another table for the admins at the other end of each of these rooms.
The press room was a bit larger than those two and had a quite large screen on one wall, showing the games.
The location was overall great, but there were some technical problems over the weekend. Some of the games got interrupted by disconnecting observers, and one time, the whole network went down, cancelling two ongoing games. Luckily, the problems mostly occured only in two of the wars.
What was really nice was the large amount of space. The halls were so big that you never felt in a crowd, even at the "rushhour" before and during the football world cup game between Germany and Sweden - which was (as announced) shown on the screens and plasma TVs instead of the last games of the Consolation Final between SK and 4K.
Upstairs, outside of the three rooms, you had some benches and more plasma TVs, where mostly admins, orgas, press and sometimes players were watching the games. There was also a counter where you could get soup and sausages, which was much frequented, but I also saw lots of people going to get some food in the nearby station or the hardly more distant shopping mall, which had a McDonalds, too.
Outside in the court, some smokers were always standing in small groups, because there was a strict "no smoking" rule inside.
Of course there weren't ongoing games all of the time, inbetween them, there were interviews, MVP/MIP/Newbie vote results and other moderations.
The moderation by TheKoenna, TaKe and Frogbender was done pretty well, especially Koenna showed some insight into the games and TaKe was power-talking every competition down. Frogbender and Koenna together on the stage took over the parts of Guenther Netzer and Gerhard Delling, which Germans will know from TV: Trashtalking about each other and always subliminally fighting with words.
The ingame commentary was also in German, which caused some international guests to rather watch it on side-screens with sound turned off, but most of the internationals did not really need audio-comments anyway, because they were experts of the game themselves.
So, apart from watching the games, this event was also a great opportunity to meet almost everybody who has any importance in the WC3 scene. Not only the world's best players were there, but also the most successfull managers and bosses of the most important clans, and noone showed any sign of arrogance or distance, everyone was willingly signing T-Shirts or accepting pads on the back from unknown people after won games.
The audience was changing in numbers and composition, but overall I would call the numbers of visitors good. Notable was the fact that quite a lot of people of Asian origin showed up, cheering for the Asian players but also for the European ones.
When day two finally neared it's end, people - including me - seemed really exhausted and tired, and I heared more than once statements like "I just hope MYM wins, so we don't have to stay for another war". This wasn't a sign that people didn't like the event, though, but it was already close to midnight, at that point, and another clanwar with five best-of-three games would probably have taken until the early morning hours.
Finishing, I want to thank the organisers for making such a nice event possible. I am sure that they will learn from the technical problems and avoid them next time. The location itself was clearly great, and I hope to see big gaming events there again ... not only because it is just a five-minute-drive for me ;-)