Project Reality Forums

Posted: **2021-12-09 14:47**

The Long Project Reality Tournaments Chronicle

A Foreword by Yrkidding:
The Official Project Reality Tournament ran in three phases, C1-5, C6-9, & C10-13, from 2006 to 2018. My involvement began in C10 as an EMF NCO for Rezza’s infantry squad, to an SL & HCO for Cossack’s MRF in C11, SCO for APN in C12, and finally as a tournament admin building & running C13 with Senshi and help from a number of others whom also began preparations for C14 that would ultimately never come to pass.

The PRT was a really interesting “institution”, technically falling under the PR Dev Team who exercised varying levels of control throughout the tournament’s history, and competing with other tournaments hosted by the community. The admin/management team tried different structures and rules, adapting to new strategies, metas, & versions of PR, and tried our best to deliver a balanced experience. Teams were varied, including the legendary NATO - CATA rivalry and all that came with that, and in the C10+ era a variety of teams pulling from different factions and maps.

There are some people on these forums & discord servers that participated in campaigns earlier than I did and could tell you more about how those earlier NATO vs. CATA campaigns went, and perhaps there’s a dinosaur out there who could tell you why the tournament was created in the first place and with what goals, but I can at least speak to the last iterations of the tournament from C10 through C14 and share a bit of insight into the development of these campaigns and my greatest times in PR.

From a practical standpoint, we did our best to create fair and balanced tournaments. It was important that the players felt their team began the tournament with a chance to win it. This wasn’t always the easiest of tasks but it was always worth pursuing to the best of our abilities. We experimented and thought through different structures and point systems. We often assembled a working group before each campaign who could add voices and ideas to those discussions. The role of these PRT vets were greatly appreciated in designing each campaign and picking up some of the workload to make them happen. I’d like to think that structurally, we created the closest thing to balance that we could come up with.

The battles were often intense. Each time a tank or two were destroyed, it was suddenly an opportunity for the other team. Commanders trying to gather that information, then move assets and squads to take advantage of it. Each push was a risky endeavour that could make or break a battle. Each battle was a fight to break ahead, or to tie it up, or a desperate endeavour to catch-up late in a campaign. Before the battle even began, COs, SLs and battle planners were working to figure out the initial deployments, testing timings, assets, and other factors. On other occasions, a defending squad might find themselves humming the Jurassic Park theme song, unoccupied but nonetheless doing necessary work.

Maybe the biggest philosophy was always to mix the community. Unlike some other tournaments or organized clan battles, we didn’t want there to be clan squads or a clan team. Each team was allowed a few SLs from the same clan or group and each squad was allowed a few members from the same clan or group. The remainder had to be composed of other community members. We also accepted almost anyone who applied as long as their application was legitimate and they weren’t on our ban list. There was no prerequisite of experience and if there was a spot available on a team then it was first come, first serve to fill it. What this meant in an ideal situation was that each squad was mixed between a core of veterans and new or inexperienced players, where these newer players could learn and grow as a PR player. It was always our goal to mix the community and share that experience around. You could debate whether or not we succeeded in the goal of creating healthier public play as a result, and I know a few people who ended up playing with questionable characters too, but I know plenty more who found themselves playing with a group of people they’d never forget, connecting with players they might never have met, and welcomed new PR friends for years to come because of the PRT. If nothing else, that may have been the tourney’s greatest legacy, and I’m glad to have been a small part of organizing some of those lasting friendships.

Once again, a thanks goes out to the pre-tourney task forces for contributing your thoughts & ideas, to the admin team including Senshi & Onil who worked to make the C10-era campaigns successful, to the COs, SCOs, officers & battle planners who spent countless mundane hours planning, teaching, & organizing, and to the players who fought through the months of each PRT campaign. A final thanks to Deviro for compiling this brief history of the PRT, it was my hope that the legacy of the tournament might be captured in some way for the community and the PRT vets still kicking around the forums and elsewhere. I saw some of the finest, highest-stakes PR rounds I’ve ever seen through the course of my time with the PRT and I hope you all found enjoyment in the depths of a firefight with everything on the line, in a victory cheer blasting over mumble at the end of a round, or in a casual conversation on Teamspeak with a new brother.

How this project happened:
I've done it again guys: I saw a thread about the history of Project Reality, in this case the tournaments and decided to make something out of it.

But in all seriousness, this isn't my fault. Yrkidding asked me if I wanted to create a project like "Today in PR History" for the PRT and I said why not. I did not expect to find much, that there would be lots of missing data and not be able to even form a chronology of all battles, but I was wrong.

To my surprise the PRT staff doesn't delete anything from their records, only archive them in giant piles that somebody was going to have to go through one day.

All of that info is only available to PRT staff with some serious access privileges, which Yrkidding was gracious enough to lend me. So not everything is verifiable through web.archive.org shenanigans. Which also means you are free to doubt my findings and go look through thousands of threads.

I could've been smart and just used the search function but I wanted to be as thorough as possible. Without manual search, the records presented upon you would've been much less complete.

With all that said, this still won't be as thorough as some might've wished but compromises had to be made. I could've compiled rosters for all teams but I didn't want to stare at lists of names that changed every battle with people resigning and LOA-ing or whatever. Don't get me started on the NATO vs CATA period of tournaments with their 4 team structures.

Some other minor details are missing from some battles, like which sub-team was on which battle or ticket counts but there's only so much I can do and chase after before the scope of the project balloons out of control. Though I managed to include the Contact tournaments because they are an unofficial community effort and the information was very easy to obtain.

Lastly, I wanted to say that this project would not be the same without this thread right here, which was created by Curry and maintained by Onil. And finally - thank you Yrkidding for being the last piece of the domino line that pushed me gently into sitting down and doing this.

I hope my aim of compiling all of this info in one place satisfies some and has a future utility.

Legend:

A single question mark after a detail [X?] means the info is not verified up to my standards: either an official source or 2 different pieces of conversations leading up to the same conclusion;
Double question marks after a detail [X??] mean it's an info equivalent to a claim made in a passing conversation. The info is not challenged and therefore remains as a speculation;
Just a question mark [?] means I couldn't find the info in question, very rare, but it happened. Some cells are left blank because of similar reasons (or laziness);
On rare occasions battles/events were never held for various reasons and are marked with a hyphen [-];
For some battles it's very murky whether an event was cancelled, ended up in a draw or something else happened - check the interesting facts section of each tournament for further information - sometimes you will get a good answer, sometimes not. This type of ambiguity applies especially for cases from point 3 and 4 above;
I know some of the map names aren't as obvious at they should be but some of them are too long, so I decided to use short hands for all of them to make things look neater and organized.

You have questions or concerns? You think I missed something?
I'm willing to add more tournaments to this spreadsheet if there's interest and reliable sources. I'm also looking for more videos to add to each playlist - if you know of any missing videos related to earlier PRT campaigns feel free to message them to me.

Communication channels are as follows:
Email: [email protected]
My discord: Deviro#8506
Yrkidding: Yrkidding#9049

The clicking game is non existant with this one and this forum doesn't support tables, so the results below are best viewed by downloading the .pdf version:
1) View the .pdf
2) Download .zip (with the extra Tourney Times)(v1.0)
(Thank you Woxbel for helping with the tables!)

This chronology was last edited on 9th of December 2021.

If you've enjoyed this post, feel free to check out the Project Reality Timeline, which is more about PR's long and varied history. In it I've done my best to archive all important events and some minor things that I hope will interest you.

Have fun looking at numbers and dates!

Interesting details in general:

The C1-5 tournaments were hosted on Gloryhoundz' servers (trainings and battles)
In the early tournaments: While TS was used mainly for comms while playing and forums used mainly to organize and keep track of the tournament, it was encouraged to share other external ways to keep in touch, especially within squads (MSN, email and Xfire)
Early on: Even though PR was still very arcadey and closer to BF2 than ever, some people were still sharing and trying RL tactics and formations, using military lingo and the NATO alphabet
There were lots of battles in the early tournaments that ended in draws after both commanders agreed to it because of lag or crashes. PR/BF2 was not very stable
In early tournaments battle plans were called "strats"
"HALO jump/drop" (parachute deployment?) was a term used in early tournaments
Up until Mumble came into existence, SLs had to use TS key binds for each squad while playing
In the early tournaments trainings and drills were a lot stricter by the looks of it, as opposed to what I saw with the last few PRTs and Contact
In a lot of the tournaments one team would do something so unexpected and sometimes egregious that the admins would have to change the rules after the other team started complaining. Some tournaments were landslide for one alliance, another one for the other and in both cases people would accuse the admin team of being biased towards the side that was winning. From what I've seen, rule changes were done to really enforce the tournament ethos and fairness. The admins were constantly trying to keep up with the shenanigans of players who wanted to simply win in a game that was constantly evolving.
With all that being said there were still moments of sweetness between the players and admins. Even if a disliked admin left, players would still be sad because of the amount of work and dedication those who ran the tournaments demonstrated.
I saw my share of controversies when I played PRT12-C3 but man were there problems like every battle in the earlier ones (PRT1- . Admins had to deal with all sorts of problems and somebody would always find a reason to hate them.
In the early tournaments and even around C9 it was a common desire to start the next tournament as soon as possible. Sometimes a new version of PR:BF2 impeded that but players wanted a fresh start ASAP.
Looking at the scores it really becomes apparent why there were so many campaign landslides victories for CATA. It was the same people on the same sides almost every tournament. There was a team/tribe mentality to it. NATO always played Blufor factions and CATA always the Opfor side. Something the latter campaigns (post C9 and Contact) would abolish. The theme of East vs West, Good vs Evil or however you want to see it, would be gone with the mixed factions but it was so much more balanced and dynamic, instead of losing or winning every battlecycle.

PRT C1
ARRC vs EJOD

Players were assigned to their squads on 21st Feb 2006

Interesting details:

C1 was a trial/beta
It was debated which maps on each battle night should be played multiple times like Kark 2 and some just once
Battles every 2 weeks after Kark2
UK_Force was the head of the tournament
requiem, rhino, eggman and other devs played in it
10 planned battles, gamemodes: AAS, CQ
This tournament is perhaps the most poorly documented one out there. For example, B3 (Oman) was deemed as a draw after the server lagged out. But according to some, after the campaign ended, it was awarded to ARRC and that's how the tourney ended in a draw. I've seen claims that the last played battle (Drg Vlly) was won by each side but ultimately decided a null because of EJOD shenanigans. It's just a mess, I wish I could've understood it myself.

Battles:

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