CP REWRITTEN, United Media Headquarters – With a disappointing cancellation of the HF v. IW AUSIA Arena semi-finals, the United Media ponders: What other tournament flops have the CPPS community witnessed recently?
The United Media team took a look at the past few years of Tournaments and the controversies around them, compiling the Top 5 Tournament Flops of the recent years. Ranging from disqualifications to judging mishaps, let’s see what tea we could find!
5. Multiple LCXI’s by Various Leagues
Following CP Army Hub‘s shutdown in January of 2021, the league announced their return with their Summer ’21 post only four months later. In said post, Koloway shared the excitement around the annual Legends Cup, with the Army Hub promising to host it once more. Two and a half weeks later, the CP Army Network‘s Administrator F6sixer revealed plans of a Legends Cup as well. As the Legends Cup is one of the most anticipated tournaments of the year, it was then no surprise that the CP Army Headquarters had been brewing their own version of it as well. The lack of communication between the leagues led to a statement battle between CPAHQ and CPAN, with the Tournament eventually being organised by a board of Army Leaders instead.
CP Army Hub’s Initial LCXI Announcement
To comment on the incident, United Media reached out to CPAHQ’s administrator, DMT:
CPAHQ briefly intended to host LCXI cause no announcement had been made yet. But, a day before we planned to release our summer post, CPAH announced it. We took it out of our post and didn’t mention it until CPAN announced their own. When that happened, we released a statement advocating for LCXI to not be used as a bargaining piece between the split sides of the community.
We made the post because we were getting a lot of inquiries from HQ-aligned armies about if we will host LCXI for them. We did not want to ruin the legacy of LCXI, so we made that post in hopes of illustrating the need for an independent army board to be formed, since two other organizations didn’t seem to value the history of Legends Cup.
Of course, the first community run tournament had its bumps, but the board has improved as the tournaments have gone on, and is now seen as a positive change for the community.
4. March Madness 2020: “Oops entered early!”
The 2020 March Madness proved to be one of the most attended tournaments of the entire Club Penguin army history. The two armies in focus, the Doritos and the Ice Warriors both showed sizes of over 150 and 165 troops, respectively. With over 300 troops attending the semi-final battle, the chosen server, Parka, rose from one to five bars within 30 minutes. The battle resulted in a tie, which forced the judges to announce overtime. The chosen overtime room, the stadium, was entered by both armies simultaneously, yet the team of judges, including Epic101, Harout and Popcorny, decided to call the room void due to early enterers. The pizza parlour was chosen instead, yet evidence of both armies troops’ presence in the stadium surfaced. This resulted in major arguments in the league general chat, with the community blaming the judges for corruption. A battle review was later published by Popcorny, trying to amend the communities trust in the judges, but the tournament was unable to continue. The Ice Warriors were later deemed victors of the semi-final battle and were given the chance to redeem their lost MM final battle under the August Sadness Tournament with CP Army Hub.
In the video below, taken by Judge Popcorny, various blue and orange troops can be seen waiting in the Stadium prior to it being announced (10:08).
United Media spoke to Shinde, who served in the Ice Warriors Higher Command of Ice Warriors at the time:
March Madness was my first important event during which we provided Voice Commanders to be faster with changing rooms and tactics. Battle between Doritos and us was one of the biggest I have ever seen. None of that kind events can go without controversies or incidents. That time there were 2 – enterning early in Stadium and choosing Gift Shop and Pizza Parlour for OT rooms. The Stadium room incident had a place but to be fair it could happened to everyone – locked people had been waiting there, some disconnected people just logged back on and it was their start room. The point is – as I remember – only IW was mentioned for “enterning” the room early while the opposite army troops where there also (I think it was cleared after all). I think those incidents had an impact on IW and the whole community. For IW – to always get their rights, be careful for choosing the waiting room for being locked. But also we made a lot of fun after it – having some inside jokes based on it. On the whole community – I think judges are now more careful and restricted for choosing battle rooms and more fair. Plus armies can reject judges if they have suspisions that they might be in favour of the opposite cp army.
3. LCXI HF v. IW Semi-Final Halt Following Mass-Kicks
The semi-finals seem to pose a curse for the Help Force and Ice Warrior troops. In the 2021 Legends Cup XI semi-finals, the two blues were logging on to Zipline for a seemingly regular tournament battle, yet after around 25 minutes of battle, both judges and battlers were noticing an unusually high amount of disconnects. In the next three minutes, all judges and both armies would be kicked from the game completely, with the battle server even getting temporarily removed from the server list. After some waiting time, the judges decided on a new server, and the last battle room would be repeated. The mass-kicking began due to the armies reaching such high sizes that the original 2-bar limit set by CPR mods could not be followed. Although CPR did not provide a statement on the incident, it sent a clear warning to the whole community: Do not mess with CPR’s rules.
Confusion in the Ice Warriors main chat during battle
Help Force’s former leaders Nell and Vedant provided the United Media team with the following statements:
Nell: What can I say, I mostly remember how confused everyone was. It wasn’t such a big surprise, because there had been times in the past when the players were suddenly kicked or banned during events. I think that during all that stress and tension, a break like that, even if it was kind of ‘forced’, wasn’t so bad. It gave us a few minutes to find our strength and give our best during the last room. The whole thing didn’t affect Help Force much. For anything, it helped the people understand that such incidents are possible and they should always be prepared for it. Since then, we all did our best to keep battles off from the active servers and to avoid mass kicks like that one. It was all for the best, in my opinion.
Vedant: Such action by CPR staff was always expected against armies, let alone a major army battle with more than 70-80 on each side on a semi popular server. But it didn’t have a negative affect on us. No matter how much CPR troubled us, back on that day, nothing mattered more than getting that sweet overtime revenge.
2. Pirates Disqualified from Legends Cup X
The Pirates proved to be a dominating force throughout early 2020, topping the Top Ten on multiple occasions. On Monday, June 8th, the army community woke up to a surprise, which would not only disqualify the Pirates from Legends Cup X but also undermine their whole army’s success as a whole. A special report by the CP Army Media revealed that multiple members of the army’s leadership and staff had been multilogging in various events and tournament battles. This showed at least 16 multilogged penguins in the first round of LCX, and at least 13 in the second. As a result, the battle against Crimson Guardians was declared a loss for Pirates and the start of a zero-tolerance policy for any multilogging. For the Pirates, the exposé resulted in a shutdown only a week after the battle. The community was left questioning: Why would a major army multilog if all odds were always in their favour?
Pirate Multilogs as revealed by CPAM
The author of the CPAM report, Max, commented on the impact of the multilog flop as follows:
Unearthing the Pirates multilogging scandal came after a string of exposés from the CP Army Media, although these had been of small and medium sized armies up until this point. These previous investigations had also seen one or two multilogs uncovered, while the Pirates had a significant operation occurring amongst their staff. The event in question being the second round of the prestigious Legends Cup X, and the fact it resulted in their disqualification, made the story even more shocking.
The impact of the investigation arguably lead to the Pirates shutdown, as their leadership stopped using CP Army: The Game for their events and instead began hosting on a CPPS they had created for themselves. This isolation from the community did not last long and they ultimately closed. As for community impact, it paved the way for more multilogging investigations under the united CP Army Hub and more awareness within the community of our methods to catch multilogging. This in turn saw armies adapt in their attempts to multilog, and a cat-and-mouse situation with the Army Hub trying to uncover the illicit actions of certain individuals trying to escape justice.
1. March Madness 2021 Battle Review Disputes
Mad as any Tournament can be, on top of this list is the 2021 March Madness with its controversies and consequences. The recently opened CP Army Headquarters announced eight armies to battle for the title. Yet following the semi-finals, the community was in dispute. Many felt that the judges decisions hadn’t been justified, leaving the organising league no other option than to review the results. CPAHQ agreed that they had not built up a satisfactory judging system as of yet and that their judging protocols would be reviewed as well. The post then declared that the Army of CP v. Rebel Penguin Federation semi-final result would be overturned, whilst the Ice Warriors v. Help Force one remained. Losing the battle to a review, the Rebels then fought back with a post named “Bias Headquarters“. In said post, the commanders show various screenshots, alleging bias against their army. Expressing extreme disappointment with the league and the review process, the Rebel Penguin Federation then pulled themselves from CPAHQ completely, which was followed by the Ice Warriors and the Help Force as well. The two armies then proceeded to found a new league, the CP Army Network, promising “a fair, safe league. Surely, no one from the CP Army Headquarters administration expected a tournament flop to result in such drama and a split of the community that remains to this day.
A screengrab from the later reviewed RPF – ACP battle
To gather some insight from the occurrence, United Media spoke to F6sixer, Rebel Commander and CPAN Administrator:
RPF had no issues with the original judgement of the battle and we’d thought that the matter ended there. However, ACP troops and staff started calling the verdict and judges rigged in their event chat and main chat shortly after the results were announced. They then proceeded to approach the CPAHQ administration for a review. In their rush to announce a tournament, CPAHQ’s admins/tourney organizers never even bothered to formulate a comprehensive review process (or communicate said process with army leaders). So when ACP approached CPAHQ with a battle review, we were never informed by the administration and had to initially find out about it from an inside source (not affiliated with the admin team) in CPAHQ (Funks officially DMed me several hours after the review request was made). CPAHQ in their review process, said that they’d taken pics and videos from both armies to come to their decision. However, not once were we asked for any information to defend ourselves, while ACP claimed in their own chat that they’d supplied “evidence” to CPAHQ admins. Unsurprisingly, we weren’t informed of this either. If the admins had done their due diligence and asked us for our pics/videos, they’d have come to the logical conclusion that the original verdict was right. The review was posted over a day after the battle was complete without once asking RPF for its side of the story. To top it all off, DMT had the audacity to offer RPF leader elex (and by extension RPF itself) Discord nitro as “compensation” for the reviewed verdict!
At this point, RPF’s leadership felt that we were being treated as an afterthought and were being punished for no fault of ours and decided to call out CPAHQ for what they’d just done. Feel free to read that post here, https://clubpenguin.rebelfederation.com/bias-headquarters/. Help Force, too would claim similar biases against them and pull out of CPAHQ shortly after us. The lackluster organization and the appalling lack of common sense from the admins during the running of this tournament is the foremost reason why the community is split today, and in a way, led to the creation of CPAN. It also led to low levels of trust in the community, cause seemingly neutral figures were responsible for this mess. This is supported by the fact that most leaders prefer a community run tournament as opposed to one organized by leagues as there is significantly better accountability. All in all, March Madness 2021 is the perfect example of how not to run a tournament and I hope future tournament organizers learn from its shortcomings so that all new tournaments can meet the expectations of the community.
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These five tournament flops certainly caused drama and controversy within the community and in the individual armies. One thing is sure, our community would not be what it is today without these incidents happening. The hardships we have had to endure as armies or as a whole community have changed our judging systems, our tolerances for multilogging and much more. They have taught us to evolve, and learn from our mistakes.
What do you think? Do you agree with this lineup of events or do you have any other memorable moments to include? Let us know in the CPAHQ and CPAN Discord Servers!
