n00b Alliance bags their second GCWL win with Season 5 domination

The 5th Season of GCWL went official as it opened for registrations on the 3rd April 2012 and the draw was published on the 29nth of April 2012 at Gamer.LK. This season the tournament  started off with some early surprises as the tournament received  the highest number registrations. It was by far the highest participation in an online COD4 league in SL COD4 history; 32 teams participated which was an increase by 12 teams compared to Season 4.

The Season concluded 10th June 2012 with the Grand Finals between n00b Alliance and Death Company. n00b Alliance reached the finals through the winners bracket while Death Company made their way through the lower bracket. The grand final was the second time the two teams encountered each other this season. n00b Alliance won the match 2 points to 1. (nA had an early advantage of 1-0 as they came from the winners bracket.)

Final Match notes (GCWL Referee - ViP3R!)
Since there were no local COD4 servers, the Finals of GCWL Season 5 took place in a server hosted by [TM] Nutro. It was one tensing match which went in the favor of both the teams. People who had gathered to get live updates to z.Gaming teamspeak were all tensed and excited.

nA won both the knife rounds and chose to attack in Citystreets.. DC were leading at halftime 9-3. They kept that momentum and won the first map 13-6 with ThomaMki and axe<3 leading the fragboard.

1st Map - Citystreets - 13-6 to DC.

DC's map was Strike and nA chose to defend in Strike as they won the knife round for sides. Ch!mpy and Luffy were  dominant in Strike as they took nA to a lead of 10-2 at halftime.. Though there was a certain comeback from DC in the latter stage of the match, it was not sufficient enough to meet the challenge as nA went on to win the 2nd map 13-5.

2nd Map - Strike - 13-5 to nA.

nA won the Finals of GCWL 5 with the score of 2-1.

GCWL  Season 5

Winner - nA
Runners up - DC
Third place - Maximum Inside Gaming

Result sheet

Player interviews
Gamer.LK spoke to Jayanath 'Jay' Dissanayake of team n00b Alliance on his thoughts about his team’s performance this season:
GLK: Congratulations on winning Season 5 of GCWL. How do you feel about your achievement?
Jay: Even though this is our second GCWL win it feels great that we've won again because we defeated a lot of the top teams including Tech morph outlaws who were undefeated for quite some time.

GLK: You’ll remain an unbeaten side at the end of the tourney, how does that feel?
Jay: Coming from the upper bracket undefeated was very difficult since we had to play vs. Outlaws and DC which are undoubtedly the two best teams. We beat both of those teams without even losing a single map. The only time we came close to losing a map before the finals was when Team Oxide drew on mp_citystreets, but we played most of that map with only 3 player’s cause of connection problems and electricity failures.

GLK: What were the teams thoughts when you'll started this season?
Jay: Talks of playing GCWL began before it was even announced on the GLK site. Making a good team this time around was so difficult since Heyzr (who was in part of the GCWL Season 3 winning team with us) quit COD and our next two best players Darksign and Kable both had exams throughout these two months. Even I and scooby had doubts of playing this season but however with Luffy's return to COD we were motivated to play, even though two of us had semester exams during the season and two more had full time jobs.

GLK: If you had to choose an MVP (most valuable player) who would it be?
Jay: It’s hard to pick a MVP from my own team but if i had to pick it would be Luffy because he was the most consistent with the scores. However in almost every match the whole team had similar scores. I can honestly say no one cared for who was playing the best. I remember so many occasions where one of us sacrificed our score so many times just for the round win. We let go of so many individual aces just cause we didn’t care for individual performance and only counted the team score.

GLK: What was your best match of this season?
Jay: Best match would be vs. Outlaws. Since the Outlaws knocked us out of two LAN tournaments it felt like sweet revenge to get rid of them. I remember how chimpy and myself said that if we beat the outlaws it’s as good as winning the finals. That’s how much that win meant for us. Even after easily defeating them in the first map very easily we didn't get overconfident and start celebrating, instead we discussed how we will play the next match.

GLK: Who was your toughest opponent?
Jay: Hard to pick the toughest opponent. We expected the Outlaws to be the hardest so we practiced to counter attack their play style so much that we didn’t have much trouble vs. them. We defeated DC in the upper bracket quite easily (in both our map and their map) however when we met them again in the finals they completely caught us off guard and defeated us 13-6. That was definitely the toughest match we had to play. However when it came to the second map we defeated them 13-5.

GLK: How do you feel about the current team composition and chemistry?
Jay: When we played at SLCG '10 we had the exact same lineup except now we have chimpy instead of heyzr. So we were very familiar with our play styles and knew what we had to do to play better. Chemistry and teamwork was so much better than usual after we started practicing with this lineup. We had little problems with teamwork at the beginning but towards the end we worked those problems out. The number of times we clutched impossible 3v5 or 2v5 rounds is ridiculous and in the end most of those rounds came down to teamwork and chemistry. A special mention has to be given to scooby and orion who have improved tenfold in terms of team play during this tournament.

GLK: What do you believe the main factor behind your success?
Jay: The main factor would be dedication. We've wasted a lot of time coming up with strats, counter strats, positioning, coordination and nades and it payed off in the end. After every match we played we spent so much time discussing what we did wrong and what we could do better next time and for the most part of it we improved with every match we played. Even when we had exams we were still discussing what we could do to improve our game play. Even during the finals chimpy was on the borderline of dengue, Luffy had a very bad cough to the point that he couldn’t even talk properly and I also had a bad basketball related injury, however we were motivated to win. We wanted this win so badly and we didn’t want to use subs for the finals so we decided to play with our sicknesses and injuries (I myself had to limp my way all the way from kurunegala to colombo just so I can get to my PC for the finals). And in the end it felt so good to have won specially under the circumstances we had to play in.

GLK: What is there in the future for nA?
Jay: Currently there is nothing going on in the Cod scene but we are excited to play our next LAN and that will be our next target and its always been our main goal. We are yet to win a LAN despite coming so close on several occasions. Since we finally have a steady lineup we won’t have a problem there and we can focus on just winning instead of the previous occasions where the biggest problem was deciding who was going to play and what weapon everyone would play.

GLK: Any thoughts you want to leave us with till the next tournament?
Jay: There isn't really much to say apart from that and in my opinion this GCWL season was great. The number of teams that were willing to play this time around just shows how strong the SL Cod community is even when we had no local servers for most of the tourney. It’s great that we have GCWL this time of the year to keep us occupied till the next LAN tournament.

Thoughts from the players
“Well organized, matches were on time, referees were open minded when switching servers. Only disappointing thing was the servers, pings to Indian server were unstable at times; the final could have been hosted on a better server, not complaining but when the server restarted every 2 mins (because of lag) it killed the team momentum a bit  Anyway, DC are looking forward to season 6 of GCWL“
- [DC] keen

“Being an nA really proud of the performance as the team had to play with lot of difficulties in finals. Thank you everyone who helped to make this a success. Specially z.Gaming for providing us with the match server and their TeamSpeak channel to bring all the live updates. Also DW, TM, MAX and PnX RS for coming us to help with the servers when we needed them most. Also [TM] Nutro for providing us with a server for the finals. The referees also did an outstanding job this season as always, so thank you, - nA - Scooby for doing an awesome job getting all the things together along with the other referees,[DC] NoVa, - nA - Orion, - nA - Luffy, - nA - JayMGWTFBBQ, - nA - Ch!mpy, [DC] Ghost, [DC] Jackal, OutLaw-ViP3R! [TM], z.lod, z.RoKu, M.eSports Asus, M.eSports LaZer, GeaRs.MurA, KiNG and dirkblack. Really happy to see that all the clans in SL COD4 made this the best GCWL Season we had so far. Again thank you all who supported and participated and sorry if I missed anyone.”
- Malinda Jayasekera

“Gamer.LK congratulates n00b Alliance on their outstanding victory & hats off to the Sri Lanka Call of Duty 4 Community for their support. Stay Tuned for GCWL Season 6”

[J4CK4L]

[DC] NoVa, - nA - Orion, - nA - Luffy, - nA - JayMGWTFBBQ, - nA - Ch!mpy, [DC] Ghost, [DC] Jackal, OutLaw-ViP3R! [TM], z.lod, z.RoKu, M.eSports Asus, M.eSports LaZer, GeaRs.MurA, KiNG and dirkblack. Really happy to see that all the clans in SL COD4 made this the best GCWL Season we had so far. Again thank you all who supported and participated and sorry if I missed anyone.”
- Malinda Jayasekera

Good Job Guys !! Specially Viper and Nova. Well done indeed.

GG

[V[i]P3R!]

Congrtz nA

[LeoN]

Congrats Boys!!!

[___!$H@N___]

Congrtz nA

[dINk]

Congrats nA!

[EMAX]

Congratz ! nA

[Xa[i]N]

Congratz guys!!! 

[SIRUS3001]

:$

[LioN-KoLLA]

CoNGRaTZ Bros =D

[riK]

wow. tm outlaws was defeated :/ . "NA" Cheers, back to gaming again

[Termi]

Congrats 

[warzchiEf_]

Congratz nA !!!

[Erazor]

well done peeps!

[NoVa]

congratz nA