when you play online there is also a connection to the Stardock servers tracking the (broken) Achievements. This is what sometimes causes mysterious lag (if the SD servers are slow that day).  

oh, no where near "all". It's just some of the mysterious lag. 

If you look through your Impulse Reactor logs you will see them FILLED with

"XX:XX Request Timed Out: 6000 ms"

If you look at the timestamps, this will usually be when you were in an unusually laggy game with people you can usually play with no problem. 

SO after getting caught back up on the posts all i can really say is wow.

I've been out of the loop a bit due to thanksgiving, a "vacation" and then working quite a few 15+ hour days to get ready for a presentation to one of my clients last night.  FYI Obiwhan did a rendering for said presentation at his own risk since payment was based on his final results.  My boss loved the renderings and the client did even more.  But I digress. 

The goal of this tournament was to just have some good and fun games spread out over time. This tourney was never intended to be finished over a weekend.

Im disappointed in everyones reaction and anger when it came down to the end, can't we all just get along? 

I understand that there was a push to finish the tourney before Orcun's trip which definitely makes sense. I also wanted to get the tournament done so the winners could have a little extra $ for the holiday season.   

Education has to come first though.  Finals are important whether or not it's a 60000 level quantum mechanics course in a technical field or if it's a 100 level economics course.  Sure, the 6000000 level course will have a higher time investment but both have the same importance to the individual.  Pointing out that there's a difference just reflects a major inferiority complex. 

DQ'ing teams during that time is also quite unfair. Why not wait until Orcun returns from his trip? 

So here is what i will agree to:

1.  If you want to roll the money into a next tournament then that's fine with me.  I want to wait for Orcuns return before the next tourney, they should have a shot at the prize as a team.  I would want orcun, mcshane & renz to agree to this though.  Of all of the teams that played in the tourney they were the team that had the most availability. We could roll over the round robin winner or i could send that $ out as early as today. 

2.  Finish this tourney after Orcuns return.  This is also another quite viable option.  If you guys can't make an agreement then this is probably the only viable option. 

I think Hedgie's and my vote weigh the most in this situation because both McShane and Pacov are compromised due to their involvement. 

That wasn't meant to be offensive, by never wanting to play I meant it happened twice.  The first or second night of the tournament we tried to play you and you said you wanted to get some practice  games in against other teams first.  Then a few days later I asked if you guys were ready to play us yet and you said no because I don't think you ever managed to get those practice games in.  Then a week or two later you guys dropped out for a very understandable reason.  I'm not apologizing for anything, I could change "never wanting to play" to "not wanting to play the two times we asked and both teams were on" though since that more accurately describes what happened. 

There we have it - jon - please distribute the round robin prize to renz.  I'll figure out how to do the participation raffle soon, then we'll figure out what were going to do. 

I agree on the not holding up the next tourney part, but no idea what we are going to do yet and when.  I already have more than a few revisions in mind that should easily mitigate against the scheduling problems.  Shame things end in such an anti-climactic way, but life is like that from time to time.  Hopefully our next tourney will be MUCH better... and now we have to have one anyway

At the rate the skirmish AI is being developed, the computer Normal setting will be more desirable to have on your team than myself.

2 vs 2 next tournament with an AI Demigod on each team?

If you're going to scoff at this idea just for the sake of scoffing (yeah I'm talking to you McShane) please at least try playing with the latest version first.  Its absolutely amazing what they've done.

Only problem with it is that its been tested mostly on Nightmare settings which give the AI a shit load of gold, so if you try and put Normal AIs on your team they spend all there money on not quite worthless upgrades, but not exactly priority upgrades and leave themselves naked for too long.  Plus they love their easily interruptible big pots still for some reason.

With a few more tweaks I think we could have all the fun of a 3v3 tourney without the insane scheduling difficulties.

you know what would be amazing for the AI? If they were doing a cast and an enemy demigod starts casting a non-instant interrupt, they have a percentage chance to cancel their cast (can't do it 100% or that's too crazy). 

10% of total pot goes to round robin...   check the finance thread for the total, eh?

renz said he needed a day to think about it or something.  Didn't really understand, but I think he'll be contacting you at some point today.