In retrospect - the competitive Red
Orchestra scene
In the first part we devoted our article to the very beginnings of competitive Red Orchestra
gaming and RO:Ladder. With this follow up we would like to shine a light on the story of the
first two Nation Cups and the release of Ostfront 41-45.
A national task
USA - winning team of NC
Even in the year 2005 it was a common thing that competitive platforms did not just organize
tournaments where only clans could compete against each other, but also host an annual
nation’s tournament.
Exactly this idea led us to the first Nations Cup at RO: Ladder that actually started only few
weeks after the final of WinterCup. With dominating teams like of Finland and project
Twilight of Germany, many people considered them to be the favourites for this first cup.
However, after a quarrel inside the German community, project Twilight decided not to
participate with the German squad anymore. On these grounds the first-ever played match for
the Nations Cup was rather one-sided match between Germany and Finland, which Finland
won easily.
Apart from that the course of NationsCup2005 was actually quite predictable, so the big Red
Orchestra nations Netherlands, Finland, USA and Czech Republic fought their way to the
semi-finals. In these two matches Finland and USA defeated their opponents to face up to the
first grand finale of NationsCup history. This final promised to be a hell of a match because
neither Finland nor the United States of America lost a match in this tournament but yet the
US squad managed it to get both rounds on their home map Koitos and to move on and also
win one round on Kaukasus. As a result team USA won the first NationsCup in Red
Orchestra gaming history.
Red Orchestra gets into stores
Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45
Due to winning the major prize of Epic's "Make Something Unreal" Contest it was quite
obvious that Tripwire Interactive would aim for a commercial success with Red Orchestra.
This finally happened in the spring of 2006.
TWI released the successor; Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 and everyone could buy their own
copy from stores or Steam. Due to the fact that RO: Ladder was the most active competitive
site for the Red Orchestra scene, the Ostfront ladder opened already on March 20th, 2006. In
spite of a huge rush at the public servers, clan activity grew much slower. For that reason the
ladder still looked quite similar to the old ladder, with clans like projectTwilight, 13th Panzer
Division and Full Metal Jacket at the three top spots.
RO:Ladder in a state of flux
As slowly as the activity began to rise, there was good competition already in August 2006.
During this month we published our completely new website with lots of interesting features,
introduced a "newcomer’s ladder" to provide a kind of newcomer bashing protection and
announced the second Nations Cup. Furthermore some new teams like NoWay of France
promised to give the mod vets a hard fight for the top of the European ladder.
The 2nd NationsCup
Final matches
As with the year before, the second Nations Cup started in late summer and this time, for the
sake of having a more interesting tournament, the double elimination format was chosen.
Already in the second round of the winner bracket, the former champion from the United
States met the all-time favourite Germany, with the Americans going out as winners.
Likewise Finland, the runner-up of 2005's Nations Cup, managed to make it through the
upper tournament tree into the winner bracket final against USA. In the loser bracket on the
other hand, the German team pulled them self together and managed to beat Finland, who got
dropped to the loser bracket by losing to the USA.
A detailed report of the final could have filled the contents of a book, so a summarized
version had to do at this point. After battling out a draw in 4 rounds and all 3 overtime maps,
Germany decided to stop the marathon match because of their local time of 2 AM and left the
server. The Americans filed in protest afterwards because for them; just leaving the server
was forfeiting. Because most of the American players ID's were completely missing on the
RO: Ladder webpage, the admin team decided to have the match replayed on another date,
with an extended overtime rule. In the end the USA managed to defend their title and defeat
Germany quite clearly.