I didn't want to have anything to do with this, but truth be told, this shitstorm happening was to be expected, sort of.
Before delving into the actual topic, I will first speak for myself - and myself alone - here and say that I didn't cheat. It's unfair for any of the parties involved in this tournament, even more so when it is a competition for real money. Whether or not any person in the party (or others) cheats outside of it or not is of no concern to me in this however, I've been asked by said party - and only that one - to participate in this tournament, and I accepted the offer, so long as I get to play the game, that's all that matters to me, simple as that - not like there was much choice to begin with. A statement that applies to both this tournament and the game itself...
Unlike my party members I did only record a few (failed) stage 51 attempts - which I'll gladly upload if needed - and that's all, as I saw no reason to do so otherwise - the ingame meter logs having the capacity to track suspicious activity regardless, according to Bluehole. I'm sceptical enough as to not take their word for that, and am pretty certain that in one way or another exploits, scripts or whatnot of any form may/can be abused regardless. This sort of thing needs a different form of controlling, but current ideas either violate EU law (i.E. XignCode) or are just not in Bluehole's budget interests or whatnot (i.E. an ON-SITE tournament, good luck trying to cheat there and getting away with it).
Let's be real here though, with the small playerbase, this tournament could hardly be considered a competition regardless, but I'll get to that. As it stands for me, I will NOT participate in another tournament of this kind if no changes are being made to the way they are controlled and conducted.
Anyway, so much for myself.
Now to the actual tournament:
First of all, congratulations to all winners, including the ACTUAL second and third place winners from all regions, that being the one party from Yurian, and the other one from Mystel (?) on EU servers, for example. You rightfully should have deserved your titles and I personally think the way this was handled was just poor event management at its finest. Why it was so difficult to seperate the best runs for every group individually is beyond me, but I'll save my rant here for now if it is truly so that this was in the hands of Bluehole. Needless to say, only the best run of any given group should count for the actual ranking, and not each individual one. It defeats the whole purpose of having such a ranking at all, as the best party of any given region will ALWAYS either try to beat their time if they hit a plateau (especially when another region is on the same stage, which was the case here), or attempt to go higher, to a stage which the other parties may or may not be able to even reach.
Anyway, Korea beat the other regions to it, and while it most certainly is due to skill, there are however a few points where I sadly can not deny that the tournament's outcome as a whole was just predetermined from the start, and as such, in a way, doomed to fail.
Not to say that Korea had an unfair advantage, but having the dungeon for almost 2 months ahead of other regions gives them, naturally, an advantage in experience and skill in it and more time to strategize/gear according to it. This is something no other region, save for Japan who were barely a week ahead of us, had. (And to those claiming AAH Resonance is an old dungeon, I beg of you, please enter it yourself, especially the higher stages. It is very much different from what you may be used to, especially if your dungeon effect RNG is just bad.)
Now, other advantages are naturally the better ping and stability that Koreans and Japanese enjoy due to significantly more modernized and better network infrastructure in their countries, but those factors are out of control for Gameforge and Bluehole (and again, an argument for on-site-Tournaments, as they eliminate that factor for the most part). And no, scripts are not an equalizing factor for this on other regions at all. Claiming this is utterly delusional.
The biggest factors here however were lack of class balance and players. Let's be real - a party that didn't have at least 2 Warriors would hardly compete with any other party composition, all of the winning parties of their regions having had such. Some classes could hardly output the damage to even be considered competitive above stage 45. This is especially bad for party setups that are balanced between physical and magical classes. Unless you do all balls during the mechanic every time, which costs DPS again (due to having to destroy them all), the boss is just going to gain stack after stack of either physical or magical resistance.
As such, an optimal party setup would be to take 3x physical or magical classes (preferably physical, since tanks are always physical, and their damage actually matters in higher floors). There are also some discrepancies with the balance of tanks right now, with the Brawler Rhythmic blows just being absurdly powerful and outscaling Adrenaline Rush, which again, was reflected in the rankings. (Had I had a choice, I would have gone for a brawler party as well because of this. But as mentioned above, there was none.) ...Point being, if classes are not balanced, and a dungeon heavily favours one class, then all this tournament does is just promote the most meta setup to be used for a guaranteed win, which in this case, happened here, sort of. Kudos to the Korean Archer on that note.
Of course, this is something that plagues other games as well, but to a much lesser extent as they still are way more balanced, so much so that better skill can still prevail over minor imbalances.
And that leads to the final problem... the lack of players. Because even if we want to believe it is like this, let's be real, does any server have enough people of such a skill level to even create an actual competition at least on a regional level? If we combine this with the earlier issue of lacking class balancing, I am fairly convinced that it does not. Too many players quit, for whatever reason, to make this a possibility anymore. And the ones that are there are scattered on many classes, some of which are not even viable for the high end stages of the tournament as established earlier.
As such, I am sorry to say, but I believe this tournament was doomed from the very beginning.
Bluehole needs to put emphasis on creating a more controlled environment for it, creating a MUCH better balance in both dungeons and classes and avoiding mistakes such as including multiple runs from the same party. It worked for the WDC, so why not for the regional competitions? And finally, if a competition is meant to be fair, give every participating region the same amount of time to prepare and train for it. This is something that Korea, and to much a lesser extent, Japan, had on every other region. We could of course talk about providing equalized gear as well, but if the competition is held on official servers, that would just defeat the whole purpose of gearing at all.
...but alas. It's Bluehole we are talking about.
Rant over, Amen.
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah and a Happy new year.