The new King of the Hill

Last Saturday saw our second King of the Hill tournament, and we have a new champion. If you're not familiar with KOTH and how it's played then there's a perfect opportunity coming for you this coming weekend - BattleTech Boot Camp. Check out uglyman's post on the subject here.

In order to make this particular KOTH tournament a little more interesting, we added in a combat element. Or rather, we added in a reason for you to shoot each other - bonus points! Due to the number of players we had to adjust the format just a little bit, but the concept works like this:

1. Normal KOTH scoring applies, so you score points for being on the hill.
2. AFTER the round, bonus points are added to your total for each kill you scored during the round. In the first round each kill was worth 10 points. In later rounds, each kill was worth a number of points equal to double your target's tournament score in the previous round. So if you killed last round's winner you received 18 bonus points!

For reference, a typical winning score on KOTH is around 500 points. So bonus points for kills weren't going to be enough to win a round on their own, but they were definitely significant enough to re-arrange the order.

Everyone got to play 4 missions, after which Soto was looking like the prime target during the finals. He was also worth the most points. :) We watched the mission live while Darkton and Gurn jockeyed for 1st place, but since we didn't know for sure how the bonus points were going to work out we weren't certain who was actually winning. With about 45 seconds left in the mission Gurn was killed which allowed Darkton to re-take 1st place based just on KOTH points. Gurn jumped (literally) back into the fray and executed a perfect DFA on Darkton with about 20 seconds left. Amazingly, this knocked Darkton from 1st to 5th - only 21 points separated the top 5 pilots! So it came down to bonus points.

After some quick math and a double-check to make sure everything had been recorded correctly, Tatsu came out of nowhere and won his second tournament at The Airlock. Tatsu is the Ninja Mechwarrior - as you might recall, he barely squeaked into the finals by killing 2 'Mechs in the last 6 seconds while he was dead. He then proceded to run away with the finals with a superb 'Mech choice.

For his victory, Tatsu was awarded the Eastern United States because that's the portion of the Risk map that contains Arlen, Texas. Congratulations to the new King of the Hill!