I guess this is as good a thread as any to place this, and since I haven't posted anything about the battle, I feel like I should post something.
I'm only going to explain this once and I'm not going to argue with anyone from the NE who disagrees with part of it because if you do, you're either completely disregarding everything simply to make yourself feel like you won something, or you've got Down Syndrome, in which cease, it's not healthy for me to waste my time arguing with you.
So here's how shit went: First of all, you have to understand that I had people (devs included) telling me that I would most likely be hacked in some way for this battle and that when I was, I needed to immediately tell chadz in irc and change my password. Second, because of that, I lowered everyone's rank to "1" in the clan so that the only account that could access anything of importance for the battle, would be my own. Because of this, we ran slightly behind schedule(Which caused several other problems).
Just before the battle, I told everyone to grab our cheap gear as we were going to test the NE's tactics in gear that didn't quite matter so much, then after we got a feel for how they were fighting and what their overall plan was, we'd break out the heavier gear and try to counter their tactics. I never would have thought that an open field battle would be on such a small map, especially one that involves over 3000 troops. This doesn't make sense to me, honestly, I figured the battles would start out something like the huge eu multi clan tourney battles, which were fun even to just watch.
I was the first to spawn on the flag and I believe the 2nd or third person was Miley, and he was naked, then one or two spawns more, there's another person naked and everyone's telling me they were missing shit. Remember, I was told I was going to get hacked, so I immediately thought that's what happened and so I began trying to figure out what the damage was so I could report it to chadz as well as get people to stop spawning with the problematic equipment. We had horsemen spawning without horses or lances, melee without weapons, helmets, boots and body armor and ranged without their weapons or ammo as well as other equipment. It was so random that it just added to the confusion (Though I'm now under the impression that the number of different types of equipment has something to do with what we now know, is indeed a bug). Unfortunately though, there was absolutely no time for any of this as the NE had simply rushed our flag.
As you can see in one of the videos, the NE appeared over the hill just in front of our spawn as the last few guys were spawning in. I believe also from the video you can see that 8 seconds after that, the fighting had begun. There was no time for any sort of coherent formation, not with the chaos that was incited due to items. You have to remember, people spawning without items isn't only an issue of a "few" people that spawned naked and thus only a few guys of our 50 were at a disadvantage. It's that several people were missing a few things here and there and the chaos that ensued because of that.
Aside from the item bugs, the spawn mechanics were also an issue, made apparent by the following hat trick wins by lljk the next morning. Pecores, Templars, and the esteemed Shogunate all expected the same rush that the NE did to us, to happen to them, and they all fell victim to it in just a couple of minutes of battle. Shogunate, a clan that has won countless EU tournaments, something that required teamwork, organization and coordination, couldn't even last longer than three minutes against lljk.
I can't imagine that anyone could honestly feel as though they accomplished anything or "won" any victories in any of these battles.