UT3.sk

Vulgarus conquers DM-Facemash after nine lead swings

The lead changed nine times before a Shock Combo settled the argument.

Match 73 on DM-Facemash squeezed rockets, shrapnel, revenge and self-inflicted trouble into seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds. Normal Deathmatch required thirty points, yet nothing about the opening suggested a comfortable win for the eventual champion. Freylih struck first, Trefa answered forcefully with the Flak Cannon, and Vulgarus sabotaged his own start with two early suicides. The leader would change nine times. The key was not a lucky hit but the ability to overcome mistakes, accelerate at precisely the right moment and keep scoring against two opponents who would not surrender the contest.

First blood and the price of careless rockets

Only ten seconds had passed when Freylih hit Trefa with a Rocket Launcher from 5.8 metres, claiming the authoritative first blood. At second sixteen Vulgarus killed himself with the same weapon; at eighteen Freylih followed suit. Trefa replied with a Flak Cannon kill at second 31, turning the opening into a chase where the scoreboard sometimes moved backwards. Another rocket suicide at second 57 left Vulgarus on minus two.

Biosludge had a brief entry in the results and departed early: zero kills, one death, minus one point after a suicide of unknown cause. A 68-second drought followed the kill at second 122, lasting until second 190, when Trefa hit Vulgarus with the Flak Cannon. Freylih had already begun gathering points; Vulgarus was still paying back his own mistakes. The contest looked chaotic, but its timing and scoring were perfectly clear in the log.

A double kill answered by a wall of flak

At second 227, Vulgarus rocketed Trefa from 27.9 metres, then hit Freylih one second later. That was his first recorded Double Kill. He climbed through the ties and reached five points at second 309, finally showing the Rocket Launcher could be more dangerous to rivals than its owner. Trefa refused to yield and made a Double Kill of her own at seconds 323 and 324, eliminating Vulgarus and Freylih.

The middle phase was a sequence of close exchanges. Rocket kills at 388, 398 and 414 took Freylih to seven points, but Trefa replied with attacks at 420, 422, 429 and 436, reaching eight. Flak Cannon, Stinger and later Shock Combo gave her several ways to keep the leaders guessing. The eighth minute produced nine kills, with the seventeenth minute eventually matching that mark. There was no stable front-runner; by the end the lead would have changed nine times.

Trefa leads; Vulgarus finds five in a row

At second 560 Trefa completed another Double Kill after eliminating Vulgarus and Freylih. Thirteen seconds later she had twelve points against Vulgarus on ten and Freylih on nine. Her close-range approach shows up unmistakably in the statistics: fifteen of her twenty-one kills came from the Flak Cannon, and her average kill distance was just 7.2 metres. She also collected the most items, twenty-one, although their map positions are not provided.

Vulgarus gradually rewrote the balance. His fifteenth point arrived at second 744 and his sixteenth at 785. From there came the decisive five-kill streak, with hits at seconds 785, 815, 825, 830 and 853, taking him to twenty points without dying. Freylih ended the run at second 870 with the Shock Rifle. He stopped the streak, not the wider surge: Trefa was still on fifteen and Freylih had also lost ground to another suicide.

A long Shock Combo and a same-second finish

Vulgarus kept applying pressure after second 879. A rocket hit Trefa at 886; the Flak Cannon brought down Freylih at 901 and 923. Freylih responded with Rocket Launcher kills at seconds 949 and 961, yet a Shock Rifle suicide at 974 erased one precious point. By second 985 Vulgarus had reached twenty-five.

Nine seconds later he landed the longest kill of the match: a Shock Combo on Freylih from 32.6 metres. It was short of the fifty-metre sniper threshold but a notable distance in this fight. Another Shock Combo brought point twenty-seven and a Shock Rifle kill at second 1023 made it twenty-eight. Trefa reached twenty points and Freylih equalled her with a rocket at second 1054. In that same second, Vulgarus ended the match with a Shock Combo against Freylih: 30:20:20.

Match moments

• Freylih claimed first blood with a Rocket Launcher at ten seconds.
• Two early suicides left Vulgarus on minus two points.
• Trefa recorded Double Kills at seconds 324, 422 and 560.
• The lead changed nine times, and two minutes recorded nine kills each.
• Freylih broke Vulgarus’s five-kill streak at second 870.
• A 32.6-metre Shock Combo preceded the match-winning Shock Combo.

Across 1,054 seconds, Vulgarus compiled thirty-five kills, five suicides and a winning score of thirty. Freylih ended with twenty points and twenty-three kills; Trefa also scored twenty but registered twenty-one kills and only one suicide. Neither second nor third place implies a lack of resistance: the lead changed nine times, while the Rocket Launcher and Flak Cannon delivered twenty-four kills apiece. Vulgarus led the instant-revenge table too, with nineteen against Trefa’s thirteen and Freylih’s twelve. His average life lasted thirty-eight seconds, compared with thirty-two for each rival. He did not avoid every explosion; he simply recovered from them better.