A personal note: this the last 'GCS' tournament.

Just a personal note to the community, that the this is last iteration of the GCS tournament concept.

This is a positive thing!!

I'm very comfortable in how things have gone and am able to say this in advance.

It means I'm very assured that this year that as a team and a community we should absolutely nail the live aspect and it'll be climactic send-off and give closure to the project.

GCS2 was only attempted and initiated based on four factors.

I wouldn't have started the GCS2 process without:

1) GCS1's audio being bad so ruining the satisfaction of completion of GCS1 from my standpoint.

2) Janne252 being convinced in the project and wanting to do all the work to make the website.

3) George and Ed generously offering their venue for cost-only use.

4) Community keenness and wanting to support it.

Then it wouldn't have been possible without:

A) Generous community funds and support

B) Help from other community members.

C) My unhealthy fascination at going full tilt on hobbies. Modesty out of the window here - I have put around 3,000+ hours into the GCS project. Including web art, marketing, travel organisation, failed sponsorship bids, tourney rules and systems, refereeing, web design, live event organisation, countless meetings, merch production, 100s of hours of casting, networking, analysis and feedback processing, accounting and fiances, extensive writing.... etc.

(FYI to detractors my only personal gain from the above was in £500 in hardware I bought in 2017 that is still used to this day for casting. Web cam, mic, GPU - these were very necessary upgrades at the time.)

I personally need to move on with my life now, and focus on getting fit again, career, finding a partner (Evelina?) etc. etc.

The Future

There are some fantastic community members that are bringing you events in the future, and of course there's rumblings of a next game in the series?!?!

Personally I'll still be available as a tournament caster for other people's events if they request my services, and to any tournament organiser that wants to ask my opinion or advice.

Any large scale projects like this one in my opinion should be funded by the Relic, Sega, and Sponsors.

Why did I write this?

It was tilting me how many GCS3 jokes I see, I want people to tune in and watch as much of GCS2 as they can and enjoy it here and now.

Oh and as a 'look at me aren't I great?' exercise.

Oh and as a 'look at me aren't I great?' exercise.

Dane can help you with that!

Thx for all your hard work

I think we all discovered just how totally dedicated you are to COH2 when we saw that download finish mid casting.
Rather than make excuses and go and watch your...ahem, video, you stayed and cast the rest of the match. #Professionalism #DedicationToTheEnd #COH2ComesFirst

Well done for all the amazing work you did with GCS! The huge amount of contributions from the community show how much support you rallied together. It's clear those thousands of hours you invested into it have created something incredible that everyone is enjoying to the fullest.

I really love watching matches that are cast by you and Stormless, because they are always hugely entertaining and also very insightful. IMO there hasn't been such a perfect pairing and dynamic between two casters since Ami and Ipkai.
That's just one more reason why I'm really looking forward to watching the GCS finals!

Well done again for all the incredible time and passion you put into GCS it has absolutely paid off already and we haven't even seen the final yet!

It's odd that so many people remember my lax notification control incidents even if from January 2016!

Yeah big shout out to Stormless, it's off the back of support for our casting that GCS was possible in the first place. Hopefully he gets the same satisfaction of seeing GCS2 go down with good audio as I will