For what it's worth:
I was rooting for VonIvan, but DevM played brilliantly and in the end I'm fairly confident he'd take the win and advance to the finals no matter what happened.
HOWEVER
Using Formula 1 as an analogy:
If a driver's in the lead for 90% of the race, feeling confident, cruising to what's looking like a smooth victory but suddenly, his engine goes boom and the driver's forced to retire, what happens then?
Usually, the guy behind takes the win and, due to F1 regulations, the driver previously in front gets a grid penalty for having to swap engines in order to compete in the next race event.
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/127346
Considering DevM as Lewis Hamilton here for a minute, he obliterated Von's trucks (FeelsQuiteBadMan), had Von on the backfoot and then all of a sudden bugsplatted.
No matter how much DevM was leading this game, he crashed and was unable to finish game 4. In line with a lot of other tournaments, the person who bugsplats after a set amount of time is given the loss because they're effectively unable to finish the game. This should be quite obvious.
Considering Von still had the VP lead when his opponent dropped, it's weird to see that DevM had no "grid penalty" against him.
I do however somewhat understand the decisionmaking process as it happened. There were 1600 people watching the GCS semi finals, arguably making it the biggest CoH2 event as of yet.
Both AE and Stormless were doing a tremendous job, maintaining their high standards regarding production & casting quality. When something as unexpected, unique and unprecedented as that happens, shit can and will hit the fan.
I'm 100% certain that, despite AE's "bias" towards DevM, he'd never, ever deliberatly make a decision that disadvantages one of the players in his tournaments. He holds sportmanship and fairness in the highest regard but he's only human and at that time, we have to understand that he might have been under a tremendous amount of pressure to both carry on with the stream as it was at the time without causing unnessesary delays and helping make a very important decision in a split second.
What's done's been done. As I said, despite really wanting VonIvan to win, I'm sure enough that DevM would've won the series eventually so I don't think that the decision that's been made would have had such an enormous impact.
If there's any future big tournaments however, I would urge the organisers to make the rules regarding busplats crystal clear so that there won't be a discussion of any kind.
Let's close this, let AE and VonIvan discuss this in person and resolve the matter.
When I was in Leicester last year, Stormless and AE were able to impress both their ESL hosts and the people from Sega that were present. Those guys never thought that such a relative old and unknown game could attract such a crowd and have such a dedicated scene and fanbase.
With an even bigger event coming up, it's time to show those guys again how we resolve conflicts and mishaps.
And plot twist, it's not by writing consipracy theories on a public forum...
To quote our immortal, beloved and slightly awkward former community manager Noun (praise be upon him)
"
Let's all be awesome together"