Battlefield 3 team SA takes down Australia

Team Battlefield 3 South Africa is now 3 weeks into its Nation’s Cup 2012 campaign, and yesterday the team produced its first positive result, beating a favoured Australian team in two consecutive rounds to win the match.

Having lost against Finland in their opening match, and then against Belgium in their second round, Team South Africa was picked to lose against a strong Australian team. However the team managed to defeat the Australians 13-0 in the first round and then 23-0 in the second round.

After some scheduling problems, the match was finally set to be played at 1PM local time, Sunday 19 February. The match was played on the map Operation Firestorm, and it was the first map to be played with 2 jets, helicopters as well as 3 tanks. Only 1 tank and 1 jet were allowed to be used at any given time. The total ticket count for the match was 200 per team.

Each round was played on a different server, to help offset the advantage the teams would have playing on their local server. Team South Africa’s “home game” was played on an MWEB sponsored UK based server, and it was decided that the second round would be played on a US based server.

Due to problems with latency as a result of playing over a 3G internet connection, team leader AJ ‘Assassin’ Herbst, was not able to play, but did participate over team-speak, encouraging his team mates onto victory. This meant that team South Africa was down a player throughout the entire match.

Australia managed to take air superiority, completely grounding team SA’s aircraft for most of the match. South Africa countered this strategy cleverly by reallocating aircraft players to infantry squads, giving them a slight advantage on the ground. While Australia took the high ground, protecting their flags from building tops, South Africa played a “cat and mouse” game by keeping low and out of sight while moving in-between rubble, wrecked buildings and vegetation.

MWEB has provided local as well as internationally located servers for the South African Battlefield 3 team to practice on, as well as provided players with bandwidth accounts and a Team Speak server to use when playing online. The team’s next match will be against Russia, and after that it will be decided which teams continue through to the next round.