Skilled Soldier @kpap
This goes without saying, 120 has been the most high skill world of the last year because it had two extremely stacked premades. The titanic rematch between the Swedes & the Balkan boiz (plus a few .net bigboiz) against the 'Last Ride' of the .net old guard under Grandpa Minty. Of such a high skill world, Kpap was without a doubt the player subjected to the most pressure who simply did not give an inch. Yes, we must give a shoutout to other Washed players who were taking plenty of sits and doing a lot to fight Kek, but Kpap was fighting a different war. In k53 Kpap was getting cycle catted by the rank 1 and 2 player and many of their minions despite being barely top 30 (size difference of many many times). Yes, the tribe backed him with defence, but he was getting catted by like 1k nukes a day or more for weeks at a time. Eventually, they decided to try a huge op on him with hundreds of nobles. The madlad cancelled his holiday and defended for 18 hours straight because he 'didn't trust a sitter not to lose villages' and his US Carry fatticus matticus was away at the time. In the end he went positive on that war day because he took villages from his opponents.
I must address the elephant in the room, kpap is a bit of a dick, but there are very very few players who could have kept logging in and kept playing aggressively under the amount of pressure kpap was under and none of those players were in such a desperate position during the year of 2021. Furthermore, this is an award about, in my opinion, skill and not character. That is what other awards are for. Mechanically and in terms of general offence and defence strategy the guy's a beast and I would put him up against any other individual player currently on .net 1 for 1 and trust him to either roll them, or at the very least chip away a few caps at a time whilst holding his own. He even held his own when he was playing solo before Matt came and started to (much more politely) carry the account while the Orkpap was sleeping/beaching.
That is why kpap deserves skilled soldier, the man was a wall on the defence, and crazy on the offence on 120,115 and every world he has played. I mean back on w106 a couple of years ago the 'legendary' abel
quit went on holiday until Kpap deleted after having to frontline Kpap for too long... This award has been a long time coming.
Master and Commander
@Mintyfresh
Minty is one of the most well-known members of the .net community, this old man is a seasoned veteran of a million different worlds. Some say he always cancel snipes to his last village. Some say Minty is such a tribal wars addict that he wrote a 1000 page treatise on archers called 'an archer, an archer, my skilled soldier for an archer'. Some say he is the greatest defender of all time. All I know is.... he was an outstanding duke on w120.
The washed 120 tribe came pretty much out of nowhere, we joined late, and most of us joined the premade days before starting on the world. The sole reason Minty was able to build what was the greatest tribal wars tribe most (all?) of us have ever played in was because of his own leadership abilities. It is a testament to Minty's reputation and the trust we all have in him that he was able to bring so many players who had already 'retired' back for
one last ride and I think that none of the other great dukes of recent time would have been able to bring together quite so many players from so many different .net cliques. The reason for this vast tangent is simple: Washed was jam-packed full of egos and people who had not played with each other before, or did not like one another. Despite this, thanks to his leadership abilities and people management skills, in no small part by creating a first-class competent and effective council to back him up, Minty was able to prevent almost any huge drama from impacting Washed even as it crippled our enemies. Minty was a very no-nonsense but also understanding leader and he and his council were able to forge one of the best tribes arguably ever.
The second main point is Minty's abilities as a commander. I think the single best thing about Minty was his ability to see the bigger picture and change his plans based on enemy action. KEK tried some huge pushes in K53 whilst the Washed council had decided to have us hold k53 so that the main efforts could be made further east. This was a good plan until the huge pushes started and we came under unsustainable pressure. Instead of doubling down Paul showed outstanding flexibility in moving resources to relieve the pressure. In the end, even as the KEK main offensive petered out in the West, Knockout blows were being delivered against KEK players in the east. One of the biggest criticisms I have heard about other dukes is that they focus on their plans and their carries (I have been guilty of it to on a brief foray into leadership) and are caught off guard when overstretched players in other areas can't keep up. Minty is a great leader because he never sets unrealistic goals for his members. He understands his accounts, he uses them well, and he ties it all together into an unmatched general strategy when it comes to the operations side of tribal wars. He is a good leader because he puts strong accounts into the situations in which they can best thrive before letting them do so without curtailing them needlessly.
Finally, when it comes to the morale, content and espionage side of things Minty is also unmatched. 'Espionage' does not mean dirty things as Minty is also a very principled player when it comes to rule-breaking. It means Minty is not above employing spies disillusioned with their tribe, or of feeding false information to suspected spies to rat them out. This means that we had a much clearer picture of our opponents than they did of us which is a key part of diplomacy based, no enforced teams game like tribal wars. More than that, we also had very few leaks ourselves. The mean reason for this was not Minty's counterespionage (although this played a part), it was the consistent high morale and loyalty fostered in the tribe in no small part due to Minty's constant ability to have a laugh and encourage content. Toxicity was swiftly stamped out and it was the loyalty to the cause and our uniting against KEK thanks to Minty and others' work that got us through the world. Washed was probably the least drama-filled tribe I have ever played in DESPITE HAVING AN ENTIRE ROSTER OF HUGE EGO PLAYERS, many of whom (myself included) have caused tons of drama whilst playing with the same players on other worlds. Therefore I can only guess that this is in no small part once again due to Paul's leadership abilities.
For his abilities as an inspiring internal leader, a people manager and a thorough planner, it's about time Minty got a Master and Commander Award for winning such a competitive world as w120. It is well deserved.
N.B. Jon, Jake, Trex, all the other council players and even non-council (until world end) players like Babin all had considerable parts to play in all of the praise heaped upon minty above and he could not have done it without them. But... Minty chose and directed them so I have chosen to analyse him as a leader of the tribe and I am sorry to those players if they see their hard work being ascribed to Minty. I am sure they won't mind!
Tribemate of the Year @Timothy Mus
What can I say... Mesut is a divisive figure in this community. Seeing him on W106 on the externals and the world discord, and after all the arguments I had with him, it is easy to see why he gets a bad reputation. I have played with Mesut a lot since 107 and suffice to say I was expecting him to be intolerable from what the swedes have said.
Therefore, you can imagine my surprise when I played with him for the first time on W107 and found that reality could not be further from the truth. Mesut has always been a hard-working, loyal and dedicated tribe member for every single tribe he plays in. And yet, he has been kicked from tribes during the victory countdown, he is subject to constant abuse from the very tribemates whose skill he defends incessantly (shameful swedes), and in his current tribe he is already called the 'Dagestani rat' on the tribe members list. I think this is the best example of Mesut's exemplary character. Despite all this treatment he is still playing for and completely committed to playing with his .se server mates, and he never ceases to tell us how good they are before going back to being insulted and trolled by them again. To be brutally honest, they don't know how lucky they are to have a tribemate like Mesut.
The Mesut who played on W120 was different to even the slightly toxic one of the W107 days. He joined very late but from day one his first loyalty was always to the tribe. He didn't care about rank, or awards, or growth for his account, he only cared about the tribe winning. Anyone in Washed can back me up here, and you can read Crunsh's earlier messages for further evidence. Mesut took tons of sits just solely to mint for people, and even more normal sits too. I believe he spent the majority of a couple of days straight minting for backline players to the point I was asking him why the hell are you agreeing to these sits? The answer was that mesut's account was small and so he was
minting to help the tribe in the only way he could.
In fact, during the infamous 'haircut incident' Mesut ended up sitting one of the largest accounts in the world to help snipe for kpap during the massive op being launched on him (see above). Mesut wanted to help so bad that he was getting audibly frustrated every time he missed a snipe (which was not often).
We also had jokes in the tribe that Mesut is like the eye of Sauron because he sees everything. Mesut was constantly checking up on TWstats and the world discord, amongst other things, and telling us about important intel like people losing villages in almost real-time. He was an invaluable asset here and probably helped us capture or defend many villages that we would not have otherwise got/defended.
I have highlighted some of the individual incidents where Mesut really showed that his loyalty was to the tribe and not to himself, and I will now round things off with a more general closing statement. Mesut went 100% defence so that he could literally just send support to his tribemates. Mesut was constantly in our discord ready to (
provide content) help people and keep spirits up, and when he started getting defence mesut emptied his entire account day after day (like many of our amazing washed backliners).
As Jacob has already said, mesut was probably the person most dedicated to victory in the tribe. The Tribemate award should be awarded to the person most willing to sacrifice any personal advantages in order to help the
tribe as a whole win. I cannot think of anyone more deserving of this award, and I think it would be the culmination of a few year-long redemption arc that has seen Mesut go from infamous troublemaker to committed and motivating team player.
Trust the Process.
Community personality of the year @Britney Spears
If this award should go to discord spammers, it should go to Ragestyles. The community personality award has always been about providing content and engaging with people from across the entire community, if you are gonna start giving awards for being helpful on discord you might as well pin medals on all the mods. I think Britney Spears was creating some of the best content consistently on the w120 forums, probably on every other world he plays, and now he is continuing with a recent quality content dump on the w125 forums. Jakes meme dumps always come along out of the blue and catch you unexpected, but every single time there is a wall of quality content farming in the likes that gets the community buzzing for many replies. It is fostering this worldwide engagement across tribe boundaries that truly makes someone like Jake deserve the community personality of the year. It is not just about getting people interested in the world, it is also about giving people that content and that enjoyment that keeps them coming back to what is, respectfully, a dated and often mechanically boring game.
Furthermore, Britney Spears is just so much more consistent than anyone else, there are no long downtime periods, there are no long waits for 'Part 2's'. One of the best parts about playing in washed on W120 was the content, and where there is quality content, you don't have to look far to find Jake.
Jake is one of those players I’d definitely play another world with/for in the future for this very reason.
