Celestrial Order Match

We were all looking forward to this match because of the Rum lineup. Playing for Rum was Blessed, Crash, Viper and Who. With the exception of Who, all original members going back to when Rum was founded in April 1997. Who is from the second wave of members, joining in May 1998. Unfortunately, the match turned out to be an unpleasant ordeal. This scenario seems to play itself out time and time again when we match west coast clans. The goal is to find either a suitable central server (almost never successful) where pings are equal for both sides, or to play one map on an east coast server, one on a west coast server and try to agree on a suitable server for the tie breaker if and when we get to that point. Instead what happens is we wind up playing on the best east coast server for the other side which almost always turns out to be one of our worst servers out of all the east and west coast servers combined. Both sides are lagged, us more so than the other clan and we lose the map. Then we move to a west coast server where we are still lagged but the other side has no lag and we lose that map too. The inequality of this situation is Rum = lagged on both servers, other side = lagged only on one server (and less so than us). That's exactly what happened tonight except that we managed to win the second map only because it was a large complicated map and one that we are good enough on that we have never lost it in a match. Had it been any other map we would have certainly lost it because of the lag. Prior to starting the second map, both clans went to the Rum server solely for the purpose of inspecting each others pings on that server. Pings were decidedly in our favor so we decided to try a caltech server. On the caltech server pings were substantially in CO's favor. Knowing that finding a server where both sides were equal was going to be impossible, we took a gamble and agreed to play the second map (risking losing the match if we lost the map because of the laggy server) on the caltech server if the tie breaker would be played on the Rum server. CO agreed and we managed to win the map. Faced with the prospect of playing the deciding map on a server that was more favorable to Rum, CO reneged on their agreement and refused to play, forfeiting the match to Rum. I don't think CO was trying to screw us but their perception of what is fair is colored by their immense self importance. For them, fair = favorable to CO. If it's favorable for the other side too, that's fine but above all it needs to be favorable to CO. They are good players, no doubt about it and they clearly expected to win this match in two maps as evidenced by this comment from one of their players when we were negociating the server for the tie breaker - "isn't gonna be a next map". Surprise, there was a next map and they weren't going to risk losing it despite their agreement.