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CPL Europe

Friday, 07 December 2001 -
I`m back. ? $comment_count ?>
I've been away for a while and have now had a few days to get back in touch with the recent happenings in the Quake world.

In fact I must admit, I've taken a bit of extra time to consider the North European semi-final situation before venting my opinion. Had I been around, I could probably have helped clear a few things up, since some of the -moslty imaginary- problems were caused by the evolution of the backoffice in recent months. For example: remember when we reverted the procedure for map selection to a simpeler version? That's when I removed the decider map field from the game schedule page. (Incidentally we also made it perfectly clear that if trouble would occur, we would go back to the more involved procedure).
Appolyons decision might have been harsh, but it was within the rules and his authority and, as far as I understand, not uncalled for. That he was able to revise his decission later only confirms his selfless dedication to the league and the players. (Not that I needed any more evidence to be convinced of that in the first place though.) Instead of regurgitating IRC-logs and drafting immeasurable lengths of pointless prose, some peoples time would have been better spent reading (and, for a change, understandig) the competitions rules, or trying to properly word badly needed apologies.
Let's try to make the final turn out better, and with the efforts by the NEU admin team over the past few days I'm pretty confident it will. If we do have another season, I can only hope that those who have no basic trust in or respect for the leagues organisers will contemplate that fact and refrain from registering. At least that would save us the trouble of having to draw a conclusion for them.

The North American division has ended, with AG taking the title for the 3rd time. Sadly, the lack of stable teams in the division has again resulted in many matches left unplayed but that in fact highlights the perseverance ot the admins and remaining players to bring the season to a worthy conclusion.

While being the most 'noisy' division previous seasons (i.e. filled with trouble-making, profanity slinging, Qizmo-impaired players), this time around everything went exceptionally smooth in Australia. So smooth in fact, I hardly realised the division has had so many games played. From a quick glance I'ld say 3/4 of all scheduled matches got decide without default wins; most certainly a record in any division! Congratulations to Wart, his admins and all teamsfor that! With THDM taking the title, it was great to see a 'new' team make so much progress in the game. I must admit I chuckled when I first found out a bunch of Team Fortress (and hence, obviously, newbie) players had registered for season 2. So much for QuakeWorld deathmatch being past its peak and impossible to get into for less experienced players I'ld say.

November saw a flurry of activity on the QW client coding front, as evidenced by Besmellas news archive. Hoonys story on MVD caused quite a bit of excitement. While it's obviously great that talented people like Tonik, Highlander, Sturm or Strider continue to dedicate huge chunks of their spare time to enhance QuakeWorld, I still feel it would be much more efficient to coordinate the efforts. If we want to end up with a generally accepted next generation QW-client (and server), someone will have to eventually.

In short, a lot happened last month, but nothing really changed, did it? :)
In the meanwhile, I've been thinking about some rather unrelated project I'ld like to set up for online gaming. I'll try to do an update about that soon.