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CPL Europe

Friday, July 24, 1998
'Twas the Night Before GibCon:
Tomorrow (Saturday morning) sees the beginning of the huge Australian LAN GibCon'98, to be held over Saturday and Sunday in Sydney, New South Wales. For many months now, the top players have been practicing hard for a chance to win First Prize.

Here are the vital statistics for GibCon'98 (with thanks of course to the GibCon'98 website for the text - check it out):

The Official Competition List:
Quake I - Free For All
Quake I - 1 on 1.
Quake II - Free For All
Quake I - Team DM
Quake I - TeamFortress
Quake II - Novelty
Other Comp's

The Network:
A 10Mbit fully switched network with a 100Mbit backbone, routed by a GIGABIT switch.
Each lot of 24 players is attached to a BayStack 303 10Mbit switching hub. Each BayStack 303 10Mbit switching hub is hooked up to a BayStack Accelar 1200 series GIGABIT switch, at 200Mbit (100Mbit full-duplex). Admin machines are connected to a BayStack 303, which in turn is hooked up to the Accelar at 100Mbit (200Mbit is a waste of processing power) servers are connected directly to the BayStack Accelar GIGABIT (it deserves to be bold) at 1000Mbit.

The Servers:
GibCon will be running 8 servers, all under Linux. Absolute minimum specs are PPro200, 128meg Ram, gigabit [thats optic fibre] network card. Failing availability of the Gigabit hub, 100MBit cards, straight into the backbone. The majority of servers will be P2/266's or higher. GibCon will also have access to 2 duel P2/300 machines, which will be running the more intensive Mods. TF, and 100player Q2.? :)

Selected Prizes:
The Harris Technology "phat system" for the winner of the Duel Comp:

Intel PentiumII 400MHz
ASUS BX chipset motherboard (100MHz FSB)
128Mb PC100 compliant SDRAM (100MHz)
6.4Gb IBM DeskStar EIDE HD
Diamond Viper V330 4Mb + Diamond MonsterII 12Mb
Diamond Sonic Impact S70 Sound card
Philips 19" Brilliance Monitor

The Americans gave away John Carmack's Ferrari to a certain Mr Thresh. GibCon doesn't have that much cash, so they got something which is a real-close second. One of John Carmack's Ferrari Pistons.

GolSyd have put up GibCon'98 predictions on their LAN page with various Australian Quake Players having a go at predicting who will win the Duel & Team DM comps. Here's how Bitchy summarises the collective view on the GibCon newspage:

Looks as though AO, CW, TS, dN and Mhcns are the favourites so far for the team comp. Favourites in Duel Comp seem to be Harsh (considering he picked himself ;)) Hook, K5, Spore and Reload. The majority are NSW players thank goodness:P It will be great to see duelers and teams from the hosting state come out on top! Of course these are a limited amount of predictions and they may seem biased so if you think you have a better predicition please email Bitchy :)

New Zealanders Have Arrived:

Eraser, GoosE_, Incubus, Lord Valkrist and Abaddon (absent from photo) are in town, having flown in from New Zealand for GibCon'98. In fact, four of them are at my house, testing their 19" monitors (hired in Sydney) and getting ready to go see the X-Files (gets out in September or something in NZ). You may be interested to learn, GoosE_'s machine is a P2-450, 256 MB RAM, 2X12MB Voodoo2's, commonly referred to as either the "heater" or the "beast" back home. Whatever his refresh rate is, that's what he gets for a frame rate. Looking at Quake2 on it, my thought was "that's how the game is meant to look".

Thresh:
Thresh mentioned Challenge.AU in his Frontline page, which is being revamped (looks like the whole Gamers Extreme site is getting some work done). I think this definitely is a sign he is letting his hair down more these days :P~

"On the topic of International Quake sites, there is another site that is updated quite often with a lot of the recent haps. It has some really cool International Quake scene coverage and is worth a looksee. Props go out to them Aussies down under who have some really impressive Quake stuff goin' on! (i.e. Team Fortress) Go to www.challenge-au.com to check it out!"

Thresh was writing some stuff about Quake.World, Izn0's site looking at international Quake scenes. He also talks a bit about some of the practice the DR guys have been doing for their upcoming match against Nine:

"I spent the weekend & Monday practicing with the Death Row guys (Frick, Unholy, B2, and Dayvid) for the Sweden trip. Ahh, there's nothing like playing Quake till 8 in the mornin' and having only eaten Taco Hell all day/night. I think some of us might have even recorded some demos. We played a bunch of 2on2's and 4on4's on Kitty. (Kitty is the most popular west-coast server) I think we played quite decent, considering it was the first team games in some time for many of us".

Hobbex:
Speaking of Quake.World, Izn0 has a new "scene profile" up for Sweden, partly based on an interview he had with LakermaN_of_SC. Check it out here. I learnt there of a long-established Quake website in Sweden called A Frag in the Darkness, which is a very cool mix of news and comment by Swedish Quake Player Hobbex. According to Izn0, this site "was, is, and will most likely also remain Scandinavias most respected clan ranking, and news page". A Frag in the Darkness has the most sophisticated rankings and statistical stuff I've seen yet - if you are at all interested in this sort of stuff it is a "must visit" site.

Plans for the Weekend:
Well, you know the usual story, unless something gobsmackingly huge occurs over the weekend, I'll be back on Monday. Of course, with GibCon'98, there IS something humungously gobsmackingly HUGE happening, but that's even more reason why I'll be unable to update over the weekend. Next week I hope to be able to bring you some stories, piccys and tale tales from the EVENT :-). Until then, make sure you have a fragalicious weekend, especially if you're up for the CPL Event.

Thursday, July 23, 1998
World Quake League:
For the second day in a row, a new Quake site with an international focus has appeared :-). This one is called the World Quake League, and was announced on Bluesnews. Commissioner Euwyn Poon writes that:

"My vision for WQL is a league run similar to that of a professional sports league, with players from various regions. Each team will consist of at most 20 active players, representing either a city, province, or region (if from a big country) or an entire country. WQL will focus on it's inaugural season, the 99-00 Quake Arena season... ... Planned currently are two divisions, and four sub-divisions. The North American Division, consisting of the American division and the Canadian division, and the World Division, conisisting of the European division, Asian division. This will be an international league".

Hoony will keep an eye out for the progress of this one - it's an amazing (and ambitious) concept.

Nine Studio News - 9 Vs DR:
Marik has put some more info up on the official Nine Studios Clan 9 Vs Deathrow website. I saw on the Info page that the studio is going to have a large screen projection for every Player:

"The actual studio where the match is played is about 3,600 sq.feet in size. Each player will have their screen projected on to a wall. In total we?ll have 10 projectors showing the match. 8 for individual players and 2 for chasecam?s. If you can?t come to see it live, you?ll be able to see it on the internet. We will cast the match by using proxy?s. More info on how to watch the match live will be posted shortly. When the match is completed we?ll throw a party for all participants and ticketholders to celebrate the event".

On the Rules page I saw what must have been the preferred Map choices of the two clans for both Normal Quake (NQ) and Quakeworld (QW). Since you'd expect that Deathrow selected the NQ Maps and Nine selected the QW Maps it's interesting that they are almost a mirror image of each other. The Americans slightly favour DM3, which seems to be the Map of choice for team games in the US, while the Swedes slightly favour E1M2, which I have heard described as Nine's favourite Map for Clan matches:

Matches: 5 Normal Quake, 5 Quakeworld
Time: 20 min
Deathmatch Mode: 1
Match Style: 4X4
Maps: NQ: 2X E1M2, 3X DM3
Maps: QW: 2X DM3, 3X E1M2
Teamplay: 2
Powerups: ON

Finally, on the Participate page Marik offers you the opportunity to take part in this event by running a proxy to "broadcast" the games live. Challenge.AU hopes to be able to show some of the games at our office with a large screen, and I have talked to Guzz of GolSyd about the possibilities of GolSyd running a proxy. If you're interested in this, let him know. If you live in another State or country, why not email Marik?

"We need operators of websites to help us distribute the match live on the Internet. If you have bandwith available and wish to help us by letting people connect to a proxy run by you, mail us at for additional information".

More from Izn0 and Quake.World:
Izn0 has put up a very interesting review of the Quake scene in Finland on his brand new Quake.World site, and has added a demo of Finland's Clan Z Vs Denmark's NBI (Nasty Beasts Inc.) in the Demos section. Clan 9 recently played an international against Z and beat them 283-259, which is a very close margin. Finland's Z are widely regarded as one of the top Clans in Europe.

If you visit the Z webpage you'll find this about the match:

"We fought against CLAN NINE, we lost 259 - 283. Damn that was close =)".

I had a good talk to Izn0 last night on ICQ and he told me a lot of really interesting stuff about Quake in the Northern European lands. For example, in Scandinavia "A LOT" of people have even better connections than ISDN... "and ISDN costs as much as modem per/hour". As he says on his website, this is even more true for Finland:

"Finland must be a quake players dream. ISDN is as cheap as modem and the majority are therefor LPB?s".

Sweden is the largest Quake nation, with Izn0 estimating that about 2,000-4,000 ppl play every day or so.

"Sweden is the biggest, but Norway Denmark Finland Sweden should almost be considered as one country quake wise... cause people play over those borders everyday... i usually dont even care to know if the server is in one or the other of those countries... get the same ping in all of them".

We also talked about Quake in Russia. Apparently the Russians love their Quake but they don't have good internet connections. Perhaps for this reason (who knows?) they have grown into the unusual habit of playing Quake using tp1 rules - which means you can't kill yourself or your team-mates. Izn0 told me they do a lot of shooting at each other and a lot of shooting at floors ;-).

From Sweden, Izn0 can play on the best (for him) Russian server with a ping of 200ms! In fact, he said there was a "sweet spot" in Europe that would make a European League possible:

"Well actually I think that it would be possible if people werent so lazy for almost the whole of Europe to play a league... cause there was/is a server in Wien there even I get 200 ping on 33.6 from Sweden, and its as we say in Sweden "mitt i smeten" which means, about; in the middle of everything... so ALOT of countries get good ping there".

Finally, I asked him about Thresh's comments in a recent Front Line article where he said that he'd heard from top Players in other countries that they were about ready to move on from Quake:

hey, I saw on Thresh's frontline that he said he'd been talking to top players from around the world, and that many were ready to move on from Quake - is that true?
i think that; if Quake Arena then it comes out, isnt very good, and then i mean VERY GOOD; not graphic wise, but the feeling... short version: if QA sucks Quake will live on :)
yes, that's what I think too - I think that just because it's getting old means nothing - age has got nothing to do with it - it's all gameplay that matters
i was gonna switch to Unreal that was before i played it :) goddam crap game, lousy weapons, no feeling
yes, it just goes to show how hard it is to really get it "right" and so how lucky we all are with Quake really
:) quake is the best game still... and in Sweden almost no one plays Q2 or Unreal...
I wonder who Thresh talked to then :P\
well... old players may tire and quit... nothing strange with that
yes, I think that's true too - and a natural process
but some of them seem to think that if they quit the scene is dead... new players come everyday, dont think there have ever been more quakers in Scandinavia... just that people prefer to notice good players quitting, instead of 20 newbies starting :)

Australian CTF Team being Readied as we Speak:
Fatal-Reaction, good news, I got some reaction from a local CTF Clan regarding the news last night:

"Fuck.. which two..need some real fragging power in 2x2 ??? :-) "

That was it hehe - just a title with no text on a message board, and I haven't heard anything more yet :-). My guess is that they'll be planning a 2-person team. This weekend we have one of the biggest LANs of the year in Australia - GibCon '98, so everyone is a little busy with that.

Kiwis Invade Australia:
Here's how Abaddon reported the news on Abaddon's News that those Kiwis are coming to GibCon '98:

Australian invasion plans announced - updated by Ab
"A delegation from Hurricane has volunteered to represent Aotearoa at GibCon 98 in Sydney. Lord Valkrist, Eraser, Incubus, GoosE_, and maybe yours truly, are flying out tomorrow to start handing out some trans-Tasman beat-downs. Yeah. (I won't be attending unless I get confirmation from XTRA within the next 6 hours that I still have a job...)".

Hamlan Demos and Results are Up:
Results of the LAN held in Hamilton, New Zealand - July 18-19 1998, can be found here. There's some demos of the games, mostly using NZ's creepcam by the looks of it. The creepcam is one of the better chasecam-type demo utilities out there. The final was between Immortal and Mirage, with Immy the winner.

More CPL Coverage:
Can be found by the Adrenaline Vault's CPL Event coverage. Click here for a humungus panoramic view of the main event hall.

CPL Vs PGL - Geographical Casualty:
To really understand what's going on with the CPL vs PGL in the USA, a great place to start is this Introduction by Jeremy "Lindril" Degroat, to a series of feature articles (being written over the next few days) by Andy "leprechaun" Vajda called "The PGL and CPL: A Comparison of Experiences".

It seems pretty clear that something is sadly wrong with the way top level US Quake has been split between the LAN-based CPL and the mostly online-based PGL. But is this split simply the result of the different network choices made by the two organisations?

Lindril writes that US Quake Players are actually split on geographical lines, mostly as a result of the almost accidental way history played it's hand:

"The division referred to is the East vs. West (Westside) controversy. Out of the sixteen finalists sent to E3 for a chance at the Ferrari, nine were from California. Many East players felt that they had been treated unfairly and that Mplayer's servers had inherently, and yet unintentionally, favored those who played nearer to Mplayer's California offices. While many of the top players from both geographical regions have since forgiven and forgotten, many fans of both sides have remained hostile towards opposing players, and particularly, organizations they represent. The East vs. West debate raged back into full flame recently when four out of the five low-ping finalists in the California-based PGL's Season 1 came from the Westside. Again, many felt betrayed by the system, and misdirected, often blamed the West players specifically. Fan assertions that West players are simply better than East ones has done nothing to quiet the dissent. ".

Being based in Dallas, Texas, the CPL is of course something of an East Side league, and the top players in the CPL are in fact the same East side Quake players who have historically been excluded from previous tournaments, including the PGL.

Next up, if you at all intend to produce top level Quake matches for a live audience, make sure you read Andy "leprechaun" Vajda's article called "The PGL and CPL: A Comparison of Experiences". Andy is the only player to have become a finalist in both the CPL and the PGL (placing 6th at the FRAG and 4th at the PGL Season 2 finals).

Andy starts off by talking a bit about the dilemma of the "live" Quake match - namely how do you manage to reconcile the Players' need for calm, quiet, and concentration with the Spectators' need for sound, action, and participation.

"With everyone wanting to catch a glimpse of the action first hand, it often times became crowded, and when a frag was made or a tense moment passed, the crowd reacted with an energy that everyone could feel. This is a good thing, but not when 30 people are standing behind you "oohing and aahing" while you're trying to play a game".

I don't think that this challenge has been met and the problem solved, yet.

Next up he gives a really interesting Players' view of the vagaries of playing Quake at the top level - how important initial spawns on a Map are, which map you get to play etc. It seems pretty clear that you have to be prepared to deal with this kind of stuff all the time:

"We went random and it came up dm2. I would have played a decent game, but he got a very lucky spawn and grabbed both RL's immediately, not letting me have one for 5 minutes. I did a good job of keeping him to only 1 frag a minute, but I was in deep shit and I could tell it was only going to get worse".

Ahhh, the perils of DM2 if you play dm1 rules and your opponent runs the rockets! More on this stuff to come :-).

Deathrow Not at the CPL:
Zenmaster asked a very good question over on the Cyber Sports Network Message Board:

"Will there be anyone representing Death Row in Texas? This would be a great chance to see how well they measure up against the best of the east and probably the last chance".

To which Lindril replied:

"Unfortunately, Death Row has chosen not to attend the CPL event in Dallas, and this is probably a good idea considering that they've left the Quake 1 scene and would probably not fare that well against the practiced and pumped Cyberathletes. If DR however, had been practicing and attended CPL, many of them would have easily made my Top 10, and possibly won some of the prizes/sponsorships offered. Perhaps we will see the DR crowd at the next CPL event, and get that comparitive look that you and I both want to see".

Wednesday, July 22, 1998
US Challenges Australia in CTF 2-on-2 via ISDN:
Please, if you read this and you know which retirement home the Frightened Old Codgers are resting at, could you let them know that we have a great opportunity for them to play the top CTF Players in the US?

Here's what I heard back from Fatal-Reaction [Clan GIB], President of the League of Capture:

"Okay, we will probably be able to supply you with the needed dial up isdn connection located in eastern usa. A few members of our clan "Clan GIB (CGIB) currently the top NQ CTF LPB clan" work at erols (an isp provider who offers the connection you require who also host quake servers (Q1 Dm/CTF, Q2 etc.). We recently hosted a tournament called the Kings of Capture (KoC) it was a 2 on 2 ctf tourney. You mention that with your 128k isdn u would probably only be able to get 2 players? We would be happy to have a 2 on 2 NQ Q1 ctf tourney CGIB vs Australia?".

Quake.World - New International Quake Site:
Markus Sonermo, aka Izn0, who runs the leading Scandinavian 1-on-1 Quake League - The League, emailed me to say he has created a new site called Quake.World:

"Since you seem to be interested in Quake in other countries I thought I would tell you that I have just opened my site about that very thing over at FragZone. Take a look at it if you are up to it... After playing alot abroad (more than 30 different countries), I thought that other people also might be interested in quake in doing the same and reading about the scene in those places".

The site has just gone up, and already has a server list for 30+ countries and a report about the quakescene in Hong Kong. Izn0 seems to have an extensive contact list with Players from around the world and reports on the site that articles about Turkey, Argentina, Brazil and more are on their way.

"Hopefully also demos from the soon to come match between DF and DDT, two of Moscow, Russia?s, best clans".

Cool :-) I've been waiting with great interest to see what the Russians have been up to. This site is going to receive a lot of hits from Hoony ;-).

Roundup and Review of Upcoming CPL Event:
It's starting :-). I won't try and repeat all the stuff that's going to be reported over in the US News sites regarding the CPL over the next few days and especially during the tournament itself. Instead, I'll try and focus on one or two things that really seemed to stand out.

The Cyber Sports Network is covering the CPL Event at http://csn.mpog.com/. Check out http://csn.mpog.com/events/cpl/preview.html - for the predicted Top 20 finish. sCary is ranked #10, and here's what they say about him:

"The Quake community's favorite web personality and my dark horse pick for the Top 10. sCary is a surprisingly lethal Quake player who takes the game very seriously. Although a QW native, he's quite familiar with the majority of the top NetQuakers, and is certainly not intimidated by any of them.

Pros: NetQuake opponents might be tempted to take him lightly, a grave mistake. Practices and works on his game constantly. Might surprise even the best players on dm4. Top player on a deep Clan r3volution.

Cons: A QW native in a NetQuake tournament. Lack of experience against NetQuake's "Elite", so there may be some self-uncertainty concerning his ability to win against the best players".

http://csn.mpog.com/events/cpl/ignatu.html - CPL Commissioner Frank "Ignatu" Cabanski talks about the CPL Event, his hopes for the games, and his role as CPL Commissioner. Frank has extensive experience with Clanring which has 3 team tournaments (T1 - T3), and he organised the Red Annihilation tournament. I was particularly interested in what he said about enabling spectating of the matches and conveying some of the incredible excitement that these games can generate:

"I want to see the people at the CPL Event really hyped about the final few matches. It really gets exciting during the latter stages. I want to be able to present the tournament to people online, via QuakeTV. I think it's very important to give people the ability to see events like this. That's the point of an event, in one regard, that people watch it".

New Zealand HamLan Review:
Mr SelfDestruct has written a nice review of the recent HamLan LAN, and we are all waiting expectantly for the demos to be uploaded. Will hopefully be able to bring you info of where to pick' em up not too soon after :-). Those New Zealanders, by the way, are CTF Ninjas, just in case you're browsing this from the US with a Flag hanging off your shoulder...

FrogBot News:
Robert "Frog" Field has worked out a simple way to modify any Quake mod so that it is impossible to do teleporter tricks:

You can download the QuakeC changes you need to make to the progs.dat here. Robert has included the description of how to make the changes to any mod:

I took the opportunity to ask Robert what else he's been working on lately. If this is the first time you've heard of the FrogBot, it's an amazing AI Quake adversary - probably the best Quake bot out there. You can find out more and d/l the Frogbot over at http://www.telefragged.com/metro/, where Robert also has an open dialogue with Gamers on his message board. Here's what Robert has been working on (some very cool stuff indeed :-):

"1) Thinking about how to make the Frogbots circle air jump (eg. if you respawn near the quad you may not jump in the direction of the quad, but you steer yourself towards it - the Frogbots currently jump predict in a straight line). This may eventually enable the Frogbot to do the near quad circle jump and the dm2 circle lava jump.
2) Adding cheatlook mode where the Frogbots will hit you before you know it, like other bots (this is the equivalent to the cheat snap look that any bot I've ever played uses). This should make the bots more difficult for people who aren't happy with the current challenge the Frogbot presents.
3) Laid some code foundations for rocket jumping, alternative routes, and indirect paths (eg. the buttons in dm2 - though only the yellow armor one is necessary) - the Frogbot isn't a "follow it's nose" bot.
4) Done ztndm3 support, just need to check some item info.
5) Thinking of better bot evasion and combat tactics (eg. given that I do this: the bots will attempt to hide from you when you are respawn raping, and they should know how to strafe behind corners effectively in fights).
6) Start aerowalk support.
7) Do adequate teamplay.
8) Take a look at supporting dm3.
9) Do user map support editor. That is, users will be able to use the editor to alter .bsp files to support their own maps. It is possible that I will include in the progs.dat map support that people send me".

New Irish Leagues on the Way:
Saw over on the IE MB that there is a heap o' new stuff on the way for the ninja's of Ireland:

IQCAL - Irish Quake Clan Arena League
IQCL - Irish Quake Clan League
CAM - Clan Arena Mosh
IQCTFL - Irish Quake Capture the Flag League
IQMCL - Irish Quake Modemers Clan League

Tuesday, July 21, 1998
Welcome to Korean Quake:
Some of the best news I can get in my email is to hear from a new country that loves to play Quake :-).

Something I'll never forget from the Seoul Olympics Opening Ceremony was about 500 guys in white PJs kicking planks of wood into tiny splinters which then littered the central grassy oval like dandruff. They made a HUGE mess. Then they all ran off the field at top speed and along the way they picked up every single splinter of broken wood.

[KQM]Hurd sent me the following information:

hi..

I'm [KQM]Hurd from Korea and I'd like to make a notice that there are many quakers in my country. The history of Quake in Korea isn't long enough to have a lot of players, yet so far there are 10, original quake, and quake 2 clans formed starting from this year. We often have lan parties as well. Here are Quake Related Websites in Korea. Unfortunately, there isn't any Quake Website in English. [Warning - if you don't have the Korean Fonts/graphics, some of these sites may cause your browser to crash - mine did :P~]

http://fwq.always.co.kr <-- ( Quake related news site)
http://qwk.always.co.kr <-- ( Korea Quake World Server)
http://game.always.co.kr/quake/ <-- ( Quake 1 demo land, My Web page ;)
http://members.xoom.com/q2demos/ <-- ( Quake 2 Demo Land)
http://kqm.always.co.kr <-- (Quake 1 Clan)
http://smile.always.co.kr <-- (Quake 1 Clan)
http://sexy.always.co.kr <-- (Quake 2 Clan)
http://galaxy.channeli.net/skw001<-- (Quake 2 Clan)
http://soc.always.co.kr<-- (Quake 2 Clan)
http://qn.always.co.kr<-- (Personal Quake news Site)

Well, I have added the one of the Demos from the latest Lan-party we had. It's a deathmatch demo between 22/Plex and Indra, from the same clan called "Go With a Smile[(:]" I hope it helps you to see on what level we play Quake. If it is possible, i'd like you to introduce us to the world along with the attacted demo file, since everyone reads around the world reads your news. Thank you".

[KQM]Hurd also sent me this demo: plex1-3.zip, in which [(:] 22/Plex shows off some Ninja skills with the RL and LG to take out [(:] Indra 34 to 9.

The Birth of a National League in Australia:
There have been discussions going on concerning the creation of a national competitive structure in Australia. I'm really confident that we'll see stuff developing in this regard over the next few months. A positive sign is that many of the Australian States are preparing their own regional houses, a necessary first step before we can begin to see some real inter-State matches take place.

One of the developments I can report, albeit with a "Coming Soon" story, concerns Western Australia. Dalai-Lama has told me some exciting stuff and while the details must remain unpublished for now what I can say is that we are talking about a well-organised regional competitive structure here. For now, Dalai-Lama is interested in hearing what non-WA Players think in general of the national/state competitive concept, so feel free to email him at and strike up a conversation. What he's hoping to achieve in WA is something we can all benefit from with our own State stuff. Will bring you more on this soon :-).

US League of Capture Opportunity for Australian CTF Players:
Received word from Fatal-Reaction (Clan GIB), who is the President of the League of Capture, which is a very large and well-organised CTF group in the USA. Here's some info about the LOC:

"Gathered here are a group of players and leagues all dedicated to providing the best in Capture the Flag play. In search of a way to unite the best run leagues, organizers, and players came together to form the League of Capture. We are committed to hosting the best leagues, tournaments, and features from around the CTF community and are currently involved in creating a new CTF Web-Ring".

There's a shitload of good stuff on this website. For example, check out the news regarding the upcoming World Cup of Quake, scheduled for September. With 119 Clans registered, the goal is to search for "the BEST Capture The Flag Quake Clan in North America". If you are into CTF and haven't visited these pages before, you will soon be very happy :-).

Fatal-Reaction writes:

"I was wondering if you Australians play Quake 1 CTF.. as it is very popular here and we at the "League of Capture" run a U.s.A and Canada Capture the Flag League. We would be interested in setting up some kind of match between our Australian or whoever counterparts. I was looking at your site as with us connections would be a problem but are willing to look into a way around this and would be interested in setting up a CTF match. Either with our TOP clan or an "all-star" team. If this sounds appealing please reply with any questions and we could get this started".

There is a way Challenge.AU could approach this. Our single ISDN line would be insufficient for more than two Australian Players to connect to a US server, and even then one Player would have the best chance of a good connection. This means we can't really field much of an Australian CTF team until we get more high-speed connections.

But we could field just one or two Players - we could get a couple of the local CTF masters - the Frightened Old Codgers spring to mind - to join an American CTF team as Australian reps for a game. That would provide just as much of a challenge and an opportunity to play well. Australian CTF Players, let me know what you think of this as an idea.

4 Kane Vs Timber Demos up at Shroet Kommando:
Kommando Clan Leader SK_Griff sends word that four recently-played [SK] Kane vs [QPD] Timber demos are up on the Shroet Kommando website. If you haven't seen Kane and/or Timber play yet, prepare for your imminent re-education. The demos can be found in their international 1-on-1's demo section, which also includes a number of demos of LakermaN and Sectopod playing in the recent Swedish COTS LAN tournament. The demo dojos recommend that you bookmark this page :-).

Saw on the SK News page that:

"The Dutch Quake League 1o1 League seems to be pretty dead. No one of my opponents till now has replyed my or Kane mails or didnt show up at the date to play. Too bad.... could have been nice. Nowadays we are playing most in LAN, cause our University has some connection problems. Hope we can be back soon :P".

The guys are also hoping to be able to send Kane to take part in the upcoming action in Stockholm - I'm hoping they can too.

Irish Quake Clan League Demos:
Head on over to http://www.quake.ie/files/demos/index.html where MindPhuck has posted news and demos of Irish Quake ninjas in action. I'm going to get one of these demos up into my own demos page, soon as I can.

There's also a good demo there from the Irish DM4 Duel God Competition of Ser 2_1 Vs [CT] Reaper. Ser is Ireland's DM4 Duel God - well worth checking out. Von Swine emailed me to say: "I think everyone was a bit too drunk to carefully record demos properly at that stage of the evening so we missed some great ones like the final between Beast and Ser". Sounds like a good LAN to me :-).

Gamers Extreme Q2 Mod Beta Version Released:
D2-B2 sends word that GX has released the beta of their Quake II Tournament Mod:

"Just wanted to let you know that we've just wrapped up the first beta version of the GX Mod, a Quake II Tournament mod which manages team and 1 on 1 games. The mod contains a host of features such as a comprehensive voting system, 3 chasecam modes, advanced admin and configuration settings for different types of matches, support for ffa/practice modes, and much more. You can find more info at http://www.gamers.com/gxmod, and server administrators can download the beta version from there".

Sounds like it will be extremely good for Quake 2 Players.

Remember Woodstock?:
Both Sujoy and Timber are reportedly going to Stockholm, Methos is probably going to beg, borrow or steal his way over from Canada. Do you have the feeling it might be kind of important not to miss out on this one, if you can go?

A Local Story:
You probably heard of "Sheep Rooter Central" - it was a CA server that sprang up one day and became hugely popular. One day I had an ICQ conversation with a very worried MG-Titan, who it turns out had created the server on one of Multiplay's machines without telling any of the MP staff. All of a sudden it was a roaring success - what the hell should he do?

Well, finally, he decided to tell pouity, Multiplay's Chief Operations Officer, and own up, but he also made a strong and eloquent case for MP to keep the QW servers running (MP run the TEN service in Australia). The good news is that the MP honchos have embraced the idea. If you were playing at MP in the old dial-up QW days, you'll know that they had a great QW community going. It brings a tear to old Hoony's eye ;-).

Here's the low-down on this story from poiuty:

"Before Mike left MP for QLD he created a login for one of the machines for Titan. Titan was using this for TA maps and the like - no dramas. Then a while back I saw a new server at the top of my Gamespy list (yes I still play quite a bit of QW - just not as poiuty or any of the other nicks ppl know me by :P) called Sheep Rooter Central. I was full so I didn't bother checking it out. Then I started noticing some posts on quake-au about it, and thought I'd check it out again. I finally got on and saw the 'connecting to..' message. That was when I noticed the IP - one of mine! So that explains why one of my machines had gone from not too much traffic to quite a few gigs in a week ;)

My first reaction was one of curiosity - I wanted to know who has set it up - I thought Mike might have done so but then I saw it was Titan. I wasn't really concerned about it - from MPs perspective it wasn't using excess bandwidth or resources, but i was concerned what the 'upper management' might think of it (and that if the shit hit the fan I'd be left standing in front of it!).

So I let it slide, and had fun playing on the bugger. I guess the problem was though that it became too popular. Titan sent me a very long email, basically owning up to it, talking about misusing MPs resources, and hoping that I wouldn't can it and him in the process. I think he was surprised when I replied that I allready knew about it, and congratulated him on using his initiative instead of going postal at him :P

Since it was getting so popular, and since ACAL has contacted Titan about using the server I didn't think it could be run 'unofficially' for much longer. So now I was in Titans shoes- knowing about this server and wondering if the ppl upstream would have a problem with it. But I approached Dave about it and after explaining it he was cool about it. Of course it costs us to run the servers, so basically we decided to get some credit for it - hence MP showing up in the name.

So basically it all came about through Titan, but now has opened the door for MP to explore more possibilities and not limit ourselves to one platform. The servers are going very well - they are allways full, and I have plans to put up more across the country, with different mods as well. I want to set up a mod server that pl can vote from a web page for the mod to be used - there are so many great mods out there, yet only a few of them get real exposure. And what I would really like to do is have a server for mod authors to use for testing their code - I've got plenty of experience with tweaking game servers for performance (how many other ppl have been *paid* for 2 years to do that!) and I'd like to pass some of that on to the aussie coders out there".

?Way to go MP and Titan!?

International Quake Star - Gandalf:

Following my global expose last week, Irish Quake player Gandalf was amused to find that international fame had struck overnight:

"If I knew I would have got that piccie taken from my better side. Just one correction I was not the person who started saying "We love you Bitchy", it was that well known cyberstalker Earthworm Jim (But we do like Bitchy over here :P, not enough women playing Quake in Ireland)".

Asked if he had any tips for aspiring Players, Gandalf replied:

"Don't ask me I'm not a top player. But from an Irish point of view I reckon someone who has access to a lan with good players will improve their skill quite rapidly. Most of the really good 1 on 1players come form the colleges here, people like Reaper, Bunny, Zero, Krusty etc (I know I've missed some...) where they have the time and resources to play Quake (some of them played too much from what I hear of the results :P)".

I asked a few more questions:

Is there anyone who always beats you (never!)?
"Theres quite a few players who do that, but the one that beats me and pisses me off the most is [CT] Free Frag (he's part of Clan Trinity) the recent winners of the IQCl that you covered. I play mainly Clan Arena these days and the only map to play CA is DM3. If you know DM3 then you know where the Red Armour room is, this is where Free Frag will camp for the whole game and even though you know he is there he will always frag you (arrrghhhh)".
Have you ever had a Quake groupie offer you her motel keys?
"I bloody wish we have hardly any women playing quake over here. If thats what happens in Oz I'm emigrating :-)".

Monday, July 20, 1998
New Zealanders Coming to GibCon '98 :
Shane "GoosE_" Cole, who runs NZ's premier Quake ISP, Paradise.net, in Wellington, has emailed me to say that a team of Kiwis are coming over to crack skulls at this weekend's GibCon '98:

"I've told [GibCon] its 99% for sure that 4 of us will be going, Im waiting for confirmation on the last one which I will have on Monday. 100% for three of us. Most keen to have a NZ vs AU Q2 game, the guys were a little dismayed that all the Comps almost were Quake but thats ok. We are pretty sure there will be some Q2 games going on. One of them is Lord Valkyrist (came 2nd at national Q2 comp) One of them is Incubus (3rd equal with myself I think) and the other one is Abaddon (not sure where he ranked but hes good)".

Borg Article - Unreally?:
Borg [SOQ], one of Australia's best online commentators on things multiplayer gaming, has written a review of Unreal which Challenge.AU is pleased to bring you in the revamped Features section. The article takes issue with Australian gaming mags' Hyper and PC Powerplay's "highest ever" ranking for Unreal - "sales generating sensationalism".

"Unreal is now a reality. What many people thought couldn't or wouldn't be done is here at last. True to their word, Epic have reached their goal of going gold with Unreal and admittedly, it is very much like they said it would be. Almost. Unreal is everything it was ever meant to be, except that it isn't any Quake killer - not even close".

The review encompasses graphics, engine performance, gameplay, Internet performance, and "soul".

"Unreal a Quake killer? Hardly. In fact, to say that Quake 2 is a Quake killer is somewhat ridiculous as well, because if so, why is Quake still so incredibly popular when the community has so much choice - from games that are supposed to be so much better no less. There never will be a Quake killer. Quake is the Genesis for all that follows, and that is all there is to it. It will live on in every game that is anyway remotely like it, because it is because of Quake they have been made. The essence of what it is shall always remain, and for that reason will never die".

Ettu, Hellrot, and the End of Sequential Spawns:
Believe me, you'll really enjoy this story, over on Methos' Plan(ned) Update page.

Cyberathletic Professional League - Big Comp Starts this Friday in Dallas:
Is it just me or is the CPL Event sheduled for this Friday in Dallas pretty bloody amazing? I hope that we see some good coverage of it in the US gaming sites.

They have very decent sponsorship, you've probably heard that "Mad Catz will be offering a Grand Prize of $10,000 to the winner of the official one-on-one Quake? tournament" and that "256 gamers will compete to win a $3,000 endorsement from Babbage's and Software, Etc. and various software and hardware prizes". No doubt you read somewhere that "the CPL Event will offer workshops and conferences by some of the most influential people in the gaming industry".

"John Carmack and John Cash from id Software will be discussing Quake III Arena and related issues, at the CPL Event on Friday, July 24th at 3:00 PM".

For an interesting perspective on what the CPL is up to these days, check out this interview with John Romero ("chairman of the board of directors"):

CPL: Are you just a press figure of the CPL or are you really involved?
John Romero: I am really involved, meaning that my name isn't just used to get attention. I really care about the CPL and what we are trying to do.
CPL: Why are you involved?
John Romero: "Because I truly believe that there is a place in the gaming industry for professional competition and that deathmatch is truly a sport that should be supported as such".

Coverage of 9 Vs Deathrow Games:
I've created a special section in the Features area to collect the coverage of the upcoming Stockholm games. If you go there you'll find various interviews with the Players and organisers of this incredible match.

Hits and Feedback:
Had a bit of a surprise when I did a routine check on the "hits" for the website on Saturday - it was something like 7,000. It took a few minutes for the penny to drop - sure enough turned out that Bluesnews and sCary's ShugaShack had both posted news about the 9 Vs DR games and a link to Challenge.AU. I hope the US visitors enjoyed their stay :-).

If anyone is interested, Challenge.AU passed the 5,000 visitors mark last week, with a total of about 100,000 "hits" since we started up in May. By far the majority of visitors are from "overseas" - countries like Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand, England, Germany, and the USA. Several Players have emailed me to say that they enjoy the international coverage - thank you!

Stuff Done Over the Weekend:
Got time on Sunday to get stuck into the Features section, which is now much better organised, and to stick some stuff in there I'd been meaning to do for a while. Also got the third AU Vs NZ games write-up done, which can be found in the Games section.