I left work at 13:00 with some help from my friend who drove me to Elmia. I checked in at 13:30 and received my player pass from a tall blonde bloke in white clothes (who later on revealed his nick as Dronar, the Quakeworld tournament admin). I brought my luggage, which basically was my computer and i must say that my new TFT monitor was a major relief for me. I love it!

I made my way to the Quakeworld tournament area, which features 12 shuttle computers with TFT screens and they're all setup with the Quakeworld clients that are allowed in the tournament. Paradoks was then already in place, practicing and configuring the computer to get best possible performance. This was something quite a few of the players had some problems with. (i'm right now having half an eye focused on people staring at DDE3 which is running at the 40" monitor in the tournament area. QW has more exposure than i thought it would have tbh)

Anyway, me and Phil both had LAN seats booked for us. Initially there were some problems with these - there were seats reserved, but at no particular place it seemed. We were lucky that there were a few seats empty just beside the QW tournament area. I'm not sure where the other BYOC-QW-people are sitting, but i think Reppie, for example, just grabbed a seat somewhere to get to play as soon as possible. The tournament computers have been available for the players to practice on for the whole time though - as long as there are no matches going on - which has been very nice. (Although it makes my byoc just a tad redundant, but i can live with that).

So, we've played some Quake today too. I played my first game against Riker and as he was supposed to be one of the "z0mg-it's-a-superstar" i thought it was gg and byebye. I also knew that he's only half-assed in 1on1, so while i lost DM4 pretty big (after having tilted somewhat in the end) i won Aerowalk with a two frag margin. After this i expected a third map as decider, but apparently i hadn't done my homework when it comes to the rules - only two maps are played in the group stages! I had hereby blown my chances on finishing no.1 in my group.

There were quite a few blowouts, as expected, in the group games. I won't go through the games too much here, i leave that to Phil or something, but rather report about the whole event. For specific results you can see my post on ESReality. (there are people staring at the screen showing QW movies again)

After i had finished my games for tonight Me, Phil, Paradoks and Casey grabbed something to eat. The dining place was the Scandic Hotel restaurant which included good food, not so good waitresses (she wasn't Casey's ideal woman anyway ) and a good atmosphere. It was a nice meal with a good conversation. After this Phil, Paradoks and Casey went up to Paradoks' hotel room. Paradoks' hotel room had a couch, so hopefully Phil won't have to fuck up his back by sleeping on the floor tonight again. While they went there, I went back to the LAN to report results and to upload the few pictures i got to the Dreamhack QW tournament gallery where you can see a few familiar faces. The image quality isn't top notch as pictures are taken with my cellphone, but it's better than nothing.

I've been wandering around at the LAN and it really shows how big Dreamhack has become. The swedish defence is here showing off their equipment and so on. Various competitions arrange their finals here and so forth, which makes for a good atmosphere. It sometimes sounds quite silly to hear people cheering in front of a computer game, but i guess we'll get used to it.

I think i'll finish this blog update now. Day one, for us Quakeworlders, has been good and it only gets better when the tournament starts. Stay tuned.