I've already discussed this a bit on ESReality with their various members, but thought i'd post something about it here too, to get some discussion going. Recently, the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) announced the games they are going to use for their various tournaments the next year (2008). Among them were the usual popular games like Counter-Strike and Warcraft III for example. The last games they decided to reveal was the 1on1 first person shooter game and the decision lead to many people getting happy in pants over at ESReality as the game chosen was Quake III Arena.

The ESWC CEO Matthieu Dallon posted the following reasoning among the comments to the post on ESReality:

I understand that Quakeworld isn't the first game on their list, that it didn't get chosen, but shouldn't it at least be considered among the last four/five games? My guess is that the organizers aren't fully aware of the community and technology the game posses today, so the question might be how to enlighten them?

(I tried to get an answer from Mr.Dallon as to why Quakeworld wasn't among those last games, but a simple thread reply didn't seem to do it)

Warsow? wow!

perhaps a little Alien Arena would of turned the kids on :/

Of course it should have been considered. However, you won't be able to alter their decision no matter what I fear.

What i'm trying to do here is not to alter their decision or anything, i just think that Quakeworld wasn't considered at all when they lined up possible games to use in a tournament that shows off a "demonstration of what a cyber athlete is". It's not just ESWC either, but all the other organizers like The Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) and World Cyber Games too.

I mean, if games like Warsow and Quake 3 can be on that list, then so should Quakeworld? The question i'm asking is why it's probably not even considered in the first place, and what we can do about it for future similar selections (and maybe eventually end up on top ).

Yeah it looks kinda frustrating that they just skip out on QW and leave no motivation for us, it should be totally natural for them to include it in the list of candidates. Maybe they thought "either QW or WSW" and went with WSW?

If Matt doesn't reply, maybe that means he's too embarassed about forgetting the greatest game of all time

Well in the end they're going to choose only one game anyway so i don't think that kind of reasoning is applicable.

sad in pants. why wouldn't qw be the #1 choice; it's the best game ever created.

I see. Most probably it's because they are noobs...

If we want others to notice qw, we have to go where they are, imho it's our own fault, we isolate ourselves from the gaming/eSport community.

We have our own community sites, leagues, lan(s), (demo site), and what not, the other scenes use what everybody uses, clanbase, esl, esr and so on.

But i guess thats just how we like it

Can seem odd that they didnt chose qw, as all the arguments for using q3 is even more valid for qw. (developed clients, its fast, hardcore skills etc)

I think most ppl on esreality come into 1on1 with q3, simply becouse the singleplayer was a lot about 1on1. They played 1on1 against bots, try to beat them on nigthmare skills and then start playing online and discover that they need to get even better etc. Most havent played anything qw, or maybe they played some ffa back in 98 or whatever. But many started dueling with q3.

WORD!


right. and why is that? why do have the extra effort of making leagues web pages and such? why?....
we could use clanbase. or others. we had qw in clanbase in 2003 or such. But it wasnt "important". NQR was much more important, more status. Clanbase was a secondary league; kinda just for fun. plus, div0 clans didnt played it. at least for real.
WHY?

Zalon has a point. Should we abandon eql/nqr websites and do the leagues in clanbase/whatever like everyone else?
Imo YES.
We want QW to be considered. But if we keep the primary qw leagues on the shadow, QW will never be considered.

Imho, we should leave the nqr and eql websites and focus web developing efforts somewhere else (ch-tv?).

I agree to some degree, but ultimately feel that most players feel at home in our little qw universe that has pretty much all the services needed for a gaming community and remain strictly qw. Also it's important to consider how much time people have put into these projects. Most of them put in the time because they are passionate about qw in some regard and also have need to create something of their own and possibly feel that they can do the best job

One thing that really surprised me was the amount of comments written on esr concerning Carmac's Para interview and that's considering that esr really only started with q3. They were around before that if I remember correctly, but q3 was the breakthrough.

So in conclusion: I really think that qw becoming active in the central hubs of gaming would be good for the growth and recognition of the game and scene, but I don't think a lot of the more older players would appreciate it. I certainly enjoy our little niche elitist universe, but I would also enjoy some more team deathmatch

mushi:
GGL has a feature where you can create tournaments, QW is a category there as well. ATM only single-elimination tournaments are supported, no ladders or double-elimination last i checked.

Think is that QuakeWorld might be too HardCore for the audience, there was PainKiller on CPL, and I think that most ppl didnt get it. To show QuakeWorld to audience, there is need proper shoutcast that will describe ppl what is going behind flood of rockets, grenades and shafting.

It is also hard to explain ppl, that you did big jump in way, how to bring games to ppl via QTV.

Hopefully thinks in Quake will move forward in future and QuakeWorld will be on place where it should be.

I think most people consider Quakeworld to be a relic and simply don't have any idea of how QW is advanced these days. Also, I think that the fact that QW's weapon pool is hugely imbalanced (not that its a bad thing) and is missing a railgun might have played a part in it.

nQuake has done a decent job of getting the Quakeworld name out there. But I think we need to be even more evangelical.


Laugh all you want, but Warsow devs actually do care deeply about the competative community. In fact, that is their 'target market' so to speak. Also, Warsow put together a great deal better than the other games and at least tries to have some sense of having a cohesive and consistant art style. Alien Arena, OpenArena and Nexuiz on the other hand don't really 'get' what it is to be a good deathmatch game, and simply try to cram as much GPL-compliant crap as they can into one game, with a result that keeps a small pubbie community happy and pleases the open source zealots, but alienates anyone who is looking for a decent game.

QuakeWorld got its rail in boom stick or shotgun, because when you hit anybody with rocket or grenade you can easily finish by this weapons - or just another rocket or shaft, you know :-P There is no need for changing anything in QW. It is best in this way ... even with all stuff there is for broadcasting.

I think that biggest problem for QuakeWorld is that it is hard to attract ppl on idea of this game and to describe them by easy way how to start and what is important when you starting with QW.

More over, when you type QuakeWorld into search engines QuakeWorld.net and QuakeWorld.com are first links - on first, there is last news from 1998 and on second is stay tuned ...

That sucks quite a bit yes. I think attempts have been made to get the Quakeworld.com domain, but without any success. :\

On the contrary those who watched Painkiller during the CPL World Tour 2005, such as myself, understood the game quite well. It seemed really easy to understand and this is coming from a person who had 0 previous deathmatch experience at the time.

Oh I totally agree with the fact that it doesnt need it, it's just that convincing potential players that they dont need one either will take some work.

There IS interest in QuakeWorld amongst esreality users though... I mean, they loved these QuakeWorld matches with Q4 player "Foj" or "Fox" in the Quad tournament at Quakecon. I remember there were streaming videos posted too. And they also were interested in QuakeWorld matches at Dreamhack 2007.

I remember a comment like "QuakeWorld is the shit" and more of that.

Also.... in 2005 some esreality user posted this awesome QuakeWorld CTF in 2005 video which showcased some high skilled American players going totally nuts and were using the "hook" in advanced manner that really impressed people there at esreality.

So when you consider that esreality users are people who like competitive skill games, then it's no question at all whether they respect QuakeWorld or not imho.

Personally I love to spectate the QW game better then anything else....

Perhaps more movies should be made and uploaded to stage6 for promotion purposes. I don't mean these slick edited movies with music etc - that's not what the game needs. I think it's more important to let people spectate qw without having to really get the game, so just some encoded match. I've made two of these myself and some people really liked it. Maybe I'll create some more... I've been making demos from xs4all ffa .... people like Ake Vader, ok98, Batfink, hagge, ... these deathmatch monsters give lot's of spectating pleasure. I'm sure when I encode it and up it to stage6 people at esreality would love it. I've really seen some serious sick shit...

Or perhaps ffa movies is not the way to go, otherwise ppl might whine about the steap learning curve. Perhaps it's better to make team dm movies so these organizations can see what qw tdm is about.

As for the "let's join big sites" - I think players are too conservative for this - let's take DreamHack as an example. There was this "controversial" rule about picking the maps.
Players didn't choose maps, they did throw away maps they didn't want to play (let's disregard the details) and the remaining maps were played. A lot of QW players didn't like it. Or better to say observers, because I didn't see any players' reaction. So lets say observers had this "common feeling" that something is not allright.

The problem here is that no consensus happened later. Let's try to do one now - what the rule caused:
- more balanced matches -> more entertaining matches
- a lot of ztndm3 and dm2 -> more than we are used to from other tournaments
- and other observations... (I'm not the one to do the job)

But such summary did not happen anywhere. Players didn't reconsider their stances, therefore they will keep their conservative views. Conservative views are not a way how to make QW scene move to big sites, not a way how you can improve anything.

I think after each league there should be some poll, where both participant and observers should be able to say what they did like most and what should be improved, what got better from last time, what got worse, and so on.

This way we can slowly improve the "competitive platform" I think. It gives much more representative feedback than when some commentator writes an article "EQL is over" where he sums up such things in two brief sentences.

That players didn't complain that loud was probably because not everyone even knew about the rule (or maybe it was just me, but noone of the players i played in the group stage + first playoff game asked me to drop map). Another "point" you can add to that list is that the quality of the played games will most certainly be lower than if players were allowed to play their own map.

What i'm saying is that although most old players are conservative when it comes to both rules and such things as joining sites and stuff, they often have a good reason for it. Also, when using other sites for stuff like leagues we also miss our own creative freedom when it comes to features on these websites and what not. Try adding fragstats and stuff to the clanbase website and you'll see. .)

(a not-so-coherent reply because i'm at work )

I didn't play in the tournament, but I gotta say when I saw that rule I didn't like it because then the whole concept of having a home map is vanished. Your good maps will most probably be dropped and you're forced to play on something you haven't practiced that much, at least for spectators it would suck I think, but I'm not sure maybe the new rule has something to it for giving a chance to the worse player.

"GTV 1 covered over 3500 matches and with the pending tv clients for Quakewars, Warsow and hopefully Call of Duty 4. The admin crew decided to use a brand new code for the new GTV version to provide better support for the community in the upcoming games."

http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1491214

add QuakeTV on GamesTV.org

exposure!

The problem with things like this is that too many QW players are living in pleasantville already.