Now since many of us have been playing for a great while, and some not so long, but let's start a GREAT topic to see what people actually think,
* and NO this is not for me to get my ego up, it cannot get any higher and I know all of you, well most of you hate me so it's okay"

-TOPIC-
1) In the history of NA-QUAKEWORLD, who do you believe in ORDER, top 10 players overall are, this means 1on1,2on2,4on4 JUST OVERALL GOOD PLAYER
TOP 10 LIST (just like NFL,NBA, ETC....)

I will post mine after a few people post some, or if youd like, you can separate in groups, top 10 1v1, top 10 2v2, top 10 4v4 ETC. JUST NORTH AMERICA!!


FEED BACK!!!

There are/were good players in America ? I didn't know about that !

HUAheUAHEUheUheUHeuahe

a league of their own
-
1. def
2. kovaak
3. squeeze
4. sane

the leftovers
-
yogic
cyan
thump4
fiend

I don't think anyone else is really worth mentioning because they didn't accomplish nearly as much as the above players in all categories.

love it fenris love it! <3

Wasn't czm pretty good in the ol' days?

I wasn't going to post but since we were talking about it on IRC -

You can't list people I don't think. Why not? NA QW was basically three separate flawed eras.

Era 1 - Old School - 1996-2000(?).

Pros:
-most players by far
-everything was new, being discovered and the foundation of QW built
Cons:
-over shadowed by NQ (more competition, more players)
-unfair competition, dominated by LPBs and good hardware

Era 2 - New School - 2000(?)-2006(?)

Pros:
-modern QW starts to develop (bunny hop, open source, etc)
-more fair, less reliant on connection and hardware but still a big factor
Cons:
-dominated by ruthless politics of AG
-only a small fraction of players remaining

Era 3 - Modern QW - 2006(?) till today

Pros:
-modern QW established (antilag, EZQuake, etc)
-very few remaining players have hardware or connection issues (even 100ms is vastly playable with antilag)
-draft leagues in TDM so pure politics don't win TDM (most fair TDM competition yet)
Cons:
-extremely small player base (currently a handful of guys left in NA)

Each era has there ups and downs which define them. The Modern QW Era is definitely the best yet but we lack a critical mass of players in NA. One interesting thing is I don't know of one top players who was a top player in two eras in NA. The few top players from Era 1 who played in Era 2 had mostly moved on to Q3 and it showed. The few top players from Era 2 mostly couldn't handle the fairness of the draft league in Era 3 and struggled without a stacked team supporting them. Can't name one guy who was a top player across multiple NA Eras.

if you're looking at my list sane/squeeze both fit in era 2 and 3 as top players. they most definitely do not struggle without a stacked team and often carry their team. you can make a list now if the only requirement for a player to make your list was for him to span multiple "eras"

What NA events did Sane or Squeeze win in Era 2? Just because Squeeze won some lower ranked divs in EU TDM doesn't mean much for NA QW. They are good players no doubt but for me you have to win to be considered a top player. Squeeze is much more interested in playing EU with high ping than vs NA guys anyways. I remember when Fired was in their best shape with a good lineup vs AG in a match for a NA event and they all pinged up to 100ms (and lost).

I guess I did word it confusingly. I should have said no top players has really played in two Eras. A few have tried and failed. CZM and EG played in some early Smackdown events but lost pretty handily. Early Smackdown events were sort of dumb in NA though with many matches being done 4v4 DM6. It depends how you define it top player too. I'd say it's someone who won an event. You have guys in EU who break across Eras like Paradoks for instance but I can't see the same in NA.

Squeeze:

2004

Champion: NQR Season 6 Silver Cup with Fired
2005

Champion: NQR Season 9 Bronze Cup with Defs
2006

Champion: EQL Season 3 Division 4 with Defs
2007

Champion: NQR Season 10 Silver Cup with Ballistic
Champion: EQL Season 5 Division 3 with Ballistic
2nd place: EQL Season 6 Division 2 with Ballistic
2008

2nd place: EQL Season 7 Division 2 with Mean Machine
5th place (tie): NQR Season 11 Silver Cup with Mean Machine
3rd place (tie): EQL Season 8 Division 3 with Fusion
2009

9th place: EQL Season 9 Division 1 with Fusion
1st place: EQL Season 10 Division 3 with TeamKillers (switched to Fusion during season)
7th place: EQL Season 10 Division 1 with Fusion (played 1 map)
2010

1st place: ClanWarz Poland, Cup of the Sith with Fusion
3rd place (tie): EQL Season 11 Division 1 with Fusion
5th place (tie): EQL Season 12 Division 1 with Sauna
2011

4th place: EQL Pro Group A with TeamKillers
4th place: EQL Season 13 Division 1 with Fusion (switched to USSR during season)
5th place (tie): EQL Season 13 Division 1 with USSR
2012

2nd place: EQL 15 Division 1 with ParamedicS

nah not a top player at all

Actually def spans every era with accomplishments in both NA and Europe.

nowadays Squeeze is SQUEEZING everyone, indeed!!!

HUAheUAHEUheUheUHeuahe

No Batch and Pure?

Since when does winning a lower EU TDM div make you a top NA player Fenris? It doesn't. Squeeze for a long time has preferred playing in EU. IIRC he didn't sign up for season 2 or 3 of the draft and was a replacement for Sane in season 1. That's sort of why Squeeze and Sane hard to put in the top player category too. They disappear at random and often drop out or don't play in NA events. Sane forfeited out (two FF) of the latest Thunderdome duel tournament for example.

Def's accomplishments come exclusively in Era 2 as far as I know. Main problem with ranking NA guys is almost all tournament history has been lost. There's some random info scattered through the wiki but nothing very detailed or all inclusive of NA QW history. I personally ran quite a few events or helped admin them (1v1s, 2v2s, 4v4s), so that's where most of my personal opinion comes from. Sadly I don't have any records myself of events I was involved in.

AG dominated Era 2 without a doubt. Yet don't forget Def lost NQR NA both seasons when he was forced out of AG/Boss. Era 2 was corrupted by power politics and a monopoly of talent. Just as an example let's say there's 8 top players in a part of Era 2. If 6 of them are in AG, and the AG guys don't like to practice or play with anyone but themselves it becomes quite hard for the other 2 top players to compete. They certainly can't win in TDM and duel is hard as well as they don't have nearly as much high level practice or metagame help. Once Def was forced out of the politically dominant group he lost a lot more. IIRC he also lost to Kovaak in one of the last major duel events of Era 2 then exited the scene some time after that.

This is the reason I find the draft much more compelling especially for smaller scenes (like we've had in NA since the 2000s) because it puts everyone on much more equal footing. A lot of supposedly great NA TDMers did not like the draft and complained how all their team mates suck, blah blah yet they didn't end up winning it either despite their attitude of how bad NA players supposedly are. That's one reason I respect EU QWers a lot, they are more fair minded and engage more in tough competition. In NA we have a tradition of supposed top players refusing to play or doing silly stuff to stack the deck against themselves so they will be expected to lose (100ms Fired vs low ping AG is a perfect example of this).



They were definitely some of the best NA QWers from Era 1. IIRC Batch also played NQ in U4. In Era 1 NQ had more players and tougher competition so it overshadowed QW. I'd say Rapture 99 was probably NA's finest QW moment. The whole DR vs 9 thing was a joke in comparison.

i feel like you're just throwing out arbitrary rules to avoid making a simple list of who are the top players. the threads purpose is to list top players not "come up with arbitrary rules to prevent making a list of top players" you obviously didn't read the wiki entry on def. i could come with imaginary situations all day too. what if thresh played through all 3 eras wouldn't that make him the best player? who gives a shit about something that never happened. if you look at recorded history it clearly shows def was on top of everything when he played 2000-2006. youd be hard pressed to find another player with as many accolades as def has from NA. so if you want to argue you should go start re-writing history on the quakeworld wiki or just make a list of who you think are your all time top na qwers instead of avoiding the threads purpose.

I don't think I've been around long enough to make a good list of top NA players throughout history,
but I can say that I've seen some pretty amazing people from time to time in NA anyway :>

NOT IN ANY ORDER, the people I've been impressed by most since I started playing in July 2011 (and these are only people I've personally witnessed, so I can't include obvious players like Def, etc, whom I've never really gotten to watch play versus the current crowd):

Kovaak
Thump4
Sane
Squeeze
Serp
Vegeta
Foogs

The things that impress me about these guys aren't necessarily their win-lose ratios in 1v1/2v2/4v4/whatever, but rather their play-styles. They all have distinct skill with whatever best suits their style, and their tactics generally seem to match up with what they're able to accomplish.

I know all of those guys pretty well (except thump4 and kovaak; I've only known those two for brief periods of times) and have played against them all. Their tactics are all impressive, some of them have amazing movement, some of them have unbelievable aim; but for all of them, it seems that their stats fit their play-styles so they all make cream's list.

Some other names that deserve mention:
xoque
bulldozer
cano
brute
daw
swift
These are just the ones that stand out from my east coast memories.

I won't rank the names mentioned above, except two. The first is def, for being the best, and having that win-at-all-costs mentality (some will say this is bad, I won't argue that point. The first time I saw him play was vs czm on dm6 and czm won, and he was losing for a long time before that, which people forget, and only remember the time when he was unbeatable) . The second is kovaak, for also being the best, but more than that for having a unique, awe inspring movement and aim style, as well as sportsmanship.

(stalking mode on) Btw, czm played a little in April last year as ultrono (stalking mode off):
http://stats.quakeworld.nu/index.php?a=qwplayer&currentPlayer=ultrono

hihi, stats abuse

FOR PHIL, you named cano? the only thing he was good at was CA, dm trash we know THIS

I wouldn't say trash, but yeh he wasn't as good in dm. However, qwca was a big part of north american quake scene in those years, especially for me

Lots of people know his fakenick "ultrono" and could just be pretending to be him

Yep, but he was in Europe at that time. Rusty movement, spot on timing, I am pretty sure it was czm.

If I remember correctly, the CA community was quite a bit larger than DM during the 2001-2006 years.

Oh, so if I do a random list of my opinion of top players without any reasons why that's better? At least I'm giving thoughts and reasons for why I think like I do. I was also an observer if not fairly involved in NQ and QW across all Eras. Can you say the same?



These aren't imaginary situations I'm talking about, it's real stuff that happened. When did you start playing QW anyways? AG/Boss might have a very different reputation for people who know them from before The Dojo because they changed their ways later on. They weren't always into helping people or playing with them. Old AG was the opposite of that in fact. I don't know why you seem so offended by my opinion and how I think about trying to rank people.



This is exactly why I think of Eras. In Era 1 Def was a nobody, but he dominated Era 2. In Era 3 he's gone. I played in Era 1 and 2 but I had a 26.4k connection and 200-400ms usually. Yet in Era 3 I was on a winning TDM team and had a very good performance in the other TDM draft league I didn't win. Does that make me a top player? I have a TDM league win, that's more than some top players other people rank as such in Era 3. Often in competitive games people stick around until they can have their moment at the top, then once that happens they often aren't as motivated to stay at the top. So players who where unknown in one Era might be great in the next but it seems quite rare to people to have staying power as a top ranked player across Eras. Look at griffin and fix now in EU, they are still very good but they used to be huge stand outs. I respect them for still playing for fun even if their desire to perform isn't as strong as before.

Picturing sane rasping his fingers together thinking "just as planned, my minions, just as planned..."

Would rather have a list of players than a mountain of text of why you're not ranking players.

Yes, a few paragraphs is definitely a mountain of text. I'd actually try ranking people if I could see records of past league results. As it is I can't remember the exact outcomes in 90% of them. There were loads of tournaments over the years but they've all been forgotten more or less. The tournament I had the most fun in was actually the NAQL in NQ. XBand (XBN) won West and Zero Tolerance (ZT) won East. This was in 1999-2000(?). Then they refused to play each other in typical American Quake fashion to determine the overall winner. Both teams probably had cheaters on them however. Back in those days I most looked up to Air2 and Exile because they were HPBs who rocked.

don't worry i won't judge you if you make a list that isn't 100% historically accurate.

Incorrect about sane, he can't do anything if I don't carry him. Sqz on the other hand can carry himself!

Also Cream, you're missing someone important on your list...