nice teams, should be alot of interesting games. didnt watch the stream but^i predict zero/paradoks in the finals, on the other end i think bps/karl might struggle a bit , gl to all^^

It was really a fest last night, fun thing to be in!
and rookie: everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.

Nevar forget Miltons team tho rookie!

funny to see how everyone have different thoughts about the players and teams

Imo funny to see how good players didn't get picked which is quite surprising in the end. Didn't realize how many "starplayers" there was signed up until they were listed as on the "finalized teams"-picture. But should be quality games atleast. Rookie, you sure about bps:s team with 3 tdm (super)starplayers will struggle about last spots and not first spot?

ow, first spot u say! maybe im way off , maybe not , feel free to do your own predictions

What good players didn't get picked?

Unfortunately, this UMG-music-content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.
Sorry about that.

Please don't use music industry music to prevent this crap ((((((((

If you tell me some style/genre/type of music you need I will try to find something free to use.

I lol'd

Hehe Spirit, I told ParadokS that would likely happen - I just hope that I won't lose the ability to upload long videos

Paradoks: Ihminen talks about himself i guess...if he compares himself to some ive seen in the draft. Anyway should be like more players and leagues maybe....to wake the ppl up more. This is like inbreeding teamplay 30 ppl and thats all. Maybe would be fun to get more ppl excited and into the game instead of same ppl different league name....

It is Itsinen, not Ihminen...

30 players? first of all it's 50 players, making 10 even teams featuring all the best 4on4 players and a bunch of others as well. We saw more action the very day after, draft teams praccing together, than we saw clans praccing the last 6 months. And I think there will be tons of more games coming the next month.

Why? Because we just created 10 teams, each with 5 active players, all about equal in skill .. do you know any better way to create activity?
There was about 10 good players who opted out of this concept, which I hope they regret and will join us for season 2, that should allowed us to make 1-2 more teams.

Weather or not there will be a draft including low div2/div3 next season we haven't decided or discussed yet. Atm. we are all very busy covering this season's activity and ofcourse.. playing!

I think it's great that you're focusing on making the current tournament as good as possible before expanding. Quality > quantity!

Looking at the teams I think there are only a couple of players I consider having better alternatives among the free agents considering ping etc.

Also think zero's team will be hot; nepra most underestimated player in the prediction thread in the forum?

nepra or mm/lethalwiz! Lw will bring forward his "greatlooking"-skills

#13 Yes you created activity among the 50 top players signing up. The downside could be that their clans could see even less activity because of it. And ofcourse, all the players that didnt get in might suffer even more if their clans now lack players due to the draft clans praccing or just having a hard time getting a prac because everyone wanna spec instead of playing.

Not saying this will happen but it is a risk without a doubt. I am also dubting the success a draft for lower tier players could have based on the stuff hangtime posted in the forum.

Aside from that, I hope the draft will be a success and that the rest of the scene wont suffer too much from losing players to draft pracs...

#13: It's nice that you feel so good about it. But as long as the concept stays the way it is now, it's nothing I would sign up for. Hopefully, it could evolve into something that included everyone who wanted to play. I don't think that would cost you much more effort, but I'm also aware including new players never was your goal to begin with.

As a competition, this appears totally pointless and boring to me. There's basically not one single team sport I can think of that has any success mixing random players together for competition. For including more of the scene to QW TDM, a draft has great potential. Now you basically just clashed together most who plays 4on4 regularly already and made some mix teams out of them. Best case scenario, unless next seasons include everyone, is that the feature of high level QW TDM doesn't consist of clans, but of mix teams. I don't want a part of that direction, but kinda hope this turns out well anyways so either you will include everyone in upcoming seasons, or someone else finds motivation to run something similar for everyone.

I also had an idea for how the low level clans could raise their activity. Seeing as some of the former div3 clans (you know who you are) think that EQL15 sucks, and had no chance of getting drafted, I suggested they could invite all the clans they think are on the same level and play eachother in a round robin style tournament. The clan with most points when all games are played is the winner, no playoffs. Perhaps after a few games you just might have build up some courage and skill to atleat play vs the former div2 clans?

Hell we could even host it on the EQL15 page, just tell me and Ill create a group just for you.

"#13 Yes you created activity among the 50 top players signing up. The downside could be that their clans could see even less activity because of it"'

Clan scene was already dead - and noone praccing before draft started. So Where's the downside, that we trade 15 draft pracs for 2 clan pracs?

Rikoll said: "There's basically not one single team sport I can think of that has any success mixing random players together for competition."

Heard of NHL or NFL? It was gg. You are so off the mark it's sick
First of all it's not random players, it's carefully selected players, from top part of the scene. If it actually WAS random it would probably suck
For instance mixing div3 with div0 players, I don't really see the point in THAT, but apparently you do.

I'd hate to leave on a negative note, so I'll leave you with this. We had so many tight games yesterday and positive feedback already after just 1 day that I think most of the participants are excited for a really nice and competitive tournament.

This draft seems really well organized (the show, the charts, powepoint stuff, coverage etc) and also seems to have spurred activity. It's a great chance to learn stmh and master one's skill. However, I do agree that we really need to involve the rest of the scene (div/3) in the upcming seasons. Their own draft seems te best choice, those guys really deserve it.
On the other hand, I dont want clans to be blasted into oblivion and I hope this will never happen.

The clan pracs started as soon as EQL15 started taking signups. The draft just boosted an already high amount of 4on4 games being played.

#19 clan scene was definately not dead so thats just bs. We havent had any problems finding pracs since EQL15 signups started. Even when fielding omg div1 players like rikoll, votary and od we have gotten loads of pracs. The scene just waited a bit in jan-feb to see what was gonna happen and I am sorry we couldnt announce the new EQL season sooner than we did because then we would have boosted activity even earlier.

Just to make this clear, before draftfanboys complain, I like the draft league. Im just totally opposed to the notion that the draft, consisting only of the top 50 players (that signed up) somehow single handedly boosted the overall 4on4 activity. It will be a factor helping to do so, nothing more.

Great job Para, dont listen to the negative comments, you, and the other draft captains/admins did something great for the scene, dont listen the bullshit. Heroes for life!! lol

"... I think most of the participants are excited for a really nice and competitive tournament."
Most of them? If not 100% of them are excitied for a "really nice and competetive tournament then why would they sign up in the first place?
I dont think anyone would expect anything less than exactly that. The ones that arent excited obviously didnt sign up.

#24 Yeah, because disagreeing in a well mannered and constructive way is "bullshit"
I just dont like when Para is trying to take credit for boosting 4on4 activity on his and Salvations own when it cleary is a factor of several tournaments contributing together to the activity.

well as with all QW tournaments, not all that signup actually wanna play. They think they do, but they don't

That's why you always see so many walkovers in 1on1 tourneys and clans that have 10 players signed cause they got no idea who actually wanna play in that season.

They signup to support community (I don't know what signing but not playing, is doing to help), and maybe they think "uh that sounds nice, good tournament i'm in! But they don't actually sit down and put in the hours.

Just look at EQL. half the teams don't even play. I would say that's pretty dead then. I wish the clans would play a lot more pracs and EQL games but what can you do - well what we did was make the draft and hope that would get some of the slackers active

I am excited for one to see how the strict schedule turns out. I hope we get 0 walkovers of course, and I hope all participants will do their utmost to make sure this doesn't happen so we can focus on covering and playing all these great games.

Edited by ParadokS on 23 Mar 12 @ 12:03CET

"Clan scene was already dead - and noone praccing before draft started. So Where's the downside, that we trade 15 draft pracs for 2 clan pracs?"

This was perhaps top10 of Dave bullshit ever...

There are always clans, every season, who sign up and dont play. We remove them after a while if they havent started playing. This is not something new.

The 10 player limit exists because not everyone has the time to play alot, thus some clans need about 7-10 guys to be able to stay active. Some players are also in there just in case they wanna play a game or two. Trying to make 2 teams out of a 10 player div3 team will most likely lead to two inactive teams.

Most of the "slackers" you are referring to arent in the draft since you said "we just created 10 teams, each with 5 active players". How would that help to activate any of the "slackers"?

On a sidenote I also hope that the strict scheduele will turn out nicely and that players will get used to it and respect it. I think that if it works it could be tried in EQL as well. The really active clans will have no problem, the semi-actives probably could adapt with the right lineup and the real inactive, 1-3 games, clans would get WOs and eventually kicked. In a normal season their results are always disregarded or WOs anyway so it wouldnt be any real difference.

It help make the slackers active because they wouldn't have played in EQL otherwise cause of stupid system. Div2 teams can't prac with the bottom teams cause its uber rape every time, top teams cant prac with div2 and lower, that leaves only div2 teams that can prac within a small segment of teams.

Here you have 10 active teams that can all play each other, so that might attract otherwise inactive players to come back to QW, when they know there is guaranteed lots of 4on4 action every night, instead of spamming for prac for 3 hours before getting maybe 3 maps.

The system is tried out in an effort to make the clans play outside their comfort zones again. Perhaps you didnt notice but there was no div1 left for example, or didnt div1 suck in EQL14?

The complaints about the teams being too uneven is because the scene is small and the teams have become very polarized skillwise, mainly because of the stupid division system used ever since NQR3.

How many otherwise inactive players came back for the draft? I could go so far as 5 but atleast it is something, Ill give you that. All of the other 45 players already were active! Also, just getting some nice 4on4 action can be as easily acheived by just joining a mix and go ready. That has been on every night for ages.

The best clans always had a hard time finding pracs, hell even your own team refused pracs versus the best clan and now you think its strange when it has been hard for Slackers finding pracs?

Yes, div1 sucked in eql14 and it sucks in eql15, but I know the idea is to "give it time".. we are

Yeah all the 45 players might have been active, but the teams they were playing in weren't.
Also there is never more than 1 mix going, last night we saw 4 draft games going.. that's 8 teams playing at the same time. Also mix teams are of very low quality with players ranging from "how do i unlock my mouse?" to milton type players. Sure it's fun chaotic, but the skill gap can be very frustrating and there just are no alternatives.. why? Because there are no clans playing.

We maybe refused to play few games here and there, but we have always pracced any team several times during every season. Some more than others.

But I hate this turning into a draft vs eql battle. We made draft to spike activity, get a lot of great games and a nice tournament. Low EQL activity and clan prac is just a sad fact, but not something I wanna focus on really.

Btw, something I said for years to spike EQL activity was to be more strict with schedules. We had plenty of oppertunities to get EQL games played, but opponents always say "we play you list cause we want more prac". Way to kill the early to mid-season action. I'm sure this is the case for other teams as well.

"It help make the slackers active because they wouldn't have played in EQL otherwise cause of stupid system. Div2 teams can't prac with the bottom teams cause its uber rape every time, top teams cant prac with div2 and lower, that leaves only div2 teams that can prac within a small segment of teams."

Wich of the "slackers" now playing in Salvation wouldnt have played in EQL15 because of the "stupid system"?

Noone is requesting div2 teams to prac versus bottom teams, we only request official games between them. What if they notice that they arent so far apart? Without the official game they wouldnt even have tried.

Top teams can prac with div2 teams just fine, machinery ask us to prac all the time for example. And we have pracced alot of maps vs SD, not using our top lineup, despite being shot to pieces. You have a very negative view of it all because you have been in the top for long and have been denied alot of the action because clans have been afraid to prac vs SR.

It doesnt leave "only div2 teams who can prac within a small segment of teams". In fact there are about 6 top teams who can prac eachother just fine, then we have about 8 mid-teams who can do the same and also give some of the top teams a good fight, then we have 10 bottom teams who also can prac just fine and also give some of the middle teams a good fight.

Stop being bitter and see the possibilities outside of the draft, even tho it is a good idea and fine way to further boost the 4on4 scene.

I think Salvation and EQL can complement eachother fine. Perhaps starting each season with a draft to see who is active, perhaps even some of the draft teams stick together for a season of EQL before xmas/summer and then next season kick it all of with draft followed by EQL again. Lets give it a thought.

My main concern was that it could kill clans even more when ran side by side with an EQL season and the notion that it alone raised 4on4 activity when it only raised the activity for the absolute top layer of players. Other than that, I am all for any project with 4on4 as its main focus.

The thing I especially like about this tournament are the strict deadlines and overall fast progress of the tournament. I wish other tournaments took some inspiration from here.

Yeah like I said, Im interested in a fixed scheduele and looking forward to seeing it in action. There has been problems in the past when using a fixed scheduele but hopefully the scene has matured and become able to adjust to this. We will see.

So Rikoll, you basically mean you don't want to participate in any tourney/league which is not open for the whole scene?

No murdoc, that is not what I basically mean.

Then please explain what you do actually mean

Maybe we have come to a phase in our community/scene where it's just no longer possible to have regular clans and compete with each other.

Top Div1 teams will rape low div1 teams, top div2 teams will rape low div2 teams, top div3 teams will rape low div3 teams. That's just how it is because the skill level various so much and there are not enough teams/players to fill those holes. Without strict schedule people intent to postpone all there games vs better clans to the very last end.

Many people have put the focus on attracting new players to our scene and in my opinion it has affected the whole rest of the scene and the overall skill level has dropped. Since the better teams who put so many hours and dedication into the game are being put in a dark shadow and seems like there are a very few people left with the intention to grow in skill and become part of the div1.

The purpose of this draft is to create these high skilled "equal" teams with much fun and competition and not knowing that team A will rape team B with 350 - 50. Sure it would be nice for next season to include all the players but it would require a whole different system. It's not fun for most div1+2 players who have put much effort to take over a map and some "new" player is giving away free rocket packs and complete undo where you put so much effort in. Therefor we would have to split it into 2 different "divisions" and that's something we'll look at for next season. Right now we don't want to overdo it and get this draft going in the highest quality possible.

Someone put it really well in QTV while speccing some div0 duel:

If you're unemployed you can play alot and the one playing the most is on the top.

Thank god most of us are not unemployed.

Dave said somewhere that you need to be smart to be good in QW. I personally think you need to be good in QW to be good in QW, smart or not. It doesn't mean that you're stupid if you're not good in QW and that you're really intelligent and wonderfull person if you're div0. So stop mocking div3 guys just because they "suck" (there is div3 people who can outaim/outplay div1 guys in other gamemodes ez).

Saying it has hurt QW scene overall when we've tried to attract new players is just bullshit. There're always people on top and the overall skill is really abstract, I personally think QW's skill level stinks compared to other eSports because we've 100 guys playing the game, you can't find talent that way.

I'd say this draft thingie separates QW even more, I see some really promising players signing to Salvation without any hope to be picked. I'd say it comes down div1 playing their stuff and we others just specc and play some every once in a while and dont give a shit about any tournaments.

Yeah whatever

"If you're unemployed you can play alot and the one playing the most is on the top."

That's just bullshit also, take a look at the stats page and see which players have put in most hours. I can see some names in the top 20 that still play in div3.
I don't see anyone mocking div3 players here...yet somehow you always feel so attacked.

"I personally think QW's skill level stinks compared to other eSports because we've 100 guys playing the game, you can't find talent that way"

I think if you let any top div1 qw player play a other fps game he can easily frag along with the top within 6months . The other way around is complete different story... it takes at least 1 to 2 years for really good/talented players to adapt to qw to be able to compete in my experience over the last years.

i topfrag bf3 after 1 month, almost outfrag u murdoc on dm2 after 1 year (it was 3 frag diff), and im still div4/3 to many players in this scene. =)

murdoc, I'd like to see div1 guys being on top of CS 1.6 in 1 month, maybe u should go there then and make some profit.

Nice trolling pekto. He said could do it within 6 months, which is perfectly reasonable. Considering how many QW'ers went to other fps games and dominated fast, got bored and left.

To Para and Hto: EQLro used strict schedule and I worked 100%, these are the same players, it should work just aswell here/now!

Otherwise you debate was quite funny, since both are rightish

Thanks Itsinen

First of all I have no interest or whatsoever to make cash out of playing computer games. My eyes are already bad enough as they are. I have played some cod4 on high level 2on2 (top15 with over 5000 teams participating) after about playing the game for 3months. Even after not playing COD for months or longer I can join any FFA Call of Duty game and top frag every round after playing a few rounds. You might say yea some random FFA server with noobs... then how about new players joining our FFA server with noobs? They get bitchslaped around multiple times and they don't have a clue what happend to them.. if you get my point.

I think the direction cannot be stopped. Whether it's good or not may be another question. But IMO the Quake "clan concept" might be considered dead or no longer useful. Clans stopped having a history and a background a long time ago but the scene continued as if this didn't happen. What was the initial reason for a clan? Bringing together players and manage teamgames. In a world full of players it used to be a good idea and get this done in an organized way. Players - mostly between 15 and 25 years old - required structure, discipline and motivation in order to take things seriously. Is this the case nowadays? Approx. 10 years older on average, I doubt the majority requires others to tell them what to do, everyone knows his place. There are no players coming and leaving daily. And most importantly, players can't play daily, active and less active periods change regularly. Being in an organized team with inactive players stops your activity which you currently have time for.

Maybe the basic idea will emerge and there'll be a middle way which includes interests of players who enjoy playing together (like 2 captains + random draft picks) or something, but generally I think this might be the only future QW TDM has.

#50:
Count the amount of clans in NQR1, it's not that different that it's now. I quitted qw when there wasn't "any clans left" when NQR2 began. Then came back when it was like nqr & eql running at the same time with veryplentymanyclans. At the time when NQR1 was running there was lots more "sunday players" than now but tbh it was just like it is now. Same players over and over that are on the servers searching for a game. There wasn't that many clans either that were active that didn't signup at that time.

It has been clear that the clangames will hit a bottom low at some point but I doubt it will go straight down to zero from there. One of the hopes I've had for several seasons is that we would get some tournament running even once of the halves of the year with some other name than EQL. Just to get something fresh on to the scene that would wake it up. This draft has a great value considering waking up some high/mid skilled players. The problem is that we need something to do the same next fall. Just getting an EQL running the fall/winter isn't enough to keep the scene intrested. Also news beeing updated frequently is an important part since it atleast creates an illusion about the scene beeing more awake than it is if nothing else

One thing missing on the scene is minor tournaments that are 1-2 day events! There has been some people now getting some together but this should happend EVERY week! Kenya, 2on2, one-day-draft, 1on1, and all of these don't need to follow the "normal criterias". The 1on1s can be with random map, or random tb5 as a one map decider etc. Not much is needed to wake up people, but if it's the 5-7 same persons in charge of running the whole scene basicly (tournamentwise) it will be all the same from day to day until it dries out.

Now people go do something!

If you don't try to get better you probably won't. I spent 2008 playing a lot and focused on improving my gameplay, aim, teamplay, movement, and what not..

Its not that hard, but it requires you to have a plan and goal instead of brainless run-around which won't give you shit.

I'm sure a lot have seen this but here are a lot of my own thoughts on the matter - http://esreality.net/post/2227033/why-draft-leagues-are-clans-obsolete/

I guess we'll just have to see what works in EU QW. I personally think you guys can probably go beyond 10 teams in the draft league but I can see why you don't want to as well. I will say that the IDL went from 12 teams to 8 teams to encourage more "elite" play and the result was we quickly went back to 12 teams because the skill level wasn't that much different and it cut off a lot of people from playing. If the draft league ends up being the main TDM league and many people are excluded from it that won't be good in the long run.

I do think the current NQR/EQL clan system has shown it can't sustain itself any longer. Each season is quickly getting more and more grim. In NA our drop off after NQR NA 2 was 8-10 teams to none basically. Just look at the current EQL season where 13 out of 24 EQL teams have played 1 match or none this season. So basically there are 11 semi-active or active teams in EQL. Only 5 teams have played 4 matches or more this EQL. With 10 teams the draft league is almost same size of the active teams in EQL.

@51:
Comparing with NQR1 isn't really valid because NQR1 was nordic clans only (i.e. there were many more clans that were banned from participating). Looking at EQL page there are now only 12 clans with Nordic flags and half of those have played max 1 game.

@16:
Not really sure what I posted in the forum that could be useful in relation to having a "Div2" draft tourney. My advice would be to at least wait until the end of Salvation Season 1 given that the schedule is fairly rapid. I have doubts over how successful a div2 would be; personally I think a better solution would be to expand the number of captains for next season to 12 as I suggested in some other thread earlier on.

Edited by HangTime on 24 Mar 12 @ 10:01CET

Edited by HangTime on 24 Mar 12 @ 10:08CET

#40: I mean you're trying too hard to make this a serious competition. This is a draft, and should be inclusive rather than exclusive. You'll probably make some pretty even games with quite high standard, I'll give you that. But if the future of QW TDM is this, I don't want to support it in any way, and I certainly won't care to play in it. I think the whole concept is totally uninteresting. It could find it interesting if had some goal of including fresh players. In its current state, this concept is more destructive for the scene than helping it from my view.

Was my earlier post really that hard to understand?

No way! We are like 3 weeks old clan and we are practising and trying to be inspiration for other rookies/newcomers to create new teams ))

"I mean you're trying too hard to make this a serious competition"
Isn't this what a league/tourney is about?

"I could find it interesting if had some goal of including fresh players"
Then why did you bother to participate in EQL Pro? Which had exact same condition of excluding all other players but div1?

#57: Because it wasn't a draft, and the competition aspect made sense. This is a draft, there should be no need to exclude anyone.

we didn't exclude anyone.. ?
If captain's willing they could pick any player they wanted.
But ye, to some degree there is some exclusion cause of the predetermined captain size. But that is for season 1 as of now. It might change in future.

But to keep interest for captains and top half of scene we felt it was important to keep a certain standard of play. I think some would have stayed out or treated it as less of a competition, if we allowed bottom players to join teams, and force captains to let them play also. Would be much harder to make fair teams and basically you would have to force Milton to play with starving/netspider. Sure, it's one way of making a "project".
Doesn't feel like an interesting tournament to me though, certainly not to the rest of admins, and probably not to many of the top players participating in this one.

But as we said many times before, during and after season we will take feedback and suggestions to see if there is room to accomodate even more players next season.

For now, enjoy the show from the bench Rikoll

Edited by ParadokS on 24 Mar 12 @ 13:33CET

I really like the agile approach.
This is a new fresh and fun tournament in my opinion, that has created activity and some interest into the tdm scene. Lets try it out and after the season is over (it's pretty swift, not your entire lifetime) evaluate what was good and what should be changed, what could be improved etc.

Word rio.

There are lots of idéas floating around, and I'm sure there will be lots of things to improve next season.

Also we don't really know what to expect from the season yet, we haven't even had the first official gamenight yet. It's been a little slow last few days with the draft pracs (no eql games played afaik), so I hope it's not an indicator what we can expect.

Fingers crossed for 0 walkovers and lots of 2-1 matches

There have been eql games played 19th, 21st and 22nd.

Friday and Saturday are idle nights since forever

Come on rikoll, you miss out on fun stuff!! We still have EQL also so I don't understand how this could hurt other than taking away some pracs from peoples ordinary clans.. but I don't think it will be such a huge issue, especially with the strict schedule.
speaking for myself though I'll probably just play more and it won't affect my clanprac activity..

I woulnd't want this to totally replace normal clans either.. clans give more personality and rivalry etc in games.. but as a side thing this is just a kickass concept!

10 totally even teams batteling it out! When was the last time that happend ?
Also big creds to paradoks/murdoc and co: for the effort in this and nice coverage, the pick-show, cute little team images.. etc..

i also prefer 2 divisions.. including everyone won't be as good imo. hotmixes has always been very entertaining, and this will be a whole tournament full of them!

Initiatives like this are the reason why the QW community is still alive while Q2, Q3 and to a certain extend QL have perished. I never played a lot of QW, but there is no community that I have more respect for in terms of survivability, flexibility and innovation. Keep on going