Spontan.games community is happy to announce news about our third Quakelive 1on1 night cup. The cup has become some kindof a tradition for us, and we are planning to do more cups in future. But to do this we need you people to support us, and to be active on our channels and within our community, therefor we can make many more nice cups with prizes happen.

CUP INFO:

START: 5.4.2009 , ~16:00 CET

END: 5.4.2009, late night.

RULES: 32 slots, bo3 single elimination, no looser bracket.

MAP POOL: qzdm6,qztourney4,qztourney6,qztourney7,qzdm13,

ADMINS: yuka, chako, smx


All the players, who did find themselves on the list please join #spontan.ql channel on quakenet, on the day of the cup or before! Hopefully it will be a nice tournament, and will be played quicker and with less problems then previous one.

EUQL have recently published their first feature article entitled "Freedom Isn't Free". The article explores the future of free to play games, their effect on the establishment, and what the future might hold for the entire gaming community.

An excerpt:

"In the past if you walked into Game and asked for a freebie, the most you would get is a free smack in the teeth. Today the internet is a sea of free, mostly crappy games. For years websites like NewGrounds.com held an almost monopoly on free games, anything from the Britney Spears dress-up experience to watching an animated frog get blended. This genre of “a student’s first go” games are just scratching the surface. There are businesses making a lot of money from offering free services online.

A home for young gamers, casual gamers, and aggressive paedophiles – Neopets offers everyone free access to their sickly cute MMO / RPG world. It’s not alone, even my shielded step-brothers and sister regular Maple Story and RuneScape. These games are making money, a lot of money and it isn’t just advertising either, the key is to get the user hooked. As players become more and more involved they’re offered incentives to start paying up. Spending the odd few pounds on some in-game currency soon leads to signing up to the all bells and whistles package, just to get a few more hats for their character."

The entire article can be read over at www.EUQL.org

Due to the current financial crisis, the ESWC Grand Finals has been postponed until the end of the year.

None of the past ESWC partners has yet renewed its support for 2009, [..] No new partner is ready to commit on financial support of events operations in 2009. The IT & Hardware market is very affected here in Western Europe, as probably in the rest of the world.

Sponsorships and communication budgets are the first to be canceled in such situation. And as E-Sport stands as a niche value for most of the brands, it is even more difficult

(As a result) we will suspend the upcoming Grand Final of June to postpone it to last quarter 2009.

Says Matthieu Dallon, the ESWC president.

The financial situation has certainly had its negative impact on electronic sports recently, with ESWC struggling, MYM closing down large parts of their organisation, AMD stopping all major sponsorships and mTw being forced to cut gamer salaries by 50-75%. Apart from the ever successful Starcraft in Korea, progaming seems to have gone back several years just in the past few months.

Friday, March 13th

After a week away from doing the Starcraft Weekly show due to ESWC Asia Masters planning, we’re back with some new fresh stuff, you can read what we cover here: ESWC Asia Masters and all that jazz, PJ and his recent ICCUP rank, multiple Liquibition stuff, a new Starcraft section inside a PC gaming magazine, Winners League updates, KTF and SKT1’s match this Sunday, a ton of MSL coverage, OSL as well, and what we’ll be covering next week.

Friday, March 20th

We kick things off with the foreigner scene. SC2GG and its StarLeague are covered first, followed by the ESL Major Series, NonY vs. F91 in Liquibition, latest news about PGL, WCG Ultimate Gamer stuff, ESWC Asia Masters, Starcraft 2, WeMade FOX loses a Protoss player, KTF MagicNs gain a new Terran player, a lot of Winners League, MSL, and OSL coverage, followed by what we’ll be showing next week.

You can view Episode 7 by Clicking Here.

If you're unable to view it from the original source, you may view also watch it through YouTube, Click Here for part 1 of 2 & Click Here for part 2 of 2.

Scheduled: 14:00 CDT, 29 March 2009 to 18:00 CDT, 29 March 2009
Schedule: Passed

The guys at Team Liquid will yet again be holding another Liquibition Event: the 29th.

F91 -vs- NonY (BET)

This time the title-defending champion F91 is currently on fire, he recently beat
IefNaij (aka JF) 4-1 in the 27th Liquibition on February 8th, 2009,
Strelok 4-1 on March 8th, 2009 in the 28th Liquibition as well as
IdrA, who is on pro-gaming team CJ Entus in Korea, 5-2 in the Broodsport #1 event on February 21st, 2009.

He's going up against NonY who just returned from Seoul, Korea where he played for team eSTRO for a couple of months. Will it be enough to beat F91?

Casting will be done by Day[9] and Artosis.


*UPDATE* (21.03.09)
Due to (seemingly) shitty chinese intarwebs the match has been delayed for a week. Read the full story here.

*UPDATE 2* (29.03.09)
F91 won 4:2.

Due to deotrip dropping out to move back to Germany, we have one to fill in the ESL Pro Series UK.

An 8 player, single elimination cup will be played on Monday night to decide who takes the spot. The requirements are that you live in the UK (nationality is irrelevent) and are at least 15 years of age.


To sign up, register and login to the ESL and sign up!

Almost two years after the release of MXS - The Movie, the guys from MXS have just released their second Unreal Tournament 2004 frag compilation movie, MXS the Movie 2.

So what can you expect?
Great quality, great and original effects, lot of creativity from the editor, great content with quite a few sick frags, good sync with a unique soundtrack. And the experience takes more than 10 minutes. Everyone should check this out, those too who are not fans of the Unreal series.


Source: UnrealNorth.com

Scheduled: 18:00 CDT, 12 April 2009
Schedule: Passed

After the vq3 2v2 nations cup was announced, we decided to make our own. So, we are proud to announce the European CPM 2v2 Championship which will start on April 13th.

The limitations are:
* North American team may attend too, but all the games will be played on European servers.
* All the team players must be of the same nationality
* one nation may have maximum of 3 teams
* team may have maximum of 3 players
* coaches are not allowed

The tournament system will depend on quantity of teams. It will take 1-2 months to finish it, as it was with tdm nc.


Main admins: eThaD and blazeh

Registration: mail your line-up to cpmnations@gmail.com
Cup website: http://cpmnations.tourney.cc/

We recently reported that one of the limited edition Serious.Razer.Cypher mouses was put for sale on ebay with its winnings to be donated to charity. The mouse has now been sold after 38 biddings for no less than 501$, which will go to the Red Cross International.

The R3spect 4v4 TDM tournament, with 24 teams from all over Europe, just ended and we can guarantee that we will continue the r3spect series of tournaments on OSP (1v1, 2v2, 4v4, CTF), of course CPMA (1v1, 2v2, 4v4) and QL. Our website is still under construction, but we expect it to be up and working really soon, so stay tuned! All the players will have to sign-up on the page to acquire an account, and afterwards they will be able to register their own clan.

The grand final between Team Poland and MiEL-GAMiNG was played on Monday and there were as many as 200 people on the GTV watching the battle. MiEL-GAMiNG was absolutely unbeatable and didn't lose a single map during the whole tournament. Also some other teams like QCG, empowered with proZac (sajje), or wCm, SP and skillz united showed some nice results. After the grand final, I interviewed link1n, kertaL, zyvve and zik (available in English in this news).

Big thanks goes to all the people who helped us with the tournament: Hawr1x, Smasher, Hudy, xou, 1fall|Danmer, eJo

Demos - Tournament Brackets - Interviews

EDL has finally moved on to the next rounds! Matches in 1/2 winner brackets are between Damiah - DM, and PURRI - Assasin. In losers bracket the players will have to play two games per week. The deadline and forced date will be on Sunday 22.3.2009 - 17:59 CDT!


Previous news

Website: q2scene.net - IRC: #edl - Download Quake 2

The inaugural Quake 3 ESL Pro Series in the UK kicks off this week featuring 12 players from around the UK (and Ireland!).

Playday #1
ddk vs. dallow (match link - betting fixture)
HELL vs. PRIESTLEY (match link - betting fixture)
IspAH vs. dopey (match link - betting fixture)
rax vs. dozo (match link - betting fixture)
GaRpY vs. getsome (match link - betting fixture)
kRoNic vs. deotrip (match link - betting fixture)

Due to the short preparation time all matches from the first week are not at their default time and are currently being scheduled.

Betting fixtures will be made later today!

EPS UK - Rankings - Fixtures

Update: Sign ups for the Qualifier #1 are already full, but if you leave a comment in the ESL news you can be added to the waiting list.

The ESL just released some informations about the qualification process for the Quake 3 ESL Major Series 4. The top4 of 4 Qualifiers cups will gain access to the Q3 EMS4 roster, and the final 8 players will be selected from applications to be invited. After that, the 24 players will compete for the 750€ cashprize.

The Qualifier #1 will start this Sunday 22nd of March at 16h00 CET and will feature 2 group stages (8 groups of 4 players with bo1 matches, then 4 groups of 4 players on bo3) and a double elimination brackets on bo3.

Qualifiers schedule:

- Qualifier #1: Sunday 22nd March
- Qualifier #2: Sunday 29th March
- Qualifier #3: Sunday 5th April
- Qualifier #4: Sunday 12th April

More informations regarding the rules and the sign-ups can be found on the ESL website.

Source: ESL.eu - #esl.q3

Pictures rumoured to be leaked from multiplayer maps of the new Wolfenstein title has started circulating on the web. Wolfenstein uses the now rather old iD tech-4 engine, known from Doom 3 and Quake Wars amongst others so the graphics may not be superb, yet thankfully the player has finally found the end of the bunker in Wolfenstein 3D and has now stepped into an open and in some ways vivid world. Likely with help from the previously hyped MegaTexture technology. The biggest new feature of this installment of Wolfenstein is The Veil, a sort of alternate reality that the player can switch in and out of at will, similiar to the world Frodo enters while putting on the One Ring. It is uncertain how this will work in multiplayer.

Wolfenstein is scheduled to be released this summer by Raven Software, with multiplayer by the CTF masters Threewave and the new studio Endrant. Publisher for Raven will be of course Activision Blizzard.

Crossfire.nu said that maps are mostly small and feature indoor environment just like RtCW did. It's still not sure from which state of the game development process those map screenshots are taken, hence there might be different maps in the final version, or some things may be left away or changed. As all the screenshots are watermarked by idsoftware, we can assume them being legit and true content of the upcoming Wolfenstein game.

Screenshots

mp maps
As the names of the leaked screenshots say, Wolfenstein will have the following multiplayer maps:

mp_bank
mp_canals
mp_chemical
mp_facility
mp_hospital
mp_manor
mp_rooftops
mp_tesla

Wolfenstein.com official site
Wolfenstein

We're finally getting down to serious business.

Sweden vs Icemark @ Thursday 21:00 CET
United Kingdom vs Poland A @ Sunday 22:00 CET

I asked djWHEAT to shoutcast the semi-final games. The days he could do some shoutcasting is from Wednesday to Sunday, so that's the days you can pick to schedule the game. Since none of you settled for a date I don't think this should be a problem. As usual, tell me when you scheduled the game RIGHT AFTER YOU SCHEDULED IT!

The really strong team of Sweden will face off the joined nations Iceland and Denmark.
I think that Sweden will win this one in 2 straight maps, they played each other during the group stage and Sweden managed to win that one convincingly with 2:0 in maps. Although I doubt that Icemark will let the win go easily, they've got some high skilled and really good aim at their team and will use that to counter the Swedes.

United Kingdom and Poland A will face off in the other semi-final. I think this game will be really interesting and the predictions pretty hard. Poland A consists of some of the old schoolers of Poland with the addition of the vq3er v3rb. I'm expecting crazy aim and some nice team play from the Polish team.
The UK team has some wide spread skill and knowledge of the game, with the powerhouse ddk in the front.

I'd say this game goes 2:1 to Poland A, but depending on the lineup from UK that could as well turn to 2:1 in the favor to UK.

As always, you can find the updates first at the tourney site or at irc (#cpm.nations)

Update: Unfortunately djWHEAT couldn't make it for the Sweden vs Icemark game tonight, but he confirmed that he will be here at Sunday when United Kingdom and Poland A is playing!