qw4ever: the question mark
How does this sound in your ear, it’s extremely hot summer, you have a QuakeWorld tournament and you’re supposed to play on some of the weirdest maps there are, sounds like a good deal? Well, I wouldn’t say so. The idea of custom map tournament is great, but for QuakeWorld community there isn’t any worse to time to organize it than on summer. Anyone who has been part of the community for longer than a year knows that the community goes falls into torpor for summer like a hedgehog for winter.
When the signups opened it was very clearly stated that players and teams should only signup if they are seriously going to play their matches. Although the text was bolded and underlined, what would be a tournament without inactive players? Perfect. But perfect is not the word we can use to describe how well qw4ever tournaments succeeded to stay alive. In this case it wasn’t the organizers that failed to do their job, but the majority of players. TDM Group A and FFA Group C being great examples, as they have not played any single match till to this very moment.
While I trying to schedule matches for my own team, I asked SamoN from The Pimps that why did they signup for qw4ever, here is what he had to say:
“We are often with 3 players. Defcon had signed us and he didn’t even ask us if we wanted to play. I personally don’t even want to play as I don’t know the maps.”
Talk about good communication inside the team? Gheh.
Although inactivity has been high, still quite few teams have successfully played some nice matches. In the group B we had three active clans and all of them were quite equally skilled but one of them had an edge over the other two. That team was Veterans of Hellfire who were able to beat both Chosen and Oldones straight in two maps and due to this taking the group win, unless some of the inactive clans wake up and beat living hell out of them. In the match for the 2nd spot Oldones and Chosen both won each other’s home map and the game was finally decided on cmt1b, which Oldones won by notable comeback.
Group B also managed to get their matches played if we don’t count AntiQuad in. As predicted, osams mix0r was too mixed in order to be real threat for Dead Rabbits or MNY. So the number one spot was to be decided by Dead Rabbits and MNY. After going through the entire map list, we didn’t see MNY players opening koff’s but dead rabbits running happily. Screenshots can be found at following address: qw4ever.com
The FFA tournament was pretty much same story, Group C not being played and for the other two groups about half of the players were kind enough to show up, but just for the first play day. Although the group matches were almost total failure, the final actually turned out as pretty decent battle. The following players qualified for the final:
Gamer
Jukka
mli
ragz
tyrone
eizid
Mikey
ill
After a rough fight through four crazy kenya maps (cmt2, e4m3tdm, dm15, cmt4) Gamer came out as the king, with Jukka having to settle down for second place, only one point behind. The third place went to tyrone who was able to place between 2-4 on each map and mli coming 4th right after with few point less. Me, myself, I was able to secure the 5th spot by placing 3rd right after the div0 stars Gamer and Jukka on last map, cmt4. For screenshots and closer review into each map, you can find right here.
All in all, I personally enjoyed the FFA tournament especially as it was on these not so well known maps, it gives nice little chances for lesser skilled players like myself. We can now only hope that the TDM playoffs will be successfully played. As soon as the match-ups will be announced I will try to write and predict who will be crowned as the king of team kenya.
As last not certainly not least, I want to thank Link for his effort for these leagues. Keep it up!