ParadokS: “What a noobshow.”

Another edition to the interview-series, enjoy!

Hey ParadokS, tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is David Larsen, I’m 25 years old and I come from Copenhagen, Denmark. I moved to Ingelstad, Sweden about 3 months ago. 100mbit/100mbit mmmm.

It seems to me that you have stuck around in quakeworld for a long time, whats the main reason?

Well QuakeWorld is undeniable the best FPS game outthere since 1996. Combine that with the most interesting gamingscene IMO you can’t really ask for more.

When you’r an online gamer, alot of the time isn’t just used for gaming, but also interacting with fellow gamers in other aspects. Chatting, sharing experiences, trading warez, following tech. development in clients/servers/mods, and following forum debates. Then there’s the whole clan and tournament aspect.
I mean there’s just so much material to dig in on, that nomatter what type of personality you are, you can always find something interesting to do within the quake world.

You were attending qhlan10, what were your expectations and how did it go?

The last QHLAN was not a success and only a handful of people showed up. By that time I thought QHLAN was done for.
But I’ve been to quite a few other QHLAN’s and IMO they have always been a big success. So when they announced QHLAN10 I was ofcourse curious and always ready to give it a chance.

I knew the last few years of QHLAN was hard to bounce back from, so I didn’t expect any miracles - and I didn’t get any either. I was quite pleased with the venue and setup. At first glance it looked like the usual quality we have come to expect from QHLAN crews regarding network setups and other basic stuff. Trash can’s setup, refridgiators were a very nice touch!! A bar with somewhat limited supplies. The usual spectator area and so forth.

But once you went past the “facade”, problems started to emerge quite early on. It was clear noone really had a grip on tournaments and no preperations were made. Everything were improvised and tournament system used was old java script from few QHLAN’s back. The admin was some voulenteer that didn’t really wanna do it, but did it anyway. And that was about it. No real info on tournament, nowhere to follow brackets or schedules. No info about possible prizes (although that is kind of a tradition at qhlan, to keep it a secret and let it be in a kind of non-comercialized atmosphere).

xazqe came to the rescue though and set up an info page really fast where there was info and serverlists of all lanservers, links to tournament brackets. 10 thumbs up for that. So now finally we could join some quakeservers, cause joining any internet servers was ofcourse out of the question, sitting on 30mbit radio link with pl 40 half the time and jumpy ping. Unacceptable if you ask me, for a LAN in the city of internet year 2007. I was one of the few lucky one’s that could use IRC cause of a bouncer, but everyone else got G-Lined cause noone fixed a trust. What a noobshow. I know it’s nice that you have to go around asking people for games personally, but cmon, QuakeNet is part of QuakeWorld and we could have saved alot of time searching for tournament opponents etc. through IRC rather than walking around like donkeys looking for people all the time.

The attendants list wasn’t that big either. Alot of the regulars showed up and they are also the ones usually making QHLAN worthwhile showing up. Here I’m thinking of players like Mooseman, Swingah, interceptor, most of suddendeath crew, mutilator. Unfortunately I was missing alot of players. Whole KOFF and LA for example. What is a QHLAN without dag, space, nabbe, slime, not to mention griffin and mrlame? At least we got the dutch - a whole busload. They are always lots of fun :) Chatty social people.

The power outage on day 2 was a real pain. Thinking of the very poorly organized tournaments, the 5 hour poweroutage or how long it was certainly didn’t help. In all honesty it wasn’t their fault, but if alot of the other stuff were run more smoothly, maybe the power outage wouldn’t have had such a big impact.
We did not have room for beds in our car on the way to QHLAN, so I did not get much sleep. Towards day 3 I was in a zombielike state, which probably helped me through losers bracket where I lost to lacsap (for the 2nd time) earning me 4th place in the tournament. Fairly ok I guess, noone was expecting to go past reppie/inter in top anyway so i guess 4th. was good enough.

2on2 was labeled reppie/razor so no surprises there, except how good they actually were. Man I would have loved to see them get some real action vs griffin/mrlame and dag/space. Maybe next year. 4on4 was also bit of a drag. Not alot of teams and not even a handful worth noticing. I know SD was hyped alot, but they didn’t stand much chance vs either us nor firingsquad, which was basically it. Who would win? SR or FS - but wait, gay seeding/groups/whatever meant that we met FS in semifinals, and whattaya know. SD came 2nd after all after losing to us in the finals :) Unfortunately I had to go immediately after semifinals, so I could not stick around to watch neither 2on2 nor 1on1 finals, or play the finals with slackers. XalibuR took over for me and did his duty without questions or flaws.

So was it worth coming at all with all that negative shit? Ofcourse it was :) Would you come again? Ofcourse I would! I know I didn’t have 15 hour drive, but it’s always worth it to meet the ppl real life that you chat with everyday on the net. It’s always fun to actually go outthere and attend something with ppl of same interest. When all came down to it, it was a nice LAN, with room for lots of improvement.

Where do you se yourself in 10 years?

Can you answer that question with a hint of realistic arguement? I doubt it, so here goes. In 10 years I’m a poker pro, living the sweet life on the road.

What computer headphones,mouse,mousemat,client do you use?

Athlon XP 64 3000+, 1gb ram, GF6600GT, WinXP.
Sennheiser HD-250 Linear II, Logitech G1, Func 1030 (rough side), EZQuake.

If you could choose 3 things to improve the QuakeWorld community in the near future, what would it be?

Can I only get 3? Puuh.
1) QTV with full commentary support build in. Mass broadcasting is the way to go and a natural next step.
2) Better base for the community (old qwnu?) with room for many sides of the community to grow. Here I mean map interested, graphics developers, tournaments and so forth.
3) Better FFA scene to make it more attractive for new players - and old.

What old-time players do you wish to make a comeback, if any. and why?

pietro was always my favourite. Great playing style and great personality. RoadRunner was an old danish Quaker and I would love to see him still play.
You know that anyone with today’s experience and skills would take them down, but you still wonder “well if they still played today they would kick aassss!”

What are you strenghts and weaknesses do you have as a dueller?

I don’t consider myself a dueller. I like DM6 and I got really good at it and it’s the only map I really enjoy in duels.
I’m mainly 4on4/2on2/ffa player. But if you wan’t to compete in duels, even just for DM6, you have to accept playing other maps.
It took me years to become half decent on DM4 let alone DM2, and still neither of those levels come close to my DM6 game.
So I guess my strenghts as a dueller is DM6 plain and simple :=)
And my weakness ofcourse lack of skills adapting to other maps.

Do you see any new tricks/tactics/bugs nowadays, or is it all allready done?

Seeing as we have played the same maps for 10 years and there have been thoussands of players spending hours on end at home exploiting all possible tricks I don’t see any new tricks no. But that dosen’t really interest me that much. I still think new styles and tactics are being developed and that will always change.

What do you think of the ownage tournament replacing duelmania?

Sad :) Duelmania has always stood in my mind as high quality, high number of attendants and tough competetion. I know ownage looks like a copy, using same page and rules but I’d still rather play in duelmania. I’m sure duelmaina will return soon though and it’s a nice initative ownage crew is doing, cause we really do need some more tournaments.

What do you think of fakeshaft being allowed in ruleset smackdown?

I think fakeshaft should be banned, just as kfjump was. However I think the impact fakeshaft has is smaller than kfjump and if fakeshaft really do stay in official rulesets of most tournaments then I’ll probably learn to accept it. kfjump was something that i felt really strong for, but fakeshaft not so much.

Do you have anything to add, or maybe a shoutout to anybody?

Shoutout to Dennis ‘XalibuR’, great to see him again after several years. He got sick good in a few days and played almost as if he never left.
And ofcourse my sugardaddy Casey, for lending me his phat computer to play on. Whoom without I would not have been able to attend this LAN and beat up FS on LAN Muahaha.

Thanks for you time and gl hf!

U2 man