SyncError wrote:

Today marks the conclusion of our Year One Event, I hope everyone has enjoyed the first year of Beta and was able to earn their Year One award.

I know twelve players who certainly earned their awards this week as the world's best faced off at the ESL Intel Extreme Masters Seasons IV World Championships in Hannover, Germany. Earning the first IEM World Champion title was Shane "rapha" Hendrixson of the United States who defeated Anton "Cooller" Singov of Russia. Maciej "srsav3krazer" Krzykowski of Poland seized third place after his victory in the relegation match verses Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky. Congratulations to all of the ESL IEM4 participants and best of luck in future competitions. We have added four new awards to recognize these twelve professionals, shiny flair for their profiles.

In other recent news, the venue and dates for QuakeCon 2010 have been announced. This August 12th-15th, the event returns to the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, Texas and is FREE to all attendees. We hope to see you there.

Also included in today's update are some additional improvements to the Duel Spectator function, extensions upon the existing AutoAction record features, and some improvements made to diagnose and improve PunkBuster interactions. Check out our Devblog for a full list of changes.


Game Updates

* Spectators in duel now persist across map switches. So an idling spectator should not get picked as a viable player if they have previously selected "Spectate" from the join menu. Spectators will now be shown with (s) appended to their name in duel.
* cg_autoAction will now work for matches that are already in progress. For example, if you set cg_autoAction to 1 or 3 prior to joining a server where a match has already started, a demo should begin recording upon connecting.
* Fixed the "3 Second Respawn Delay" message from appearing at the end of CTF matches in situations when the match is not going into overtime.
* Gametype-dependent menus, such as Join screens, should now display properly.

Web Updates

* Added four new awards to recognize the participants of the ESL Intel Extreme Masters World Championship:
o ESL IEM4 Champion
o ESL IEM4 Challenger
o ESL IEM4 Contender
o ESL IEM4 Professional
* Password entry fields are now masked on the Join Private Server dialogue.
* We have further expanded upon our client error tracking to help diagnose and support users obtaining PunkBuster communication related kicks.