Posted by Slasher @ 16:19 CDT, 24 April 2017 - iMsg
Russian YouTube channel C-c-combo Breaker! has released a full ~13-minute Duel between id Software's John "ZeRo4" Hill and Adam "SyncError" Pyle featuring the previously mentioned three-champion per player, round-based format.
Edited by Nukm at 07:29 CDT, 26 April 2017 - 70562 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 07:16 CDT, 20 April 2017 - iMsg
The current iteration of Quake Champions duel mode has been revealed by Russian YouTube channel C-c-combo Breaker!, which features a match between QC Lead Designer Adam "SyncError" Pyle, and new QC Esports Manager John "ZeRo4" Hill.
As broken down by PlusForward, QC Duel works as follows:
- Matches are best of 3 rounds. 2 rounds wins the match.
- At the start of the match each player picks three champions. The same champion cannot be picked more than once, and each player can have the same champions.
- After each death you respawn with your remaining champions, pickups are reset at the end of each round.
- Rounds last until one player has lost with all three champion picks, or until the timelimit is hit in which the player with more champions left wins the round. In case of a tie, the game heads into sudden death OT.
Edited by Badb0y at 18:06 CDT, 27 April 2017 - 74252 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 15:09 CDT, 7 April 2017 - iMsg
Quake Champions Executive Director Tim Willits speaks to IGN on id Software's intent to please the longtime Quake community, the current usage of team-wide powerups such as Quad, and looking forward towards custom servers.
It is so important that we capture that core Quake community. If we blow it with the pro players, then we’re not going to get any casual players. Today, especially with spectating – people watching other people play games – watching the world’s best Quake players play a game of Quake is really enjoyable because they can do things that are just amazing.
We do feel that if we can capture those really competitive hardcore streamers, pro players, they will build a community around themselves. That’s huge for us. We do believe that can pull people in that may have been playing other first-person shooters.
The best players always still win. We have John “ZeRo4” Hill, a competitive Quake player that’s been on the scene for years. He is an employee here. He still wins. The focus of the game is on skill. You may use the active abilities for an advantage, or you may use them to help you get out of a situation that you feel is a problem for you, but the best players still win, and that’s important.
We have our custom game mode that allows custom games to be tweaked up a little bit But we do believe that people will play the game as it is. You’ll be able to adjust some things, but we really discourage that. We do believe that once people play it, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ Because you know what? If you want to play Quake where everyone is exactly the same and you’re all the same character, just play Quake Live. It’s still available. We’ll have our custom game modes, but we don’t think people will actually play like that.
There are a lot of folks that say they want everyone to get Quad [Damage], everyone on your team gets Quad. Then there are some people that are, like, ‘No, we’re okay with the slight buff that we have now.’ And there are some people that are like, ‘No, it’s got to be a single person.’ That is definitely something that we are going to be looking at when we move into closed beta. It could possibly change.
Posted by Slasher @ 02:03 CDT, 28 March 2017 - iMsg
Quake Champions Executive Director Tim Willits recently spoke of id Software's commitment to both duel and team modes in QC. Willits has now revealed in a new interview how duel is currently working within QC - which for now includes Champions - while hinting at a new team mode and weapons.
Our Duel mode allows you to pick your group of champions and then compete one-versus-one, so there's more strategy.
Depending on what you and the other player picks, you can really have a lot of thinking to do and analysis in the matches, and it becomes another layer on top of just the raw skill that I think people will really be encouraged with. It fills a nice little missing 1v1 hole that we currently have in the competitive games industry.
Our current Duel mode allows you to bring three champions into the match, so you need to figure out which ones will work best. Like, for instance, Galena is better in team game modes, I believe, than 1v1. But then I had an argument with one of our programmers who said: 'No, no, no: you can use her offensively in 1v1, and if you play her like this, you'll have an advantage.'
We're waiting to hear back from our fans after our closed beta test about what people think of Duel. We may tweak it some, but our current plan is to start with three champions.
Willits says new mode Sacrifice is being tweaked, and offered up that id Software is working on a new unannounced team mode. As Capture The Flag and Rocket Arena/Clan Arena have yet to be mentioned, both rise to the top for speculation.
[Originally] you held your Sacrifice Point and then you got more points for your frags, but now we're switching it to an act, so that you have to activate the points. So that game mode is still being developed.
New weapons will be coming.
The holy trinity of Quake is of course rocket, rail and lightning gun, so we did not mess with the holy trinity, okay? We would be roasted if we messed with them.
"We've kept a lot of the weapons pretty familiar - but we have a few surprises that I don't want to announce quite yet. Remember, the Quake weapons have been refined, debated and tweaked for 21 years. So we know the speed of a rocket, and we know the damage-over-time of a lightning gun. I want our players to understand that they are going to feel right at home with the weapons. That was really important for us: not to mess that up.
Posted by Slasher @ 05:07 CDT, 17 March 2017 - iMsg
In a new extensive interview with Russian esports site GoodGame.ru, Quake Champions Executive Director Tim Willits revealed several important details for the game and its future in esports, including:
- Quake Champions will be featured in a tournament at QuakeCon 2017
- All future Champions will be free with a purchase of the full game
- Team gamemode 'Sacrifice' (and Duel) is being built for esports
- Ranked matchmaking will be for both Duel and team gamemodes
- Anti-cheat measures are being put into place with a third party organization
- Another classic map will make its return to QC
- Closed beta will start in the next few weeks
"So. Yes. We are committed to have a large e-sports presence. We can not announce any partnerships right now, but we're talking to all of the big esports companies, I mean we were just in Poland, Katowice IEM which is ESL's event. So we're definitely talking to the different companies, we want to make a game esports-friendly, spectacular, with different spectating features and we want to have a game modes that are esports-friendly, and we feel, after talking to a lot of pro players, that the one versus one (Duel) is something that is missing in the first-person esports scene. As well as one esports game mode which we're currently working on (Sacrifice) based on a feedback from some number of pro players. So yes, we very, you know, we very focused on e-sports. Quake has a long history of e-sports and we definitely want to work with a number of partners to ensure that we will have as many tournaments as possible."
Translator Artem 'DieZel' Volodin has made the interview in its entirety available for ESReality below:
goodgame.ru: So let's start then! Very first question is about PAX East 2017. PAX is the first event where Quake Champions was shown so massively, any participant could take a seat and play Quake. What is the feedback from the community?
Tim Willits: We've brought the game to PAX East this weekend which was a lot of to us. The overall feedback that I heard was that: "It is still Quake!", which is really important to us, because we want it to ensure, that we stay true the the Quake's, you know, the spirit and core. So the people had sat down and said "Wow, movement is so good!", "Wow, weapons are so familiar!", all that cores are like Quake. And we have got many responses, and you can see it all online, like "Champions did not change the way that you play", that "it is still Quake", it was good for people to see, you know, how the Champions' abilities added to overall game experience. So, I've been very happy with this feedback from the show this weekend.
gg.ru: Okay, very nice. Now you have the feedback from the PAX participants, what will you advantage with it?
Willits: There are some things we want to adjust. A lot of feedback that we want to take action on actually came from some of the pro players, that played it. Like for instance, we had a game at Katowice, Poland, about two weeks ago, and we had a number of pro esports players who played it. And some of the feedback from them was like, you know, they wanted some adjustments to a team game modes, they gave us some very specific responses about movement techniques, they wanted weapon switching to be faster, so they gave helpful thing we wanted to address.
And then, in the next few weeks, we are going to the closed beta, and it will be a small closed beta, then we will have able people to play the game for longer that just at the show, and hopefully we can gather more feedback and make changes to the game. We are committed that we are listening to our fans and we are trying to make the game as best as possible.
gg.ru: Okay, that is very nice. So. The closed beta is very close, right?
Willits: Yes, yes, yes! If you go to quakechampions.com and sign up, we should invite you with some other people in a few weeks. So stay tuned, it is coming ip closer. But, remember, it is gonna be small and it gonna be growing. And we will kepp inviting people because we want to test the infrastructure, we want to test a backend, we want to test a game modes and the Champions balance. So we will grow closed beta over time.
gg.ru: One more little question about closed beta. Can you say how many people already signed up for the beta?
Willits: Oh yeah. I actually have that number, but it is a lot. We've been very happy of signed number, it was an amazing for us. So we definitely have enough people for all our plans on beta. As I said we want to test a backend, we want to test the server integrity, will servers crash when many people get connected to. We want to test progression, the balance of the Champions make sure that not one Champion is more powerful. We will definitely grow closed beta numbers over time, but we've very happy we have so many signs so far.
gg.ru: So could you throw a bit of light about range of signed people - is it hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands? How many?
Willits: Oh. again, I will not talk about numbers. But I will tell you this. Guess what country after the United States has more beta signups than another country in the world? I will tell you. Russia.
gg.ru: We all are waiting for the closed beta till Quake Champions was annonuced for the first time and Russia has a huge quake community, even bigger than in US. Okay, now I'm going to ask you a set of big questions about the plans of Quake Champions and mostly about e-sports plans. Will Quake Champions be promoted to the third-party e-sports organizations like ESL or whatever, or it will more involed to the Quakecon and related events?
Willits: So. Yes. We are committed to have a large e-sports presence. We can not announce any partnerships right now, but we're talking to all of the big e-sports companies, I mean we were just in Poland, Katowice IEM which is ESL's event. So we're definitely talking to the different companies, we want to make a game esports-friendly, spectacular, with different spectating features and we want to have a game modes that are esports-friendly, and we feel, after talking to a lot of pro players, that the one versus one (Duel) is something that is missing in the first-person esports scene. As well as one esports game mode which we're currently working on (Sacrifice) based on a feedback from some number of pro players. So yes, we very, you know, we very focused on e-sports. Quake has a long history of e-sports and we definitely want to work with a number of partners to ensure that we will have as many tournaments as possible.
gg.ru: So you've said about competitve game modes and ranked matches, could you please giva a little more information about. What the modes will be?
Willits: You will be able to play ranked matches. Both TDM and duel modes, and we have a new e-sports mode called "Sacrifice" which one guy of pro e-sports players played at Quakecon and fold it said we need to change it at all (hehe). So, actually we work on the game mode based on what pro players told us to do. That mode is an objective-based gamemode. And we hope pro players will play "Sacrifice" and duels. And classic TDM for sure.
gg.ru: What about automatic matchmaking. If I, for example, want to play rated "Sacrifice" match, will I have the option to find an appropriate match automatically?
Willits: We're always and continously improving matchmaking over time, but the first you have to do is a pick a region where you playing in. And then, when you're going to the matchmaking system it will find other players with around you skill, and based on region information where are you playing from it will find a server for you. And initially in
closed beta you will pick a region then matchmaking could start work. Make sense?
gg.ru: Yeah, anything is pretty clear. The next question is about maps and gameplay. The Blood Covenant, for expample, is a reproduced Campgrounds from Quake III. Will we see any other well-known map from previous series of Quake like Blood Run or maybe Aerowalk?
Willits: Oh, that is a great question! So... So, yes! It should be surprise, but yes. We have another classic well-known map that in coming down. I won't tell you which map it is, but I know it is the one you're very familiar with. We have an another duel map that people would be happy to play on.
gg.ru: Nice! Pretty nice, I'm glad to hear it. Any previous Quake has its own physics and gameplay, like, for example, Quake World has bunnyhop, Quake III has strafejumping, etc. And that options any time affect the maps: its design and size, propotions. In that new Quake the Champions have a different set of abilities including different movement styles and speeds. How this problem is being solved?
Willits: That is a very good question. As you said the Champions have a different move styles, for example, Anarki has more air control as Quake World and Ranger has more strafejumping like Quake III. So it is more challenging with the maps. I think, you know, current version of q3dm6, the Blood Covenant that we have, there are some place which Anarki or Slash could reach easier that Clutch can do it. That is a part of playing most Champions. Part of the strategy and a part of the design. We've tried to make a map playable for everyone, but there are number of features that one characters can do and other characters can not do. For example. Q3dm6 railgun area and the bridge. If you're playing Nyx, yeah, you can actually jump, then use an ability "wall-run" and reach the railgun. And get back same route. But you're playing Snorlag you have to use rocketjump to reach the same place. And if you're plaing someone like Anarki you can just accelerate with air control and fly over gap from bridge to railgun. So, based on Champion you're playing for you have to know all options and strategies.
gg.ru: Will we see Quake Champions contest at upcoming Quakecon?
Willits: Oh, yes. Sure. We are definetely want to have a tournament at Quakecon and I've said it at last year's Quakecon. We will talk more about it soon, but yes, we will have tournament at Quakecon with Quake Champions.
gg.ru: Ok, we're all waiting for the event. Now I have my personal set of very technical questions about how the game actually works. If you know, I'm hosting set of Quake Live servers at Saint-Petersburg and Amsterdam, and I am full of curiosity of how game is working.
Willits: Oh, sure. I am not so techician, but I think I am able to answer you. Go on.
gg.ru: Will there a community-managed dedicated servers? I mean can I run my own server of the Quake Champions game?
Willits: Initially we will run the servers. We will run it to be sure that we have servers in the right territories, it is important for us. Because progression is important, because cheating is important, because free-to-play nature is important. So we will actually have to run the servers. You can create a custom game, and you can invite people to play on, but official servers will run and need to be managed by us.
gg.ru: So, make me sure: I will not be able to run "official matchmaking server", because all official infrastructure is under your management, but I am able to run a custom server and play with friends without being rated.
Willits: Yes-yes. We will run doze of matchmaking servers but you will be able to create your own custom one. Yes.
gg.ru: What is "120Hz gameplay" actually? I saw you interview about Rage couple years ago and you said that almost any game runs at 30Hz, but Rage is designed to run at 60Hz, now we're talking about 120Hz. Do you really mean that that quantity of Hertzs is real frequency of game world is being updated? Or it is something esle?
Willits: Oh. The Hertz. So, there is FPS and there is Hertz. And Hertz is a speed at which game makes a decisions. In Quake Champions we are targeting at 120Hz with uncapped frame rate. So game's responsiveness will be as fast as possible, so I believe that how faster your Hertz are that better gameplay experience it will be.
gg.ru: So, does that mean that server will 120 times per second send gamestate packets to the client or is it the client's refresh rate?
Willits: Internet will chuck if you set server's refresh rate to 120Hz. Sure it is on the client's side. It is responsiveness of the client.
gg.ru: What is the very common system requirements for the client side of the Quake Champions? I mean, for exmple, what videocard I must have to feel as full as it is that "120Hz responsivness".
Willits: Well. We haven't quite worked with optimization yet. You know, right now we're focusing on general features, balancing. We haven't started focusing on optimizations. So we really don't have that information. But. We do understand that we have to make it as accessible as possible. So we do our best to run it on a most machines, so when we will have that information with system requirements we will definitely release it.
gg.ru: Actually I have a last one question for today. So, Tim, what about possible cheaters in Quake Champions? You're introducing it as free-to-play, so everyone could play it. You're introducing it as competitive e-sports game with massive e-sports presence. Cheaters will be there. How to prevent cheating or how to fight against them?
Willits: So. We know about the problem and we taking it in the two focused approach. First one is we're trying to move a lot of critical decision making from the client to the server. And then we're cooperating with a service, we haven't announced that yet, but I can tell you that we're working with another companies, also helping us with the anti-cheat. One part is the game site developers working with a company that helping us to make an anti-cheat services, we haven't announced that partnership but we will do it soon.
gg.ru: And in the end of our chat let we discuss the business model of Quake Champions.
Willits: Yes, sure. So game is free-to-play. In free version you're able to play only with Ranger. There is also Champions Pack buying which means buying all the features. Also you may buy single champions for a limited time range or even forever for real money or in-game currency. So you can just download it and start with Ranger or buy features.
gg.ru: Actually, keep me clear, if I buy full Champions Pack does it means that I will have an access to all the Champions even introduced in future?
Willits: Yes. If you're buying the Champions Pack in the very beginning of the game you are getting all the Champions already released in the game, or that will be released as base of the game. So best option for everybody is to buy the Champions Pack. You will get the Champions!
gg.ru: Surely I will buy the Pack.
Willits: Thank you. I very appreciate it.
Edited by Slasher at 05:17 CDT, 17 March 2017 - 63712 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 06:56 CDT, 16 March 2017 - iMsg
In the final piece of original video content from PAX East, legendary Quake broadcaster & player, and now old, old, old, old man at Twitch Marcus 'djWHEAT' Graham makes his return by playing Quake Champions at PAX East. Playing Ranger on Ruins of Sarnath. Styles.519 can still frag.
Warning: Contains Wheat-esque complaining over the bad mouse, not rebinding his keys, and 'what the fuck is the ability key?'
Posted by Slasher @ 07:12 CDT, 15 March 2017 - iMsg
More gameplay of Quake Champions at PAX East featuring ESReality user phaZon playing Galena, Clutch, Sorlag, Nyx, on map Blood Covenant (Campgrounds-DM6).
Note: Sound has been muted as you're not able to hear game sounds in these videos anyway.
Posted by Slasher @ 15:11 CDT, 14 March 2017 - iMsg
More gameplay of Quake Champions at PAX East featuring ESReality user phaZon playing Visor, Nyx, Galena, Anarki, and Ranger on new map Ruins of Sarnath.
Guest appearance by djWHEAT at the end (footage coming soon).
Posted by Slasher @ 23:04 CDT, 13 March 2017 - iMsg
While id Software has made a commitment to Duel and its importance in esports, much of the focus for Quake Champions is in its team-based game modes. For QC Executive Director Tim Willits, this will allow for both new players to find an easier footing in QC, and to keep Quake diehards happy.
"Historically, most of our Quake games are free-for-all, so you have one winner and 15 losers," Willits told GameSpot. "So we definitely want to push people more into teamplay because you have a better chance of winning--a 50-percent chance of winning. And it allows, especially new people, to find a champion they like, be successful, not have the entire weight of the game on their shoulders, and have these successes that build over time so you can feel more comfortable as your skills increase."
"It's 2017, and we want to have a lot of people to play the game. We both need to make our Quake fans happy but also make the game approachable and new and fresh and allow people to feel good when they play it."
Willits also remains confident that abilities in QC and comparisons to other games such as Overwatch will not detract from a true Quake experience.
"We do feel that when you come and play, you go, 'This is the right way to play.' You still run and jump and strafe-jump and rocket-jump and stuff, so it doesn't really change. I think people are like, 'Oh my god! There's abilities in Quake; you're ruining the game!' Luckily, people that have gone through [our PAX demo] are like, 'This is good,' and they see what we're trying to do.
"We needed to tap into that core DNA of Quake: skill-based, it's fast, everyone has the same weapons; no one has a weapon advantage. We have the holy trinity: rocket launcher, railgun, lightning gun--we'll never mess with that. That core game loop, the recipe for our cookie, is good. So then we just need to add on stuff and push, push, push--oh, that was too much, come back a little bit and then push, push, push.
The beginning of the video includes opening QC loot boxes and the backpack, along with initial impressions of alternate skins. The end of the video includes end of game stats and scoreboard.
Edited by Slasher at 13:54 CDT, 17 March 2017 - 13504 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 08:44 CDT, 13 March 2017 - iMsg
While Quake Champions will have a strong emphasis on team modes, the historical Quake staple of 1v1 Duel has previously been confirmed to be in QC. While details on the inner workings of the game mode have not yet been made public and no new information was provided at PAX East, Quake Champions Executive Director Tim Willits has assured that Duel will be a focus for esports. id Software's Lead Quake Designer Adam 'SyncError' Pyle and new Esports Director John 'ZeRo4' Hill recently ventured to IEM Katowice to have CSGO pros try out the game (non-duel), and professional Quake players will be coming to id Software's offices as soon as today to test Duel further than the play tests at QuakeCon 2016.
“There is a hole with one-versus-one, it's missing from first-person eSports,” Quake Champions Executive Director Tim Willits told PCGamesN at PAX East. “The title fights are great for Quake so our Duel mode is going to be uniquely Quake, but will still incorporate the champions. We have Duels [working in-game] but we need to get more pro players to play it, just to make sure they like it. We have some coming up to id next week.
“We've been listening to [the pros] too, at Quakecon last year the pro players came in, they played our team mode and they were like 'yeah you gotta change this', we said okay, we started changing it.”
Edited by Badb0y at 12:58 CDT, 15 March 2017 - 46324 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 03:08 CDT, 12 March 2017 - iMsg
Quake Champions video from PAX East featuring QuakeWorld & Quake 4 player Jeffrey "Thump4" McShane playing Anarki (CPM/PQL movement) on new QC map 'Ruins of Sarnath'.
Posted by Slasher @ 10:56 CST, 10 March 2017 - iMsg
Quake Champions Executive Director Tim Willits tells Polygon that "at its core [Quake Champions] will be free"
Players who want to can play Ranger for free, or they can buy the Champion Pack and get unlimited access to Ranger and all other champions for a fixed price.
At its core, it’s a free-to-play game,” Willits said, “with the option to buy the Champion Pack and just get in and play with all the Champions. There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. ‘I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions.’
“But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people.”
“We do feel it's more approachable,” Willits said, “and we feel that with our team game modes, and then especially our dual mode, that we can fill a hole that's missing in esports today.
“We do have a really nice advantage, because lots and lots of the pro players got their start playing Quake. And yeah, they're playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive now and, Overwatch, but their first love is Quake. So we want to get that critical mass where you have enough players and then we want to ... expand our competitive play, our league play as we move into late this year and next year.
Today is the final day of competition for the two debut Overwatch LAN events since the games' release earlier this week. The €5,000 TakeOver TV LAN is being held at the TaKe studio in Krefeld, Germany and the $10,000 Dolby Agent Rising LAN is being held at the Esports Arena in Santa Ana, California
TakeOver has four teams remaining in the tournament. Creation Esports featuring players LiNkz and numlocked has booked a ticket for themselves into the grand finals with a win over Rogue featuring winz, aKm, TviQ, and iddqd. Rogue will fight it out with Melty (ft Flippy) and Graviton Surge (ft Zebbosai, Kryw) in the losers bracket.
The event is being broadcast by 2GD, Jason Kaplan, Nathanias, UberShouts and the players at https://www.twitch.tv/taketv
Alienware Monthly Melee champions Cloud9 featuring reaver and Surefour coming in as the heavy favorite. Their main competition in attendance will be from TeamLiquid, featuring players DaHanG, AZK, dummy, and MESRAWR, GaleForce eSports, and the American Quake legends of Still Here, featuring Rapha, ZeRo4, cl0ck, and allmEntal.
It's been a while since I posted here, and I'm sure the reception to Overwatch content may be lukewarm at best, but with the games release today Alienware is hosting a $3,000 64-team 2-day Cup today and tomorrow. Among the teams competing are many familiar faces from Quake, along with star players from other games such as Team Fortress 2, CS:GO, UT, Dirty Bomb, etc.
Tonight Live On Three with Slasher and djWHEAT returns with special guest, 4x QuakeCon Champion Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky. We'll be discussing his recent victory at QuakeCon 2014, now having the most QuakeCon victories of all time, his rivalry with rapha, and his future playing Quake.
Willing to take some of the top questions from this thread if you guys have some good ones!
For those interested, The International 2014 $5 Million Dota 2 Champions Hao of Team NewBee will also be on the show later on. I will replace the live Twitch link with that of the VOD once the show is over (will be available right away).
American Quake Champion Shane "Rapha" Hendrixson from SK Gaming won the Quake Live 1v1 QuakeCon 2013 Championships and $9,000 in a thrilling five game final over Russian favorite Sergey "Evil" Orekhov.
Hendrixson speaks to GameSpot on winning his third QuakeCon title, now nearly a dozen major Quake Live titles. He says he will not stop competing.
"I think I'll just look at it like 'hey, if I have the time to go play in a big tournament and can prepare for it, I will,'" he says, as DreamHack's 2013 Winter event looms in the distance with $15,000 in prize money. “"So I won't say that I'll 'retire'. I’'m going to always leave the door open. I've accomplished quite a bit in Quake, and to me I don't really look at it like 'okay, I've finally won this now I'm good.' I've always tried to take it one tournament at a time and I'm always looking to win and do more and I think it'll always be that way. If you don't look at it that way it's so difficult to win against someone who really wants it more than you.
Winning a third title now does mean a lot to me considering that John [ZeRo4] is my friend, someone I looked up to as a player for a long time and was the one who helped give me the little push I needed to start being able to win," Hendrixson said. "So to have that same accomplishment as him is nice to have. As with Cypher almost every tourney we go to I want him to do very well also and we have a good friendly rivalry, neither of us gets bitter when losing to the other and now that I have three like him, the race is on to see who can get four.
Posted by Slasher @ 17:19 CST, 5 December 2012 - iMsg
Tonight on Live On Three #141 with djWHEAT and Slasher, DreamHack Champion Evil and IPL Champion Stermy of colwn join the show to talk about their recent victories.
Topics for discussion include Evil finally winning a major title, beating Cypher and Rapha back-to-back, thoughts on playing Shootmania, another title for Stermy, and where competitive deathmatch FPS will go from here.
Posted by Slasher @ 10:18 CST, 5 December 2012 - iMsg
I was able to have a brief interview with IPL5 Champions colwn (stermy, winz, aKm) who took out FnaticRC (strenx, LeKaiM, JiePie) in the finals 3-0, winning $30,000 in the process.
Discussion includes:
- The road to victory at IPL5
- Beating strenx in the finals
- The current state of Shootmania as a competitive title
- Shootmania as a spectator sport
Posted by Slasher @ 16:58 CDT, 20 June 2012 - iMsg
Tonight on Live On Three, DreamHack Champion Shane "rapha" Hendrixson will be on the show to discuss his victory at the DreamHack 2012 Summer Championships. We'll talk with him about his run through the bracket including Semifinals against Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, finals nemesis Alex "Cypher" Yanushevsky, and the future of Quake as it stands now.
Hosts Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and Scott "SirScoots" Smith have returned from Sweden, and will be joined by Rod "Slasher" Breslau.
Scheduled: 18:00 CDT, 10 August 2011 to 19:30 CDT, 10 August 2011 Schedule: Passed
LiveOnThree is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau & Scott "SirScoots" Smith.
Live On Three #83 will recap this past weekend's biggest events - QuakeCon 2011, Assembly 2011, and the European Battle.net Invitational. QuakeCon 2011 may be the last major tournament until DreamHack later this year. QuakeCon 2011 champion Shane "SK.rapha" Hendrixson, arguably the best Quake Live player of all time and in the running for best Quake player of all time with tox, will join us on the show to discuss his second QuakeCon championship. EU Battle.net champion Jos "Ret" De Kroon will also join the show and discuss his first major victory since Assembly Winter, and the brewing rivalry between him and NaNiwa.
- Sweden and the World gets DOMINATED in GSL Code A
- MLG Anaheim and EVO World Finals Numbers released; controversy regarding statistics
- ESL GamesCom groups announced including MKP, Puma, Killer as invites; ESL goes to Brazil
- YellOw comes back to the Starcraft scene quickly, will have his own show on Gom and be managed by SlayerS_Jessica
- TeamLiquid pick up HerO
- compLexity Triggers Down merges with Final Boss
- TSL kicked out of the Starcraft 2 committee, let back in shortly later
- $30,000 Heroes of Newerth and CS 1.6 tournaments confirmed for DH under Beat It tournament; no Quake
- IPL with new $100,000 prize purse, 2 new games announced soon
Scheduled: 18:00 CDT, 3 August 2011 to 21:00 CDT, 3 August 2011 Schedule: Passed
LiveOnThree is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau & Scott "SirScoots" Smith.
Live On Three #82 will recap what was the most momentous, passionate, and pure largest weekend in eSports/Competitive Gaming history with the EVO 2011 World Finals, MLG Anaheim, and the GSL July finals. As was expected by many, Korea dominated MLG, Japan won Arcade Edition at EVO (though America stepped up), and the GSL finals was another 4-0 sweep. We examine why all of this happened and if the American/Foreign players for Starcraft 2 and Fighting Games will be on notice from these events and work harder, or continue to fluster when it comes to playing fierce competition. EVO official streamer Victor "Spooky" Fontanez will join the show to discuss all of the weekend's events in Marvel vs Capcom 3, SSF4AE, Mortal Kombat 9, and how it felt to stream EVO for the very first time.
We will preview QuakeCon 2011, in what might be the last major Quake tournament for some time, with fascinating individual 2GD. Predictions of the groups including if tox can win it all in his first tournament back, will Cypher easily take it instead, or can rapha retain his throne as the greatest Quake Live player ever? Also thoughts on the Facebook vote, the stream and his new casting partner, and his time on the MLG cast.
Scheduled: 13:30 CDT, 4 July 2011 to 23:00 CDT, 4 July 2011 Schedule: Passed
Join us today for a sneak preview of MLG Live as we knock Independence Day out of the park with ten straight hours of live streamed content featuring the best of the world of eSports/competitive gaming.
Many of you in the US will be out with friends and family for the evening, which is great! If you have some time throughout the day, check it out. If not, VOD's will provided shortly after. For everyone who can't get enough eSports, and those outside the US where it'll just be another Monday, this will be a treat.
It’s an extravaganza of gaming with all your favorite players, commentators, and community members - all streamed to you live in HD. Starcraft 2, Quake Live, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach and maybe even some Mortal Kombat 9/SSF4AE.
Below is the tentative schedule of events for the day. Because matches are live, there is no knowing how long games will go, along with all other apects of running a live event such as this.
Slasher will be hosting with various pro's. 2GD's assistance has been requested.
14:00 CDT, 19 April 2024: MLG Live Launch with JP McDaniel w/ special guests, tour of studio
14:30 CDT, 19 April 2024: Starcraft 2 1v1 Showmatch - White-Ra vs TLAF`Ret - Best of 5
15:15 CDT, 19 April 2024: Starcraft 2 2v2 Showmatch - coL.CatZ & coL.Drewbie vs EG.Axslav & EG.StrifeCro - Best of 3
16:00 CDT, 19 April 2024: Quake Live 1v1 Showmatch - Toxic vs srs.av3k, winner vs srs.Cypher - Best of 3/5
17:00 CDT, 19 April 2024: Special Edition of SC Center with JP McDaniel and Chobopeon
17:30 CDT, 19 April 2024: Call of Duty: BlackOps Showmatch - OpTic Gaming vs Force - Best of 3
18:15 CDT, 19 April 2024: Halo: Reach Showmatch - Status Quo vs Dynasty - Best of 5
19:00 CDT, 19 April 2024: Quake Live 1v1 Showmatch - ZeRo4 vs EG.DaHanG, winner vs SK.Rapha - Best of 3/5
20:00 CDT, 19 April 2024: Quake Live CTF Showmatch - Evil Geniuses (DaHanG, id, viju, kgb) vs Cloud 9 (ZeRo4, Rapha, br1ck, FienD)
20:30 CDT, 19 April 2024: Starcraft 2 1v1 Showmatch - FXO.qxc vs FXO.Twilight
21:00 CDT, 19 April 2024: All-new State of The Game with new co-hosts
Posted by Slasher @ 15:11 CDT, 17 June 2011 - iMsg
id Software's John Carmack has outlined his vision for the next game in the Quake series.
While confirming that the next Quake is not in development, Carmack told Eurogamer there are "strong factions" within the US developer that want to create another game in the seminal first-person shooter series.
"Nothing is scheduled here, people are not building this," Carmack said.
"We went from the Quake 2 and the Quake 4 Strogg universe. We are at least tossing around the possibilities of going back to the bizarre, mixed up Cthulhu-ish Quake 1 world and rebooting that direction.
"The way I think about some of those things, and I actually get into arguments with my wife about this, who loved the original Quake game, I looked at the original Quake as this random thing, because we really didn't have our act together very well."
Live On Three #68 with djWHEAT, Slasher & SirScoots is tonight with a recap of the ESL IEM European Championships. I have made the rounds and can happily say we are fortunate enough to bring on the three champions in Quake Live, Starcraft 2 & CS 1.6 even as the early morning hours hit. First time and long-awaited Quake Live champion Anton "Cooller" Singov, Sweden's continued dominance in SC2 with Jeffrey "SjoW" Brusi, and fnatic's Patrik "cArn" Sättermon showing what a leader is capable of.
GSL S4 Finals:
- Preview and predictions of the S4 Grand Finals between MVP and MarineKing, the first GSL Terran champion.
- Recap of the Ro4 and Ro8 - IdrA & Jinro foreigner losses, NaDa gets swept, NesTea the last Zerg hope goes down.
- What four foreigners should go to Code A for S5?
ESL TV is proposing a premium stream special offer for 3.99€. Joe, calipt (QL) and RotterdaM (SC2) will be the commentators on the main ESL TV stream. There will also be a second stream covering SC2, as well Russian and Polish streams.
Also, Level Up TV with nVc, Slasher, Stermy, Fishstix, ischju and friends will cover most of the Quakelive matches! Join #lvl^ for the chat / flood during the matches. You can find more details about all the streams available on the schedule page.
Update: Bronze final game will be played at 07:00 CDT instead of originally announced 11:45 CDT.
Posted by Slasher @ 09:26 CST, 22 December 2010 - iMsg
On this past weekend's Live On Three #65, the last one of 2011, I confirmed that id Software is currently talking to Major League Gaming, the World Cyber Games, and ESEA regarding the inclusion of Quake Live in each of the respective leagues for 2011. After the communication breakdown at MLG Dallas, it is confirmed that talks have been initiated from both sides for North America's premier competitive gaming league. There is also much discussion on whether Quake Live fits MLG's business model for the next year, and if they need the game at all to begin with.
You can watch the whole show on Blip.tv, or on uStream if you're having tracking issues. The QL discuss starts at 48:20.
Live On Three is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Scott "SirScoots" Smith.
Edited by Slasher at 09:27 CST, 22 December 2010 - 33448 Hits
The Kaspersky Quakelive Championship tournament at DreamHack Winter 2010 is now over. Make sure you watch the VODs made by Level Up TV and check out the demos.
Friday 26th
04:00 CDT: Group A - rapha vs GaRpY
04:00 CDT: Group A - DaHanG vs noctis
04:45 CDT: Group B - Cypher vs p0ni
04:45 CDT: Group B - k1llsen vs Spart1e
05:30 CDT: Group A - rapha vs noctis
05:30 CDT: Group A - DaHanG vs GaRpY
06:15 CDT: Group B - Cypher vs Spart1e
06:15 CDT: Group B - k1llsen vs p0ni
07:00 CDT: Group A - rapha vs DaHanG
07:00 CDT: Group A - noctis vs GaRpY
07:45 CDT: Group B - Cypher vs k1llsen
07:45 CDT: Group B - Spart1e vs p0ni
10:00 CDT: MSI BEATIT Grand Final - Cypher vs rapha
12:45 CDT: Group C - av3k vs Krysa
12:45 CDT: Group C - strenx vs fazz
12:45 CDT: Group D - Cooller vs guard
12:45 CDT: Group D - stermy vs Vo0
13:30 CDT: Group C - av3k vs fazz
13:30 CDT: Group C - strenx vs Krysa
14:15 CDT: Group D - Cooller vs Vo0
14:15 CDT: Group D - stermy vs guard
15:00 CDT: Group C - av3k vs strenx
15:00 CDT: Group C - fazz vs Krysa
15:45 CDT: Group D - Cooller vs stermy
15:45 CDT: Group D - Vo0 vs guard
Saturday 27th
04:00 CDT: Quarter Final 1 - DaHanG vs Cooller
04:00 CDT: Quarter Final 2 - k1llsen vs av3k
05:00 CDT: Quarter Final 3 - strenx vs rapha
05:00 CDT: Quarter Final 4 - stermy vs Cypher
07:00 CDT: Semi Final 1: QF1 vs QF2
08:00 CDT: Semi Final 2: QF3 vs QF4
Posted by Slasher @ 12:40 CDT, 5 November 2010 - iMsg
Scheduled: 16:00 CDT, 5 November 2010 to 16:00 CST, 7 November 2010 Schedule: Passed
Major League Gaming's National Championships are this weekend in Dallas, Texas, and will feature the largest Starcraft 2 tournament thus far outside of Korea.
The event is being streamed live all weekend on MLG's site with commentary by Sean "Day9" Plott, Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, and JP McDaniel.
MLG DC champion Greg "EG.IdrA" Fields will be on hand to defend his title against MLG DC 2nd place finisher Kyung Hyun "d.SeleCT" Ryooa and a slew of opponents from around the globe. TeamLiquid has sent their entire team to the event including star player /Dario "LiquidTLO" Wünsch and Swedes Hayder "HayprO" Hussein and Jonathan "Jinro" Walsh who have been in Korea for GSL, MLG Raleigh champion and mothership rusher Chris "HuK" Loranger, along with Jos "Ret" de Kroon and Tyler "NonY" Wasieleski.
Other first-time MLG attendees include fnatic stars IEM North American champion Jian Carlo "Fenix" Morayra Alejo, and the impressive Yang "Sen" Chia Cheng.
The Americans will look to defend their home turf with Root gaming's strong lineup of Kevin "qxc" Riley, Jonathan "KiWiKaKi" Garneau and Paul-David "SLush" Pagé and EG's Bryce "Machine" Bates, Geoff "iNcontroL" Robinson, and Jacob "LzGamer" Winstead.
Other notable names to look out for include MLG Raleigh third place finisher Giacomo "Socke" Thüs, GSL participant Trevor "TorcH" Housten and YouTube caster Alex "HDStarcraft" Do.
Posted by Slasher @ 07:33 CDT, 4 November 2010 - iMsg
According to SyncError, id Software's head of Quake Live Steve Nix will be meeting with Major League Gaming (assuming with CEO Sundance) at this weekend's national championship event in Dallas, Texas. This is presumably to talk about next year's 2011 circuit, and the possibility of getting the game on there. Each season has 5 events (possible 6 next year), and with Starcraft 2 out, MLG PC has never been bigger or have more pull than now.
Posted by Slasher @ 10:12 CDT, 31 October 2010 - iMsg
Today is the final day of the Starcraft 2 EG MSI Masters Cup, with only 4 players remaining from the original 16. Tournament favorite root.KiWiKaKi has already been eliminated, along with teammate root.Drewbie.
The remaining four players vying for the $1,000 first place prize are TL.HuK, root.SLush, EG.Machine and EG.LzGaMeR. The winner of the event will then face off against EG.IdrA who is here in the States preparing for MLG Dallas next weekend. If the player wins, they will be awarded a MSI GT660 notebook.
The whole event is being broadcasted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and Sean "Day9" Plott on the mic, and Scott "SirScoots" Smith behind the desk.
Posted by Slasher @ 14:10 CDT, 15 October 2010 - iMsg
Major League Gaming's DC event is here featuring an impressive lineup for it's second Starcraft 2 tournament.
MLG Raleigh champion TL.HuK is here to defend his title, along with several other players from Raleigh including root.KiWiKaKi, EG.LzGaMeR, root.qxc, TL.Tyler (NonY), EG.Machine, fnatic.TTOne, and EG.iNcontroL. Three first-time MLG players who look to do well are EG.IdrA who's here before he starts GSL Season 2, and White-Ra & TL.ret to represent Europe. Brackets will be released right before the event goes live.
Like last event, all matches will have commentary by Day9 and JP, but this time will also have the addition of djWHEAT. HD and Husky are not in attendance.
The live stream can be found on the front page of MGLPro.com all weekend. The schedule is below, with the finals taking place Saturday night. Those wanting to come down to the event and watch and can do so for free at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just outside DC.
Posted by Slasher @ 18:17 CDT, 30 September 2010 - iMsg
The World Cyber Games Grand Finals are currently going on live this weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Games featured this year include Counter-Strike 1.6, Starcraft 1, Warcraft 3 and Tekken 6, while League of Legends is a sponsored game.
Commentary this weekend will be provided by: Paul "ReDeYe" Chaloner (Counter-Strike 1.6), Jonas "BSL" Alsaker Vikan (Counter-Strike 1.6), Shaun "Apollo" Clark (Starcraft), Bruce "Rivington" Bisland (Starcraft, Tekken 6), Kevin "RotterdaM" van der Kooi (Warcraft 3), David "Phreak" Turley (League of Legends), Ben "FishStix" Goldhaber (Quake Wars Online), along with several others.
This year the finals have two streams running at once, one for the Main Stage and one for the Broadcasting Stage. A free low quality stream is available for both, along with a paid high quality stream for purchase. The high quality stream can be purchased for $9.95 for each day, or $29.95 for the weekend. A low quality re-stream of the Broadcast Stage is being done on Samsung's Livestream.
Thursday
16:00 CDT Warcraft 3: Lyn (Korea) vs Fly100% (China) - Broadcasting Stage
17:30 CDT FIFA '10: Deto (Germany) vs Wepep0te (Spain) - Broadcasting Stage
Friday:
11:30 CDT Tekken 6: Honnda (Japan) vs TheGame (USA) - Main Stage
11:30 CDT Counter-Strike 1.6: WeMadFox (Korea) vs GameHolichs (UAE) - Broadcasting Stage
12:00 CDT Tekken 6: Ryan Hart (UK) vs Binchang (Korea) - Main Stage
12:30 CDT Tekken 6: GEN1US (France) vs Ali (Japan) - Main Stage
12:30 CDT Starcraft: Jaedong (Korea) vs F91 (China) - Broadcasting Stage
13:00 CDT Starcraft: Kur0a (Japan) vs Adokate (Russia) - Broadcasting Stage
13:00 CDT Tekken 6: Knee (Korea) vs Ali (Japan) - Main Stage
13:30 CDT Tekken 6: FightingGM (USA) vs Knee (Korea) - Main Stage
13:30 CDT Warcraft 3: Grubby (Netherlands) vs FoCuS (Korea) - Broadcasting Stage
14:00 CDT Warcraft 3: ReMinD (Korea) vs TH000 (China) - Broadcasting Stage
14:00 CDT Tekken 6: FightingGM (USA) vs Ali (Japan) - Main Stage
14:30 CDT Tekken 6: GEN1US (France) vs Knee (Korea) - Main Stage
15:00 CDT Counter-Strike 1.6: SK Gaming (Sweden) vs MeetYourMakers (Russia) - Broadcasting Stage
16:00 CDT FIFA '10: KreeganBG (USA) vs Zola (China) - Broadcasting Stage
16:30 CDT Starcraft: Quarterfinals - Broadcasting Stage - Main Stage
17:30 CDT Warcraft 3: Quarterfinals - Broadcasting Stage - Main Stage
Saturday:
11:00 CDT Quake Wars Online: Grand Final - Broadcasting Stage
11:30 CDT Tekken 6: Quarterfinals - Main Stage
12:00 CDT Warcraft 3: Semifinals - Broadcasting Stage
12:15 CDT Tekken 6: Semifinals - Main Stage
13:00 CDT Tekken 6: Third/Fourth Place - Main Stage
13:25 CDT Tekken 6: Grand Finals - Main Stage
13:30 CDT Counter-Strike 1.6: Quarterfinals - Broadcasting Stage
13:50 CDT Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Reveal & Speech by Katsuhiro Harada (Tekken Project Director) - Main Stage
15:30 CDT Starcraft: Semifinals - Broadcasting Stage
16:00 CDT League of Legends: Grand Finals - Main Stage
16:30 CDT Warcraft 3: Semifinals - Broadcasting Stage
18:00 CDT Starcraft: Semifinals - Broadcasting Stage
Sunday:
11:30 CDT Warcraft 3: Grand Finals - Broadcasting Stage
12:30 CDT Starcraft: 3rd/4th Place - Broadcasting Stage
13:30 CDT Counter-Strike 1.6: Grand Finals - Broadcasting Stage
16:00 CDT Starcraft: Grand Finals - Broadcasting Stage
17:30 CDT FIFA '10: Grand Finals - Broadcasting Stage
VOD's are being edited and uploaded after each day has finished on WCG's video page. Results can be found on WCG's results page, as well as photos they're doing.
Posted by Slasher @ 06:58 CDT, 12 September 2010 - iMsg
Scheduled: 12:00 CDT, 11 September 2010 to 20:30 CDT, 12 September 2010 Schedule: Passed
We are here at the World Cyber Games 2010 US Finals at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, where qualifiers will take place in Starcraft 1, Counter-Strike 1.6, Tekken 6, Warcraft 3 and more as entrance to the WCG Grand Finals later this month at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This will presumably be the final year of action in the original Starcraft before moving on to Starcraft 2 next year. Players and teams participating include Evil Geniuses (CS), WinOut.net feat. Rambo (CS), Geoff "EG.iNcontroL" Robinson (SC), Kelby "EG.iNkA" Williams (SC), Phil "LongWalk" Crawford (WC3), Reepal "Rip" Parbhoo (T6) and more.
The entire event will be streamed by the Live On Three crew of Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Scott "SirScoots" Smith. Special guests to help commentate throughout the weekend include Sean "Day9" Plott, Bruce Rivington, Adande "sWooZie" Thorne and Mark "MarkMan" Julio. All the action can be watched live on djWHEAT.tv and WCG Live.
Friday
15:00 CDT Live On Three Show with WCG Ultimate Gamer guest ChosenOne
16:00 CDT CS 1.6: Grid05 vs Underestimated
17:00 CDT Warcraft 3: LongWalk vs Cruncher
17:30 CDT Starcraft: iNcontroL vs G5 (Maybe)
18:00 CDT Starcraft: G5 vs Sterling
19:00 CDT Tekken 6: Rip vs Reaper
19:30 CDT Tekken 6: Black Mamba vs TheGame
Saturday
12:00 CDT - Live On Three Show with WCG Ultimate Gamer guest Vanessa
13:00 CDT - Starcraft: iNkA vs Machine
13:30 CDT - CS 1.6: EG vs Loaded
15:00 CDT - Starcraft: Nyoken vs iNkA
16:00 CDT - Live On Three Bracket Preview
16:30 CDT - CS 1.6: Upper Bracket Round 1
17:30 CDT - Starcraft: Upper Bracket Round 1
18:30 CDT - League of Legends Finals
19:30 CDT - Starcraft 2 exhibition Match
Sunday
12:00 CDT - Live On Three Show
12:30 CDT - Starcraft: Upper Bracket Finals
13:30 CDT - Starcraft: Lower Bracket Finals
14:00 CDT - Starcraft: Grand Finals
14:30 CDT - Tekken 6: Lower Bracket Finals
15:00 CDT - Tekken 6: Grand Finals
15:30 CDT - CS 1.6: Grand Finals
Starcraft 2 will be making it's circuit debut at Major League Gaming's 50th live event in Raleigh, North Carolina this weekend.
All of North America's best players will be in attendance with the exception of IdrA and Artosis who both live in South Korea and will be attending the GSL qualifiers. Notable names include TL.Tyler (NonY), coL.silver, EG.Machine, M.HuK, root.KiWiKaKi, root.qxc, EG.LzGaMeR, fnatic.TTOne and SLush. Europeans d.SjoW and Socke will also be in attendance to try and dash the American and Canadian hopes.
All matches will be casted by Day9, JP, Husky and HD, rotating out with different pairings. The live stream can be found on the front page of http://www.MLGPro.com all weekend. Brackets have not been released yet.
Schedule is below, with the finals taking place Saturday night.
Scheduled: 13:00 CDT, 22 August 2010 to 16:30 CDT, 22 August 2010 Schedule: Passed
UPDATE: VOD's of the interviews with k1llsen & MorroW can be found on Lo3 #57 & WoC #9
"Live On Three" is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Scott "SirScoots" Smith.
Today's "Live On Three" #57 will be a special post-GamesCom edition of the show, which will also involve djWHEAT's other show, "Weapon of Choice", which specializes in Starcraft 2.
GamesCom 2010 winners Marcel "k1llsen" Paul and Stefan "MorroW" Andersson will be coming on both shows to talk about their victories, and their immediate afterthoughts. k1llsen will join "Live On Three" to dive into his first major international LAN victory, how it felt to play and win in front of his home crowd, and the difficulties in taking down last year's Season 4 champion, Shane "rapha" Hendrixson. MorroW joins "Weapon of Choice" to discuss his last-minute entrance into GamesCom to begin with, the many cries of 'imbalance' for Terran in StarCraft 2, and how he was able to take out the machine that is Greg "IdrA" Fields in the finals.
The first person knocked out of WCG Ultimate Gamer Season 2, Michael "michs09" Labelle, will also be on the show.
Tune into "Weapon of Choice" at 13:00 CDT for MorroW, and "Live On Three" at 15:00 CDT for k1llsen, all broadcasted on djWHEAT.tv.
Live On Three is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Scott "SirScoots" Smith.
Live On Three #56 is now online featuring discussing regarding several aspects of this year's QuakeCon including Cypher and Cooller's epic final, proZaC's banning, and the multitude of DNS, streaming, and coverage issues at the event. Special guests on the show include first-time top 3 QuakeCon finisher Stermy, the infamous proZaC, and QuakeLive.tv's Ben "FishStix" Goldhaber.
Stermy's thoughts on Cooller gg'ing him with 3:30 left on Furious Heights:
What can I say? I mean..that's Cooller, ya know? it was probably 10 frags ahead with 3 minuted left, and I knew that the match was pretty much over, but I gusss he wanted to get into my head because I won the first map. I don't get scared of those things anymore. I played during the time when 2GD was playing, and I mean that guy's trash talk is definitely worse than Coollers even, so i have enough experience from that, I don't get annoyed anymore by it. Cooller is like that, gotta take it for what it's worth.
proZaC on getting booted from QuakeCon:
...I'm playing my game which is awesome - I kept it sexy. I thought sparks was a half-newb, and wanted to show the world you can play Quake without pressing +back, just keeping it fucking sexy, and i lost int he last 15 econds because i missed a rocket jump to red armor. If I got that rocket jump I would have won hands down. When I lose to sparks I'm steaming so I go to the pool - I'm out. Go to the pool, get my swim on, get my drink on, when my CTF team comes and says I have to come back and play
Listen to the show now on djWHEAT.blip.tv. QuakeCon talk starts at 5:00, FishStix on at 38:00, Stermy on at 46:00, proZaC on at 60:00.
Edited by Slasher at 00:43 CDT, 18 August 2010 - 26699 Hits
Sorry for the delay, had to get some sleep. QuakeCon 2010's second day is over, and the problems continue. The tournament once again stalled for several hours without any notice from anyone at QuakeCon. It seems DNS issues continue to plague the event, only briefly resuming for the vamp1re vs dandaking match before lag struck mid-way through, calling it a day once again. Evil Geniuses' player manager Stuart Ewen comments: "This even has been the single most disappointing Quake tournament I have attended, while the head admins are not at fault the lack of organization and preparation leading up to and during the event is deplorable. If the buzz around the forums is true as well, then the BYOC is in a similar state."
Gamespot decided to restream the event on their site, which was pretty cool for however long it was up.
proZaC was escorted by police and kicked out of QuakeCon for indecent exposure after changing his pants in the tournament area after coming back from the pool. "No kids, no families, no nothing. Fuck QuakeCon. I'm OUT! Love", says proZaC in his posting, who's been relegated to room arrest in his hotel due to the incident. He tells me later, "The way those guys were coming at me, it's like they think I'm a terrorist or something. The police made me wait like two hours." He has and is currently ready to party in room 2269. It seems as long as you have a tie on, you're good to go.
I have given a short interview regarding my inability to attend this year's QuakeCon, as well as severalnewsstories that have popped up. "Although I had not logged into the Focus Test in quite a while, and the information was public, I had still signed the NDA previously, and was therefore banned from Quake Live for a month. Then a few days ago I received an email stating I would not be allowed to enter QuakeCon 2010."
chance and destrukt had their quite boring rematch from last week's IVGHOF, with destrukt able to squeak out two one-frag victories. From what I hear, a video exists of chance not too happy after the loss, stringing obscenities towards destrukt after it was over. stermy looks in good form, taking down DaHanG in straight maps with a close win on Lost World (dm13), and a very strong defensive showing on Battleforged. The italian now looks forward to a hotly-anticipated semifinal with rapha, who he's taken out before. Spart1e came back down a map and railed his way to victory against Cooller to send the fan-favorite into the lower bracket, before being taken out by Cypher in the upper bracket semifinals. Spart1e had a sizeable lead against Cypher on Aerowalk before letting it slip away in the final minutes (Video: Cypher POV), leading to a rather one-sided victory on Lost World.
The match between QUAD Gaming and compLexity was rather close on both Japanese Castles and Troubled Waters (ctf2), with QUAD Gaming able to pull ahead in the second half of both maps led by strong play in jones and rapha. This now leads to a great matchup in the semifinals with Evil Geniuses. /Loaded and boobs clashed in the lower side of the bracket, with the Europeans led by draven mopping up on Japanese Castles, and the Flysher American/Canadian mix doing the same on Stonekeep. They will play the third and deciding map on day 3, with fnatic waiting in the wings.
ESReality's own seven has put together a very well-written, but quite uninformative interview with Quake Live's lead man Steve Nix and Community Manager Adam Pyle (SyncError).
Rage has been confirmed for a September 13th, 2011 US and September 15th, 2011 release for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. The game was shown off simultaneously across all three platforms at 60 FPS, with some impressions of the demo already coming out.
John Carmacksays that "[Doom3 would] have been more enjoyable if people could actually see it", wishing he'd added more lighting options to the tech, adding "the artists hiss at us if we turn on lights." He also promises that dedicated servers are high on the list for possible features in Rage, and "expects it will be possible [to run a dedicated server]."
The second day of QuakeCon Steam sales has popped up, with every game in the Doom franchise 66% off.
According to QuakeLive.tv's FishStix, matches are scheduled to start a half an hour earlier than usual because of the previous day's issues. But anything could happen.
Edited by Slasher at 09:07 CDT, 14 August 2010 - 37596 Hits
QuakeCon 2010's first day is over and a long one it was. In what seems to be a theme year after year, the QuakeCon tournaments did not start at all today, fueled by an electrical fire in the tournament area, and continued by delay after delay, which resulted in the decision to call it a day to the dismay of unhappy and tired viewers.
Brackets for Duel and CTF have been released with some interesting match-ups ahead.
chance and destrukt will meet each other in the second round after their heated encounter at the IVGHOF last weekend which saw destrukt forfeit to chance in the end out of frustration. According to DaHanG, destrukt has already proclaimed this "to be over already." proZaC has been practicing and is trying to make a real run at this year's event, but will have to face a tough sparks in the first round, and a determined stermy in the second. A stermy who's still one of the very few to take out rapha in a set of maps. On the other side of the bracket, unless draven can continue to impress and LoSt-CaUzE can make a next to impossible comeback, we will most likely be seeing Cypher versus strenx and Spart1e versus Cooller quarterfinals.
Evil Geniuses might find some opposition in compLexity on their way to the winner's bracket finals, but will probably arrive with relative ease. Fnatic and Deus want their shot at a rematch with EG, but shouldn't look too far ahead as they're in for a tight game with Loaded in the semifinals.
DaHanG says he isn't thrilled with Battleforged, and hopes a placebo will get him past rapha, if he makes it there.
John Carmack is still the most bad-ass programmer in the world and has managed to "do some fairly clever things" to get their new title Rageworking on the iPhone - at 60 fps! It looks sick.
Doom 4 will not be shown at this year's QuakeCon, after id Software previously promised last year that it would be. CEO Todd Hollenshead commented that the company wanted to put more work into it before it was revealed.
id Tech 5 will apparently be for Bethesda titles only, with Hollenshead stating "I think that [Epic] made a strategic choice to focus on the middleware service stuff, and we never pretended to be focused on technology licensing...Epic's made a good business out of that so kudos to them, but I wouldn't change the way we've done things."
Lastly, you can buy every current id Software and Bethesda game right now through Steam $70. All of them. That's only slightly more than a year's subscription to Quake Live.
PS. I have contacted HEXUS Lead Developer Steve Kerrison ([email protected]) about the site load for this weekend, and he is making sure to keep ESR up and running for the duration of QuakeCon (and other major events from now on). Send him thanks.
Edited by Slasher at 05:19 CDT, 13 August 2010 - 36208 Hits
The first day of QuakeCon 2010 has concluded. Evil Geniuses' Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty is seeded 5th in duel while his team took the top spot in CTF. He faces a rather tough road ahead of him with Alessandro "stermy" Avallone and nemesis Shane "rapha" Hendrixson in his path, and shares his thoughts going into tomorrow's matches.
Rod "Slasher" Breslau: You look to face stermy in the 3rd round of the bracket as your first real challenge, what are your thoughts going up against him here?
DaHanG: He's a very strong player that you can't afford to make mistakes against. I know he stepped up a bit at ESWC by defeating rapha in groups, so he's capable of playing great games. I am just hoping to feel comfortable at the tournament with my setup and just feel good in general (awake and alert). I don't think it's really worth thinking about too much though as we both are veterans and know how each other plays. It's just going to come down to who is playing better this particular match.
Players weren't able to play their first games today, what happened there?
DaHanG: Apparently the internet was down, and this is required to play the game. The internet was up later in the afternoon, but LAN servers were still not available. I don't know any technical details, but more games will be played Friday because of it - and I hope because I'm in both tournaments there aren't scheduling issues or personal fatigue. I hope things are VERY smooth tomorrow.
I recently stated on this past weekend's International Video Game Hall of Fame event and Live On Three that I would be providing scores, interviews and features coverage live from QuakeCon 2010 for Tek-9.org, Crossfire.nu, and here on ESReality. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I will no longer be attending QuakeCon, and will not be able to make any on-site updates.
I will still attempt to make off-site updates and coverage from watching the stream and talking to my contacts at the event. Sorry to those who wanted more content!
Live On Three is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Scott "SirScoots" Smith
Live On Three #55 airs today as a preview to next weekend's QuakeCon 2010 which features large Duel and CTF tournaments, as well as the major release event for Quake Live out of beta.
Shane "rapha" Hendrixson, Anton "Cooller" Singov, Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky, Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, Maciej "av3k" Krzykowski, Alessandro "stermy" Avallone will be attending, while Magnus "fojji" Olsson, Richard "noctis" Gansterer, John "ZeRo4" Hill, and Pelle "fazz" Soderman will not be, and we'll give our thoughts on the player list and predictions for CTF and duel.
We will also be discussing the recently announced Quake Live pro and premium packages; how the community response has been, whether they're fair, and if people will pay for it.
Starcraft 2 broadcaster Sean "Day9" Plott will also be making his first appearance on the show. We will talk about all the recent announcements by GomTV, Major League Gaming and the Electronic Sports League, and how they've all scheduled tournaments on the same weekend.
To try to cover as many games as possible, Jay "2GD" Harding and the Swedish pimp Cyrus "proZaC" Malekani will be on one stream, while Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham will be on the other stream. (djWHEAT may wake up late and I will have to do things solo for a little while).
Group Stage 2 - Group A (casting by 2GD and proZaC)
03:30 CDT: R1 - av3k vs strenx (TV1 HQ+LQ) // rapha vs stermy
04:15 CDT: R2 - rapha vs strenx (TV1 HQ +LQ) // stermy vs av3k (livestream)
05:00 CDT: R3 - rapha vs av3k (TV1 HQ+LQ) // strenx vs stermy (livestream)
Group Stage 2 - Group B (casting by Slasher and djWHEAT)
03:30 CDT: R1 - Cooller vs DaHanG (TV2 HQ+LQ) // Cypher vs noctis (livestream)
04:15 CDT: R2 - Cypher vs DaHanG (TV2 HQ+LQ) // cooller vs noctis
05:00 CDT: R3 - Cypher vs Cooller (TV2 HQ+LQ) // noctis vs DaHanG
08:00 CDT: Semi-final 1 - DaHanG vs rapha
08:40 CDT: Semi-final 2 - av3k vs Cooller
Posted by Slasher @ 13:39 CDT, 28 June 2010 - iMsg
Got approval from admins to bump this up. All of the VOD's from this event were uploaded a day or two after it was over, but E3 was starting that Monday and I had to fly directly to LA and didn't have time to update the post. After it was over, Dreamhack was starting, and I didn't want to interrupt the coverage. With ESWC two days away, I figured I'd do this now before it gets too late, and let people watch Rapha and DaHanG in some matches before ESWC starts.
The other quarterfinals matches can be found on wheat's Blip.
Update: Shane "rapha" Hendrixson has won the EG Masters Cup, winning both the grand finals and the exhibition match over Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, 3-0 and 3-1, respectively.
Finals rankings:
1st. Shane "rapha" Hendrixson - $2,000 2nd. Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty - $1,000 3rd. Brian "destrukt" Flander - $500
4th. John "ZeRo4" Hill
5-8th. Chance "chance" Lacina, Andy "gellehsak" Ryder, Christopher "tehnewbz" Messer, Tom "griffin" Wall
The MSI EG Masters Cup top 8 starts today, with Live On Three bringing you all the action, as Marcus "djWHEAT Graham and Scott "SirScoots" Smith will be broadcasting live from Phoenix, Arizona while Rod "Slasher" Breslau will be Skyping in.
Edited by xou at 11:19 CDT, 29 June 2010 - 103007 Hits
Update: VODs of a great interview with Sundance have now been put online, including his thoughts on Quake Live entering the MLG circuit (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
Live On Three is hosted by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau, and Scott "SirScoots" Smith.
Today's show will feature a very special guest, one who we've been teasing about for a long time. Major League Gaming's Sundance DiGiovanni will join the show, giving his first interview since becoming CEO of MLG when three weeks ago former CEO Matthew Brombergstepped down after a difference in opinion with Sundance on the future of MLG.
We will talk with Sundance about several topics including the incident with Bromberg and what his differing vision of the league is, additions to the PC circuit including the possible selection of Quake Live and Starcraft 2, the difficulties of inclding Super Street Fighter 4, the release of Halo: Reach and the impact moving forward, the floundering of GotFrag.com and how GameBattles.com is shaping up, and why MLG refuses to use the term "eSports", plus much more!
- Blizzard signs official deal with GomTV for Starcraft 2, Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and WoW in Korea, dropping KeSPA and giving the league's till August to figure things out
- Flash destroys a rather lackluster Jaedong 3-0 to win the MSL finals
- White-Ra takes out Idra in the HDH finals, Tester wrecks Idra and White-Ra in the Altitude TL Invitational
- EG announces MSI tournament series for Quake Live, CS 1.6, TF2 and Starcraft 2 which will have at least $3,500 per tournament
- Na'Vi invited to Dreamhack, DaHanG has to drop out due to school commitments
- ESWC hosting a $5,000 fragmovie contest
- Live updates from the NorCal Regionals featuring Justin Wong, Mike Ross, John Choi, Ricky Ortiz and more
Tune into Live On Three today at 15:00 CDT on djWHEAT.tv
Posted by Slasher @ 13:04 CST, 11 March 2010 - iMsg
After last month's inaugural TEK-9.org Quake Live Top 10 Rankings list, which was extremely well received by the community, the March version has just been released. The rankings are based off of five journalist and broadcaster perspectives, with professional player votes being added next month.
With the Intel Extreme Masters Season 4 Championships now over, the rankings list looks quite similar to the final standings of the event, with some small differences. Everyone agrees on one point though, that Shane "rapha" Hendrixson is currently the best Quake player in the world.
- Michal "Carmac" Blicharz
- Rod "Slasher" Breslau
- Paul "ReDeYe" Chaloner
- Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham
- Liam "crow" Crowley
"The Russian continues to play sexy Quake, aggressive, compulsive and dynamic, whilst rapha is more calculated, precise, complex, fast thinking and much more the strategist than his rival" commented ReDeYe on the finals. djWHEAT was disappointed by the bottom half of the competition stating "I was so underwhelmed with the 7-12th place play, that I've actually given the 10th spot to Quake 3's infamous UnnamedPlayer. Hopefully that will incite some change in those who are currently just below that coveted 10th ranking spot. "
See the rankings and read up on the panel's views on TEK-9.org.
Edited by crow- at 19:22 CST, 11 March 2010 - 42527 Hits
Live On Three sees the return of co-host and Team EG manager Scott "SirScoots" Smith from the Canadian olympics, who will talk about his trip and his players performances here this week at the Intel Extreme Masters Season 5 Finals. Quake Live champion Shane "rapha" Hendrixson will be this week's featured guest, going over his road to victory including revenge on American champion Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, a miraculous comeback against Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky, and an epic final with Anton "Cooller" Singov.
Also joining the show today are ESEA News Editor-in-chief Mark "jESUIT" Cheben and World of Ming lead editor Nick "Bodi" Johnson. jESUIT will be talking about the launch of ESEA's new site, and diving into the Counter-Strike 1.6 action which saw the first event major champion for a Ukrainian team with Na'Vi taking out the legendary fnatic in the finals. Bodi will dive into World of Warcraft, where America's Team EG, who picked up a stand-in just days prior to the event and was expected to easily be knocked out in the group stages, clawed their way through the best of America, Europe and Korea to take top honors.
Tune into Live On Three today at 16:00 CDT on djWHEAT.tv
- Lots of talk of the Intel Extreme Masters Season 4 finals including DDoS attacks and scheduling issues, broadcasters Jay "2GD" Harding and Joe Miller's comments about Slasher, and Quake Live players comments before and during the event
- Major League Gaming has announced their first 2010 Pro Circuit details including the removal of Gears of War 2, the addition of Tekken 6, Smash Bros. and Modern Warfare 2, and the noticeable absence of Super Street Fighter 4. We'll also speculate what the PC games and announcement may be, and where you may be able to find out
- Justin Wong won the first Level|Up tournament, still the best player in the United States, is now using cammy a lot
- Another Starcraft 2 patch is out, how the balance of the game is going
Edited by xou at 14:15 CST, 7 March 2010 - 45013 Hits
Live On Three returns to normal after last week's special Silent Gamers Cup broadcast, where Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty took out Shane "rapha" Hendrixson from the lower bracket. The event saw over 100,000 unique viewers, 250,000 total visits, an average of 4,000 concurrent viewers, and astonishing 2400 days (not hours) of watching time. We thank everyone for tuning in, and are pleased to say that the VOD's for the event should be released on Monday.
This week we will be covering the TeamLiquid StarLeague 2 Finals and previewing the Intel Extreme Masters Season 5 championships this week. The TSL S2 finals will be between Protoss hero Tyler "NonY" Wasieleski and Zerg mastermind Christoph "Mondragon" Semke, vying for the $10,000 grand prize in a grandiose best of 7. The final starts at 2 PM EST, and at the conclusion of the event, the winner (NonY or Mondragon) will be coming on Live On Three for a post-game interview. Commentators Blake "Chill" Muzar and Sean "Day[9]" Plott may also show up. The IEM S5 championships start this Tuesday at CeBIT in Germany, with the best players and teams across North America, Europe and Asia come together to compete for $170,000 in Quake Live, Counter-Strike 1.6 and WoW PvP. The aforementioned Silent Gamers Cup winner DaHanG will be joining the show to go over his win last week, his bootcamp in Germany thus far, and how he feels going into the finals. Prominent journalists in each of their respective game's will be coming on to preview all the action this week, with HLTV.org's Marc "Nix0n" Winther (CS 1.6), Major League Gaming and BlizzCon broadcaster Jared "vhell" Coulston (WoW) and TeK-9.org's Liam "crow" Crowley (Quake Live).
- ESL announces new partnership with Dell and Intel, keeping Intel on as head sponsor among speculation they would be dropped
- H2k releases their CS team and SpawN's comeback is over quite soon, retiring once again. He will now serve as the team's coach, who just raided the entire Begrip squad
- Frag eXecutors gain entry to the IEM finals due to Asian team UMX not being able to attend. Now placed in Group A, may have created the biggest group of death in Counter-Strike history
- Team Pandemic ceases operations for good, cites economic issues
- Stracraft 2 patched twice, more impressions
Edited by Slasher at 12:33 CST, 28 February 2010 - 7264 Hits
Myself and Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham will be casting the final day of the Silent Gamers Cup (Brackets: WB, LB). The following will be the attempted stream running order:
At the conclusion of the event, Street Fighter legend Alex Valle will be coming on to talk about a new fighting tournament series he is a part of that is launching called the SoCal Level|Up Tournament series. The debut event will is set to take place next weekend, February 27th, at Dave & Busters at The Block at Orange. There will be a 64-man tournament in Street Fighter 4 and Tekken 6, featuring the west coast's top players and a bonus $1,000 for each winner. Level|Up COO Jimmy "ShinJN" Nguyen and media specialist AJ "PotatoHead" Papa will be joining the call as well to talk about the release and concept of this project, the first event next weekend, and what we might see in the future, including the release of Super Street Fighter 4 in the near future.
- Starcraft 2 Beta is out! Will discuss our thoughts so far and those of the hardcore Starcraft community
- Major League Gaming has launched the site for their Combine event series, as well as announced the dates and locations for their first four events, which will be held in Nashville (Mar 26-28), Chicago (May 14-16), Denver (Jul 23-25) and Washington DC (Oct15-17).
- The Electronic Sports League has announced a $170,000 prize purse for their Global Finals at CeBIT next month. It has also been noted that the ESL has removed the Intel logo from the German portion of its website, and has said that changes will be coming with the combined power of two partners. Could Intel no longer be affiliated with ESL?
Posted by Slasher @ 12:28 CST, 14 February 2010 - iMsg
Today is a special Valentine's Day Massacre episode of Live On Three with your hosts Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and Rod "Slasher" Breslau (SirScoots at the olympics). djWHEAT, who worked for both Global Gaming (GGL, formerly the Global Gaming League) and the Championship Gaming Series (CGS), will be having a tell-all exclusive on the rise and fall of both of these large companies.
GGL - Early 'vSports' involvement at the company, buying out and collapse of ClanBase, along with the slow death of AmeriCup and EuroCup, the Hip Hop Gaming League and Professional Baseball Gaming League, the failed Digital Games Chinese Olympics event, and the owed money to both players and former employees
CGS - Draft at Playboy Mansion, the selection of mediocre games across two seasons, the decision to use Counter-Strike: Source and not 1.6, Jonathon "Fatal1ty" Wendel's commentating ability, CEO Andy Reif being replaced, TV vs corporate and online streaming, the failure in the CS production value, and the spending of $40 million in two years
Tune into Live On Three this Sunday at 16:00 CDT on djWHEAT.tv
After one week of public release for CSProMod, including reactions from pro-players in both the 1.6 community and Source community, as well as the media'sdifferingopinions, Head of Development Alex Garfield will be a guest on Live On three this Sunday at 4 PM EST/22:00 CET. We will be talking about how the release has gone thus far and if things have gone as expected, better, or worse, his reactions to the player and media statements, more information and hopefully a general release date for 1.05, and what the plan is for CSProMod for the future of the Counter-Strike community.
Former SK Gaming Editor-in-Chief and current Replays.net editor Lawrence "Malystryx" Phillips has written an article detailing the death of Warcraft 3 in Europe, Korean players growing dislike for European organizations, and the move into Starcraft II in the near future. Malystryx will be coming on the show to talk more about his thoughts , and the possible imminent death of Warcraft 3.
Tune into Live On Three this Sunday at 16:00 CDT on djWHEAT.tv
- ESL's Intel Extreme Masters Asia Championships wind down, with the Chinese legend Fan "Jibo" Zhibo winning, and Swedish pimp Cyrus "proZaC" Malekani also qualifying for the Quake Live Global Finals, while CS 1.6 and WoW continue
- SK Editor-in-Chief Duncan "Thorin" Shields has written an article "In search of the greatest team of all time", taking a look back at four possible contendors to greatest team of all time: SK.swe (2003-2004), mTw.dk (2008-2009), fnatic (2008-2009), and AGAiN (2006-2009)
- A man by the name of Arbalet keeps pumping money into the Counter-Strike 1.6 scene; Announcing a $10,000 Cup in February, A $32,000 Cup for press only, and launches 'World Electronic Sports', an online league, starting with $3,500.
- Major League Gaming announces details of their first Combine event, which will be amateurs only; AOL Games President Ralph Rivera leaves AOL to be MLG's new President
- GGL gets bought by PrismOne, wants to be the "Facebook of gamers"
- The TeamLiquid StarLeague heads into the Round of 16 with action continuing to heat up
- Marvel vs Capcom 2 gets added to Evolution 2010, sells $4.2 Million on Xbox Live Arcade
Edited by Slasher at 02:20 CST, 8 February 2010 - 11169 Hits
On this week's edition of Live On Three with djWHEAT and Slasher (SirScoots will not be here for the next few weeks as he is at the Winter Olympics), we will have on the new owners of the AGP Tour. Last week it was announced that the AGP Tour would be changing management, changing direction and expanding operations. We will now be able to find out what some of these plans are, and if, how, and when they would be implemented. Additionally, we will have on TeamLiquid's Kennigit and HotBid to talk about the TeamLiquid StarLeague, currently in it's second season.
Other topics to be discussed include CSProMod's release on Monday, the ENC game announcements and the addition of Quake Live, the EVO 2010 game announcements and the addition of a female tournament, ESWC;s new "sponsor", the Arbalet Asia Cup & IOL Finals, and more chatter around the QL Euro Championships, as well as a look at the Asian Championships
Tune into Live On Three this Sunday at 16:00 CDT on djWHEAT.tv
The QuakeLive.TV team (FishStix, Jehar) were joined by Live On Three co-host Slasher for a post European Championship event recap and inteview series. Cooller, Carmac, and DaHanG come on the show to discuss all the happenings from this weekend, include lots of talk regarding the Cooller vs av3k semifinals.
Edited by Slasher at 19:57 CST, 24 January 2010 - 25277 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 04:38 CST, 27 December 2009 - iMsg
We will be having a special edition of Live On Three today recapping 2009 with an extended show of 3 hours or more. We will have on several special guests, including the legend Anton "Cooller" Singov, to talk about his results in 2009, thoughts on the 2010 IEM championships, Quake Live moving forward, and how it feels to be close to the top again.
Spcial guests:
Duncan "Thorin" Shields (SK-Gaming Editor in Chief) Michal "Carmac" Blicharz (Head of the Intel Extreme Masters) Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski (Starcraft player and commentator) Anton "Cooller" Singov (Russian Quake 3 legend) Filip "Neo" Kubski (Captain of Polish CS 1.6 champions AGAiN) Robb "JediRobb" Chiarini (Runs Devastation)
Topics will be discussing (not all listed):
- Best event of 2009
- Best team of 2009
- Best player(s) of 2009
- Best play of 2009
- Favorite games of 2009
- Best overall event of 2009
- Biggest influence in eSports 2009
- Worst team/players of 2009
- Biggest upsets of 2009
- Biggest disappointments of 2009
- Best stream of 2009
In collaboration between myself, id software's TTimo, the Dreamhack staff, Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and GreasedScotsman of QuakeLive.tv, we will be providing live video coverage of the the entire group and bracket stage of the event. We have also changed the groups around so that we can cover all of the main matches of the group stage, and have provided a (very loose) schedule. All the action starts at thursday 05:00 CDT.
Additional commentary will be provided by 2GD, Slasher, and clampOK. Watch it all at QuakeLive.tv.
Thursday schedule
04:30 CDT Dreamhack Pre-game show
05:00 CDT DaHanG vs Z4muZ
05:00 CDT destrukt vs fazz
05:30 CDT Cooller vs link1n
06:00 CDT fox vs av3k
07:30 CDT Spart1e vs linKoo
08:00 CDT Madix vs Strenx
08:30 CDT Stermy vs chance
10:00 CDT Round of 16 TBA
11:00 CDT Quarterfinals TBA
The day 2 stream of the semifinals and finals starts on Friday at 04:00 CDT will be done by djWHEAT at djWHEAT.tv. 2GD and Joe will also be streaming the semifinals and finals live on the DreamArena stream.
Posted by Slasher @ 17:42 CDT, 24 October 2009 - iMsg
(NOTE: There is a special time change for tomorrow's show, 3 hours earlier, and 4 hours earlier for Europe with DST in effect)
The ESL Extreme Masters Dubai event has concluded with Shane "rapha" Hendrixson and fnatic taking home the Quake Live and Counter-Strike 1.6 titles, respectively.
The American dueler has now won four straight major Quake events, dating all the way back to ESWC Athens. After a loss to Magnus "Fox" Olsson in the group stage, Rapha redeemed himself by taking out Michael "madix" Hindersson and Richard "noctis" Gansterer in convincing fashion to meet up with Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky in the final. The final was a rather defensive, low-scoring affair, rapha able to pull out the victory in 4 maps. The event saw the return of the legend Anton "Cooller" Singov, surprising many by winning his group and barely losing to noctis in double overtime in the quarterfinals, as well as Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, who was never a Quake 3 player.
This week's special guests will be Quake Live Dubai champion Rapha, and MYM's in-game leader, Jimmy "Jumpy" Berndtsson. We'll talk to Rapha regarding his streak of wins in Quake so far, if he'll be attending Dreamhack, and his impressions of the overall play from Dubai. Jumpy will be chatting with us regarding the team's remarkable performance in Dubai, how the new blood has adapted to a major LAN event, zet's impact on the lineup, and their preperations for Dreamhack.
- SpawN has officially returned and announces that he has joined the Swedish team H2k, along with former SK player zneel
- Slasher attends the Capcom Super Street Fighter 4 Fight Club event in NYC, impressions on the game and conversations with Justin Wong and Capcom Community Manager Seth Killian
- Dreamhack Quake Live and SF4 signups have opened, Brian "dkt" Flander has signed up along with Swedish greats Alexander "Z4muZ" Ihrfors and Karl "fooKi" Johansson.
- Dutch Starcraft player Jos "ret" de Kroon has arrived in Korea, where he will play at IEF 2009 in the next few weeks, how will he do?
- MLG has confirmed the WoW team list for Anaheim, which includes EG's return, two compLexity teams, two SK teams, and Button Bashers from Korea
Posted by Slasher @ 06:00 CDT, 22 August 2009 - iMsg
The BlizzCon 2009 tournament stream is now live with Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft PvP action, with strong international competition in each discipline.
Wenjun 'Beckham' Ji Jung Woo 'EffOrt' Kim Yoon Yeol 'NaDa' Lee Jae Yoon 'sAviOr' Ma Byung Se 'sKyHigh' Jo Myung Eun 'ZerO' Kim Joseph 'Ret' de Kroon Gregory 'IdrA' Fields
Pedro 'LucifroN' Moreno Durán June 'Lyn' Park Chul Woo 'Shy' Park Deok Man 'SocceR' Youn Manuel 'Grubby' Schenkhuizen Nikita 'Nicker' Pomadov Phil 'LongWalk' Crawford Nikolaus 'SonKiE' Cassidy
QuakeCon is only one week away and the Live On Three crew is eagerly anticipating arriving in Dallas and broadcasting to the masses the great game of Quake. Quake Live is the only featured game in this year's competitions, with $50,000 on the line in two disciplines, Duel 1v1, and CTF 4v4.
QuakeCon 2008 duel champion Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky will be returning to defend his throne against an onslaught of talent from across the globe, including such notables as Shane "rapha" Hendrixson, Alessandro "stermy" Avallone, Magnus "fox" Olsson, Rafik "LoSt-CaUzE" Bryant, Maciej "av3k" Krzykowski, Marcel "k1llsen" Paul, Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, Sebastian "Spart1e" Siira, Tom "griffin" Wall, Gareth "GaRpY" Marshall, Chance "chance" Lacina, Brian "destrukt" Flander, Pär "fazz" Söderman and Aaron-Anton "HELL" Jones.
The CTF action will also be highly intense as Europeans Pierre-Emeric "link1n" Portier and David "deus" Kinnaird will also be making the trip, teaming up with Stermy and Fox, specifically for CTF. They will go up against top American teams Evil Geniuses and eMazing Gaming.
Jam-packed Quake Live action will be joined by new footage and information on new releases Wolfenstein and RAGE, as well as John Carmack's annual keynote, will make this another great QuakeCon.
Special Guests on the show:
Quake Live's Executive Producer Marty Stratton
Quake Live Community Manager Adam "SyncError" Pyle
Alessandro "stermy" Avallone and Shane "rapha" Hendrixson
Joining us will be Id Software and Quake Live's Executive Producer Marty Stratton, who's the leader of the Quake Live project overall. We'll be talking to Marty regarding the lead up to this year's QuakeCon, the preparation behind it and changes we will see this year from previous years.
We will also discuss several aspects of Quake Live both on a mainstream and hardcore level, including matchmaking, social networking, private and public server features, arQon's work so far, game ratings, along with wanted features such as QLTV and Threewave maps.
We will talk about id software's viewpoint with Quake Live on eSports as a whole, and the involvement of the game in such leagues as ESL, MLG, and KODE5.
Quake Live Community Manager Adam "SyncError" Pyle, who will discuss with us more of the nitty gritty in Quake Live, including all of the weapon and balance changes made thus far.
Tournament favorites Alessandro "stermy" Avallone and Shane "rapha" Hendrixson will also be on to give their thoughts on the event with only a week left, their practice schedule, the map selection, how confident they are coming in, and who has the edge right now, USA or Europe?
Reminder, QuadV and Live On Three will be broadcasting QuakeCon LIVE all through the weekend.
Tune in Sunday, August 9th at 4 PM EST / 22:00 CET at www.djWHEAT.tv
Edited by xou at 19:22 CDT, 9 August 2009 - 35554 Hits
Posted by Slasher @ 15:45 CDT, 1 August 2009 - iMsg
Live On Three #24 with Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, Rod "Slasher" Breslau and Scott "SirScoots" Smith
This week's special guests will be e-Stars champions Manuel "Grubby" Schenkhuizenand FNATIC team leader Patrick "cArn" Sättermon. We will talk to grubby about his recent win streak after a slow start to the year, his orc-mirror match win over Fly100%, Moon not making top 3, the current state of the European Warcraft 3 scene as well as international, and Starcraft 2's near and long-term impact on the future of RTS eSports. The chat with cArn will consist of FNATIC's continued dominance thus far in 2009, how they've been able to stay on top for this long, thoughts on mTw and SK's play, as well as how the Asian teams stack up currently, topping GotFrag's World Rankings, Sweden's ENC lineup, and if this is the best team FNATIC has ever had since the team's inception.
- FNATIC's Call of Duty 4 squad wins the Experience LAN, taking out Team CoolerMaster in the finals, USA's pureSports does not impress
- sAviOr wins the e-Stars Starcraft heritage tournament, defeating NaDa in the final and also included several other large names isuch as BoxeR and YellOw
- Legendary Counter-Strike player Abdisamad "SpawN" Mohamed, who retired from CS nearly one year ago, signs a new deal with ZOWIE GEAR, a newly formed company in California, speculating rumors that he might return to CS
- The ESL Quake Live Invitational is down to it's final four players, fox, noctis, k1llsen and Spart1e, who will play the finals on Monday
- 20id destroys Evil Geniuses to win the ESEA-I S3 TF2 finals, taking them out 5-0 without much of a fight
- Gravitas Gaming announces Paul "Adrenaline" Baker will join the CS 1.6 squad, benching Shaun "Hostile" Catron in the process
- QuakeCon and BlizzCon coming up! Huge pre-event Live On Three shows to air, giving early predictions and thoughts on both events
Tune into Live On Three on Sunday at 4 PM EST / 22:00 CET at www.djWHEAT.tv
Posted by Slasher @ 20:23 CDT, 25 July 2009 - iMsg
The EVO 2009 Championships are now over, and Daigo has claimed victory over Justin Wong in one of the greatest matches in fighting game history. Justin Wong switched to Balrog which wasn't part of his three character practice-regime at all, came from the loser's bracket, too out Daigo in the first set, and forced a final game in the second set. We had wondered among all the big names at EVO if we would see any surprises, and we actually had quite a few to come through the bracket, including the top 8. Eduardo Perez stormed through the bracket with his Balrog play, while Long "ShadyK" Tran and Sanford "Santhrax" Kelly made a bigger splash than most people expected. Southern California's EdMa stayed the most consistent, earning a third place finish after his third place at Devastation. The East Coast dominated the competition in the 5v5 event, going 15-1 and only losing one match the entire tournament.
In Spain, Mousesports has won the GameGune title over Wicked in the final, going undefeated throughout the event, while ledpc had a strong National showing for Spain and took third. The eStars event is still going on with Europe taking on Asia, Europe losing the the Continental Cup, but dominating the King of the Game tournament with SK Gaming, fnatic and mTw all in the brackets. In Dallas, Texas, the best teams in America are battling it out at the ESEA Season 3 finals, where Evil Geniuses and compLexity are currently ahead of the pack.
- Sanford Kelly - Took fourth at EVO for Street Fighter 4 and wasn't even going to go originally, and finally earned a championship in Marvel vs Capcom 2, defeating Justin in the final.
- EdMa, Placed third at EVO and took his SoCal team on his shoulders in the 5v5.
- Issei - The dominant Japanese Third Strike player who won the 2v2 3S tournament at EVO with Justin Wong, now lives in New York City, and will now train Street Fighter 4. Will give lots of insight into Japan.
- Mousesports, star player cash or manager django - Winners of the GameGune tournament, a representative from Mousesports will be on the show to talk about their recent win.
- A report from someone at the KODE5 US finals
- We will give our reactions of the EVO livestream, from both a production and talent/commentator point of view, and how we felt about the experience overall from being from home. Videos start to go up on IGN for the EVO 2009 VOD's, how good is the quality, footage used, production, and speed. Some YouTube accounts have been taken down or outright deleted for having EVO 2009 videos, even if they're just rips from the uStream VOD's, which are still available on uStream's site.
- MLG announces a huge deal with EA Sports and Sony, will include a $180,000 tournament series featuring several of EA's games, including the large existing Madden community. MLG has also officially announced it's Anaheim date, which was unconfirmed to this point. How do sports games fit into the competitive gaming equation?
- The eStars Seoul Heritage Starcraft League is currently going on, celebrating 10 years of eSports within the Korean Starcraft community, featuring $40,000 and some of the most legendary players, including BoxeR, NaDa, sAviOr, YellOw, and more.
- Reports from China say that Starcraft 2 has been banned from the ChinaJoy event, we give our reactions. Moon and NaDa play a Starcraft 2 showmatch.
- id Software releases a new Quake Live patch, includes more features for commentators and spec options, which we will use for QuakeCon. The ESL QL invite is still going on, and includes Stermy spanking av3k in the showmatch. Fatal1ty updates his facebook status looking for QL players to sponsor for QuakeCon.
- pureSports sent their American CoD4 team to the Oupost On Fire 3 LAN, the first American showing since Doctors/EG and Pandemic went to Europe. They have been knocked out in the second round of the lower bracket.
Posted by Slasher @ 08:56 CDT, 12 July 2009 - iMsg
On July 4th, freedom arrived in the form of the Worldwide Federation of Gaming, a new organization who's goal is to be the governing body of tournament-style competitive gaming across numerous gaming platforms and genres. Displaying the motto ‘Built for Gamers, Backed by Gamers’, the website launched at www.WWFOG.com and includes the first details of the federation, which has a $10 membership fee that gives access to the forum and federation's professional gamers. The federation has sealed a partnership with Empire Arcadia, a team of gamers based out of New York City which includes CEO Arcadia Isaiah "TriForce" Johnson, Street Fighter legend Justin Wong, and WCG Ultimate Gamer's Robert "Prod1gy X" Paz.
Triforce will be joining this week's show as our special guest to talk about all aspects of the federation. How it works, why it will work, when will it start, how it will make money and be sustainable, how it will compare to other league's, if it will work with other league's, how current gaming teams fit into the mix, and so on. He will also be giving a report on players' Justin Wong and Marn's bootcamp in Japan, where they are practicing nonstop for next week's Evolution event and SBO next month. Former GotFrag editor-in-chief Mark "jESUIT" Cheben will also be calling in to give his thoughts.
- Related to the WWFOG, an anonymous article was written on SK-Gaming regarding the federation. Anonymous posting is lame. We'll talk about the aspects of posting articles, columns and news anonymously, and whether editorial sites should allow such behavior.
- Evolution is a week away and everyone is practicing hardcore for the battle that will commence. Famous Japanese player Daigo has been confirmed for the event, with several other Japanese players pending. Old school, new school, East vs West, USA vs Japan, many story lines to cover.
- ESL and Razer announce a 16-player European Quake Live tournament with several top names including Stermy, Fox, Cypher and av3k. This will be the first major European QL tournament of the year, and will give us a good look at what we can expect at QuakeCon.
- Counter-Strike 1.6 heats up again as GameGune finalizes it's participants list which includes Wicked, Virtus.Pro, Mousesports, emuLate, and ALTERNATE. WCG Sweden will see a battle between fnatic, SK Gaming, Lemondogs and Begrip. We'll give our predictions on the forthcoming events.
- MLG Anaheim reportedly confirmed by the Anaheim Convention Center for November. We'll talk about how this fits into MLG's circuit plans, and speculate on what exactly Sundance is doing in Dallas.
- Grubby wins the GomTV Invitational, his first major victory of the year. Can he continue this going into the next events?
Tune in at 4 PM EST / 22:00 CET at www.DjWheat.Tv for all the action!
Posted by Slasher @ 05:04 CDT, 27 June 2009 - iMsg
The Quake Live PC Gaming Season Open, presented by Alienware Arena, is a one day, $2,500 cash-prize 1v1 event that will take place on Saturday, June 27th with some of the best players in North America in action. Players will compete within their own region (Northeast, Southern, Midwestern, Western) for the cash, and I'll be prodding the winners of each region to play each other at the end for a true champion (they don't have to).
Western: Raul "raul" Raygoza Gaven "whaz" Sorensen Andrew "gellehsak" Ryder Eric "alac" Rhoads
The entire event will be streamed live by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and Rod "Slasher" Breslau with match commentary and interviews. All the action starts at 12:00 CDT, and can be watched at Pwnage.tv (there will not be a login prompt once the tournament starts). The event will also be streamed through Justin.tv.
Posted by Slasher @ 10:36 CDT, 20 June 2009 - iMsg
Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham returns to broadcasting while Scott "SirScoots" Smith returns behind the mixer for this weekend's Devastation fighting game tournament.
This weekend's Devastation event will be streamed live through uStream.tv for three consecutive days, 8-10 hours a day, featuring all-day coverage, expert commentary, exhibition matches, player interviews, special guests, and special features. The event will be dubbed a Live On Three production, and mark the return of Live On Three's Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and Scott "SirScoots" Smith to a live gaming event. djWHEAT hasn't covered an event since the Championship Gaming Series fell through, and SirScoots hasn't either since last year's MLG PC circuit for GotFrag TV. Both have been itching to get back to live streaming competitive gaming and eSports, and Devastation is the perfect event to start with. They will be joined by Live On Three co-host Rod "Slasher" Breslau, author and journalist Bryan "DrDogg" Dawson, as well as former CGS player and WCG Ultimate Gamer contestant Adande "sWooZie" Thorne.
Every game at the event will get air time including Tekken 6, Guilty Gear Accent Core, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Guitar Hero: World Tour, SF3: 3rd Strike, Marvel vs Capcom 2, SSF2 Turbo HD Remix, King of Fighters XII, and of course the main event, Street Fighter 4. The video feeds for all the games will be hooked up directly to the cabinets for great quality. This will also be the first Tekken 6 tournament in the US, and the first major KOFXII event.
The Street Fighter 4 tournament will be the largest so far this year, with major competitors flying in from all around the country and on both coasts. GameStop National champion Justin "Marvelous" Wong and his SBO partner Martin “Marn” Phan will be flying in from the east coast along with Flash Metroid, and Ari "fLoE" Weintraub from the midwest. The west coast will be representated nicely with SBO qualifier winner Peter "Combofiend" Rosas looking to extend his win streak, along with Ryan "gootecks" Gutierrez, Mike Ross, Ricky Ortiz, Ed Ma, and, Ken I. Guest commentary provided by Gootecks, Mike Ross and others will come as the tournament progresses.
All the action will start at 12:00 PM EST (18:00 CET) each day and last until 10:00 PM EST (05:00 CET). For the live stream, tune into djwheat.tv or ustream.tv/channel/djwheat.
Today at 3pm EDT/21:00 CEST, two nations collide in Capture the Flag, Clan Arena, and Team Deathmatch Quake Live action. The format will be a best of three per game type. The game types will be played in the order of CTF, CA and TDM. This will be one of the first competitions for the new game featuring some of the best players in North America.
The match will be streamed with live video (also embedded below) and commentated by Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham and Rod "Slasher" Breslau.
USA
David "icel0re" Ritson (Captain), Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, Greg "wn" Paris, Viju "viju" Patel, Brian "dkt" Flander, Chance "chance" Lacina, Daniel "carnage" Sturdivant, Mike "perfuse" Hooper
Canada
Andrew "id" Trulli (Captain), Ricardo "dragaox" Bronze, Andrew "everkill" Darrow, Jeff "Flysher" Heakes, Darko "darko" Delevski, Sparks, Bentley
Posted by Slasher @ 13:20 CDT, 16 April 2009 - iMsg
This week's show will feature an exclusive announcement from Evil Geniuses, which will be announced live on the air and only on Lo3. Team EG manager Alex "chibsquad" Garfield will be on the show to discuss in length the announcement, as well as talk with us about various developments of the team as of late including the new StarCraft division, and the Counter-Strike 1.6 team replacing Gravitas Gaming at the KODE5 finals. Expect some CSProMod talk as well!
WCG Ultimate Gamer is down to it's final six competitors as Siji "StarSlay3r" Thornton was eliminated this week in a rather dramatic episode. We will talk with her about her feelings of being eliminated by Mark and all of the emotions surrounding her relationship with him on the show, her experience on the show, and thoughts about people's comments about her from the Internet.
We will go through the week's happening in eSports including SK's win at KODE5 Sweden, Pandemic's win over compLexity in the TF2 CEVO finals, and ESL disallowing HLTV at live events.
Tune in Thursday, April 16th at 7 PM EST/01:00 AM CET at the following links. Wheat will be on the air an hour earlier with Wheatisms and music.
Two American Quake 3 legends, Paul "czm" Nelson and John "ZeRo4" Hill, will miss the upcoming ESWC Masters Greece event, though for entirely different reasons.
Neither Evil Geniuses' Nelson or SK-Gaming's Hill will participate in Athens next month for the ESWC Masters. Nelson, a Princeton undergrad, current CalTech grad student and mathematical genius, forgot to sign-up in time.
"I had thought of applying but didn't know the deadline was coming up", says Nelson. "I was busy all weekend and didn't check when it was until today, which was too late."
A video interview from ESWC 2008 with Marcel "k1llsen" Paul after his victory over Zhibo "RazerJ" Fan in the semifinals, leading to the grand final match against Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky. Paul talks about his mindset heading into the finals, his overall thoughts about this year's ESWC, and his plans to retire from gaming. Special guest appearance by Anton "Cooller" Singov.
The interviews with Cypher and Shane "rapha" Hendrixson will take a bit longer due to the length of each.
Edited by Slasher at 07:01 CDT, 2 September 2008 - 69961 Hits
In case you missed them, Slasher and Carmac of SK-Gaming.com have conducted four video interviews from ESWC 2008 with Paul "czm" Nelson, Anton "Cooller" Singov, Chance "chance" Lacina, and Tom "griffin" Wall.
Post-event interviews with Shane "rapha" Hendrixson, Marcel "k1ller" Paul, and Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky will be up shortly.
Posted by Slasher @ 02:25 CDT, 19 August 2008 - iMsg
Many of you may have seen me spamming Digg links across IRC several times. For those that don't know, Digg is the largest social networking site in the world, and probably the best site on the entire internet to promote something, especially gaming. Digg is a top 100 hundred site on the net and drives more traffic in a couple days than ESR, SK, etc could in weeks.
Those of you wanting to help promote Quake Live, besides word of mouth and eSports sites, should sign to social networking sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com and Delicious.com.
Although the algorithm is quite complex and relies on several factors, the average amount of Diggs a post needs to hit the front page is around 150-200.
QuakeUnity will be providing exclusive video coverage of QuakeCon 2008's tournaments, which will include the debut of public footage from id software's new project, Quake Live. Starting Thursday, July 31st, the QuakeUnity coverage team will be live on-site in Dallas, providing video-on-demand high definition video as well as live audio for the $12,500 Quake Live 1v1 and the $12,500 Quake Live 4v4 CTF tournaments. These tournaments will showcase the first public footage of id software's return to Quake. Footage will also be available of John Carmack's keynote as well as any other special presentations by id.
Former Radio iTG commentator Stuart "Django" Ewen and Quake journalist Rod "Slasher" Breslau will be broadcasting matches along with various special guests throughout the weekend. All videos will be produced on-site in 720p high definition and be made available for download and streaming via flash video very soon after they are shot. Multiple versions of each video will be available for download along with the option of choosing either a high quality h264 or a standard quality flash video stream.
Several of the best Quake 3 players in the world will be on-hand to play in the Quake Live tournaments and showcase their skills for the world. Legendary professional gaming multi-millionaire Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel will be on hand to give his thoughts about the future of the Quake series. Currently the spokesman of the Championship Gaming Series, Wendel jump-started his gaming career and business franchise by winning Quake 3 tournaments nearly a decade ago. Wendel will be joined on-hand by his CPL World Tour rival Dutchman Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager, American Quake 3 superstar John "ZeRo4" Hill, and the ESWC Masters 2008 Q3 champion, Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky.
Id Software's John Carmack and Marty Stratton recently did a round of interviews with several major web publications about Quake Live and the future that the game holds.
Marty Stratton on Quake Live's userbase:
"When we started this, we were originally thinking it would be maybe a six-month project, to sort of wrap a website around Quake III, and get it out. And here we are almost a year later and it's just about to roll into a larger beta. On the other hand, when we first paced this thing out, there were really solid arguments that could be made that we would see 50,000 users, 500,000 users, or 5 million users. We really didn't know. There were at least two orders of magnitude of uncertainty as far as how many people would be interested in playing something like this. Some of that has at least been relieved now by the fact -- I was very happy to find over 100,000 people signed up for our beta with no promotion, no advertising, anything like that. Which in hindsight I suppose makes good sense, there are one to two thousand people usually playing Quake online when you sample, which means there's a community of many tens of thousands of active Quake III players still, nine years after the game was released."
John Carmack on the advertising that will support Quake Live's ability to be free:
"It's worth noting that I've never been a big supporter of in-game advertising in conventional games because I definitely do feel that if you're playing 50 to 60 bucks for a game, throwing advertising in on top of it is…there's a justifiable reason for some people to be upset about that. Quake Arena was always much more of a sporting arena combat sort of thing where integrating advertising directly into the game doesn't even feel like a tacky bolt-on. In fact what we've done with Quake Live is all of the original levels have been passed over and brought up to a modern level of polish where eight or nine years ago when Quake Arena would have been out, the state of the industry accepted a lot of things like mismatched texture seams and things that just weren't quite up to the level of attention to detail that we follow now. All the levels have had a pass through them bringing the attention to detail to modern standards without changing anything fundamentally in the graphics engine, just touching up all the data. They've also then been modified so that all the levels have billboard type things in them which are nicely integrated with spotlight lighting and so on in there where we can stream in-game ads as well as of course things that happen on the scoreboard and when you die and so on. It's a perfect fit for this type of thing because it's not a matter of taking some game we just happened to have around and throwing up ads that you can't skip in between every level or something like that, it fits well with the original tone of the game."
Marty Stratton on Quake Live's surprisingly graphical appeal:
"One nice thing, just to add to that, is that the game now basically runs automatically at whatever resolution your monitor is at. It just detects and does that automatically. Obviously it starts out in a web browser, you can play it at any point in a web browser interface with your friends list on one side, but just going full-screen, it automatically goes to the maximum your monitor will support. So if you've got a monitor that's over HD resolution, the game just looks ridiculous. It's amazingly crisp and sharp. Even compared to modern games, you lose a lot of the jagged edges, just because you can run at such a high resolution. Any system you've bought in the last three years, even at the highest resolution, is still going to run it at 120 frames per second
QuakeUnity will be conducting it's own lengthy interview with both John Carmack and Marty Stratton at QuakeCon. All things Quake Live will be discussed in addition to forthcoming titles Doom 4, Rage, Wolfenstein 2, and what's going on with the next Quake Arena game.
The seeds have been released for the upcoming ESWC Masters event, held July 4th-6th at the Palais Omnisports of Paris. Players and are placed in two different seed pools (top and high) while others are placed in a challenger’s pool. No group may have more than two players from the same nationality.
Top seeds: Alexei "Cypher" Yanyshevsky Paul "czm" Nelson Magnus "fox" Olsson Fan "RazerJ" Zhibo
High seeds: Karl "fooKi" Johansson Marcel "k1llsen" Paul Richard "noctis" Gansterer Shane "rapha" Hendrixson
Challengers: John "ZeRo4" Hill Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager Chance "Chance" Lacina Maciek "av3k" Krzykowski Cyrus "proZaC" Malekani Grégory "falcuma" Ollivier Jeffrey "Draven" Debipersad Benjamin "Unity" Rovira Thomas "griffin" Wall Pierre-Emeric "link1n" Portier Mateusz "matr0x" Ozga Andreas "ArrW" Ihrfors Daniel "ddk" Kapadia Arnaud "slx" Lanoe Dongkin "Dongjin" Suh
Update - the 24th player will be: Ondra "Legie" Konecny
Posted by Slasher @ 17:45 CDT, 25 June 2008 - iMsg
Id Software's John Carmack, one of the worlds most celebrated game makers, projects that Quake Live will have "hundreds of thousands of players, if not millions."
"Early on, we were tossing around two different orders of magnitudes - anywhere from 50,000 to 5 million people playing. We have no idea where it is going to be in there. The fact that 70,000 people have signed up in a week means that we’re going to be looking at hundreds of thousands of players, if not millions. We hope that that can be a sustained critical mass of a community that can play this type of game, and be self-supporting."
Further in the interview, Carmack mentions the ever present discussion of whether or not PC gaming is superior to consoles and takes a dig at Crysis, saying that a game like that is "not necessarily that exciting of a direction for the PC to be going in the future." He mentions World of Warcraft as an example that the PC games have a lot of potential and says that id Software will stay true to the PC platform:
"And even though the PC doesn’t get the focus that it used to, in many ways our hearts are still there, and we’d like to do things where the PC is the appropriate platform. [We’d like to] do something that really speaks to the future of where the PC can be superior to consoles."
Carmack plans the introduction of Quake Live's counterpart of the BattleNet match-making system known from StarCraft or Warcraft 3 so that inexperienced players are not discouraged:
"Skill-based matchmaking is extremely important, so when you jump in, you’re going to be someplace appropriate. But we’re also adding things like bot-guided training levels offline. When you initially set up your account, you get to give the system an indication of what your skill level is. After a few matches, the game will see how you’re performing and adjust your choices."
The contracts of Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel's Free Players' (FPO), Magnus "fox" Olsson, Johan "toxjq" Quick and Alessandro "stermy" Avallone, have ended. The organization has decided not to renew their contracts.
"The agreements for Johan, Magnus and Alessandro have expired and we now work with them on a case by case basis, allowing them the freedom to join other teams and organizations", says a representative of Auravision, the exclusive licensor of the Fatal1ty brand. "Our arrangement with them remains cordial, respectful and supportive."
As the World Series of Video Games abruptly shut down in late 2007, the deathmatch community was left at a standstill with very few events to participate in. Over the past ten months, there have only been a handful of high-level dueling tournaments, not including latest F.E.A.R CPL World Tour stops.
"Given the changing landscape in which present day competitions are held, it was decided to take another approach with regard to support of players under the FPO umbrella," Auravision explains. The decision not to renew the contracts also came before the recent announcement of the AGP Tour, slated to focus on 1v1 deathmatch competition.
For the past year and a half, Avallone has been playing FIFA as a member of the Championship Gaming Series' San Francisco OPTX squad. Quick has decided to take a break from gaming for the time being, as he is not too interested in competing in Quake 3 at the moment. Olsson on the other hand, one who's long favored Quake 3, is eager to get back to competing and is currently looking at his options.
"If it's beneficial, sure thing," he says regarding a new sponsor. "There are a whole bunch of events this summer that I would like to attend." Olsson is already confirmed to participate at the ESWC Masters event in early July and GameGune at the end of the month.
Although several Quake 3 tournaments have recently sprung up, the FPO is taking a broader look at the professional gaming landscape. With StarCraft, WarCraft 3, Counter-Strike, Halo 3 and World of WarCraft among other games filling the competitive niche, Wendel has a lot to work with.
"I want to sponsor more than just FPS gamers, I want to support every gamer in every aspect, no matter what the game is," says the 12-time World Champion. "Right now I'm working on building a new model of how to sponsor players through the Fatal1ty Brand and how to support them around the world."
Olsson, Quick and Avallone were each members of the FPO during the height of 1v1 deathmatch competitions from 2005 to 2007. Avallone was the first to join, signing on near the end of the Painkiller CPL World Tour. Olsson came aboard during the 2006 Quake 4 WSVG circuit, while Quick was added shortly before the 2007 WSVG circuit.
As Avallone, Quick and Olsson depart as teammates, they only have good things to say about the FPO and the way Wendel's organization treated them. "I thoroughly enjoyed my time in FPO," explains Quick. "We had great team spirit between the players and the managers, and the combination between business and pleasure was excellent." Avallone adds in, "probably the best organization out there. The communication was great, the support was excellent, and they never let us miss anything."
The decline of deathmatch competition brought this on to begin with. With some promising announcements coming lately, hopefully the FPO will be right back where it started.
Edited by Slasher at 04:34 CDT, 11 June 2008 - 28479 Hits
Rod "Slasher" Breslau reports:
Photo credit: GotFrag.com
Paul "czm" Nelson has announced that he will be signing with the North American-based gaming organization Evil Geniuses. He will represent EG during his stint at the ESWC Masters event in late June, as well as any other additional Quake 3 events this year.
"I look forward to representing EG at the ESWC Masters event in Paris, and subsequently working with them to develop my side-career as a professional gamer," tells the CalTech grad student. "It has been a while since I last competed in Quake 3, and it should be quite exciting and challenging to compete against today's best players."
The last event Nelson participated in was his championship run at CPL Winter 2006, a dominating performance over such international stars as Anton "Cooller" Singov, Zhibo "Jibo" Fan, and Alexander "Z4muZ" Ihrfors. Included in that run was his remarkable comeback against his arch-nemesis Singov, climbing back from a 13-2 deficit on pro-q3dm6 to secure victory with only a sliver of health.
Team EG Executive Director Alex Garfield who has put together winning squads in Counter-Strike and Call of Duty 4, but is still missing an international victory, looks forward to his newest prospect. "It's an honor for EG to be part of Paul's first long-term commitment to a professional gaming organization. He's a player who's been courted by many organizations over the past five years, and I'm glad that he sees in EG what I see in EG; I think we were the best fit for him, and we're going to give him more support than he's ever had before."
Throughout Nelson's Quake 3 history, which includes 24 first place finishes both Online and LAN, he has represented the legendary American team clan Kapitol. cK was also the launching ground for current Championship Gaming Series host and gaming superstar Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel. As teammates, Nelson and Wendel won all three major TDM LAN tournaments, sweeping Battletop NYC, FRAG4 and QIL4 in 2000-2001. In 2005, Nelson had a short stint with Check-Six for that year's ESWC, where the relationship ended shortly after. Now he heads back to ESWC for the inaugural Masters event, hoping to quality for the Grand Finals in San Jose later this year.
"I told Paul just recently that in my opinion this is an absolutely crucial tournament; that we may very well be witnessing a Quake renaissance in professional gaming," Garfield says of the upcoming event. "Honestly, though, he didn't need me to tell him that. The guy knows how to prepare; he's been doing this (i.e., winning Quake competitions) for a little while, and I'm sure he'll show up ready to go."
Nelson will be busy even up until the Masters event, with school until mid-June and then workshops until the end of June. He hopes to get in 30 hours of playtime before the event starts, and is doubtful of being able to bootcamp beforehand. In the four months leading up the CPL Winter '06 event, Nelson only totaled 25 hours of playtime.
"It's pretty cool. I really like Paul and its a nice to boost to our lineup," Nelson's new teammate Chance "chance" Lacina says, eager to get some good practice in. "I've often debated on what is actually the optimal way to practice. It's better on your confidence to practice against weaker players (toxjq style), but on the other hand getting inside the head of other strong players (zero4/rapha style) is also important."
Current Team EG General Manager and former professional gamer Andy "gellehsak" Ryder welcomes more deathmatch brethren into the fold. "I'm glad to have Paul apart of the squad. He needs no introduction when it comes to the world of deathmatch, as he is considered the best player ever to touch Quake 3. Not only will we help him play at his absolute best for upcoming events, but he will definitely be a great addition in helping out the rest of our squad in preparations for tournaments."
Nelson will make sure he's ready, busy schedule or not. He's given only the highest demands for himself for his first event back.
"I've always been a contender for first, even when out of practice. I'm shooting for top 12 at Masters to make my winning run at the finals -laughs-."
Edited by Slasher at 00:56 CDT, 30 May 2008 - 4180 Hits
UPDATE - Sorry, match is one hour later than originally posted. We will also have a live video stream provided by Gamefire.com, with Team EG's Stuart "Django" Ewen, Fnatic's Jay "2GD" Harding and myself commentating.
The ESWC USA qualifiers will come to an end tomorrow as Chicago Chimera General Manage Brian "destrukt" Flander will take on SK-Gaming's Shane "rapha" Hendrixson in the grand finals. (Betting Fixture)
Both players have secured their spots to represent America at the ESWC Grand Finals, taking place August 25th-27th at NVISION 2008 in San Jose, California. The final match of the qualifier will determine the seedings and respective group draws at the final.
With destrukt's win over rapha in the upper bracket final, rapha will need to win two best of 3's to secure the top spot.
The fun starts at 21:00 CDT, Thursday night for Americans early Friday morning for Europeans. GTV can be watched at 147.32.30.24:27970. Shoutcasting will be done by Team EG's Django, Fnatic's 2GD, and myself, IP TBA. Scorebot can be found in #QuakeQuickCup on Quakenet.
Edited by voodoochopstiks at 06:26 CDT, 3 June 2008 - 33069 Hits
Brian "destrukt" Flander has already secured a spot at the final event in San Jose with a win over rapha in the upper bracket finals. Flander defeated Hendrixson in two straight maps, 30 to 23 on hub3aeroq3, and 18 to 14 on ztn3tourney1. (Demo)
Chance stayed alive as he took down Daniel "carnage" Sturdivant in the lower bracket. After an 18 to 7 loss on hub and a 14-9 win on tourney4, Chance secured the win with a narrow victory on dm6. (Demo)
Edited by Slasher at 15:16 CDT, 28 May 2008 - 18348 Hits
Shane "rapha" Hendrixson's efforts and hard-work are finally propelling him to where he wants to be - on top. He recently signed to the wealthy SK-Gaming organization along with American Quake 3 legend John "ZeRo4" Hill, and is now two wins away from securing a spot at the ESWC finals in San Jose during the summer. SK-Gaming's Michal "Carmac" Blicharz goes inside the mind of the developing star.
"I'd say getting into the head of my opponent," rapha describes his biggest strengths. "Being able to be not just one but at times three, four, sometimes even five steps ahead of what they're going to do. And if they change something other than what I thought, being able to adapt quickly to the change and doing what I can to turn it in my favour. Sometimes my aim helps, but to me I aim well because of the way I think. It's not really a big reflex thing."
![shaftwhores only by [EXE]dann](/files/avatars/2007/51852-shaftwhore.gif "shaftwhores only by [EXE]dann"){kind=small}
John "ZeRo4" Hill and 
Artem 'DieZel' Volodin has made the interview in its entirety available for ESReality below:
TakeOver TV LAN is being held at the TaKe studio in Krefeld, Germany and the $10,000 
Creation Esports featuring players 
LiNkz and 
numlocked has booked a ticket for themselves into the grand finals with a win over 
winz, 
UberShouts and the players at 
AZK, 
Cypher, 
av3k, 
LeKaiM, 
White-Ra vs TLAF`Ret 
coL.CatZ & coL.Drewbie 
noctis (2 wins, 3 losses)
1st. $4,000
2nd. $2,000
3rd. $1,150
p0ni (3 losses)
Krysa (1 win, 2 losses)
guard (1 win, 2 losses)
Greg "EG.IdrA" Fields will be on hand to defend his title against MLG DC 2nd place finisher 
Kyung Hyun "d.SeleCT" Ryooa and a slew of opponents from around the globe. TeamLiquid has sent their entire team to the event including star player 
Chris "HuK" Loranger, along with 
Jonas "BSL" Alsaker Vikan (Counter-Strike 1.6), 
ESWC Finals 2010 will take place from Thursday to Sunday at the New Port Bay hotel in 
Liam "crow" Crowley
Marc "Nix0n" Winther (CS 1.6), Major League Gaming and BlizzCon broadcaster 
linKoo
All Pass 
Daigo has claimed victory over Justin Wong in one of the greatest matches in fighting game history. Justin Wong switched to Balrog which wasn't part of his three character practice-regime at all, came from the loser's bracket, too out Daigo in the first set, and forced a final game in the second set. We had wondered among all the big names at EVO if we would see any surprises, and we actually had quite a few to come through the bracket, including the top 8. 
Eduardo Perez stormed through the bracket with his Balrog play, while 
ShackNews
1UP
Painkiller.
