It's the 4th of August today and QuakeCon has been running for two days now. With the new Quad Damage Tournament, people from the different Quake communities were more eager than ever to follow the tournament at the event this time.

While the tournament in id Software's new game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has made decent progress, the Quad Damage tournament was stalled already on the first day. The reason was that the organizers couldn't get their server system working. To save resources they had the players going through a special software which spawned the correct server depending on what game they were going to play. This might have been necessary as all four games in the Quake series are featured at this event, but you might ask yourself why no proper preparation was made to avoid failures such as this. The issue was basically that it worked less good with the Quakeworld and Quake 2 servers.

Other reports also says that the Quad Damage Tournament had half players dropping out, which might have eased the stress on the QuakeCon staff a bit. They also revealed their lack of preparations when the american player Thump4 was nearly disqualified. The reason for this was that he used his own crosshair and player skin. The staff later on let him continue playing, but from that time on they examine the pak files and stuff that the players use. Another Quakeworld player called "Tydligen" (swedish name?) was really caught cheating though. Reports says it was a good old wallhack being used.

Apart from the above i can't make any report on the results of the tournament as the community haven't really received any. The event is lacking both streams and GTV equivalents in all games. No websites have decent result reports in text either, so noone really knows who is successful.

Anyway, there are some positive things with QuakeCon after all. Among other things, John Carmack revealed that they have a few aces up their sleeves at id Software. I'll just cut and paste from the official QuakeCon site:


The main news for us Quakeworlder's here is probably that Quake will be available on Valve's online service called Steam. Maybe this could result in a surge of new players in the community. With nQuake present though, it might just be minor news for the hardcore community.