Nations Quake Rank

Nations Quake Rank (NQR) was a 4on4 Team Deathmatch tournament, running from 2001 to 2008.

History
Nations Quake Rank, or NQR, is a 4on4 league and is the longest-running currently active 4on4 environment in Quakeworld.

Scandinavians only
NQR began life in 2001 as as a ladder competition. In its inaugural season, the initials stood for Nordic Quake Rank, and it was intended that the league was mainly for Scandinavian clans.

After Swedish all-stars Flaming Fist took the NQR1 title, beating Finland's Clan MalFunction in the final, the NQR admins decided to open its doors to people from all around Europe, and so it became the Nations Quake Rank.

NQR2 continued the ladder format, but with a much higher level of activity. After an exciting playoff competition, Finnish clan Zetor emerged as the champions.

From Ladder to League
After season 2, the NQR admins decided that the clans would be best served by playing in a league structure. NQR3 was the first season to use this format, and Swedish clan Lege Artis topped the 1st division of 3. Campbusters and Second won divisions 2 and 3 respectively.

The Slackers era
After reaching the semi-finals of NQR3, the European clan Slackers came to the fore in NQR4. Their core squad of ParadokS (Denmark), Goljat (Finland), Hib (Finland) and Gamer (Finland), saw Slackers sweep up 3 successive NQR titles.

In season 4, they strolled to the top of division 1, before beating Clan MalFunction 3-2 in one of the closest finals in Quakeworld history, with Slackers coming back from 2-0 down and then taking the best of 5 series on the deciding map by just 2 frags.

Season 5's final was no less exciting. This time Slackers' adversaries were Disorder, a Swedish clan consisting of former Lege Artis players aKKe, Riker and Nabbe, in addition to Mr Lame (of HellFire fame) and Slime (previously of Tribe of Tjernobyl). Slackers were red-hot favourites before the game, having beaten Disorder 3-0 in the ClanBase Cup semi-final just days earlier, and the opening rounds did little to dispel the fears of Disorders' fans. Slackers won the opening 2 maps, including the traditional Disorder stronghold of E1M2 and had a big lead with just a few minutes left of the 3rd map, DM2. The Swedes somehow found an extra gear and turned around Slackers' map lock and clawed back the 70 frag deficit inside the final 5 minutes to complete one of the most famous single-map comebacks of all time. Buoyed by their success on DM2, Disorder then found their stride on E1M2, and sent the final into a 5th (and deciding) map for a second consecutive season. The SR-luck once again came through and Slackers sealed the second NQR title by winning DM3 by 6 frags.

NQR6 (which incidentally saw NQR trying a bizarre 3-tiered playoff structure - a contrast to the 5 division regular season) saw Slackers facing up to Lege Artis in the Gold Cup final, who had missed out seasons 4 & 5 (although some of their players played in Disorder). The final featured an epic opening round on DM3, but after that the game lacked the fireworks of previous seasons and Slackers ran out 3-1 victors.

Fifi's boys get victory at last
Prior to NQR7, Clan MalFunction were considered to be one of the unluckiest clans in NQR's short history. They had lost in the finals of seasons 1, 3 and 4, and in the semi-finals of season 5. Many wondered if they would ever get the glory that their talented roster and amiable personalities deserved, but in season 7 the luck of the draw swung their way. Their core line-up for the playoff stages consisted of their old school Finns Fix and Fifi, their fellow-countryman Hlt, Swedish star Silver Fang (Siv for short) and rising star Angua (formerly of Spartacus, X and bgsr). Their path to glory was far from easy, and they had to beat down Firing Squad in the quarter-finals (2-0), Griffins Tappra Gossar in the semis (3-2) and then their old arch-enemies Slackers in the final. Slackers had played most of the season without 3 of their key players from their past successes: Goljat had gone inactive, Gamer had reformed his previous clan, KOFF, and Hib was inactive as well. Hib came back for the playoffs though, and he and ParadokS were joined by Xerial (formerly of X and The Divines, amongst others) and Circle (CAPSLOCK, The Divines). After losing an opening DM3 round that was played at a frantic pace, Clan MalFunction struck back by winning CMT4, E1M2 and then DM2 to win the final 3-1. It was a great consolation for them after they had narrowly lost the QHLAN final to Lege Artis a few weeks previously.

Fragomatic begin the age of the rising clans
Season 8 marked a down turn in activity in NQR, and the overall quality of clans was definitely lower. Lege Artis' casual attitude to getting their games played meant that they were kicked from the league, Slackers did not even join, and Clan MalFunction decided to take it easy having won the previous season. Firing Squad and Griffins Tappra Gossar put up a good fight but weren't able to stop the relatively-new clan Fragomatic from taking the NQR8 title. Fragomatic had climbed their way up the NQR divisions, having been in division 2 in season 5, adding a few top players here and there, and had transformed themselves into the strongest clan of the time. Their all-Swedish core squad consisted of Xerial, Valla (formerly of Team Freedom), XantoM (formerly of EarthQuake) plus older-school members Manulito and Xterm. In the final, they were too strong for Finnish clan Antiquad, winning by 3 maps to 0.

The QW.nu crash, inactivity and a new format
After NQR8 concluded, the Quakeworld.nu server, which hosted the NQR site, amongst others, was hacked into and all data was lost. As a result, half of the season from NQR8 is lost forever. Encouraged by constant promises from the QW.nu server admins that they would be back online "soon", the NQR crew held off on finding a new host in the hope that they could continue with QW.nu. As a result, there was no NQR season in the later half of 2005, and the website was not resurrected until early 2006.

NQR9 opened its signups, after the admins decided to operate a Champions League-style cup structure. Clans were split into 3 tiers - Gold, Silver and Bronze - and then into 4 groups within each tier. The top clans in the group stages went into a Premier playoff competition, with the other clans going into a Standard playoff structure.

In a repeat of the NQR4 final, Clan MalFunction met with Slackers and the spectators were not disappointed by an epic 5 match series. Just as in the season 4 game, one clan took a 2-0 lead only to end up losing 3-2. This time however, it was the Finns of Clan MalFunction that recovered from losing the opening 2 maps (DM3 and DM2) to win 3 in a row (E1M2 x2 and DM3), and in doing so they sealed their second NQR title.

Meanwhile, in the Silver Cup tournament Osams beat Wundberbar in another five match series: DM3 (Osams), DM2 (Wund), E1M2 (Osams), DM2 (Wund), DM3 (Osams).

NQR returns
NQR returned for a 10th season in early 2007. A similar structure to the previous season was adopted, but there was only the one playoff competition in each of the Gold, Silver and Bronze tiers. The Gold playoff competition was won by Dota-Allstar-Guys (DAG), who defeated Clan MalFunction 3-1 in the final.

The future
NQR admin Soma is quoted as saying that NQR will return in January 2008 for an 11th season.

Pioneers in expanding the map pool
When NQR was first set-up, the other major competition in European Quakeworld was Smackdown. Smackdown operated with a map pool consisting of 5 maps: TB3(DM2, DM3 and E1M2) plus 2 others, chosen from the Quake 1 single player maps.

In the first 4 seasons, NQR offered a map pool consisting of all the deathmatch maps and all of the episode maps in order to give clans some variety in their competitive games.

In NQR5, the map pool was capped at 9 maps - TB3, 3 episode maps (E1M5, E2M2 and E3M7) plus 3 new maps - CMT1b, CMT3 and CMT4. These maps were essentially modified versions of pre-existing custom maps, tweaked for competitive 4on4 play. They were then tested in the NQR Custom Map Tournament (CMT) - there were 5 maps in total. The CMT lasted for 2 seasons, and then 3 most popular maps were chosen for use in NQR5.

For NQR6, the map pool was reduced to 5 maps, with CMT4 being joined by E2M2TDM, a revised version of the E2M2 single player map. Opinion on E2M2TDM was split, and the map was promptly ditched for season 7, with CMT3 taking its place.

After a large volume of complaints from both players and spectators about the quality of CMT3 and CMT4, the map pool for NQR8's division 1 was restricted to TB3. CMT3 and CMT4 continued to be used in the other divisions.

In NQR9, the crew decided to forego the debates about which custom maps to include and elected to go with the tried-and-tested system of TB3-only.

The ladder
In early 2005, gaz and aap set up a 4on4 ladder system that was seen as a long-term replacement for Ad Mortem. The ladder allowed teams to play as many or as few games as they wanted, and on pretty much any map, with activity being rewarded over skill level. The ladder is still going strong and has proved to be rather successful. These days it includes 2 2on2 sections as well - one for Europe and one for North America.

Side projects
The NQR crew has tried to run several side projects over the years. The most popular was the Custom Map Tournament, which featured 5 specially-tuned custom maps and which used a ladder+playoff structure. Slackers won season 1, and EarthQuake won season 2.

Only 2 other side projects were run to completion: The NQR Invitational Classic Cup, and the Summer Cup 2004. The latter was a knockout cup competition that ran during the break between the regular league seasons over the summer months, and featured a TB3 section and a Custom map section. The Classic Cup (TB3) was won by The Forsakens, and the Custom Cup was picked up by Leftovers.

The NQRICC ran between seasons 7 & 8 in early 2005, and was a 16-team invititational knockout cup using the TB3 map pool. Firing Squad won the competition by beating Slackers 2-1 in the final.

Other projects included the NQR CTF league, NQR Custom Map League, and NQR North America. Each of these seasons was cut short by the QW.nu server hacking in mid 2005.