Now that it’s all over and done with, everyone’s had some time to decompress and examine the 2007 edition of QuakeCon.
Sure, there were delays, and some things could have gone better. Overall, however, I want to take the time to thank the QuakeCon volunteers for doing essentially what is a thankless job.
The network guys, the admins, and everyone else taking care of the GGL Wire production crew were top notch. The things that went wrong had nothing to do with those guys; it’s just that the automated tournament system they used for the Quad Damage tournament wasn’t tested as much as it should have been.
C’est la Vie — there’s a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on in various places, but overall the tournaments were fun. Great job to Milez, too, for keeping the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars tournament on schedule. He’s been at it for four years, and it really shows.
I took the time to praise the volunteers up front because they deserve it, and because what I say next may rub some people the wrong way.
This Q2 cosplayer didn’t |
QuakeCon is not a pro tournament. It does not purport to be a pro tournament as much as it is a festival to celebrate id Software’s games and community, as well as promote the sponsors and exhibitors.
In the tunnel-visioned competitive gaming community, many give major attention to the tournaments and pay little heed to the things the gaming masses care about: the BYOC, the game announcements, the parties, the case mods, prizes, and whatever else. These non-competitive events are why thousands of people show up to QuakeCon.
QuakeCon is not a pro tournament.
QuakeCon does, however, give away pro money. $20,000 for first place in the Quad Damage tournament is nothing to sneeze at. Nor is the $22,000 first prize for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. With a $90,000 prize purse, all things being equal, that sounds like a pretty significant event to me.
This is the paradox of QuakeCon: id CEO Todd Hollenshead calls two random gamers up to the exhibitor area stage to play for $1,000. Gripped by the power of hot babes who draw the names, massively loud speakers, and four plasma TVs, a crowd of 150 to 200 people gathers to cheer on every frag.
Why isn’t every single tournament game during the event treated this way? Sure, the competitors, pros and casual players alike, only account for maybe 200 guaranteed attendees. But their reach is far beyond that.
The exhibitor stage games go to show that QuakeCon visitors absolutely love the competition, even if they may not be competitive players. They know a good shot when they see it. And they know that sitting down to watch a couple of the best all-around Quake players in the world, Toxjq and fojji, go at it in the grand final is a spectator event.
With all this in mind, it seems to me like QuakeCon is the perfect event to promote competitive Quake. It’s got the backing of the game franchise’s creator, it’s got the best players, and it’s got an interested audience.
The fact that the tournaments don’t receive much publicity from the organizers themselves until the very end (on the main stage) is a squandered opportunity, in my opinion.
Both John Carmack and id Executive Producer Marty Stratton have expressed dismay at the dwindling Quake community. That’s part of the reason id is making Quake0, the web-based game launcher — people just can’t get the game into playable form without downloading gigabytes of patches, mods, and maps from decentralized locations. They realize the need for developer support to bring the Quake community back.
And while I applaud that initiative, why not publicize the best of the best as much as possible in the interim? Why do some of the very best Quake players in the world have to wait until the very end of the event to get their faces on the main stage?
They call it QuakeCon for a reason: it’s all about Quake. So give some love to the guys who have done nothing but play Quake/2/3/4 for the last ten or twelve years.
Put Jeffrey “Thump4″ McShane on the stage. When not studying eighty hours a week at the Naval Academy to be a nuclear engineer, Thump4 is busy owning people in QuakeWorld. But no one outside of a relatively small circle of people know his name. He’s been at it for a decade, and if id won’t put the spotlight on him, no one will.
With that said, I leave you with this shakycam footage of the Quad Damage tournament grand final. The other camera I had with me ran out of battery life, so I had to resort to my digital still camera to get the very, very, very end. This isn’t the best footage; we’ve actually got some better stuff floating around, but I think it’s decent enough to show the atmosphere of the finals.
