WCG Malaysia: A Quaker's POV

By: biatch0

20th October 2001 – 90% of the Quake playing population arrive at 11AM sharp, simply because someone seemingly important said that configuration files were to be handed in before
11AM, or those who didn’t would risk having to configure Q3A manually (oh
horrors).

Schedule for Q3A is released at 12PM. According to the schedule up on the board, the first Q3A qualifying match was supposed to have started at 10:30AM. Interesting. Upon asking, I’m told that there will be a slight delay in the Quake 3 qualifiers, probably a half hour or so, says another seemingly important person. Fine then, I return to the cold concrete floor that is the waiting area for anyone who is supposed to play but isn’t yet.

4PM, lunch. After a quick and non-nutritious meal at McDonalds, me and another few people waiting for their matches return to our designated spot on the cold concrete floor, only the floor is rather warm now, thanks to our asses being there for the past 6 hours or so. Ah well, another quick question to another important person. Starting soon they say, half an hour or so. Right...

8PM, dinner. It’s kinda annoying having to see the same cashier at a McDonalds counter more than once in a day I realize. Anyway, yet another McDonalds meal down the ol’ sinkhole. The warm concrete floor is now feeling a little harder than it did when we first got here around 9 hours ago. Guess it must be the old tired bones acting up.

9:30PM, OMG SOMETHING SI HAPPENING! After the bulk of the annoying screaming type CS crowd has gone off (l00zers), the organizers have finally made some effort to accommodate the now groaning, tired Quake crowd. It seems that they’re setting up 2 tables of 10 PCs each solely for Q3A. Amazing, or rather, amusing. Groups A and B of Q3A qualifiers are up first, that includes me. I kick my opponents ass, someone whom I don’t know at all, but someone I feel deserved it. He was playing with his headphones around his neck, hmm. Guess he thought I sucked. Group C and D finish up, and hey presto, it’s all over for today.

WTF?!!??! CUNTER-STRIEK gets an entire phoogin day for its qualifiers and Q3A only get friggin half an hour??? And that ain’t it either. Quake participants were TOLD to come at 11AM, CUNTER-STRIEK (which I shall now refer to as CS) which was supposed to be running independent of the Q3A qualifiers somehow overflows and eats up the PCs supposed to be used for Q3A??? BS.

That ain’t the end of my complaints just yet. The computers that were sponsored, in one word, I can summarize them. That one word is SAKNATS. Damn *ntel P3 1.1GHz. Ooh, gigahertz power eh? That ain’t all that bad actually, just that they paired the processor with the almighty GeForce2 MX200, the most bandwidth deprived card on the graphics market since the days when people couldn’t even imagine the bandwidth of the ISA bus being filled up. Wait, there’s this other thing, XP I believe. From a good friend of ours, Billiam Goats. As if the performance of the PCs wasn’t bad enough, M$ just had to sponsor Windbloze XP to the WCG qualifiers. XP, well known to degrade a state of the art computers performance down to a lowly XT machine, was to be launched soon after the end of the WCG qualifiers (27th October to be exact, at least in Malaysia). M$ felt that the WCG qualifiers would be a good place to showcase their latest and gratest.

Nevermind all that. My ass aches from bonding with the concrete for too long. Might as well get back home and see what the bed can do to soothe the pain.

21st October 2001 – And now, even worse than the day before, a 10AM odyssey. I’m feelin a little tired, and a little wired, so I just pray that today, the organizers will somehow have
a little pity on us poor little Quakers.

The unbelievable has just happens, Quake second round matches begin at 10:15AM. I rip through the second and third round, while a friend I came with bows out at round three. Final round for my group comes, and I fumble. Hell, it happens to the best of us. At least most of the quake community is kept occupied for the majority of the day. Worse come to worse, the Q3A matches are displayed on the medium sized screens for spectators to watch (CS still takes the big screen). Actually that’s real good. I remember finishing my third round match and getting a round of applause from the spectators of my match (mostly CS pleyarz who were intrigued by the ejecting body parts associated with each kill).

The finals come, and the favourite, bkrm>whirizm! walks away with grand prize. It’s quite something to watch, but it’s another to be playing. The winner walks away with a thousand bucks, and an all expense paid trip to South Korea for the WCG finals in December. I walk away with something I feel was well worth the RM30 (±USD7.90) I paid to get into these qualifiers. I feel alive again.

1.) Editorial Response to Microsoft - madirish
2.) WCG Malaysia: A Quaker's POV - biatch0
3.) Class Action Lawsuits for software: Why Apple would win - DietCoke
4.) The cheque's in the mail - Dinesh Nair
5.) CounterStrike 1.3 - A complete failure - DietCoke
6.) When Does Gaming Become Unhealthy? - Archfiend