Last month at QuakeCon we announced that Quake Live would be coming to Steam and with that expansion take on some new gameplay changes and features. At that time, we did not have many specifics to share as we were poised to keep an open mind as to what our future would look like, and wanted to see how we could introduce a wider audience to the game we so dearly love. Quake is a masterful game of skill, often compared to Chess by its veteran players. However, with that depth has come a challenge to welcome and capture new players long enough for them to discover the joy to be found in what many consider the finest Deathmatch game ever made.

For some of us that joy is simply nostalgia of our early days, an introduction to online FPS that ushered in a new era of gaming. For many it is a love of mastery, striving to become better in a competitive world that seems to have no upper bounds. It is a game of limitless growth where the movement, strategy, and perfection of aim seem to be an extension of our human selves where hard work, dedication, and confidence can translate into a measurable improvement that brings a great pride to our players. While Quake will always be a home to the competitive base, we have often longed for a wider audience who could experience, appreciate, and fall in love with all that it has to offer.

For new players, it has been quite clear what the greatest barriers are: effectiveness on spawn, movement, and item control. These elements on several levels also make our game great, so we wanted to inspect what could be done to make the game a more enjoyable experience, all while teaching players a bit of the meta-game depth.
We tested several ideas including granting players better starting weapons and compared that to the lessons learned in Clan Arena where players get to try out various weapons and see their effectiveness each round. We found that providing the player one single "primary" weapon of their choice in addition to letting them have a bit more freedom as to which "secondary" they spawn with allows players to try out various weapons and become more effective on spawn which has been the key complaint of newcomers. Meanwhile we still want to highly encourage picking up weapons throughout the arena, so we have minimized the amount of ammo granted on spawn so that players will continue to roam and gather both weapons and ammo. Allowing the new behavior of choosing some starting weapons greatly improved the experience in modes such as FFA and TDM and helped make some of the more chaotic modes like Domination quite enjoyable. Hence, Domination will now be ran publicly for all to play.

Additionally we wanted to find a way to teach players a few core bits of information concerning item timing. We have introduced item timers, present transparently in the world (not on your HUD), that all relay item respawn information under the following design guidelines: Each item timer has a radial display divided into slices. Elapsed time is drawn as solid slices. Each slice represents 5 seconds. Active regions are represented by blinking slices that blink once per second. The timers should adequately teach players when an item is about to respawn or when it is better to move along even without this knowledge. And as players continue to play, they will begin to understand exactly how much time elapses per slice and can begin utilizing the timer indicator in coordination with their match timer to know when items will become available. To both minimize visual noise that the timers could incur and to prevent an unnecessary flood of information throughout the world, item timers are only visible while in close proximity, gently fading in as you approach.

The final hurdle for new players to overcome was strafe jumping. We wanted to preserve strafe jumping as is, as both its intentional use and its subtle influences as you traverse the map are what make Quake feel incredibly smooth and responsive. For many of us, learning strafe jumping came naturally or for long time players was simply the foundation of our FPS experience. But we wanted to assist players and provide them with a simpler means of movement to allow them to keep up the pace as they overtime learn to more fully benefit from strafing. A basic "bunny" and auto-hop mechanic has been introduced that allows players to simple hold forward and jump to build up some speed. However, because the new bunnyjumping only provides a limited amount of accel gain, and is only effective on straightaways, players will still need to learn strafe jumping over time – we hope that this new mechanic will allow both general movement and gameplay to become more accessible encouraging them to continue to play so that they may over time become more accustom to the finer side of Quake.

But ultimately these changes have not been introduced for the new player alone. We feel that these elements overall help bring Quake one step closer to being a modern shooter, while still holding true to our roots of remaining an incredibly fast paced old school shooter. We've had a lot of fun with these new additions, and hope that you learn to appreciate them.

For players who have taken great pride in becoming skilled in our more challenging areas such as competitive Duel, we hope that running our FFA and Teamplay servers with these new, fun, and accessible mechanics that we can begin to build a larger base of players who could then try their luck at the Classic Duel experience. Here players will have to shed their new skin and play under slightly more challenging conditions, but ones that we know have proven themselves true in the e-sports arena.

Sincerely,
The Quake Live Team

- Players may now hold jump to continuously jump.
- Players may now hold forward and jump to 'bunny hop', allowing them to slowly gain up to 2x their base movement speed.
Introduced Loadouts in select modes; allowing players to select one Primary Weapon (hmg, rl, lg, rg) and one Secondary Weapon (sg, gl, pg, mg).
- Added the command "weapon toggle" to toggle between your Primary and Secondary weapons. Defaults to "f" for new users.
Unified weapon respawn time to 5 seconds across all game modes.
- Unified friendly fire, disabled across all game modes.
- Added global Ammo Packs, in lieu of weapon specific ammo, where each pack grants you a small amount of ammo for each weapon in your inventory.
- Reduced ammo respawn time from 40 seconds to 10 seconds.
- Added in-world item timers for "major" items, including armors, megahealth, power-ups, and medkit.
Items have taller pickup collision boxes, so that players will not miss items as they jump over them.
- Added Power-up Spawn POIs, that appear 10 seconds before a power-up spawns.
- Added Power-up POIs, that indicate when an available power-up is available in the arena.

For players who wish to largely avoid the new major changes, the legacy style of play has been preserved within a "Classic" ruleset. All of our public Duel servers run in Classic mode. Subscribers may host additional classic servers using our "Create Match" feature. This includes the launching of Standard Classic servers, which any player may freely join.

In addition to our major ruleset changes, the following global game changes have been made:
- Added a new weapon, the Heavy Machinegun (HMG).
- Lightning Gun now does 6 damage per cell across all rulesets, or 120 damage per second.
- New higher resolution font added.
- Widescreen Support for huds (see default huds for implementation examples).
- New in-game UI (menu and loading screens).
- Disabled the pk3 encryption. Paks can now be opened like a zip file; maps load up to 25% faster.
- Added flagstand POIs in CTF.
- Enabled self-kills with an additional 1 second respawn penalty.
- Quad firing sound reduced on high rate of fire weapons: mg, pg, cg, hmg.
- Added damage number indicators for damage dealt, can be customized by various color styles and enabled or disabled per weapon.
- Fixed a bug in that could cause the best weapon selection to fail.
Machinegun now drops to grant users mg ammo.
- Infected zombies now have air control and can double jump.
- Fixed the CHEATS ENABLED notification on the map loading screen from lagging behind its proper state.
- Reduced the default amount of player movement bobbing.
- Reduced the default amount of damage kick movement.
- By default, don't show weapons you don't have in inventory on your weaponbar.
- By default, bob major items when simpleitems are enabled.
Prevent broken shader image on crosshair '30', '60', '90', which would equate to crosshair "none" as the cycle repeats.
- Bots now randomly select loadouts, when applicable.
- Greatly reduced multiple pickups prediction errors.
- Removed the option to move to FreeCam while dead in elimination based gametypes.
- The PQL ruleset has been renamed 'Turbo'.
- Stonekeep map layout slightly modified.
- Trimmed out 19 maps will be added back later after being updated. (Arena Gate, Bloodlust, Colbat Station, Concrete Palace, Dies Irae, Double Impact, Eviscerated, Focal Point, Forgotten, Golgotha Core, Hell's Gate Redux, Hero's Keep, Power Station, Proving Grounds, Sacellum, Solid, Sorrow, Space Camp, Spillway, Terminal Heights, Terminus)

Ruleset selections (Quake Live, Turbo, Classic) are all available for standard servers.
- Now support custom values of starting ammo in AD, CA, DOM, and RR.
- Added optional Double Jump physics player movement mechanic.

- Removed Team Arena Runes from all maps.
- Proxy Launcher removed from all maps.
- Chaingun and Nailgun removed from serveral maps.
- Heavy Machinegun added to serveral maps, some depending on ruleset or mode.

LocKtar vs Xterm

Map: Claustrophobopolis (dm2)
Format: best of 5
Date: September 3rd, 13:00 CDT

The dm2 tournament took slightly longer than expected, especially the last couple of weeks, but it has finally reached its grand final stage.

Read on...
Claustrophobopolis has been the arena of choice in this great duel tournament and it's been a blast. Only a very few walk overs were forced to be awarded, which is a great success for a tournament run during the summer.

We saw old faces show up to fight; Griffin, Lakso, Xterm, bps, LocKtar, and the list goes on. We saw Blood_Dog make a very deep run, eliminating players like bps on the way until finally being knocked out by Griffin.

Now, finally, the time has come for the GRAND FINALS. The Swedish dm2 meistah, LocKtar, will be up against his countryman Xterm coming from the losers bracket. Thus far, LocKtar has only dropped a single map in the entire tournament. Not surprisingly, that map loss came against Xterm. A part from that very game, LocKtar has danced his way through the winners bracket with ease.

Xterm, on the other hand, had to face Griffin in the winners bracket semi finals in which he narrowly came out ahead with a 6-0 win in the deciding game. In the upper bracket finals, LocKtar was waiting for him. This game may have been even more tense as Xterm fell just short of winning the deciding game 8-3. There is no doubt that this will be an interesting finals!

Spread the word and make sure not to miss it!

Supraball is a mix of first person shooters and football. A genre which we call FPSG – First Person Sports Game.

There is no real violence involved, but the controls are like the ones of a shooter. The rules and tactics are similar to football.

The game feels like playing football without it actually being football. Every player on the field is a human being and has to play a role in the tactical concept of the team.

The gameplay is clearly focused on eSports. High precision controls without any random factors and a high dependency on your team mates.

The game’s basic goal is to fix the typical problems of all top down football games that you usually play with a gamepad and real football teams (you know which ones! not calling names here):

- The strategic movement of the vast majority of players of your team is done by the CPU.
- In order to have smooth animation transitions there is a delay for every input, and the little player on the screen doesn’t immediately do what you tell him to.
- Passes and shots are mostly done by the CPU and also highly random (based on the individual players skill settings) You just give a vague direction and power, but what actually happens is not in your hands. And even in fully manual modes it is almost impossible to do anything accurate with the little gamepad sticks.
- Special tricks or dribblings are not really done by yourself, you just activate them with a special combination and then they happen by themselves.

Supraball fixes all these problems and also puts you right into the action. Nothing is as immersive as a first person view.

On the other hand this accurate gameplay could not be done as a real football game. For example it would hardly be possible to properly control both your feet for a dribbling. With the gun mechanics however we can deliver an accurate gameplay that mimics the things you can do in football in some way.

On top of that you can do things that you could never do in football. Like kicking your teammates across half the pitch to get quicker to the ball or into an open space.

The rules are also vaguely different. There is no offside and there are no fouls. Instead the penalty box serves as the part of the field where you can knock out the opposing players with one hit.

In 2002 Supraball Project Leader David Münnich had the idea to create the Modification “Deathball” for Unreal Tournament 2003.

The basic idea was to remove the projectile weapons from the UT2003 game mode “Bombing run” and placing it in an empty sports field, instead of a deathmatch like arena.

That was tried with a simple small modification and everyone involved immediately got hooked to the never before seen gameplay. The first public release was on October 25 2002.

The Mod quickly became very popular with pretty much all gaming magazines covering it, it won plenty awards and had a huge league system running with thousands of players.

It was later ported to Unreal Tournament 2004 and also officially shipped with the UT2004-GameOfTheYear-Edition.

Not long after that, the game’s popularity started to fade out due to it only being a modification for a game that was vanishing itself.

David Münnich has since carried the wish with him to one day produce a standalone version of the game.

In late 2011 it was decided to make the reboot happen. The whole development team has since changed except for David.

Production of Supraball started in February 2012.

From August 2012 till February 2014 the team has been inactive because of business partner disputes. The team then shook off all the pay2win wishes of those previous partners, who had never played the game, and continued working independently.

The first public alpha version was released in May 2014. Overnight there have been tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of players.

Most read threads:
The Quake Song (7531 hits)
QL Match Making (3824 hits)
So is this a real active userbase of QL? (3709 hits)
A Reflex duel demo. Seekax vs Edu (3560 hits)
When were you introduced to quake? (3233 hits)

Most commented threads:
QL Match Making (213 comments) by Lorfa
A Reflex duel demo. Seekax vs Edu (140 comments) by MajkiFajki
When were you introduced to quake? (139 comments) by tom
So is this a real active userbase of QL? (137 comments) by noacc
What would you add to Reflex? (115 comments) by Padawan

Most Popular Users:
Teen Queen (96% popular)
newborn (96% popular)
zb0t (95% popular)
PredatH0r (95% popular)
wormed (95% popular)

Most Popular Threads:
The Quake Song (98% popular) by Memento_Mori
Quake Live Alt Browser (85% popular) by wn
A Reflex duel demo. Seekax vs Edu (55% popular) by MajkiFajki
extraQL 1.3 released (52% popular) by PredatH0r
Quake 3 Audiotest using OpenAL HRTF (48% popular) by kapca

Most Popular Comments:
Re: The Quake Song (79% popular) by function9
Re: The Quake Song (68% popular) by dru1d
Re: 125 FPS August'14 League, Group Stag (60% popular) by Grumlouze
Re: The Quake Song (57% popular) by MajkiFajki
Re: So is this a real active userbase of (57% popular) by sonic

Popularity Climbers:
Memento_Mori (90 +'s)
newborn (74 +'s)
noacc (60 +'s)
Teen Queen (54 +'s)
Anonymous (48 +'s)

Betting leader:
aeoL (E$471,325)
hghg (E$344,633)
Kost1k (E$288,952)
Joker_ (E$193,878)
qmj (E$76,993)

• Group Stage: Best of 1
• Single Elim bracket: Best of 3

• If time becomes an issue the bracket will be finished on Day 2. Since this is our first cup the total number players per group will be dependent upon how many players check in on event day. While it would be fantastic if everyone who registers also checks in I realize this is not a major event yet and some players will simply not make it. In the future the tournament structure will be more static and these kind of issues "should" be of no concern.

• Semi Finals: Best of 3
• Bronze Finals: Best of 3
• Grand Finals: Best of 5

amunster
apparition_
bL1ss
blatrix
bo0m
boots
BRRRAAAAIIINNie
Campaigner
cha1n
chance
Charnock
clast
coveryfire
dakinaw
davis
DeadIy
death_star_gone
_DevastatioN_
Effortless
GanglandOneUp
ghostulated
gnosis
hanniballer
Higgs
jdb_
jochs
jok0
judge_

kukkii
Loney
loveless
McBrady
Meowity
MidnightStar
Necrophagist
oaki_duke
p0rkage
phalaer
prophecy
rey
scorch_
shaka
sixers_
sleepii
SlLENCE
sms
sulit
_stitch
taint_
twitch
Vig1lante
vlad0
vort3x_ca
wonko
ZorakWar

• Furious Heights
• Lost World
• Blood Run
• Cure
• Toxicity
• Aerowalk
• Sinister

• Grand Prize: $100 + 1 month Pro
• 2nd Place: $60 + 1 month Pro
• 3rd Place: $30 + 1 month Pro
• 4th Place: $10 + 1 month Pro
• 5th - 8th all receive 1 month Pro

The tournament structure changes into double-elimination bracket.

1st place: $600 + EpicGames package
2nd place: $400
3rd place: $250
4th place: $100
5th places: $50
7th places: $25

Im back from the iseries now. and i will try and Stream from 3-4pm Just to let you guys Know i got prizes to give to the viewers tomorrew but im gonna need your helps to everone to promote the Channel at 7cet we will be front page so Tweet post on forums just let people know. Prizes are so far Kingston headset, GFX CARDS, Mouse. mousemat and few others bits and bobs

There are few things new players should make sure to remember when applying for ESH cups:
1. All players should double check if their PlayerId/GUID is entered for Quake Live (which is your QL nick in-game) under the Edit profile>PlayerIds.
2. Clan leaders, after creating clan, must create squad and add players from clan to that particular squad.

Failure to follow any of these instructions will result in your team not being able to join the tournament.
If further help is needed contact admin(s) on #esh.ql @ quakenet..

Gametype: TDM 2v2
Format: Double elimination Bo3
Maximum teams: 16
Start: Sunday 31 August 2014 at 15:00 cet
Check-in: Sunday 31 August 2014 at 14:00 cet
Requirements: 2 Premium or 1 Pro accounts per team
Admin(s): doz3r, PerpetualWar
IRC: #esh.ql

- Almost Lost
- Blood Run
- Campgrounds
- Devilish
- Hidden Fortress

The tournament structure changes into double-elimination bracket. Two days playoffs are divided into two parts. 1st part (day) includes 3 Winner Brackets rounds and 3 Lower Brackets rounds, final part includes Winner Bracket finals, another 3 rounds of Lower Bracket and Grand Finals.

20.08.2014 (Wednesday) 18:00 CET till 22:00 CET=> Division 2 playoffs (1st part)
21.08.2014 (Thursday) 18:00 CET till the end => Division 2 playoffs (final part)
24.08.2014 (Sunday) 15:00 CET till the end => Division 1 playoffs

1st place: $350 + EpicGames package
2nd place: $250
3rd place: $150
4th place: $50