Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty: I hope that the tournament has a lot of exciting games and good coverage. Of course, I am mainly focused on my personal performances in the CTF and duel tournaments. My CTF team is confident that we can repeat our performance, and I feel like my duel game is sort of up in the air. I have no idea how well I will do in duel as my recent focus has been on CTF practice, but I still believe I can be anywhere from 8th to 1st.

Apparently the internet was down, and this is required to play the game. The internet was up later in the afternoon, but LAN servers were still not available. I don't know any technical details, but more games will be played Friday because of it - and I hope because I'm in both tournaments there aren't scheduling issues or personal fatigue. I hope things are VERY smooth tomorrow.

This is what I don't understand. Internet was required, but it is still LAN apparently. We were able to login as well when Internet came back but LAN servers never came the following hours. There is no doubt in my mind though that it's going to be LAN tomorrow.

Well dm6 has basically always had to go in my opinion. It's not even worth discussing at this point.

As for tourney9, i thought the map was REALLY good from like Novemberish '09 --->April '10 (I'm giving a rough time period from memory). At the very beginning, spawns were very bad on the map. You could spam from center YA toward lg and get really good damage on the opponent off the spawn, as well as from plasma toward center YA spawn (when the spawn was basically on top of YA and there was only one spawn here). Then that was fixed, the lg location was moved and two center YA spawns existed instead of one and it wasn't that easy to spawnrape against a worthy opponent during this time period. Tourney9 was REALLY good until the messed up spawns, but it's still solid enough.

Yes, especially because it was new and it was such a raw map in that mix of 5 where you HAD to do certain things. Unlike other maps where you could hide and hide potentially. You could really impose your will on your opponent on t9 which was something i liked.

As for Battleforged, I posted my thoughts, and I think the map has potential, but it's too boring and straight forward. There simply isn't a lot of angles to attack the opponent or catch them off guard, and the fights are rather one dimensional but could probably be easily fixed.

Aerowalk I don't believe should be in the map pool because it's yet another old map. I don't believe really any maps should be in the map pool, but 5 completely new and good maps. We're clearly far away from that unfortunately.

If I was forced to choose Quakecon 2010's maplist to the IEM Season 4 maplist, I'd pick Quakecon's simply out of interest in variety.

Yeah, I think dm13 should have been the first or second map replaced for reasons that wouldn't surprise anyone.

I think old good CTF maps have a lot more replay value than old duel maps by the nature of the gametype. I had never played Japanese Castles before but I see why it was a fan favorite. The lack of an LG really makes the map, and there's a lot more teamwork required on this map than the average CTF map. Stonekeep is a very interesting map because of the way the bases are designed and how mid is basically meaningless. Of course quad comes but that makes mid important for about 10-15 seconds for Quad setup and post-kill quad-drop grabbing every 2 minutes. It's still early for stonekeep but my impression is that the map is awesome with the exception of the medkit water area which really slows the flow of the map. I think the CTF maps are the best maps for its respective gametype in Quake Live at this point.

Alexander "deus" Kinnaird has wanted revenge since your win last year over Fnatic in the CTF semifinals. What are your chances of repeating this year, and how will fnatic fair this time around?

I don't know how great of shape fnatic is in, but I saw they practiced a bit from Quake Live history. It's possible that Loaded could take them down. I'll be really interested to see that match and hope I will be able to. As for EG, I think our strategies are so adaptive and our team chemistry is so strong that we will have to make some serious blunders to not repeat. Regarding Deus's desire for revenge, I think the background noise to this comment is the seedings of last year. Our games were very close last year, and I would have his feelings of the overtime games went against EG's favor. He says this in a friendly way though, and I'm confident we'll defend our title.

He's a very strong player that you can't afford to make mistakes against. I know he stepped up a bit at ESWC by defeating rapha in groups, so he's capable of playing great games. I am just hoping to feel comfortable at the tournament with my setup and just feel good in general (awake and alert). I don't think it's really worth thinking about too much though as we both are veterans and know how each other plays. It's just going to come down to who is playing better this particular match.

Well, the removal of t9 definitely doesn't help as it was one of his lesser maps and arguably my best. I have a psychological trick that probably won't work (minor placebo), but I think in addition to of course focusing very hard and controlling the map better it may be enough to win. I'll reveal this trick whether I win or lose if anyone's interested :p.