By noon on Day 2, we were truly live with our first piece of tournament coverage: 2GD and Joe started us off with sparks vs proZaC. Coverage continued for the next few hours in a disjointed manner. As soon as we had something to cover, we were covering it. coL|dkt vs EG|chance hit the stream. A bit later, Jehar and I finally got on the mics to cover a TRILL vs 403 CTF blowout followed by Team proZaC vs FILP. In homage to their now-under-house-arrest team leader, team proZaC tagged up as "nude." To clarify: nudity was not the key reason why proZaC was ejected from QuakeCon despite the many speculations, though I suppose it was certainly a factor. The public also didn't get the full story on Lo3, but it's not my place to say exactly what went down. I'll leave that to QuakeCon staff or the pimp himself to make clear.

The final CTF match of the day was between two North American greats: QUAD vs compLexity. We rounded out the day with one more duel match: fnatic stermy vs EG|DaHanG. By then, the LAN gods were done smiling on us and players were fed up with some hiccups that were cropping up in their games.

At id Software’s request, we took a break after stermy and DaHanG to get two huge projected displays set up at the tournament viewing area at QuakeCon, which seated around 200 attendees. The idea was to have the center screen filled with the broadcaster’s perspective and the screens on each side act as POVs for each player in a duel, or dedicated to the Red or Blue team for CTF. Doing so delayed the event by about 20 minutes because the machines providing these projected displays were not yet set up and did not have Quake Live on them.

By the time we were got everything working, the tournament LAN troubles made competitive play impossible. The players tried their luck anyway, but connection issues thwarted what began as an extremely epic and aggressive match between QLTV community favorite vamp1re and the Aussie legend DanDaKing.

Throughout the day, we had tons of "logo time." While extremely unfortunate, during those times, there wasn't much to cover. As many have pointed out--and it is one of my largest regrets--we didn't use the stream to keep viewers updated on the delays or try to keep them in the loop on what was coming up next. Part of that was because every person on the QLTV team was trying to pitch in to assist with the technical issues. Even so, we understand how this was extremely frustrating for the viewers trying to stay in the loop, and it's at the top of our list for improvements, right next to doing away with s-video video capture cards.

We also didn't yet have our interviews rendered because the video rendering was being done on a laptop now that our video editing rig was being used for streaming. Additionally, during those down-times, QL either wasn't available or net hiccups were keeping duelers at bay. These problems, unique to the tournament network, were later discovered to be caused by the network hardware in the tournament machines themselves.

That problem was fairly easy to solve. The overall network issues surrounding DNS resolution were far more difficult to pin down.

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