Hi there! My name is Martin 'wision' Cizek, I am 26 years old, currently living in Brno (Czech Republic) where I work as a developer. I started with Quake around 1997/98 when couple of my classmates took me to local internet cafe where you could also play some multiplayer games. Before I didn't really like FPS games, but when I tried Quake 2 multiplayer my mind was blown away. There were about 100 quakers in our city (total population: ~80k), so all we did was playing against each other on LAN. FFA from the start, and later 1v1 and 2v2. At the start I didn't really think that anyone else abroad our city was playing Q2, but when I discovered the scene on the internet I was amazed again. Seeing total strangers playing the same game in different style with their sick aim and incredible movement.. it was really awesome :). But due to poor internet connection I wasn't able to play online until 2002, so until then I was just playing with friends over lan and watching tons of demos. I never actually started to like Q3 so I sticked with Q2. Altho ocasionally I played some Clan Arena and CPM defrag. After I got to university in 2004, I could finally play anywhere in Europe thanks to 100mbit connection. After I got more into the community, I found a clan and started to play TDM. Since then I hate to play duels :). I always wanted to do something for the community, so in 2007 I became an admin and for about 4 years I was running almost every duel, 2v2 and tdm tournament in Quake 2. Even though I joined one of the best Quake 2 TDM clans [HBQ], skillwise I never really reached the top players. Unfortunatelly the community was getting smaller every year and around 2010, it kinda started to annoy me that in two weeks we were able to find only like one practise match so the game just stopped being interesting to me. In october, I started to play QuakeLive for slovakian clan zapAll. Being used to Q2 TDM helped a bit, but I was still really bad :), but great thing was that we could practise every day. In December 2010 I stopped playing Quake 2 and resigned from admin post. As we practised with zapAll more and more, we got kinda better and during 2011 we managed to win some lower division tournaments. But since I was used to play in top division in Q2, it wasn't really satisfying for me. Around summer 2011, two of my clanmates from Q2 (slonken and zorre) started to play QL and joined clan 4th dimension. That made me switch from zA to 4D, where I currently play. Unluckily we are not as active as I would like us to be :/

Q2 teamplay is much more positional than in QL. On some maps, there are positions where you literally just have to stay at the same place and hold the position (mostly RA positions), because otherwise you would lose that important item and it's much more difficult to claim the position back than in QL. That's probably because item spawn times are shorter compared to QL (armors 20 seconds and quad every minute for example). Also in QL you can make a group of 2/3/4 players just sticking together and moving through the map, getting frags and the items. That wouldn't really work in Q2 at all. In there if you don't hold the position, you don't get the item and you very likely lose the game.

I can't say I prefer one to another. After almost one year of inactivity in Q2, I tried to play some TDM with my old clan and it was still a lot of fun. In QL, when I got some grasp of how the TDM is played there, I found it enjoying as well. In the end it doesn't matter which one I play as long as I get to play with people who make it enjoyable for me.

Since we didn't really practise, I didn't expect us to win anything. My motivation was that I could meet some new people and to see some old faces again :). Also it feels like I have to show some support for Quake, and participating is that kind of support which Quake needs.

When I saw our group I began to think that we had a shot on advancing to playoffs. I expected 2:0 loss with 2K-ESC and 2:1 win against onfire. Sadly admins didn't let us practise until 1 hour before our first match, and it took like 30 minutes to set up the computers, so we didn't really perform as we hoped for. After our first map (Purgatory against 2K-ESC) we gained some confidence, but made some mistakes on second and third map (Deep Inside and Dreadful Place), so in the end we lost 1:2. Kos00 and me were traveling since like 4am, until 6pm and Kaide also traveled to Jönköping the same day, so we were all really tired. Add that to our disappointment from first match and you get the loss 0:2 against onfire. I believe that with some practise, we could get better results, but unluckily Kos00 is doing evening shifts every other week and Tony had connection problems before DHW, so we weren't really able to practise as much as we wanted.

The layout was as good as it could get. Admins did a great job with available resources and I don't understand how some people can blame them for the decisions they made. But of course the old saying still applies.. "You cannot please everyone". For myself I have to say that I was disappointed that we got to play only 2 matches. But that's really a problem caused by other players who decided not to participate.

Tournament-wise I had more fun in the summer, since I got to play more matches and we had much more time to practise and adapt to lan. As a spectator, the only matches which were enjoyable in both tournaments were the finals, since those were showed on big screen with shoutcast. Everything else we had to watch standing/sitting behind the players, which is not really that entertaining to me. Some screen showing current stream placed near the tournament area would be much appreciated for sure.

Overall, I had lot of fun! We went to the same hotel as in the summer and I also recommended it to couple of other players, so there were plenty of quakers around. I don't think I was ever bored over there or even went to sleep before 4-5am. Also the duel tournament we made on Sunday (after DH was already closed) was awesome. We had some drama, we had intense matches, we had couple of rapes and we had prizes. Actually it was much more fun than official DHW duel tournament :).
Yes, I definitely recommend it to everyone who is considering coming to DH. If you want to have some fun besides playing Quake, it is worth it as well.

We don't really play together at all. Before DHS'11 we didn't play a single practise match online and between DHS and DHW we played maybe 3 games together. We all have our own teams for online tournaments/leagues. For online playing, I don't think this is going to change, but as for some another lan tournament (Hello Stermy!), me and Tony will participate again very likely. Either it's going to be FFA team again, or we might split to different teams.

Actually, as far as I know, Czech team is going to play in the upcoming NC. I saw them practising already and I offered them that I could play if they weren't able to field 4 players, so we could avoid the same situation like in last NC, where Czech team didn't participate. Luckily they have 4 players already (krysa, fragma, flatecek, debtorr). I will play for Slovakia (I'm half Czech and half Slovakian, so I can play for either of those) with Jocko, MatoD, rindo, Kos00, drill. Looking forward to it!

As much as I hate being a captain (even in pickups), I managed to pick a good team with players I know (dubcat, rindo, tony, junkz), so it was actually fun to play the games. Bad luck was that we didn't manage to get Tony to play, so we lost our second match against dibbe's team. I'm quite sure we could reach top 3 otherwise.

The idea of draft is really good, so I'd like to see some more tournaments like that again. Since we got to see some really close matches in both (TDM and CTF) draft tournaments I think it was enjoyable for spectators too. The only problem for me as a player in the tournament was picking the teams, which was really a pain and that should be avoided somehow. Maybe teams could be picked automatically based on players' ratios on QLStats page, or just create hight/top/mid/low seeded groups of all the players and the teams could be randomly generated.

Even thought I usually try to be positive, my experience tells me that it is not going to get any better. Of course I would love to see TDM grow, but I think quake community is killing itself. At DHW'11 we spoke about it with Tony, Yellack and couple of other guys and we all kinda agreed on the same thing. People are just too lazy and they expect everything served to them on silver plate, without them doing anything for it. I will quote Yellack from his last interview: "People must realize that WE, THE COMMUNITY, keep this game alive! Less whine, more play, create teams etc etc.". It saddens me, that lot of players just don't realize this. This applies to whole Quake scene, not just TDM.

On the other hand, we still have dedicated people who run the tournaments, streamers & shoutcasters and many other people supporting the game in other ways. Because I come from Quake 2 scene, where we have much smaller player base, a lot less people taking care of the leagues/tournaments and literally no shoutcasters, I am really happy and grateful for what can QuakeLive scene offer to me, even in the current state.

Thank you too! Greetings to all the quakers.