Hi szr. Let’s start with the standard introduction about you in real life.
Hello, my name is Joe Hargreaves better known to you guys as 'szr' which stands for 'seizure' by the way :p. I am a 20 year old computing student from north west England and I recently completed the 2nd year of my degree course. I will be starting my 3rd and final year in September.

Tell us about your Quake career from when you started until today.
My Quake career started in December 2006 with Quake 4. I immediately fell in love with it, I just loved the game play mechanics and the movement, I also liked the competition it had. I continued playing Quake 4 until late 2008, which is when it basically died out, this made me stop playing for a while and drop the game. After a period of not playing any computer games whatsoever I decided to try QL, this was in 2010 and I've been playing actively ever since. Although I've been playing actively, I feel like I've never really focused on duel as much as I should, I think this is mainly because it requires you to put in a lot of effort and to always stay fully focused, so I've ended up playing CA most of the time. Having said that, after this cup, I will probably start playing more duels and see how it goes :)

In a couple of sentences, explain to a noobie the beauty of dueling.
Quake duel is such a pure game type, in my opinion it is the biggest challenge of your FPS skills you can find in any game, there are so many ways you can win a duel and every game is totally different. To be good at duel you need to have a combination of good aim, tactics, movement, positioning and map knowledge. The great thing about it is that you will always have room for improvement and it will keep you entertained even after playing for years.

According to your map distribution, you seem to dislike Lostworld and love Bloodrun. Does this just reflect how easy it is to find opponents in these maps, or is this connected to your play style?
You would be right in your assumption that I dislike Lost World xD, I think the main reason for this is that I find it can be very slow and dull to play and really easy for people to +back and win with a very small lead. I prefer Bloodrun as it allows you to play any style you want, it's not an overly aggressive map but aggressive play is definitely more successful on Bloodrun than in Lostworld.

Pretend you are the king of QL for the next 4 months. Both in the interest of players and spectators, replace 2 maps from the current map pool (ztn, dm13, t7, tox, aero) with different maps. Describe your choices and try to motivate why this would be good.

Firstly I would replace dm13 with either dm6 or Hektik because I think games on dm13 can be very dull from spectators point of view, like for example when it's 0-0 for 10 minutes followed by 3 overtimes zzz... The 2nd map I would replace is probably t7, although I don't really know what I would replace it with, it sounds silly but probably some new map which hasn't been created yet because everything else is either too old and overplayed or just not a suitable duel map for both spectators and players.

How did you and sirax come up with QLRanks?
Hard to say really, it was just a light bulb moment I guess. I was thinking about the way QL lacks a ranking system then it just occurred to me how easy it would to just scrape the info from QL's website and create a ranking system based off that data, independent of id's input. Around a week or so after coming up with the idea, I mentioned it to sirax and he agreed that it was a great idea so we instantly started poking around on quakelive.com deciding how we would go about making it, we discussed it for the rest of that night and we thought of more and more cool ideas which could be done with it, we were really excited about the whole thing and coding started literally the next day.

How is the project doing right now?
The project has been an overwhelming success. The site now runs on its own dedicated server along with the crawlers which means everything runs a lot smoother than it has done in the past. Sirax and I have been quite busy in the past few months preventing us from adding new things to the site, however we are currently working on some cool stuff which we hope to be releasing soon :P

Many of the top players seem to have played ~8000 duels or more. If this were a regular 9am to 5pm job, 5 days per week, it would take approximately 7 months and a half to reach that count. We know that, in reality, to start from scratch today and reach the top, it would likely take much more time. So, is this amount of play-time really necessary to reach the top? Is there anything, in terms of tools, community interaction, or training practice that would reduce this time investment?
There are many factors which will either make or break you in terms of reaching the top, no matter who you are, there is no getting out of the fact that you will always need to put in the time and effort into gaining sufficient knowledge of the game and maps etc, however I do not believe there is a magical number of duels that you must have played to reach the top. If you have the talent, it might happen in 2000 duels, if you don't then even 100,000 may not be enough. Of course community interaction and a good solid training regime will help to speed the learning process up but if you don't have the talent then you are just going to hit a wall and never reach the top.

Say that, in the next Quake, they would make the item spec bar available in game, ultimately killing the necessity of timing in your head. Say that, you still would have to show up, for the item time being displayed. What would be your reaction?
I think it would be a shame as you are essentially dumbing down the game and taking skill out of it, however just because the game would be more simple it doesn't mean that it can't be competitive, it would definitely be a sacrifice I would be willing to make if it helped to drive fresh players into the Quake scene and grow its player base. At the moment most people are instantly put off Quake due to the sheer amount of time it takes to learn the game compared with most others.

Any shout out or last word for this interview?
I don't particularly have any shout outs but I would like to thank you guys for putting the time and effort into organising this cup and I hope I can bring my best performance to all of the games I play.