I had completely forgotten about this draft until i stumbled upon it today. its a quake recap of the year 09, so what better time to releaseit than 1 year late? not exactly usefull now but maybe some people will enjoy reminiscing ;)

January:

The first QL duel cup of the year is run by LLL - newcomer bodzo wins the final against spart1e.

Q3 is still active aswell, the Q3 Nationscup kicks off, but is overshadowed by Zubich cheating in their first game against Austria. Shame on him and props to the qqc team for their strict punishment, a life long ban.

The e-sport journalist Carmac leaves SK-Gaming "heart-broken" for an, at this time, unknown future. In an interview with readmore.de he states the following concerns: "What if I wake up one day and realise that esports has become something that I no longer enjoy? What if all I have left to cover is Halo and a caricature of esports like the CGS?". As we all know by now, he will do his fair share to not let this happen and will help competitive Quake Live bigtime.

The ESWC decides to stick with Quake 3 as one of their 2009 games and nobody suspects that the company will go bankrupt before the Finals.
The final part of the extensive LLL interview with their star player fox is released, showing me that even as a fanboy there can be too much babble about one of my favorite players.


February:

The AGP announces to feature Quake Live as their only game in an interview with fragster.de. what can i say about this... well ... ;)

Clanbase spring signups open and nobody cares.

As a first sign of support for Quake Live, the ESL opens a european Ladder.

id Software announce that they hired cpma author arQon "to bring additional features to the game".
Hopefully arqon will come back from his year long vacation in 2010.

The ESL welcomes Carmac as product manager of the Intel Extreme Masters. "Comment #1 @ 01:24 CET, 26 February 2009 - By Nukm - bring ql in the masters series" :)

Quake Live goes open beta and can now be played by anyone who is willing to wait in the queue starting at position 21783 \o/
rep summarizes: "Hi. My name is Crash. I'm a total cunt and you will hear this message at least 5 more times before you realize there's no way past the training module. During that time your browser will hopefully crash twice sending you to the middle finger we call /queue.php. Have a horrible day and enjoy your aids."


March:

Cypher gets his own Razer mouse and is yet to been seen using it in an official tournament. meanwhile butcher_kgp "wont buy this piece of crap." and will wait "for rapha mouse with "enhanced 5 steps(TM)" technology and "Jesus(TM)" stamp of quality assurance."

The ESL announce Quake 3 as part of their 4th ESL Major Series.

The AGP Tour Site launches, you can still see how it looked back then by visiting [url="http://www.agptour.com/"]

Festival runs his first QL tournament at qlive.co.cc. the 128 Player Tournament is won by Fooki. Festival and his admin team will later change the name of their series of tournaments into #eqlt and in the end organize the most ql tournaments in 2009.


April:

Sad news for the community, Game-Services, the company behind ESWC is bankrupt. This is the end of one of the best and most prestigious tournaments series ever.

Fatal1ty sets the Guinness World Record for most frags in 60 minutes on dm17 in FFA. As if that itself wouldnt be ridiculously enough, Massman reports in the comments: "It wasn't the same players playing all 60mins. They switched seats every 10mins or so but all players were equally crap.
Any half-decent players could have stopped fat's record attempt. In theory the other FFAers could stop FFAing, work together and go strait for Fat. But they didn't do that.
Or just jump in void or delay respawns or other methods to prevent Fat getting any frags. But they didn't do that. They were easyfrags as required. But be aware that fat later the year explains that he is "not a douchebag"

As part of the stagnant of Quake Live development I will point out to the following reply by Syncerror to some criticism in the forum: "The coders and webcoders are working on restoring the leaderboards and adding private servers and all that comes along with said premium package. Separate coders are finishing up the Linux and Mac versions. Mappers are making new maps, both for playing and training. Most all of which will release soon." What sounded so good back then seems like mockery by now.

SK-Gaming release their ELO Ql ranking based of all matches played on quakelive.com. Later id software will ban them for causing the site to collapse. At #quakelive we get:
<@ TTimo> anyone know the little fucks at SK Gaming here
<@ TTimo> they CAUSED this
<@ TTimo> banning their IPs from our network again"


May:

Quake-Live.tv launches. The site continues to bring great Ql coverage through the whole year.

The Quake 3 TDM Nations Cup finishes. Russia gets beaten in the first Playoff round by Poland but fight their way through the Lower Bracket right to the Grand Final where they get beaten by France, who didnt lose a single match in the whole tournament. Scweden gets third. noctis releases a frag movies featuring the Austrian Team.

Bodzo joins SK-Gaming and (spoiler alert) doesnt go to a single LAN until he gets dropped from the SK roster later anyway, fail.

The Russians still dont have QL servers and continue to play Q3. In the Asus Spring Open 09
and beats Cooller in the Final to win ~229€. :(


June:

Finally id gives us some new maps - "6 Maps in 6 Weeks". Meanwhile rawgue visits the id offices and
Still, CA and CTF players can be pleased, Duel Players argue if they should be happy about their new old ztn and TDM gets left out.

stermy lessons


July:

Cypher wins the ESL EMS IV, the last European Q3 Tournament of 09. Meanwhile the ESL-TV Invitational starts and although it is online and with "only" 1000€ prizemoney the invited lineup makes this the first major QL Event of 09. For the first time i buy ESL-TV Premium.

mrks from Shaolin Production releases "Kaleidoscope", my favorite freestyle movie of this year. Soon after KOS releases f33l, my favorite Defrag movie of the year, featuring cpm and vq3 runs by w3sp.

QuakeCon announces $25,000 Duel Tournament and $22,000 CTF Tournament - great prizes, crappy distribution. Pros start practicing seriously while fans pray for decent coverage this year. My idea to "take 1000$ away from the prize pool and pay someone to code gtv" remains unheard ;)
t9 gets introduced to the competitive mappool and together with ca2 gets a lot of gets a lot scepticism.


August:

noctis beats fox in the wins the ESL-TV Invitational. and while fjorgyn wins 600€, people wonder how much his brother got for timing.

ESL announces Quake Live as part of the Intel Extreme Masters Season 4.

emoctis doesnt want to go to QuakeCon for free so fatal1ty sends k1llsen. Props to fat for this.

I missed QuakeCon because i was on vacation, so there is not much i can say about it. rapha shows that he also is the current #1 in QL, Dahang surprises and us fanboys are happy.

gamescon http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1739028

Ser posts some cool QL Player cartoons, i want more Quake fanart like this.


September:

IEM duel, ems tdm
http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1752076
http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1750395

"THE AGP HAS LAUNCHED: 24 TOURNEYS IN 09"

strenx wins the first $100 from Zotac. The weekly QL cup is probably the most important/successful tournament series by now.

October:

Oldschool comeback, Z4muZ is back, playing for xlo. \o/

gc dubai http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1770776
fox + cooller @ mouz