Long story short:

I have a buddy who is a licensed partners of ESL in my country.

He's doing cups, running ladders and stuff like that. As you may know, ESL provides (at least in my opinion, hence why I have a regular job and do not bother with e-sports) next to nothing in return.

So, back in 2009 me and my buddy finally managed to get in contact with TTimo and get him to install and configure the infrastructure needed to become a Quake Live provider or whatever it is called.

To do that one needs decent hardware, good ISP and power. All of which translates to one thing - money. Hard earned cash. You may be surprised but cash do not grow on trees and no, donkeys in my country do not shit money which is why we don't have many of that around here.

So, for a time it was cool and all - we did get servers and I was happily doing my part. Unfortunately, the only way to spawn servers is to become an ESL fellow or something, and get access to a private IRC channel on QuakeNet. No problem, we did that while scratching our heads on WHY there is no web interface to do this shit. I guess the lack of this web interface is part of the reason why regular Quake Live players are still not able to pay for their own servers.

Anyway, I was doing my thing and it was cool but more than once I've been upset by ESL's admins trying to enforce their rules and regulations, accusing me of breaking those. Here comes the funny part and the reason I am writing all of this bullshit.

My buddy pays real money for hardware, power, room for said hardware and connectivity. Yet, he's only allowed to spawn private server exclusively for tournaments. Being an ESL franchise partner, he's fine with that and I was too, until it got me - why the hell are we doing this shit? ESL do provides nothing, nothing for the service, except a few volunteers playing the role of admins. Well, thing is we don't really need those people to do tournaments. I get to write the news, I do the brackets, I answer all questions, I maintain the servers - I run this shit and see no real benefit of these admins.

Yet, they are allowed to say 'ooooops, seems like you're spawning an unauthorized server for private needs. use gather instead' when I do it. I only did it once, but wtf?

Mentally, I am not far from buying my own hardware, taking it some friendly ISP I have worked with before, and contacting TTimo. It's not pennies but it's not a ton of money. This way I will provide the crowds with a service that's free for them, while doing tournaments from time to time and hosting a private my needs server a few times a month. I don't want to be that evil admin playing God or anything. Not at all.
The only thing that stops me from doing is ESL again. Why should I bother with these guys when I am the paying for the whole show?

On top of that, the service provider do not get to put banners on the site or in-game. So what's there for him? Well, pretty much nothing as organizations like ESL (name any other please) do get the control on the service while you're left with a bitter taste in your mouth. That's pretty amazing.

It's true that id Software's plan was to grow a user base and introduce a premium service but this shit isn't coming any time soon.

Uh, any thoughts on this one? I would love to hear from SyncError.

p.s. I wrote all of this crap at once and I will not bother reading it, checking for errors and stuff like that. My english suck. Boohoo.