First of all I'd like to say that I'm quite new to the whole quake community, so most of you will probably have never heard of me. This however shouldn't restrict my opinion on certain recent announcements regarding Dreamhack Winter 2011.

Like a couple of you, I recently switched to Quake, and QuakeLive in particular since I got bored of another game called ET (which happens to be an id Software production aswell). I became pretty active around may/june, which was right around the time Dreamhack Summer 2011 was being played. While I was still getting to know the scène, the top players and browsed through a couple of memorable _i am talking it_ interviews, it was a real joy to follow my first QL event. Especially the QL duel event made my draw drop. Seeing all of the top players compete at the highest level during one single weekend made me realise what enormous amount of experience, aim and especially gamesense somebody needed to even compete on this level.

Now, just 4 months later, QL's future seems pretty uncertain. Even though the Dreamhack crew probably did quite some effort to be able to provide a TDM tournament, it's just not the same. After duel being dropped by IEM & ESCW, it seems like one of the last resorts, besides Quakecon, has (without even maybe fully realising) given up on duel, and if it wasn't for the TDM tournament on Quake itself. Don't get me wrong, I strongly admire all the work people and organizations put into getting all of the sponsors, prize money, setups and stuff like that but it just feels like QL really needed this. Some of you (especially the more experienced players I pressume) are probably great supporters of TDM, but as a fairly new player I've noticed that the gametype doesn't really appeal to new users. A couple of people, including me, did watch the TDM stream and except for the few quad rushes, none of us really enjoyed watching the games.

Watching quake legends like Cooller & Cypher battle it out mano-a-mano in a bo3 just seemed more enjoyable to watch. Just knowing how much history some of these players have gives it a magical touch. Especially if you throw in a couple of other amazing players like rapha, strenx, avekk,. you name it. This would be the main reason why (hopefully) a lot of you were and still are dissapointed that Dreamhack Winter 2011, showmatches aside, will not feature a duel tournament. Especially with a couple of players coming back like tox and czm, and people stepping up their game like strenx I feel like now isthe perfect time to organize a duel tournament.

How desperate and ridiclous some of you may find my wall of text, I think we should come up with a couple of ideas to ensure DHW 2011 will host a duel tournament. Why not ask some of the "leaders" of the ql community to step up to the plate and maybe try to reason with the Dreamhack crew? Why not ask some, if not all of the top players, to show how they feel about the recent announcements? Why not ask a skilled moviemaker to create a DreamHack Winter Quake Live Hype video, like the one was made for TDM and show how vibrant QL duel can really be? And as a last resort, we might even contact id Software to finally do something about this game, since quake is part of their company history. Even though that last one is probably a long shot.

I myself am too much of a newschooler to think of what may be the solution here. For the meantime I'll just be hoping for a couple of serious respones on how we can all see rapha +backing, cypher ninja'ing, strenx LG'ing and cooller coollering their way to Jönköping in a bit more than one month...