not saying that those participating in the open duel are noobs, actually far from that, but compared to the duel master tournament, where it's the pinnacle of quake skills, well, in fact, no possible comparison :p
Only one American in top4 so even if Cypher loses it's hardly domination.
Kind of disapointed about ctf though. Feels like eu teams weren't prepared as well as us for these new maps.
EU CTF kind of has too much of a TDM or duel mentality. Maybe the problem is just the cost of traveling to Qcon, but look at how many of the EU players are pure CTF as their main gametype. Maybe 4 of 10? (Linkin, Gerppa, Exodus, Silencep... that would be a cool team btw.) In the NA teams it's reversed. Even Rapha has been playing CTF pickups since day 1, and while I wouldn't really call Z4 a CTF player, he's played in leagues and Qcon CTF since like 2000.
Afaik even the players you mentioned have been playing mainly tdm for years. I've never been into ctf but I think it's as dead as tdm in US. Someone better informed should comment on that.
I only meant statistics. If at QuakeCon there are like 10x more US players than EU, it's just more likely that they will take top places. There's a bit of randomness, everyone can have worse match or bad luck.
"but rapha did win" Oh yes, he did win... ctf on infinity :) First solid def, then a cap when it was needed, finally stopped ukn last quad run.
Not really dominating. 1 US player in the Top 3 for masters and 1 will place 3rd for open. The CTF side of things unk will be competing for 3rd place and only 2 out of 15 teams were from eu in the tourney. It comes down to home field advantage plays a huge part in these events (jetleg & time difference is huge when your talking about the amount of focus these guys play with). It makes it all that more impressive when a American players when a DH or a eu player wins @ qcon.
Duel side is not that surprising (aside from ppl expecting rapha bring where dahang is atm)
Ctf is a surprise for the euros though, pretty sure ppl were expecting exp and especially unk to win easy because of the ppl thinking "qcon ctf never had real teams last years, our real ctf'rs would win np!" :D
Personally I was expecting this because both euros teams seemed a bit overrated, for different reasons, and I suspected that the US teams would pick New Cerberon vs them on top of that.
it's a european colony gg no re possibly 10,000 comment shitstorm mebe not hehe who cares about nationalities these days except kids n tards with identity crisis gl c u
go dahang!
Edited by quake is potat at 04:09 CDT, 19 July 2014
having duel all on one day can lead to weird results. I've seen pros have a few bad days, especially in group stage when they just get there and warm up and get used to the tables and chairs. it's weird to see rapha lose like that, but at the same time if you consider it's all on one day, it kind of makes sense. if you didn't get a lot of sleep or don't feel well, it's over. had duel gone on over two days, I think some results would of been different
most players get there maybe a day earlier, regardless sometimes you just get very poor sleep. from travelling, time zone changes, anxiety for the next day, noisy hotel/roommates, a lot can happen. it's why one day for a whole event is rough and I feel for players like shane. not because he lost, but because he had one day to play all duel matches. all it takes is feeling a little under the weather and it can be horrible.
Hasn't it basically always been in terms of the top 20 quake players of any era that 90 percent of the list is euros then you've always had an american or two at or near the top?
impossible to make a top 20 list of the early q3 eras. there were too many players back then and too few big tournaments.
americans held their own in duel tho
Yeah, but before quake 3 there were no international tournaments, really. Outside of that one Lakerman won in quakeworld. I don't think Thresh ever competed in any international tournament, no? Should Thresh be credited on being a world class champion in quake 1 and 2 like he usually is?