In the Crosshairs: ETQW Competition Round-up With a Side of ETQWPro

I thought I’d start this blog update with a quick look at something that I’ve neglected to cover until now, a mod. This isn’t the much vaunted Wheels of War that you will have seen around the ETQW Community Site, nor the upcoming Official Competition Mod but rather a mod that has already been heavily integrated into the Quake Wars competition scene: ETQWPro.

Made by a collection of programmers from the ETQW competition scene, ETQWPro modifies the basic game to enhance it for competition play, adding the sort of features and gameplay changes many players feel are needed for tournament play. The team behind the mod includes former PigMod creator Blaze and Ultraviolet Productions‘ frag movie guru Hannes.

Initial versions of ETQWPro aimed to enforce the Community Rule Set, a unified rule set created by the European scene’s top leagues and clans for consistency between tournaments. However, as the mod has grown and added more and more features, it is actually influencing competition rules as much as it is applying them, helping to introduce changes like weapon limits, spectator locking and adjusted weapon spread. As a result, the mod has become standard among competitions in Europe and is slowly being adopted in the US scene.

Despite some members of the community arguing that mods like ETQWPro change too much of the standard ETQW gameplay experienced on most servers, there seems to be little that will halt this mod’s progress, and the team behind it is willing and able to make changes to some aspects of the game that we at Splash Damage don’t always agree with them on.

Now on to more regular news and a round up of the various leagues and cups as they stand at present.

In the US season one of the TGL’s 5v5 Infantry Ladder has ended with FATE victorious. They beat Team Silent Service in the final and they’ll no doubt be hoping to repeat this success in season two of the TGL 6v6 Ladder which has just started.

I’ve also recently discovered a new competition in the States, namely season one of the TWL ‘No Heavies’ League. This league is kind of a half-way house between the infantry only ladders and ‘regular’ six versus six play as no heavy vehicles are allowed, players are only able to use the Icarus, Husky, one Armadillo or one Hog. It will be interesting to see how this works and if its rule set becomes widely popular.

Elsewhere in the US, season two of the CAL Open Division for ETQW is underway with the first round of games having been played. I’m pleased to see MegaUberSuperEuroMix managed to win their first match 4-0 against The United Force and the likely showdown between the European mix team and FATE in this league is also something worth looking forwards to.

Back here in Europe the GameStar Liga is down to just seven teams after multiple drop outs. How the tournament proceeds from here is unclear, but it looks as if there may well be a change of format for the remainder of the event.

Over at Clanbase the EuroCup and OpenCup have both entered the play-off stages. Four Kings, VAE.ETQW, Wiechury and default are the last four teams in the EuroCup winners bracket, having forced insidiae Team (replacing Team Infinity), inFerno eSports, n!facutly and Geh aB Clan down into the lower bracket. The double elimination format means all of these teams are still in with a shot of winning the cup, though.

In the OpenCup Premier Division eight teams have made it to the play-offs. These are Team CoolerMaster, mortus, sGs, 1stCav, Cearbearclub.fi, Devilheart, HAIPINGERZ (a US mixed team) and Undisputed Clan Poland. Many of these teams will be hoping success here will win them a shot at next season’s EuroCup.

So that’s it for another blog entry. I’ll most likely be back in the coming weeks with another review of the world of ETQW eSports, if I’m not I’ve no doubt the office overlords will be after my giblets for Stroyent!