CPL Signups End Friday

gnoos writes "The BBC is reporting that this month gamers will get the chance to compete in a $1M tournament. The CPL World Tour will stage a 'Pop Idol type competition' to find competitors for the world's most lucrative tournament, and signups end on Friday." We've previously reported on this tournament and the decision on a game.

Comments

shhhh. don't bother us.

[AtariAmarok]

we're playing Halo.

Re:shhhh. don't bother us.

[cipher uk]

Halo is old. you should get with the times. ;)

I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.thecpl.com/worldtour/

is less informative than a 404...

Painkiller? Anyone know why not UT2004?

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

mostly because ut2k4 sucks. Trolling aside, I'd bet a licensing issue. PK is by a new company that wont try to screw CPL over on licensing, unlike Quake and Unreal. On top of that, PK was made to be competitive, specificly in the area that CPL is looking for: Duels. The guy(rxr) that made/maintains the major QuakeWorld competitive mod (KombatTeams Pro) was hired on to painkiller to oversee the multiplayer development, as a result you get a fun and not too unbalanced game. In comparison, UT was meant for 16+ player crazy FFAs above all else, and thus doesnt scale down right for duels.

I could have sworn they announced Doom3 as their world tour game, but maybe that fell through (Or the article is just wrong). I remember watching some PK duels on the big projectors last cpl, but I doubt theyd make it the main event.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[drinkypoo]

being surprised that doom3 is not the choice is silly anyway. why not a game that people can actually play? From what I understand I have enough machine to play doom3 only poorly and I have a 2 gigahertz AMD processor and a geforce4. Obviously I haven't spent any money on it in a while but it seems silly to me to require more machine than this. If I had been spending my time gaming instead of watching tv (entirely recordedd) or going to school or going to work I might have spent more money on it. Either way I'm not the proper material for this kind of thing... I take orders poorly and in the course of one match I tend to vacillate between brilliance and being a complete schmuck, like jumping right on top of a nade or something. But regardless there are better gamers than I am out there with less PC and it doesn't make sense to use a game that some of them can't really even play.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

It does though. Who pays these crazy prizes? Sponsors. For CPL, thats Intel and Nvidia (and to a lesser extent, hitachi, and some other smaller companys). Intel and Nvidia would both be better off if you were stuck upgrading your machine to play the game, so they'd push for the competition to choose, say, Doom3 over QuakeWorld.

And for the record, all tournament matches are done on official CPL machines, not your own. The only thing you use your machien for at cpl is the giant BYOC lan, although your point still stands for all the times you're playing the game that isnt the big matches in a tourney.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[drinkypoo]

I assumed that it was the case that the matches are done on official systems. I'm just talking about people having a proficiency with the game to begin with. It's hard to get good at a game that doesn't play well on your system.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

While I fully agree with you, I don't think thats the real problem. The real problem is modern games just arnt as good competitively as the ones we've been playing for 5-8 years. I think people would upgrade if a game came along that revolutionized everything..but its just not happening. Doom3 is kind of fun to watch, but it can become a boring shadow camping game.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[Antony.S]

It's actually because Angel Munoz is a crackpot who thinks choosing a game the massive majority doesn't like or want to play will mean more casual players will stand a remote chance. The only real competition at the WT will be between who has more of the top spots, UT2004 or Q3 players. The only PK player likely to get a top 8 will be Vo0.

To put this in perspective, there are currently 3892 UT2004 players, 3449 Q3 players and 45 Painkiller players online (ASE stats). The day after PK was announced to be the WT game PK peaked an alltime high of 80 players, it averages 20-40 players now.

Yes I am biased, but honestly, CPL would of done better picking Serious Sam 2. Even Quakers defend UT as a better choice than Q3.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction, "Even Quakers defend UT as a better choice than PK."

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

The problem with that is thats only concurrent players. PK is a duel game.. you play for 10 minutes, then its over, no reason to idle around on the server.

I really think DCI(makers of PK) paid CPL, but I have no proof, so I didnt really mention it before.

Regardless of game though, I am just glad we're moving away from CS/CoD/othe team based games. Getting 5 people flown around the country + hotel fees is expensive. Sponsoring 5 people for the above is equally costly and more risky. In a 1v1 competition, sponsoring someone with a single plane ticket and hotel room becomes much easier so you'll be able to see more players attend. Its also a lot easier to watch a 1vs1 (one of those projectors they used in summer for each player) than having some guy randomly pick someone to follow on the left screen with HLTV overview on the right (Or as they ended up having it in the quarterfinals.. same person on both screens in third person.. gotta love that.)

It might be easier if CS was maintained by people that actually play it, so you'd see stuff like QuakeWorld ( And I believe quake3) has like MultiView support (split screen in the same client.

Re:I've seen many annoyingly useless sites but

[KDR_11k]

The explaination posted on Beyond Unreal is pretty much saying that Epic didn't pay the CPL enough. AFAIK the same reason was given for dropping Doom 3.

Note that DreamCatcher is just the publisher of Painkiller, the game was made by People Can Fly.

Source of funding.

[ET_Fleshy]

Weren't these the guys that made that documentary about proffesional gaming (http://www.legaltorrents.com/index.php?fuse=29). No wonder they can afford to give out such an outrageous sum of money just to find a few new players to join their clan. Whatever happened to hosting some scrim matches over a few weeks and picking the best that played to save yourself A Million Dollars!

The post should read ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The UK clan Four Kings will stage a 'Pop Idol type competition'..."

The clan is staging the competition to find some Painkiller players to represent them at the world tour. The CPL World Tour itself isn't 'Pop Idol' based.

Million Dollars

[djdavetrouble]

Isnt this all just promotional activity and shilling for PainKiller, which I have never heard of until now (don't own a PC, play bzflag and nethack, don't care about also ran FPS games)......

in the market

[Sv-Manowar]

$500,000 to the first one to develop and aimbot thats undetectable ;)