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CPL Europe

Tuesday, 19 June 2001 -
Golden Challenge Network Eggs ? $comment_count ?>
As for learning stupid tricks, first I'd like to thank Prong an Mugwump for giving me the tips which finally let me "get" bunny hopping the other night. I can fly pretty good now on e4m3, but only in one direction in a circle. Until I can learn how to switch directions I'm afraid it will do little to help my game at all.

Having access to the Challenge Network means a programmer can always try some new things, pretty much whatever weird idea comes around. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in a whole bunch of half-finished things around the network (probably most of which were started by me), but alot of things go along without ever being announced. So unless you check Challenge-World frequently enough that you catch every headline in the 12-hour or so window that it shows up on there, there's a good chance there are a couple of things around the network you may have missed, no matter how much you look around. This column will just highlight a few things which you may find interesting, or even halfway useful.

The Player Index was recently updated with results from CPL Holland (Except for the money totals). It's exceedingly clear that this year's money list will be pretty anemic by last year's standards, and unfortunately the future doesn't look bright for individuals to make a large amount of money anytime soon...

After looking at the Csports.net player rankings, I thought a much better system could be developed by taking into account more tournaments than just CPL tournaments. Since I have access to the Player Index, by far the most complete list of records, I wrote up a few algorithms which came up with a ranking list using all that information.

To come up with these ranks, I looked at the 2 ranking systems I thought were most appropriate for Quake duels, namely the Golf World Rankings and Tennis Rankings, and I took concepts away from each I thought were appropriate. Each system weights tournaments differently depending on how important it is, and the competition involved, and each award the high winners the vast majority of the points, bothe of which I did. Here are a few rules I used to ake the ranks:

See here for tourney results used

1. Babbage's and Razer/CPL received a pool of 250 points, CPL Europe and the WCGC in Seoul received 200, and then from there everything else received much less. CPL Asia was about 150, CPL Pacific a little less, the Battletop Qualifiers around 100 each, as well as Lan Arena and a few others. Female Events got a whopping 60 points.

2. The winner received 40% of the points, 2nd place 25%, 3rd place 15%, and then on down. ( I took these proportions from Golf), In general, points were awarded down to about the top x bracket, with x about equal to 20% of the points (Tennis).

3. Only the last 20 months were included (bye bye Frag 3), and points in the last 10 months counted double. This is also from Golf, which uses 12 months and 24 months, but I figured things change a little quicker in the Quake world, so the time horizon should be shorter.

4. You had to be in two events to be included. If I left this out, some weird things popped up, like Death had 80 points, and mojo was top 5. I didn't think this was accurate or fair, and the results fit much better by including this rule.

5. Tennis has all kinds of "bonus" points for doing certain things, like if you beat a top 5 player, you get a big bonus, and even beating other ranked players gets a little bonus, no matter how low they are. It would be nice to do something like this, but way too complicated.

On Challenge-TV's home page there's a "Question of the Day" thing that has been there for awhile. I programmed it to be available to all the sites, and allow easy customizable content for each country, but I never got around to announcing it.

dk is always adding new shiet into the demo db. Lots of StarCraft replays now, and he is assisting CHiNX of Challenge-HL with sending up some DMC demos.

Challenge is home of Promode, the Way Quake 3 Should Have Been (tm), but there are also a couple of other cool mods which make their home here. Bullit haunts Challenge-HL and is constantly improving the AG mod (Half-Life's only competition mod), and the Pigmod guys (who are making the voteable CS options mod) have decided to take up hosting at Challenge-CS.

A few weeks ago I moved another service over from Gamershome, a "Make Your Own Game Server Monitor" thingamajig. It has hardly been advertised, but word of mouth is spreading and a few new accounts are made on it daily from all over the world. Death, the talented artist from New Zealand has made a new, slick design for it to replace my l33t orignal design, and as soon as I can integrate it in it will be "announced".

We breifly considered offering lan party listings. It was inspired by Ausgamers, but was going to include all kinds of cool little features before it petered out.

Stayne is a really cool guy (everyone I have met in real life has turned out that way) and somehow I managed to get the owner of Shod.com to kindly let us run the DNS for the domain, which is really, realy cool for anyone who has been around long enough to remeber all the past incarnations of SHOD. Stayne says another release of his new master-of-the-universe app is right around the corner.

The Malaysians rock. They recently put up a CS money list and CS rankings for Malaysia. And I know you should be careful what you wish for, but I kind of wish stuff like this happened around my homwtown.

I have been talking to Oogly FOREVER too, so since he is so cool he is a Really Special Affiliate and gets his own little Maple Leaf Flag on World's front page. I mean, where in the hell else are you going to go for Canadian news?

Here's some other things you shouldn't miss too, but you may have:

Agent made a file section on Challenge-TV, and that pipe is pretty fat.

Annouc makes me want to live in Spain. Again.

Here in Alabama, we like nothing more than to watch "The Strip" against Miami over and over again. Online, nothing beats reading about the good old TGI.

I almost forgot....

There was a new Links link put up awhile ago, it has links to releveant competitive gaming news sites around the globe.

And last, a Help Wanted page is up because well, we are in need of lots of help around heya.