The Crossfire Challenge 5 is officially alive and kicking, players and admins are starting to arrive in Enschede and here on Crossfire if you're not attending we plan to rub your nose in what you're missing out on!

Firstly here is a small trailer of what has gone before at the previous CC editions, You can watch the CC5 trailer here.[/b]

Secondly the coverage is well under way! Externally Cadred have published their preview of the event you can follow all of their CC5 coverage HERE, they'll be sending Max Silver & Sidney Klinker to the event to cover the action. Benelux based sites TeK9 & Low Land Lions will also be on site covering the event.

Internally the Crossfire coverage has begun, Nellie has broken down the ET winners and statistics for you to drool over and I have made a tournament prediction column asking the question who will win CC5?

You can follow the event live here on Crossfire, livestreamed by QuadV and on ETTV courtesy of GamesTV.org. You can also watch the WZZRD TV Webcam stream and http://en.justin.tv/wzzrdtv

The latest version of the Schedule for CC5 can be found Here THIS IS A NEW SCHEDULE, ATTENTION TO ALL COD PLAYERS: New Format offering more matches for you, please check it. Some minor ET changes also.

UPDATE: The rules for the tournament are also now available. They can be found here.

We also have a telephone link to the Crossfire team on site, for use only in situations where urgent contact with the admin team is required, for example if you are unable to find the LAN centre or likely to be late for a game. The number is +31202224026.

Sit back and enjoy :)

Over in Italy this past weekend, the Call of Duty 4 community has been doing battle for a sizable cheque. With many local Italian teams in attendance there was a large field and potentially a few obstacles for bigger teams to overcome, however there were familiar faces in the final.

ButtonBashers had waltzed through the winner bracket only Spanish side Overcame giving them any trouble by forcing overtime, after that point they were waiting for the scenes more established teams to fight it out between them in the loser bracket with Fatgames & CrackClan making it to the LB Final, Fatgames won that battle and looked avenge their winner bracket loss to the Dutch, but were unable to change the outcome second time around.

You can read more about Gamerland and see the full bracket on Cadred.org

ButtonBashers - €6000
Fatgames - €3000
CrackClan - €1500
4th Speedlink - €800
6th Cubesports & Dignitas €500

As previously announced, this Sunday is the CC5 CoD4 seeding tournament. The tournament will kick off in #cc5.seeding on Sunday afternoon at 18:00 CET, so can teams make sure they have a representative in there at that time.

The general jist of the tournament is to get our CC5 seeds as accurate as we can make them. So performance in the tournament will be our gauge for that and seeds will be a direct correlation. We will run a 16 team (meaning some byes) double elimination tournament with some minor pre-seeding. This tournament WILL NOT finish, We don't want to know who wins it and will stop at 4th place. The format will be Best of 1, Max Rounds 12 and will be run by myself and Morg.

Any questions, send me an email to tosspot at gmail dot com.

Overload have wasted no time in replacing their former Belgian ET team with a German one, yup you guessed it the familiar faces of Humm3L and Fireball will be at CC5 after all! The lineup is not yet complete as they are missing their 6th player however for the time being, here is there lineup:

humM3L
fireBall
criatura
z3ro
ScaTmaN_
tba

humM3L gave crossfire the following statement:

Quote

Well after we saw the scandal of the belgium guy's , it was our chance to go to the crossfire challenge 5. We not missed the last 3 edition's and im really happy and glad to go under the name of OVERLOAd and im aswell glad to be back in et once again. Crossfire competitions without humM3L and fireBall are like xmas without presents

Overload's ET team have tonight confessed to the allegations of cheating posed at them. The rumour mill had them faced with being busted via the next upcoming 'bust list' from Killerboy, and when confronted by Crossfire with that evidence they came clean.

In a statement they said they wanted to make a point to the community that anyone can cheat and that it is the lowest thing to do. The players implicated (though confessions have at the moment only come from vila & zeto) are - acid, vila, zeto, jetro lio & kevin.

All players implicated will be banned from CC5 and site bans according to the CF rules.

Some updated points for you on all things CC5. We've got a semi-completed payment list, some prizemoney changes and a reminder on the seeding tournament plus some later opening hours.

Firstly the payment list:

[bET (23 Teams)[/b]]

Fully Paid:

AoW, muse, VAE, overload, fatgames, kursor, charism, buttonbashers, FiF, ZeroE, randoms, epic-fail, MAZZ, epsilon, Mamut, decibel

Partially Paid:

aToon - 5 - Chosen, eim, heroin, draq, FimS
desire - 5 - k2k, sinus, bruceh, keeji, karnaj
dispo - 5 - mama, alexl*, wizzel*, savage*, unix*
Anticlimax - 4 - nunca, flashy, kosk, dio
kruger - 4 - bizzy, Aquila, Juif, Mirage
Copyright - 3 - Shakozor, Para, Jesse*

* = Proof of payment sent, money yet to be received.

(Whilst money hasn't been received, contact has been made with re-play (the one with lazio and nos, not the one with kot))
[bCall of Duty (14 teams)[/b]]

Tempus Moriendi, Suxus/team-e3, buttonbashers, team i'm, cubesports, dignitas(!), reason, ATS, ampol, H2k(!), Komacrew(!), Speedlink(!), VAE(!), Fatgames

(!) = Management confirmation of attendance, but money yet to be received.
[bUnidentified[/b]]
Enscription
Ruttger Van GOG nl
Sans
M Jonathon robinne

Secondly as a result of the payment list I'm moving 500 Euro across to ET, leaving the prizepurse at CoD 7000, ET 5500. Whilst I know that ET players would want more, unfortunately due to the nature of the sponsorship that's allowed us to increase prizemoney there's very little room for manoeuvrings.

Prize Distribution
CoD -

1st - 3500
2nd - 2250
3rd - 1250


ET -

1st - 2500
2nd - 1750
3rd - 1250

Lastly, I was in Enschede on Tuesday and it was frigging FREEZING, so I asked wzzrd to stay open later so that people could keep warm when playing poker etc and they agreed to stay open as late as 3AM during the event so when you're playing poker you don't have to do it in the cold! Speaking of Poker, we would still like to run another poker tourney but our last poker admin has since left so if anyone would like to volunteer their pokering skills that would be appreciated greatly and rewarded in beer.

If you are competing at CC5 and haven't read THIS then you might want to!

The Championship Gaming Series has closed it's doors and the multimillion dollar organisation has left eSports. The organisation ran a televised gaming league featuring CS:S, FIFA, DOA4 & Forza using a unique team format to award winners rather than individual competitors for each game. The show aired in DirecTV, SKY & Eurosport 2 to name but a few of its broadcast partners. The CGS world finals had a $500,000 prizepurse and all of its players (over 100) were salaried to play.

The reasoning states:

Quote

While the concept was ahead of its time and we are extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished, it became increasingly clear as this ambitious project evolved, that profitability was too far in the future for us to sustain operations in the interim.

You can read about it and more, plus extensive community reaction on Cadred

As promised for the Crossfire Challenge 5 we'll be running seeding tournaments to give the most accurate groups and seeds for the event. The goal is to use this tournament to directly place teams into their groups for the Crossfire event, however we don't want to actually determine winners of course!

So the two seeding tournaments will operate in a ONE day cup format that will stop short of crowning champions. There are pro's and con's to running a one day cup, the biggest con being 'what if our star player cannot make that 1 day', however the number of exams ongoing right now and the other tournaments that already live make running a longer event a bit of a minefield for that same reason. So we're of course going to have to be lenient with use of merc's but of course we will be looking at teams and saying well if you lose Ronner from your lineup you cannot replace him with mystic (or for CoD fans, you cannot replace Morg with someone who can shoot) for example.

So here are the dates for the tournaments (we've put them as close to the LAN as possible)

Enemy Territory - Sunday December 7th

Call of Duty 4 - Sunday November 30th

The exact bracket system designed by Adacore to give the most accurate reading will be posted in due course. However the goal is to 100% transparent so if Pink Gorillas lose both matches, then they're in the lowest seeding group. Put it in your diary!

On a side note, in the past week we've had a number of either late signups or 'oh shit my manager didnt pay' comments. This is not fatal, but it must be sorted out ASAP, contact me on either irc or via email to sort yourself out.

The TLR ET team have parted company with their Multigaming organisation parents with whom they won CPC2 & CDC3. The side are moving on with heavy hearts after a very fruitful time with the company as their ET team, the side rose to become the top ranking ET team whilst playing for TLR.

However most likely by the end of the week the side will be joining a new organisation who will be supporting their CC5 aspirations. One of the motivations for the move was the securing of the long term future of the team, which for ET and potentially RTCW2 fans can only be regarded as a good thing.

More news to follow later this week.