The Clanbase Eurocup takes to the stage on Monday night as TAG and zZz fight it out in the Lower Bracket Round 3 of CB EC XX. For the winner the right to face off against eCW in the loser bracket final and for the loser 4th place and the end of another season.
For those western eSports fans who were willing to stay up until the small hours of the night to follow this years WCG they were rewarded by some of the most entertaining eSports matches in history. WCG 09 has its champions now and there were surprises in almost every game with twists and turns in each final, the last day was cheered on by a capacity crowd of 8,000 fans!
Fnatic still werent able to take the one crown that has illuded them all these years, with cArns pending retirement time will tell whether this is it for the most successful team of the year. They dropped 6 map points against Again and then lost in the 4th overtime to concede map one, and after an amazing start on T side on train fell by the wayside despite some phenominal clutches from f0rest.
Warcraft 3
Infi - $14,000 Fly100% - $6,000 Lyn - $3000
This was the biggest game of the event for the locals and they cheered their favourites to glory. The atmosphere for the grand finals resembled that of a football match and was brought to life when eventual champion Infi, GG'd after just 3 minutes on map 1! He turned it around late in map 2 and kept Fly on the back foot to win 2-1 - the only two maps Fly dropped all tournament long.
The World Cyber Games 2009 is live from Chengdu, China. The WCG compiles the best gamers from around the world and has them compete for some of the biggest prizepurses in eSports, any progamer will admit - WCG is the prize to win.
In Warcraft the biggest names are in attendance and the scene was shocked as yAws took down two time WCG champion Sky yesterday evening. Also in attendance are the big community names such as Grubby & Moon along with a vast number of other top players.
In CounterStrike the star studded lineup includes features the likes of Fnatic, mTw, EG, mouz and many more and regularly delivers phenominal matches in the knockout stages.
There are also the other WCG Games and tournaments including FIFA09 & Starcraft. You can follow the event on either The WCG Site or you can follow it on QuadV - The event is GMT +8 - so matches take place in the European morning/early afternoon.
The American eSports scene is to many a graveyard of eSports founding fathers, names like the CPL & WSVG cloud the one succcess story that estimates it will make $50 million revenue from marketing alone this coming year. That is of course the MLG, who hosted their latest tournament this past weekend in Anaheim (which ButtonBashers won!!).
The lovely chaps at Infinity Ward who in their infinite wisdom decided to remove dedicated servers from the upcoming release of MW2 have gone several steps further towards insanity recently by confirming a number of shocking modifications to the game.
- No Console (no modifications allowed)
- P2P server hosting, with testers receiving 100ms
- Players have no control over 'server' location
- No Lean
- No kick functionality
Just when you thought they couldnt go any further wrong, they've succeeded! I end with a quote from IW Mackey - "I've been playing mainly with around 100ms ping and it was great."
One of the most highly anticipated game releases of all time is approaching with the next installment in the Call of Duty series. However, the world may now have ended for the competitive CoD community who were awaiting a fresh breath of air to their scene. Unfortunately Infinity Ward have 'done a fritzl' by making the most inbred decision in gaming history. Today the Infinity Ward community manager confirmed that since CoD4 was released the guys at IW have lost their mind after announcing the following changes to the game.
With the release of their new M15X gaming laptop Alienware decided to pull out all the stops and has put £1,000 up for grabs in a Call of Duty 4 and Counter-Strike Source competition to be run on Esports Heaven. Each tournament will run over the course of one week and the winner will walk away with £500.
The tournament will allow a massive 128 teams to enter and will feature the new Esports Heaven league system. This means that we will start off with a group stage of 128 teams where 32 teams advance to a double elimination system.
Besides the announcement of the new league system and the Alienware invasion tournament Esports Heaven also announced a cool new feature which will allow match predictions. It will be used for the first time during the Alienware Invasion but more information on this will be released later.
Swedish based Game Server provider Game-Hosting have recently completed the formalities on the first stage of taking GGL through court to procure some $40,000 owed to the company in unpaid bills. Game Hosting are owed the money following their hosting agreement with GGL that saw the company hosting the Clanbase.com website between January 06 and April 2008. GGL successfully paid the earlier months of hosting, however stopped paying and by April 08 owed approximately $30,000 and the hosting was terminated.
When Clanbase was moved onto Game Hosting's servers it was a welcome increase in performance for Clanbase users who had been experiencing large load times prior to the move. However unpaid bills are a problem that have plagued the GGL organisation for years with several other eSports organisations listing GGL owing money to a variety of teams. Such allegations are still levelled at the company today with amongst others Clanbase Eurocup CoD prizemoney still remaining unpaid according to players.
Eirik Pedersen, Sales Manager, of Game Hosting gave Crossfire this exclusive statement regarding the legal proceedings that had taken place:
Crossfire attempted to contact GGL to obtain a retort to Eiriks statement, however they declined to comment.
We will keep you updated as the legal proceedings continue.
Two big names go head to head in the ET Steelseries Summer cup tonight organised by eSports Heaven. Dutch powerhouse Kreaturen take on CC6 champions Mamut.si in a the Semi Final of the tournament which may have slipped a touch under the radar in recent times, but should still have mouths watering at the prospect of such a big game!
Also taking stage tonight is the Eurocup Qualifiers Loserbracket match between Bpbeh and Cortana. Two teams who are no stranger to the Eurocup are nestled in the loser bracket with the reality that one of them wont be making it into this season. The belgians there courtesy of their favourite opposition, Polands Blurred Vision and Cortana there after going down 4:0 to European Elite on Sunday.
frozz kept his prematch statement short and sweet...."aCozZ is back!"
Whilst vila was also a man of few, yet always controversial words: "if we won't win this, i am eating my hat"
A cracking night of ET Action for all as the Clanbase Eurocup ET Qualifiers took center stage this evening. A number of top names in action, and an epic match played out for the masses in the shape of asd vs sub which is where the wrap up focuses (as thats the match I saw!).
sublime 2:4 asd
A strong Supply defence saw sublime race into a one map lead with hYpe setting out a good case for his 'UK's #1 field ops' claim top fragging and damaging throughout the map. A combination of problems for asd meant they didnt get the first stage for 6 minutes and after that the map was a foregone conclusion, despite several exciting points along the way. However, it was the Goldrush first stage of asd that set the tone for an asd comeback, holding the tank for 4 minutes and getting the tank barrier up. They were able to successfully keep the sublime side at bay for about 11 minutes and that opened the door for a lengthy attack, which in truth they needed the comfort of as their first stage offence was a touch impotent.
Once past the first stage they were on cruise control and got the objectives away after a mad scramble at the back MG corner with Baggiez racing away with the documents towards the truck. Who should pop up from the command post but hYpe and the rivalry was to come under the spot light as unchallenged hYpe let rip with the sten onto Baggiez only to completely miss and Baggiez (not knowing where hYpe was) kept running and put the objectives home! (THis being the reason for most of the journals this evening!)
Radar started more to the liking of sublime however as asd's first stage attack was disjointed and combined with 2 or 3 defuses on the front gate it really didnt look good for them. They finally completed the first stage with 6 minutes played, it took them only half of that time to complete the second as they recovered well to set a little over 9 minutes to beat, a time that favoured sublime. Sublime took 3 and a bit minutes to take the first stage and had, just like asd, 6 minutes to complete the second stage however with some last ditch defending it was asd who came out on top and held on to win the map, and the match. All round, a cracking evenings entertainment!
Baggiez had the following to say on both the match and his rivalry with hYpe:
The other results from tonights action (Sorry I cant give you a match report as I didnt see them!)
TAG 4:0 system6 EC Winners 4:0 zero Empathy Cortana 0:4 European Elite glitz 4:0 invitium underscore 2:4 zZz
You can see the replays for all of those over on GamesTV.org and the results are of course all from Clanbase
TAG
Lightning
rimi
lettul
zerender
Clown
w3st
Lazio
rat
Eirik
Hell
Again (former MYM) - $35,000
mTw - $10,000
Infi - $14,000
Lyn - $3000
EG, 
Swedish based Game Server provider Game-Hosting have recently completed the formalities on the first stage of taking GGL through court to procure some $40,000 owed to the company in unpaid bills. Game Hosting are owed the money following their hosting agreement with GGL that saw the company hosting the Clanbase.com website between January 06 and April 2008. GGL successfully paid the earlier months of hosting, however stopped paying and by April 08 owed approximately $30,000 and the hosting was terminated.
Mamut
Cortana 0:4 
underscore 2:4 
