With the first batch of 16 teams signing up we could see big teams as well as underdogs successfully securing their spot for the upcoming Antwerp eSports Festival. They were given 48 hours to send in a proof of payment. With that deadline swiftly approaching, it becomes clear some have failed to do so.

Velerion, Team SpeedLink and 1stCav are the three remaining teams that still have their slots as pending. The Polish side have communicated with us to ensure their commitment and urge to pay. Also SpeedLink are eager to pay even though their organisation's structure is somewhat cumbersome.

The only team that hasn't even attempted to communicate about this issue is Velerion. A number of top teams waited hours to sign up to eventually see all slots were filled.

By 21:00 CET this evening the slots of pending teams will be opened to other teams again. 1stCav and SpeedLink will be given another chance to sign up next round if they still have monetary problems, Velerion however will only be able to sign up again when all other teams have signed up. That is, if they fail to pay within the next hours.

Only 40 minutes were needed to get the first 16 slots filled up for the Antwerp eSports Festival Enemy Territory tournament!

Of those 16 signed up teams, 13 already paid. The others still have until Friday 21:00 CET to provide a proof of payment or else their spot will go to another team.

Today is the day you've all been waiting for (or not so much for some). At 9 pm CET (GMT+1), the sales will open. You'll find bankdetails and more information right here when the time comes. Remember only one payment per team, so no partial payments are allowed!

Yet there seem to be many teams and players that didn't read anything about AEF but still want to go. So here is a summary of things you need to know if you want to go to AEF. Now you really have no excuse anymore to not know these bulletpoints!

When to pay:
Price:

SLAC is a brand new anti-cheat made by Chaplja, financed by Speed-Link.

The ET community has been crying out for a new system to prevent cheating for years, if not for the entire lifespan of the game. Punkbuster has clearly let the entire community down. Now a perfect alternative has stood up by the name of SpeedLink AntiCheat (SLAC).

Just like any security expert, Chaplja has experience in how cheats are made and is arguably the best in the entire scene, thus the perfect man for the job.
He has now released the first open-beta of SLAC, which is available for download and testing. Show your support by joining #speedlink.anticheat and reporting any bugs or issues you might encounter.

SLAC will be used in all the upcoming Clanbase competitions and will act as a perfect replacement for the Punkbuster anti-cheat database.

I've made up a list of questions that might be apparent with the release of a new anti-cheat system, and Chaplja himself supplied me with the answers.

The official Antwerp eSports Festival website is now live!

With the new site some new details have surfaced! Also make sure to read more to see what you have to do if you want this LAN to become as successful as it can ever be!

Set to take place from the 30th of July 2010 until the 1st of August 2010, the Antwerp eSports Festival promises to be one of the most competitive events the Benelux has ever seen. With competitions taking place in Counter-Strike Source, Call of Duty 4 and Enemy Territory, the best of the best in the gaming industry are expected to travel down to Antwerp to compete. With a maximum combined prize purse of €27,500 it also promises to be one of the largest prize purses ever handed out in the Benelux.

We are launching the website to give all the teams and players the information they need to arrange their travel and accomodation to attend the event. If you have any further questions concerning the Antwerp eSports Festival, don't hesitate to contact us as we are here to help. Also check out our Facebook fan page and make sure you follow us on Twitter to catch the latest updates.

The prize purse of this event works with triggers. There is a minimum guaranteed amount and as the amount of teams entered (and paid) increases, so does the prize money.

A hefty new patch for Quake Live, the web browser-powered remake of the awesome Quake 3 Arena, has been released.

It squashes more than a few bugs and adds a bunch of new features as part of a 'Start a Match' system, currently under beta testing. Here's the full official list:

General Changes

- Player Invite System - You can now invite players to join you in-game and/or accept fellow players invites. We have added a right-click context menu on the friends list which provides up to three options to perform on a friend: View Profile, Invite to Match, Join Match.

- Invite Monitor - Added the "Invite Monitor" which appears above the Duel Detective when you have pending match invitations. When you have invites pending you can click on the Invite Monitor to show a listing of all your pending invites in the server browser. This can be especially useful when you have a large number of pending invites to choose from.

- Blocked Player Improvements - All chat from players on your 'Blocked Players' list is now muted. This includes both in-game chat (chat, team chat, attacker chat, targeted chat) and XMPP chat (friends list chat, tell_buddy chat).

- Relaxed Spawn System - Minor adjustment to the spawn system algorithms, in many cases one additional spawn point will be included in the list of available spawn points. Further testing and improvements are planned.

- Global Broadcast Announcement System - Added support for delivering broadcast messages from the backend system to all users online. This will be used to inform players of important system information, such as when the site will be going down for maintenance.

- Match Browser Optimizations - Improved the performance of the Match Browser by limiting the number of requests it needs to make to the backend when hovering over matches. In the general case this change makes it so there are 1/6th as many backend requests made.

- Rich Presence Data - Increased the responsiveness of friends in-game icons. The method of reporting changes in status have been highly optimized and now update 'live'.

- Improved Server Daemon - Improved the way that running servers are tracked in the backend to be more efficient and scalable. This should resolve problems users were experiencing about non-existent servers showing up in the match browser.

- Punkbuster Update - Evenbalance has made improvements that may result in a reduced amount of communication failure and duplicate cd-key related kicks.

- Firefox 3.6.3+ Support - Fixed plug-in issues with newer versions of Firefox on Windows.

Start a Match System (this system is in limited beta and is not widely available yet)

- Match Visibility Modes - Added support for running private matches in multiple access modes: Public (all players), Friends Only, and Invitation only. The server will only be visible on the match browser to players who have access to join.

- Server Invite System - Added support for choosing friends who should be sent an automatic invite when the match has started.

- Custom Map Rotation - Added support for setting up a map rotation to be played on your private server.

- Improved Error Handling - Improved error handling in match startup so that users are informed why a match may have failed to start (Data Center overloaded, for example).

- Vicinity Locator - Added support for choosing "In My Vicinity" as a match startup location which will automatically choose an ideal data center based on your current GEOIP location.

- Optimized Game Invitation Strings - Join URL invite string length reduced for efficiency.

- Tiered Permission Groups - Organizations may spawn multiple servers at once without joining into matches. Individuals may spawn one server at a time and the server becomes available for others to join once the owner has joined the server.

[bMisc Fixes[/b]]
- Fixed the calculations used for shotgun accuracy so that it is now calculated per pellet rather than per firing. If you fire a shotgun blast at an opponent and 2 of the 20 pellets hit, you will have a SG accuracy of 10% (because 10% of the pellets landed) rather than 100% (because a hit was obtained).

- Added heading images to the Match Browser indicating what matches are being displayed. This can be one of the following: Public Matches, Private Matches, Invited Matches.

- Changed the formatting of the tweet used in the "Share" button when choosing to share match results on Twitter.

- Fixed a grammatical error on match stats "Least Deaths" -> "Fewest Deaths"

- Fixed an issue where the "Forgot Your Password" page was not working.

- Fixed an issue where the standalone login page was sometimes not working (this page is mainly used when following a "Join Match" link before being logged into QUAKE LIVE)

- Fixed an issue where sometimes players on your friends list weren't showing up with the proper head icon, the proper cased name, or clan tag.

- Numerous plug-in updates to support current and future functionality.

It is now officially confirmed that Enemy Territory will be featured as an official competition at the Antwerp eSports Festival LAN at the end of July!

I received the task of putting together the ruleset, maplist, schedule and so forth. I will therefore require a committee of top ET players who can give me their input on these decisions. About 8 top players should do, as I myself will be representing the low to med skilled teams. It's also crucial that the teams and players that are interested at attending this LAN, forward any information regarding their team to me. More news will follow soon as the official AEF site will launch mid April.

How to apply for the committee?
I need people who are active and who I can reach on IRC. You also need to be attending AEF obviously. Send me a pm with subject "Committee" if you deem yourself important enough to add value to discussions. You'll be invited to a private IRC channel where you can discuss various subjects amongst each other.

How to forward updates regarding your team?
Just simply post any updates in this thread. Please add your line up and check regularly if anything needs to be updated in the topic. I count on you to do this, please work with me here.

More info in the forum thread.

Impact Gaming has a habit of bringing back old legends.
And this time is no exception. Finnish allstar - or should I say superstar - mystic has rejoined the Impact ranks to strike down once more. His comeback from inactivity will undoubtedly not go unnoticed, and when this one-man-army is backed up by possibly the best medic of all time, sqzz, you really have the perfect recipe for success. If this isn't oldschool enough for you then perhaps mix it up a bit with the old legendary zP rifle gifty, plus the master of engineering, Sheep, who turned planting a simple dynamite and some mines at CPC4 into a true modern art. Spice it up with some toxic herbs, and you have yet another tasty Impact line up.

The Impact Gaming line up:

• toxic
  
• mystic
  
• sqzz
  
• gifty
  
• Sheep[/b]
  
  
• Backup R0SS

Impact Gaming manager eVo has yet again managed to put together an allstar team that will definitely be amongst the top contenders for the next big tournaments. They will be competing in the upcoming CB EC and ESL EMS, and will be present at the upcoming LAN's such as AEF and the Denmark LAN.

[img|left]http://i39.tinypic.com/2qmi1jk.jpg[/img][img|left]http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/2343/transv.png[/img]I've been in contact with Steven Leunens, CEO of Gamevibes BVBA regarding the upcoming Antwerp eSports Festival.

First off, what's Gamevibes? Gamevibes describe themselves as an innovative new media and entertainment company specialized in connecting companies with the industry of video games. Their main objective is to become the number 1 in their field of the Benelux. You might already have been in contact with this company as they started TEK9 in 2004 as a competitive gaming team which has now become one of the largest eSport websites in the world. Nowadays they focus on running events connected to eSports. In the past we've seen two different types of events: More community-based events (the Outpost on Fire series) and bigger scaled events with a huge international appeal (the Antwerp eSport Festival).

The first type is much like the Crossfire LAN's, held in the Outpost Gamecentra, focussing on the community while still having world class competitions in the meanwhile. As the organizers like to put it: Outpost on Fire is all about the community coming together for a couple of days of high standard competition, world class action and a couple of good Belgian beers to round of the evening. The event is set for its fourth iteration, which will be held next year. More info can be found here.

[img|left]http://i39.tinypic.com/ir8g2v.png[/img][img|left]http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/2343/transv.png[/img]Just to give you a small introduction to what Antwerp eSports Festival exactly is, you can visit the official website. Basically the 2008 edition came down to this: the first iteration of the Antwerp eSports Festival was one of the most prestigious LAN's in Europe, hosted in the amazing Hilton hotel right in the centre of Antwerp (Belgium), boasting a prize purse of € 50,000 for just two games, CoD4 and FIFA08. Teams had the possibility to rent rooms inside the Hilton at a discount rate, and various side tournaments were present, such as the ability to play vs. the top CS 1.6 players of the Benelux in bootcamp sessions. Booth babes didn't stay away, and if I recall correctly, there even was a body-paint stand for babes who felt like going a bit wild.

At least that was for the last instalment during 2008.
This year AEF will make its return, albeit with some changes. To quote Gamevibes:

10/03/2010 - Just over a week after the announcement of the 4th season of the Benelux ESL Pro Series, in cooperation with both Intel and Dell, two out of the total of four ESL Pro Series games have been announced by ESL Benelux up till now. Call of Duty will be featured for the first time in this season alongside with the veteran game Counter-strike 1.6, which has been part of the Benelux ESL Pro Series since the first season and two, yet to be announced, games.

This big announcement means that the Call of Duty 4 scene step has reached the next level in the Benelux section of the Electronic Sports League. After the announcement of the ESL Amateur Series merely weeks ago, the best teams the Benelux has to offer will battle each other in the ESL Pro Series for cash prizes. These teams will all battle each other in a premiership and, in the end, the top 4 teams will compete in the finals for a cash prize.