That's right, the ClanBase NationsCup XIII Grand Final has arrived. After months of drama and controversy, the best teams have pulled through once again for the Grand Final. ET's legendary shoutcaster TosspoT will also be making a return for Monday's match - undoubtedly to stir the drama for one last time!

Finland

It shouldn't come as a shock to the Crossfire community that Team Finland have reached this season's NC Grand Final. They are more than a mix team - The Finnish players have been practicing together for several years and have achieved the best possible results online. MASCULINE MANS have been crowned champions of the ClanBase EuroCup twice in a row. This Monday, Finland will unleash their most deadly players upon the Estonian lineup. The team have an impressive winning percentage of 100 this season, slaughtering every single opponent they have faced. However, that doesn't mean Estonia can be underestimated by the Finns. Can the all star Finnish lineup dominate, once again?

Impact Gaming who were in the headlines this week for removing R0SS from their online roster have moved quick to snap up another player, one some of them are very familiar with in the shape of Polish star wiadro. Wiadro was in the headlines prior to CIC7 with questions over his loyalty being raised, however after he answered in style with a dominant performance for YYT at the event and tonight has confirmed he will be moving back into Impact, for whom he played at CC5.

Following CIC7 he moved into Easymode and with their demise he found himself looking for a new home. Ironically his home would come in the arms of Impact manager eVo who was quick to lambast the behaviour of Easymodes players only to pounce upon the availability of Wiadro to fill the hole in his team. This comes contrary to a public conversation the impact manager partook in at CIC7 stating he would never have the pole in his team ever again.

- Update -

Impact Gaming manager eVo did not confirm this news. Krosan went to have a talk with him to figure out eVo's side of the story:

Clanbase Eurocup Sup Killerboy has tonight justified his decision to remove Easymode from this seasons Eurocup. The move has enraged the Easymode side who are claiming they broke no rules and should be playing.

In Short Killerboy states:

Quote

Because perfo and wiaderko were never available to play during weekdays, azatej is not playing, and tekoa left the clan, EM was left with a lineup that could only play on a single day which is bad and they weren't even adjusting at all to playing dates... and with the statement from the players that the clan "seems dead" the decision was to remove them for inactivity instead of "planning for mischief" the better way to put it would be "not planning to play" either way they would have forfeited their matches or played with backups, in both cases they wouldn't have passed. For both me & Homer and an EM Player, we want to make it clear that they were kicked BECAUSE they can not play on days that they WOULD need to play on, they were destined to forfeit-loss every game and the removal is the best option in that case and especially with an attitude of "we can only play sunday deal with it" it left us with no choice of using the delete button.

Read the full post on Clanbase

Easymode declined to give a statement on the matter.

Clanbase have today removed Easymode from the Clanbase Eurocup after fielding weakened sides in an attempt to gain GamesTV.org riches beyond their wildest dreams according to an inside source.

In a story that has all the ingredients of the current betting problems plighting the Korean Starcraft scene, Easymode have intentionally fielded a weakened side for two matches straight and bet on the opposition (Impact & Rockit). Though the match against Impact eventually rescheudled, and now forfeited the intention was during both matches to field a side that could not compete with the likes of Impact & Rockit without making it public knowledge to rake in the money on GamesTV.org. The allegations are backed up by Wiaderko & Meez's GTV bank statements.

In the end the sides plans were outed from the inside as all was revealed, the side had no intention of practicing for their matches and were planning mischief for their third eurocup fixture upcoming combined with their earlier attempts at winning money on GTV, leaving EC Sup Killerboy with no option but to remove them.

It leaves Group C with just four teams left after Frogz dropped out of the Eurocup due to inactivity.

Impact gaming find themselves looking for a 5th (online) player tonight as R0SS found himself at the center of a bitter clan versus country row. The Impact lineup still fighting in the Clanbase Eurocup have found themselves already shuffling the pack collecting Razz from Colt45, and the irony is it was that move that set the whole chain of events off.

Ross took charge of the UK team after the depature of Kamz, with the UK just one match away from the final. His decision to practice tonight with the UK team ahead of the game against Estonia ended in a debate with his manager eVo, one that left him with the ultimatum, Impact or the UK - not both. Ross chose the UK a decision that has left him both out of Nations Cup and out of Impact. Ironically however, Ross would never have taken the captaincy had Impact not plucked Razz from Colt 45, leaving Kamz to quit his roll as UK Captain.

On the decision, eVo had this to say:

"OK myself and Ross had a strong disagreement over whether he should be calling off prac's for Impact to prac for the UK, as far as i am concerned my responsibility is to Impact and making sure we are prepared as possible for LAN, i took objection to Ross's attitude and he took objection to mine, we probably both overreacted in hindsight, didn't help i was in a bad mood before the argument but i stand by my position which is that the team comes before NC however I understand he has a responsibility to the team"

When questioned about the fact eVo himself is a former UK Captain:

"Yes and I appreciate the issues that come with captain, however thats just being on the other side of the fence for you, anyway I think possibly we both maybe overeacted but that happens sometimes"

Two camps Ross wont find comfort in are the colt 45 camp, nor anywhere near Jere who can still remember his very public ousting from YoYoTech prior to CIC7.

Impacts Lineup to attend AEF remains, as it did prior to todays decisions:

snoop
mystic
sheep
gifty
sqz

Starcraft 2 has been in private beta for a couple of months now and is finally ready for shipping! The Blizzard CEO has stated July 27th will be the release date for the anxiously awaited sequel.

Blizzard stated:

""We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net(R) in just a few months."

The beta has been welcomed widely by those playing it, with many old Starcraft players and eSports fans lapping up the sequel as opposed to many FPS sequels which have fallen on deaf ears. The game however is unlikely to be welcomed by the Korean Starcraft Pro's - due to ongoing arguments with KeSPa, Blizzard has not issued the organisation with a license for Starcraft 2 and as such both its leagues and the countries top teams and players will not playing it.


Activision may be getting sued by former infinity ward workers due to unpaid royalties, but the company still has other eggs on the Call of Duty stove and plans to release installment number seven this winter.

The game titled, Call of Duty Black Ops developed by Treyarch will be released on the 9th of November this year and follows on with Activisions promise to publish a new CoD game each year. Players take the role of a Black Ops operative who will be involved in missions behind enemy lines. Missions will take place in a variety of locations, including Cuba, the Arctic, and Vietnam. You can watch the trailer here

After nearly five weeks of hot Qualifier action, we have found the best 20 teams all over Europe which will battle for one of the eight available Final Stage slots of the ESL Major Series Season VI in Enemy Territory. All teams joined a special pool according to their performance during the qualifier stage. There have been five pools:

The Pools:

• Pool #1: Invited teams (position #1)
  
• Pool #2: Qualifier Winners (position #2)
  
• Pool #3: Qualifier 2nd placed (position #3)
  
• Pool #4: Qualifier 3rd placed (position #4)
  
• Pool #5: Qualifier 4th placed (position #5)
  Restriction: No team will face a team of one's own Qualifier
  

Result of the Group drawing:

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.

After months of epic performances from the participating National teams, the ClanBase NationsCup is finally coming to a near end. This Tuesday, the United Kingdom will face Estonia in the semi-final. ET's legendary shoutcaster TosspoT will be returning for the rare occasion. The winner will go on to face Finland in the Grand Final. The final stages are not the final stages without a bit of Crossfire drama - and there's plenty of it! Continue reading for all the latest gossip and to find out who's backstabbed who.

United Kingdom

ET's "Most Hated" player, Kamz, was able to sneak behind enemy lines this season and finally land himself as the United Kingdom's team captain. After several attempts in previous seasons, the controversial player had a chance to transform his words into positive statistics - and he certainly has done so. Previous seasons saw the United Kingdom perform with unstable and unmotivated lineups. However, the tables have turned; the team have performed with a stable and motivated lineup throughout the current competition and have delivered the results to prove so. The return of the deadly combo razz and sqzz has proven beneficial for the team's matches. Furthermore, R0SS, sqzz and razz (from this season's lineup) are currently performing in the ClanBase EuropCup and EMS Qualifiers with Impact Gaming, who are also preparing for the upcoming Enemy Territory LANs in Belgium and Denmark. With such active lineup outside the ClanBase NationsCup, it's no wonder the team have reached the semi-final stages.

However, like all good things, they eventually come to an end - sometimes with devastating results. The recent backstab from razz towards Kamz's team colt 45 has resulted in hate and some unfinished business between the two United Kingdom players. Kamz has decided to hand over his captincy to R0SS for the remaining few matches this season. With razz refusing to play, Kamz quitting his team and TEKN0 away from activity, things have gone terribly pear shaped the United Kingdom team. It looks like that epic comeback has been thrown right outside the window! Can the United Kingdom cook something Jamie Oliver at the very last minute?

RtCW-Cup 4 groups were drawn last night ahead of just over a month of games! the first round of games kickoff this Sunday we all hope that you manage to see some of them on WTV and also hear any being Shoutcasted, we have had the lovely offer from mistaken and owzo and we hope they and you will enjoy the games in this cup.

I give you the groups: