The Intel Extreme Masters for Quake Live European Championship Finals have reached the semi finals!

The games are played, the results are in and the winners are known. The Quake Live IEM European Championship comes to an end with cypher taking the golden platter home!

After careful consideration and not wanting to bite off more than we can chew, we've decided to limit the CIC7 COD Teamlist to 48 teams. 48 Allows us to run a good schedule with lots of games and it 'just' works with our normal system. Now considering some teams have paid and its not arrived and considering some teams even paid today, we ask teams to stop sending money (never thought I'd say that) for the next 48 hours so we can get all money cleared and see what number that leaves us with.

We will reopen the final signups for CIC7 CoD on Saturday morning and ask that teams contact us to confirm their signup space when they do so. Again this is has been a phenomenal endeavour by the CoD community and we're very greatful to the efforts of certain individuals for mobilising this community and I am personally sorry if we cannot service everyone that wants to come, however we must make a decision in the interests of running the best tournament possible.

Please do not send any more entry fees for Call of Duty until Saturday

After some deliberation the Map Pools for both CoD and ET are now ready, for CoD it was relatively straight forward but for ET with the change to 5on5 it took some contemplation, we decided to go with only 6 maps in contrary to our usual 7 for fear of offering an unbalanced map pool, we have a mixture of 3 'stable' maps and three 'fast' maps.

CoD Map Pool - backlot, crash, citystreets, crossfire, strike.
ET Map Pool - Goldrush, Radar, Supply, Delivery, Braundorf, Frostbite

There was a desire to put further custom maps into both lists however neither had suitable new candidates at such short notice.

Yesterday evening the Groups for the Quake Live ESL Intel Extreme Masters Season 4 European Championship Finals were announced with some changes in the participating players. The final (?) player list and the groups for the event to be played between January 21st and 24th at the ESL Studios in Cologne, Germany are the following:

Group A:

Maciej "srs/rzr/av3k" Krzykowski
Sebastian "fnatic/spart1e" Siira
Gareth "dignitas/GaRpY" Marshall
Benjamin "mTw|calipt" Jakob

Group B:

Anton "mouz.Cooller" Singov
Kévin "fnatic/strenx" Baeza
Alexander "xlo-Z4muZ" Ihrfors
Jeffrey "LLL*draven" DebipersadGroup C:

Alexey "srs/rzr/cypher" Yanushevsky
Marcel "k1llsen" Paul
Pierre-E "fnatic/l1nkje" Portier
Dan "dignitas/zsx" Sanders

Group D:

Alessandro "stermy" Avallone
Magnus "mouz.fox" Olsson
Richard "noctis" Gansterer
Romain "LLL*dem0n" LeclercqTogether with groups a schedule for the whole event was released, the schedule for the first day is the following:

It is with great pleasure that I can today announce the expansion of the Crossfire Challenge series with the addition of the Crossfire Intel Challenge Malaysian edition. Running on the same dates as CIC7 in Enschede the Malaysian edition will feature CoD4, CS & Quakelive as its primary games.

The event will be held in the city of Petaling Jaya, Selangor at the Blitzone Cyber Cafe with over 140 Gaming specification PC's across the 5th to the 7th of March. The event is expecting to draw in over 50 teams across its various game titles and will be the first Crossfire Challenge to take place outside of The Netherlands. Over the coming weeks you can expect to see more integration of the event into Crossfire.

We have partnered with experienced Malaysian gaming event organisers (Electronic Sport Professionals, ESP), whom were partly responsible for a number of successful events in the past (participated being marshals, crew and/or tournament organizers - although not as a company) for WCG, WGT & ESWC Qualifiers who will be charged with what could be the beginning of a regular event in Malaysia. The expansion of the Crossfire Challenge to include Intel as a title sponsor has brought with it renewed expansion opportunities for the future and the option to run the Malaysian Challenge was one that I couldn’t turn down. Though it should be stated that the operation of the Malaysian edition has no standing on the operation of the Dutch event nor the budget for it.

I grabbed a statement from Brian Chan, event organiser of the new CIC7 Malaysian Edition:

Quote

I've always wanted to organize something larger, something a little more meaningful than just another tournament. I wanted to create a future for the gaming industry here in Malaysia, something everyone could look forward to every year where they will meet, test their skill and also, most importantly have loads of fun. The Crossfire Intel Challenge and their team of organizers are great examples of this and I'm proud to have been given the chance to show this to the rest of Asia.

My goals for this event are fairly simple : to give the opportunity to this region to be a part of gaming communities other than their own, to give them something to look forward to and eventually be able to compete against each other in the future, be it in Europe, the United States or our home ground, in Malaysia.

I hope that the Crossfire Community will see this an exciting opportunity and demonstrates the continued potential of the Challenge brand and will see this as a sign of even bigger things to come! There will be 3 more CIC7 announcements this week all related to additional prizing for the Dutch event!

After over a year in the making, Ultraviolet Productions are proud to present their fifth movie - Requiem. This is a community frag highlights movie by -Max-, initially started in October 2008 after a long break from moviemaking since mAx Chapter 3. -Max- had this to say:

Quote by -Max-

Since I've already released a clan movie with one4one Decimated and a single player movie with mAx Chapter 3, I felt that it would be a good idea to finish off my ET moviemaking career with a community movie open to everyone. The response was overwhelming and I ended up looking through about 2Gb of demos resulting in frag scenes from players all over the world. I just want to quickly thank all of those who sent demos for the movie and I'm sorry if they didn't make it into the final cut, but I wanted to keep the movie as short as possible. Originally it was going to be six minutes but I decided to add an introductory song for the first minute so I could fit in some more frags.

Although I took lots of breaks from the project during production, it is without a doubt the movie I've worked the hardest on out of my three major releases. For example, every single ET sound you hear was added manually, as well as every single popup. Although a very long and tedious process, I'm glad I decided to do it this way. Also, I hope to cater for everyone by including several audio tracks. The first audio track contains the music with lots of sounds to recreate the feeling of being ingame. The second contains the music with only a select few game sounds. The third contains only the music and the fourth contains the music plus a sort of directors commentary from myself. For anyone who's interested I used the upcoming Ultraviolet Media Manager software from hannes to cut all the demos from the movie and include them in the download folder for your pleasure.

Finally, to help out with any prospective ET moviemakers, I included all of the Camtrace Camera files and my ET Movie Config in the folder. I hope you enjoy!

Heaven Media is asking you to donate to the Haiti Earthquake Appeal.

A major earthquake struck Haiti on 12 January just ten miles from the capital city of Port-au-Prince.

As many as 200,000 people are believed to be dead, and it is still too early to know the full human cost of this tragedy.

We have set up a page for donations to Oxfam's efforts through JustGiving.com, a UK-based organisation which facilitates donations to a number of charities, and with a target of £500 set, secretly we'll be disappointed if we can't hit four-digits.

We believe that the decision to help should be an easy one, but in case you needed a little extra persuasion, here it is: Adam Godfrey, our very own Business Developement Manager at Heaven Media and of course the Reason Gaming manager/owner, has agreed that if we hit the £500, he will allow himself to be tied up at Multiplay's i39 event, for the community to chuck wet sponges at him!

Oh, and as an added incentive, if we can double our target, and hit £1,000... he'll do it wearing only his underwear. Who said that helping your fellow human beings couldn't have a second (albeit very minor) purpose?

Keep an eye out later in the week for another announcement to help spur on donations - we think we've got a real cracker in store for you.

No matter how much or how little you feel you can afford, do your part now, even the smallest of donations will help.

Donate now at http://www.justgiving.com/esports-for-haiti

If you like, why not reply in the comments below telling us that you donated and if you are feeling brave and want to shame the others, let us know what you donated ;)

After the idle.ee line up joined the American Blight Gaming MGC, and a quick line up change, the team now starts their community contributions.
We could read the following on their website:

Quote by blackfoger

The team will be releasing loads of content for all their fans including videos, commentaries, Articles, Blogs, and lessons.

And now the side has released the first bit of content in the form of the players' configs and settings.
Find out what makes these players perform the way they do over at BlightGaming.com

A little preview:

Blight|Night

• OS: Windows XP
  
• Mouse: Logitech MX310 (800dpi)
  
• Mousepad: SteelSeries QcK Heavy
  
• Misc: 500hz, Accelfix.exe
  
• Windows sensitivity: 3/11
  
• Ingame sensitivity: 2.7

Download config

Six Dutch Call of Duty legends have regrouped to create a team for The Mesmerize Cybersports Association.

The MCA have every intention to make a big name for themselves in the Benelux gaming scene. They have obtainedthe second best Dutch Counter-Strike: Source team and have struck deals with sponsors such as Tweak and now, they announce their Call of Duty 4 team. And what a team it is!

The MCA.CoD4 lineup is:

Kevin "svotoe" de Groot
Niels "zemme" van Steenbergen
Pieter "pietje" Bijl
Youri "kasparov" Mohrs
Dominique "yallie" Schurink
Alex "mofje" Kuiper

The time has come, the voting stage has closed so it's time to announce the Captains for the Enemy Territory NationsCup XIII 5v5.


You can find the entire captainlist here: CB NC ET 5v5 XIII Captains

Remember that this list is not a list of the participating Nations !
Qualifiers + Groups will be announced later this week !

Also as a reminder, captains where selected based on:
• Support from the management, clans and top players (own nation).
• Background and ability to create the best team to represent the country.

I would also like to remind the chosen team captains to contact their national team managers. You MUST be added to your national clan account!

Good luck to all the Teams and Captains involved !