Through a PRPost email we learned that registration for the big CPL World Championship in December (Dec 6 - 9) will start today at 8PM Central time. The main event at this will be a $150,000 Counter-Strike tournament.

The GodGames website is featuring an article on the upcoming 4th Anniversary CPL event, which starts June 28. This event will be dedicated to GOD's Doug Myres, who recently passed away.

ShackES and GamersLatino are reporting that some recent CPL winners are considering filing a lawsuit against CPL. Apparently they didnt realize the tax man gets a cut of their winnings and they want to sue CPL for not notifying them of common law.

Turtled.com has an article called CPL Europe and Where It's Heading and discusses what went right and wrong at the recent Pentium 4 CPL Holland event.

If you follow the whole CPL scene and wonder who are the current top Quake3 players, CSports has updated results now that the Pentium4 Holland Event was played last week.

The Quake2 revival tour! Here's a little piece hopefully discussing the 'return' of Quake2. I'm actually looking forward to the Quake1 CPL tournament speaking of this revival stuff.

Some pretty big news in the CPL scene. They have canned a couple of events in favor of a new format. Instead of holding those $20,000-$30,000 events every month or so they are going to bigass $150,000 minimum prize purse events a couple of times a year along with one charity event each year. That's one hell of a change in plans.

The Cyberathlete Professional League today announced the cancellation of August's Counter-Strike Tournament and October's Quake III Arena Tournament. With the exception of a yearly charity event, the CPL will now only hold a minimum of two large-scale tournaments a year with cash purses of at least $150,000 each. This revised approach to competitive gaming in the United States promises to yield stronger growth for the CPL through consolidated efforts. The CPL World Championship Event will be held on December 6 - December 9, 2001, offering a record-sized tournament cash purse of $150,000 and will accommodate up to 2,100 people [snip]

It's also interesting to note that with these latest events being canned the event that many players were looking to as the big last Quake3 tourney has been canned. Although QuakeCon is coming soon and offering a $50,000 cash purse.

Registration for the CPL 4-year Event starts today at 2PM CST. This event will feature several tournaments such as a Quake 1 one, a Doom 2 one, a UT and CS BYOC competition and more.

With the recent word of the new "pro" maps being developed by Fred Nilsson over at id Software to be included into the next Quake3 release and the recent demonstration of new spectator technology by Valve Software for Counter-Strike at the Speakeasy CPL tournament it's becoming apparent that game developers are taking notice and putting effort into the competitive gamer. Well it could get a lot more interesting. A story at ShackES (plug! plug!) pointed the way to this simple quote by the CPL president. Here is a link to the full interview btw.

sling_blade: what games are you most looking forward to as possible e-sports games?
angel munoz: doom iii's pro-addon pack.
update from Angel:
I said that as a funny (hopeful) remark but it has been blown out of proportion.   I keep forgetting how strong the emotional binds are between the Quake community and id Software. 

On the other hand, John Carmack told me himself that the plan was to have a separate multiplayer add-on,  it would not surprise me, if they added some tourney software to it.  Best person to ask is Mr. Carmack himself, I think it is all in his head at this point.

But this begs a very interesting question. What exactly are the characteristics of a FPS game that would make a good tournament competition platform? Save your whining about the 'pro gamer' stuff at the door. (read: trolling = nuke/ban) This question applies to everyone. What aspects do you think belong and dont belong in a game targeted at top level competition? Are developers like Valve and id doing 'the right thing' by paying so much attention to these players? What do you think?

PlanetFortress has a quick bit from Erik Johnson of Valve Software about their plans for the spectator software that was shown at the recent CPL Counter-Strike Tournament. Word is the software will work with HLDM, HLTFC, CS and a few other mods right along with the next Half-Life release.

Another CPL update, as the CPL 4-Year Anniversary event has been pushed back at the request of Canadian gamers (who had final examinations at the previous date). The event will now be held on Thursday, June 28, 2001 and will end Sunday, July 1, 2001. The main tournament at this event will be a QuakeWorld one-on-one competition.

QNews let us know about the news that the Quake3 tournament in the upcoming CPL Latin event has been cancelled. Like the US CPL, this tournament will now only offer a Counter-Strike tourney.

It's been a little while since the last Multiplayer Watch and the gaming public has shifted a bit. A couple of the larger events to have happened is the release of TRIBES2 on to the scene as well as the exodus of Quake3 players towards Counter-Strike going along with the CPL announcement of supporting CS more. Here's how the numbers are stacking up right now:

You can take a look at some of the previous ones here.

CPL's Angel Munoz has posted this message on the CPL forums asking people who are interested in a QuakeWorld Duel Tournament. They were planning for a small tournament but there seems to be a larger interest than anticipated.

The CPL has announced it's first CPL Latin America event due to be held later this month. Registration for this Sao Paulo, Brazil event has opened as well. The tournaments played there will be for Quake3 and Counter-Strike.

Not sure where Maarten wandered off to today but here are the results from the CPL Speakeasy $30,000 Counter-Strike Tournament:

1st place X3 (Blue Squad) for $10,000
2nd place [xeno] (Canadians!?) for $5,000
3rd place SoA for $3,000
4th place Good-Game (Lycos) for $2,000
5th place [rs] for $1,600

Some pictures of the CPL Speakeasy CS event to run through. ShackES here and here , Ice Terminal here , You can also follow the results as they happen here.

So the first really big CPL Counter-Strike event is happening right now. (Coverage on ShackES) and the question of if Counter-Strike is an equal or better spectator friendly game is hopefully being answered. I havent decided yet myself. I do think the whole suspense building up to key moments is interesting, and having the game broken down into rounds is a good thing though. There needs to be more visual feedback for spectators when players get killed and when one team wins a round but that can be done pretty easily. I think the round system and the great significance of player deaths etc after watching things works pretty well. It's certainly slower paced than Q3 tourneys from a spectator standpoint but if we're trying to get people outside of the hardcore gaming community to try and follow this stuff that is probably a good thing.

The Valve spectator software has proven to be quite a hit and even my fiancee who doesnt watch this stuff much has said that she finds it much easier to follow now. She thought Aztec was ugly though. hehe.

Stomped has an interview with Erik Johnson of Valve, talking about the Multicast spectator technology which will be released soon. At the current SPEAKEASY/CPL event Counter-Strike tournament they are showing a beta version of this new feature.

ShackES has gotten some more details from Valve Software about the upcoming spectator client that will be shown at CPL by Valve and released onto the net sometime after that for everyone.