Late yesterday evening I posted a story about bugs in Counter-Strike that basically had players not having shots go where they thought they were going causing a good amount of unrest among the competitive players. Of course the accusations of being 'whiners' etc came up but guess what, it's true. I've gotten confirmations from both the CS team and CPL who are working with them. Firstly here is quick quote from cliffe from Counter-Strike.net:

We are aware of the issue and are investigating it to resolve it

Also, Angel Munoz of the CPL had this to say:

Valve is committed to supporting the online gaming community and professional gaming, and the CPL knows that Valve is working to correct the reported software flaws in Counter-Strike before the upcoming SPEAKEASY.net $30,000 Counter-Strike Tournament.

Also earlier this morning there was a PR from CPL announcing that Valve has developed some new spectating software that will be shown at the event

According to an update on the CPL website, Valve will preview a beta version of its Multicast Spectator Mode at the upcoming SPEAKEASY.net Counter-Strike Tournament which will be held in Dallas on the 12th. This Multicast Spectator Mode allows spectators to follow all the action from a bird's eye view.

Counter-Strike has moved full force into the 'professional gaming' circuits now and guess what that means? People tearing apart the game and looking at exactly what makes it tick. There have been a number of documented quirks about Counter-Strike and just how random the results can be when two people do the exact same thing can and often do get different results. (I touched on this in one of my own articles a little while ago) The stink is about to really kick up though now that there is tens of thousands of dollars on the line. A CPL tournament next week is giving away $25,000 actually. Here's a bit from the latest XSR article (Thanks ShackES for the link, do I have to thank Matt? heh)

There have been numerous threads about the hitbox errors in the Counter-Strike.net forums, it's a well known problem in the community, and still no word from Cliffe or Gooseman as to how they plan to fix it.

If anyone wants to point the way to a couple of those documented analysis of CS weapons behavior I'll be happy to link it here. (Summerblue , FiringSquad)I cant seem to dig them up right now. update: Here was a quick comment from ShackES made by Frank from the CPL:

The CPL has informed Valve of these bugs and they are being taken care of.

The CPL has announced that they and Moshpit Entertainment have terminated all agreements. The CPL was concerned about certain legal issues surrounding Moshpit, and this decision means the $25k Unreal Tournament tournament has been cancelled.

A little while ago an interview with CPL president Angel Munoz mentioned possibly dropping Quake3 from the FRAG5 event. Due to public outcry though CPL has reconsidered and FRAG5 will in fact be Quake3. For the nostalgic, back in June of last year FRAG5 was tentatively a UT event

CPL founder Angel Munoz has been interviewed at Ice Terminal, talking about the CPL events for this year, the increased diversity of games being played at the events, and a couple of other things. Thanks Blues News.

CPL has opened up sign-ups for their $25,000 Unreal Tournament event to be held in Texas. The event is scheduled to be held in June which isnt too far from now.

A while back a few people probably remember Gamers.com grabbing up the rights to PGL. Well it looks like they are preparing to finally launch their new gaming league. The website has a splash page up now with an option to email you when more details are out. They are calling it GXL. What is interesting is that back in the days of the PGL/CPL pissing matches they didnt really go head to head much since PGL ran online tournaments and CPL was running LAN events. This time around though CPL has since launched the CAL online tournament league. Also of note is that Gamers.com fired a huge portion of their staff a little while ago yet they are still pursuing growth. I'll be pretty surprised if they manage to launch the new league with large cash prizes. At any rate, the more leagues the better in my book :) Plus this one could end up being fresh and in our face. Thanks BlackAria.

The pro gamers out there who have been playing in all those big cash prize tournaments are getting quite a wild ride lately. Just a few days ago CPL announced they were replacing Quake3 with Counter-Strike for their large year-end event. It's not stopping there though. This Esports-America interview includes this statement from the CPL president.

I have one more piece of bad news for the Quake 3 community. There are currently some discussions at the CPL to drop Quake 3 from our FRAG 5 event. While nothing is confirmed and the discussions are preliminary, it is obvious that the CPL team members believe that other games and developers should get attention from the CPL and that our league should no longer focus exclusively on id Software products.

Angel also talked a bit more in this ShackES thread about some concerns. A ESports-America editor also posted his thoughts the other day. Honestly I am in almost complete agreement with the decision. Counter-Strike is nearly ten-fold as popular among online gamers. A company that is trying to attract the masses to a gaming event cant ignore that. CPL is still holding over $100,000 worth of Quake3 events though this year, just a couple of their larger events have been switched to Counter-Strike. What would I say if I was still playing Quake3 the most? Probably the same thing, I would just be more dissapointed is all.

ShackES has posted word from the CPL president talking about the decision to drop Quake3 in favor of Counter-Strike for their year-end spectacular $150,000 event. They also have some reactions from before Angel's statement.

The CPL just delivered what could be the knockout punch to competitive Quake3 players around the nation. Quake3 has been dominating the 'professional gaming' circuit for the past year or so playing host to several big tournaments including a couple of $100,000 prize events. The peak of this interest probably at the Frag4 4on4 tournament. However over the past several months though there has been a noticeable drop in interest from the competitive scene, however many players were still pointing towards the upcoming $150,000 CPL Quake3 "World Championship" event as a reason to continue competitively. Well all that just changed.

The CPL announced today that their banner event of 2001, the CPL World Championships, will be a Counter-Strike tournament. The prize money for the event is $150,000. [... ] Long live Counter-Strike. Quake 3 - we hardly knew ye.

As a competitive Quake3 player myself for quite a while this is honestly no surprise. Quake3 was great fun for quite a while but for some reason it just "lost its legs" a while back. In fact my own Quake3 (r3v) clan which took 2nd place at the last CPL Q3 team tournament had nearly stopped playing Quake3 completely months ago. It just wasn't fun anymore. (Well, CTF is still fun) What have we been playing for the past few months? Counter-Strike. A ton of it. We're not alone either, several of the top Quake3 teams have been secretly or not-so-secretly trying their hands at Counter-Strike. It's a really amazing shift. Those 50,000 are about to meet up with some new friends. I'm looking forward to it.

Registration for the upcoming CPL Unreal Tournament Event will start on March 21 at 3PM CST, according to a press release sent to us. This $25,000 event will be held in Dallas, TX June 21-24. Among others, CliffyB will be attending if he's not in the bushes behind you.

Razer, creator of the Boomslang "gamers mouse" has gone bankrupt according to a report on ShackES. Razer was targetted at the hardcore gamer and was an avid supporter of the CPL. Razer currently still owes several thousand dollars to recent participants in the Babbages Counter-Strike tournament.

Confirmation came from the mouth of the CEO herself - according to my source - who said that an investor backed out recently, and that Razer (and the parent company, Karna) was unable to stay afloat without the support

However a couple of days ago (in an entirely different thread) when the topic of CPL having troubles finding other backers was mentioned, the CEO of CPL Angel Munoz had this to say:.

We are up to almost $300,000 in cash prizes just for the US events (one more to be announced), add the international events and that number increases to $450,000 in cash. I think that says it all.

The CPL has announced their online amateur league which they have started along with Domain of Games. For more info see the CPL website.

The AVault has some early details on an Amateur League that the CPL is announcing on Monday. AVault promises an interview with the people heading this online league on Monday following the announcement.

The CPL has announced a couple of changes to their upcoming Counter-Strike tournament. Firstly SPEAKEASY has decided to up the prize money from $25,000 to $30,000. Even if you're only top16 you score $500 now. Secondly the cutoff date for registration is March 19

Word from AVault is that the CPL events page has been updated with a $25,000 Unreal Tournament event. It looks like CPL is finally breaking free of strictly Quake with this event and their upcoming Counter-Strike events.

The CPL has announced the winners of their poster contest, [winner] [2nd place] [3rd place] [honorable] some really impressive work in there. You can check out the full listing here.

The CPL has opened up the registration for the new SPEAKEASY.net Counter-Strike tournament. The tournament will be featuring $25,000 in cash prizes along with fame and possibly naked chicks.

Two articles this morning looking at two different problems a lot of game news sites are having. FragLand's Game Sites Doomed? looks at the problems the game news sites are running into now that advertising companies are going either out of business, or cutting their pay to the affiliate. They have an overview of all the events, and also tries to give some suggestions as to how to get extra income on the site. In more turmoil news, Eurogamer is reporting that another large UK game server / e-commerce provider, Wireplay/Gameplay, is one the verge of shutting down with many jobs already cut.
All the News That's Fit? is an article at The Adrenaline Vault, with the author offering his opinion on the bad journalism that plagues some sites nowadays. Examples of course being Andy Smith's reporting of the Duke4 screenshots "announcement" which wasn't an official announcement at all, and the rather biased reporting of an alleged assault at the Babbage's CPL event in December.

Personal websites will always have their polemics and rants, and discussion boards are always going to be free game for the flamers and antagonists. And there should always be at least a few sites devoted solely to unsourced gossip and muckraking. But the websites "of record" have to start rising above this, just as print papers rise above their crazy mail. If online journalists are going to claim the same professional status as those other kinds of writers--the muckraker, the tabloid reporter, the city daily or the newsmagazine hack--then we are going to have to try to conform to at least one of their ethical principles. By that, I mean the one belief all those other subspecies share in common: the steadfast conviction that just because something may be a good story doesn't always mean it's news.