This league format is much better than previous 125 cups :)

Yep, I was skeptical at first but it turned out great.

C O O O O O O O O O O O O O O L L E R
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
L
L
E
R

2 vertical O's are missing.
you're fired.

I wanted to give vertical and horizontal equal length.
I'm re-hired.

270x265.
you're re-fired.

I did the closest approximation.
I'm re-re-hired.

2 O's = exact = closest.
you're re-re-fired.

2 O's is too common, needed change.
I'm re-re-re-hired.

you wanted... to change... cooller?
be lucky that you're only fired.

ok but if cooller ever changes his name to cooooooooooooooller I'm re-hired

noted.







PS: you mean "coooooooooooooller", not "cooooooooooooooller", right?

STOP TRYING TO GET ME FIRED

why am i laughing so hard at these shenanigans?!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15072710/LOL/CAMEL_DOWN.jpg

\_/

yall fired

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTCvFW2b98I&am...e&t=7s

Ridic groups. All of them are a must watch

C 2
2

What the duck, C is now B

getoutofmyheadcharles.jpeg

wow 500 bux for top1 is really nice

group B is ridic

how did u manage to draw groups this way ?

ITT: ridic

RID:DICKS

RIDE DICKS

spraying. gonna be rad

F U N N Y B
U
N
N
Y
B

B A K S T E E N
A
K
S
T
E
E
N

fuck they are in the same group >.<

OH M GEE Evil vs Strenx!

Don't forget pavel!

Holy F*** - Group B & C :O Can't wait

:DICKS

group :DICKS !

OH GOD WHY PAVEL AGAIN

your group is a joke imo

group D is so weak
should swap evil with ash & dem0n with 7

Who is this Alexey A?

He is the Bringer of Light. The Bane of Boredom. The Harbinger of Harosh.

lol woot my group :D

dem0n easy one for us :D

hehe, hf hf :DDDD

lol ;d cypher dem0n me cooller reaper;d nice.. easy :D

You CAN do it!

Ye, gonna be awe-sum :D

Evil should switch his piledriver mode on. But with springtime and all girls getting half-naked (and ASKING FOR IT), I think his piledriver tends to work in more wet and delicious places than QL arenas.

S E V 3 N
E
V
3
N

T W I S T E R
W
I
S
T
E
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K 1 L L S E N
1
L
L
S
E
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Group A2 shedule and results

p0ni vs guard gonna be gud

2ez for the funnyb

Group A2 will be streamed on www.twitch.tv/theamazingins

My internet just won't work today.... -.-

wtf is this :(

Cypher and Cooller on same group? o.O Shouldnt they both be top seeds?

1 seed - top-4 from March season
2 seed - top-5-8 from March season

k bad luck then for cooller to end on cyphers group, hoping he keeps the level of last sunday cup.

did you see faceit yesterday?..

Yep

C O O L L E R
O
O
L
L
E
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Guard vs p0ni, a really sick english languj showdown.

but we can clearly understand each other, without any troubles. I would say, our english is so good, aliens would unerstand it pefectly :))

A L E X E Y A
L
E
X
E
Y

A

Engineer will be coming round to my house tomorrow afternoon. Should be nicely prepared for group B2 if they dont arrive too late.

Sorry again for technical issues today

poor twister...in same group with pavel,evil and strenx )))

pavel and evil got knocked out relatively early last sunday, havent seen strenx play all that much, anything is possible :>

Why trolling twister? He's a pretty nice player and can happen to beat anyone when focused enough. He's definitely improved massively as of late and might even top for once and regularly later on.

ORLY...watch strenx-twister @ t7 17.04.2013

THIS... IS... SPARTAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!11!1!!

cyprus money coming to ql neat

was a huge mess today lol:D

Whats up with group A2 games? Are they gonna be played today or what?

yes, they will play today.

Internet working today. Will be back on www.twitch.tv/zootlive

yay you are so pretty <3

very sweet! :) quake evening

could you and ins get off some players dicks?

all i hear is "demon this demon that" when hes getting raped by matrox.

as if you had this panteon of players whom you will support, and give all the spot light.

we always favour the underdog or the one who's losing :|

like in matrox vs cooller?

"cooller this cooller that" "you dont deserve to be followed from start matrox"

raged like a

potat?

yea

One person who's feedback I'll never take in to account ^^

:(


ps. saying infront of dunno how much viewers that i know nothing wasnt polite :(

Do you see the world from a black/white perspective? Dont get jokes and have no feel for irony .You make urself irrelevant.

wat?

you were doing exactly the same thing here in the meantime. friendly word of advice (for real): it's all public shit. no one is clean. defend your opinions with solid arguments to keep the jesters in their peasants' sheds. and if they keep jesting: turn the joke on them.

i appreciate your effort, but im just making the drama.


actually zoot did me a favour solidating my online image, in which i put lot of hard work

very well then. proceed

your perception is so biased.

stutter stutter warp warp, offline, reconnecting

sad panda here. cant just be me? :<

y no picmip?

dm13 matrox-demon ran good

:D

nope, cooller-matrox dm13 tons of stuttering again

can someone else run a stream?

man group d is weak as fuck compared to others. who makes these groups?

I could hear cypher's ass screaming in pain through my laptop speakers

Crying Cypher again...so pathetic

Coollers aim is just on another level since he has changed to this Zowie Uber mouse. Having Cooller and Rapha with Strenx aim is just imbalanced, someone needs to break Cooller's hand.

I think that his aim improved not because of mouse, but because of:
1) mouse settings, no accel etc
2) for me this is main reason: that he started playing almost every day, not like he used to do years before - playing few days before lan tournament.

I'd like to think that the spell has been broken. Cooller has always been a top quake player capable of beating anybody, but when toxjc permanently took the q4 crown away from him he seemed to have lost some of his confidence. It'd be awesome if that confidence had been recovered right now.

Which would also underscore the shift we've recently seen in how quake gaming can be perceived. Not long ago, the common understanding was that "practice, practice, practice", i.e. devoting as many time as one can to quake - was the one key to high level gaming. And that once people dropped out of school their "career" was basically over. Where we're now seeing that experience is at least just as important.

And a couple of years ago, on another occasion when cooller announced his retirement just to come back for IEM lan events, I thought already that he could be setting an important example of how to pursue a sustained top level quake gaming career while attending to all the other demands of life at the same time, as they pile up when one's getting older. An example which now seems to actually materialize. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other old-schooler comebacks we've seen - like that of evil - were also inspired by this precedent.

So altogether and fanboiism aside, I'd say what cooller's doing there is actually paving a way for others and writing some history, too. And it's really nice to have him sticking around and maybe even see him overcome some of those shadows of the recent past, so to speak. That said - and let's just face that dire fact - quake would probably be "dead" by now anyway if it wasn't for the more eastern parts of Europe.

blame accel

and abyssus

oh no, I don't believe so

don't recall when exactly cooller started conditioning himself to losing to cypher - if I may call it that - but it seemed to be during the later asus open years, 2007/8 or so, when he appeared to have lost any interest in the game

and once that had happened, it has just been a fairly steep uphill battle against all the hungry "newcomers" pushing in (namely cypher, avek, rapha)

i'll give it to you though that a seemingly superficial change - like that of equipment - might just help manifesting another change - mental if you will - which has basically happened already anyway

Personally I have huge problems getting rid of that mental barrier. Will working on a car dealership help me on that?

Yes. Achievements made in real life will probably significantly raise your sense of self worth thus increasing your confidence which could impact your ability to keep your calm and remain focused while playing duels in Quake Live.

Dude, when you're not happy it has an impact. When you're gaming and thinking you really should be doing something else it has an impact. In this way, the more you have to take responsibility for yourself and possibly others, life becomes a journey through ups and downs. And the real, major credit I''m giving to cooller is how persistent he has been, despite there having been no lack in setbacks. Hats off to that, really.

I only play and timewaste when I can and when I'm overall happy. Already knew that. Also I never had confidence issues, though I acknowledge some people are better than me at everything I do, but that I'm not bad myself. Sometimes I have barriers with some activities and people, which is quite hard to overcome, but I'd say it's normal.

Thing is apparently cooller overcame a mental barrier from one day to another. My point is I don't believe cooller had that with cypher to begin. Maybe with rapha, not with cypher, and lets face it cooller is the kind of self confidence.

Being a noob and all, I think what matters is that cooller changed his gameplay style a bit now that he gets more damage in fights. Sometimes it works in his favor, in others he doesn't realize how much he is hitting (without accel). In that ztn match he surprised cypher quite a lot when deciding to attack in situations he never had done it before (mega for example), against demon in dm6 he misjudged his stack at the shards.
To me it's not a confidence boost in general (life) but that he has more confidence on his game, due to that he improved on his worst aspect. That boost in acc. leads him to play differently because he can now and his opponents are not used to it nor to him finally playing comfortable.

I'd dare to say that if there's a lan soon we will see cooller in his prime, ever, not because he overcame a barrier but because he is a better player now. With that said, it'd be very, very, very fun to watch him play against rapha in particular. That's his achilles' heel and the sole person who he respects in-game, not anyone else.

Not one day to another. I'm sure a lot of things contributed to it over time. Still, cooller chose and announced retirement just recently. And then decided to come back, for whatever reason. And I have no problems assuming that, when making this decision, he was also looking for a change that would get him out of the eternal 2nd place routine. While that change I'm sure has been some time in the works, at one level or another.

And of course there's been changes to his game, must have anyway. Isn't the first time, too. So these day, we've seen him ease up a bit on the "pacman" routine, focusing a little less on items but rather on enemy prediction, surprise moments and aim. I mean that's what cypher's always been saying right, how easy cooller was for him to predict?

Yet, to make these changes it needs motivation, which - in this game - pretty much equals confidence. Now just go back and look through cooller interviews from 2008 on. Main theme: how hard it was to find motivation.

Still, I really don't want to imply that I knew anything about what's going on. All I'm doing is sharing impressions. And expressing my delight about cooller still being around and apparently enjoying himself. Really, having seen him losing that close in IEM and qcon finals during recent years and then see him still coming back not only trying to play his best but to improve, at a time where there's really not much to gain in this game - now that's what I call majorly cool(l).

imo these changes in gamestyle are result of not playing as a proffesional gamer


he just enjoys the game, so hes got space for mistakes and losing. before retirement he was playing to win.

For once I agree with hitsu.

I think him playing on ping 5 during the last games vs cypher might be something pertinent to mention aswell no?

Anyways gg's for him.

Then again, cooller lost to cypher a couple of sunday cups earlier when he was playing on about 100 ping

Just took another look at those recent games, and cooller seemed to try dealing and avoiding damage a lot more consequently than usual. Like hitting a sneaky rail and then just vanish, and showing some dodging maybe even more amazing than usual.

Also, remember his unsound rushing habits, like getting fragged and then repeatedly going after the opponent with mg just to die again? Those seem to be gone too, right now.

1. cypher is not used to cooller hitting clutch rails
2. cypher is not used to cooller constantly getting in his face

all of this while running the items as always. his damage output is much higher than before, looks like evil sometimes

I think 26 is not old, especially in cybersport.

IMHO cooller (and any top player) may have confidence only when he is playing together with community - initially it was lan clubs. Then, when internet-tournaments era started, cooller activly ignored this, only played before lans for 2 weeks, so no confidence, no automation of new tricks. Now he is playing many months in a row, for first time since lan era, that what explains the result I guess.

I LOVE Cooller's newfound motivation and sheer joy of playing. Did you watch the interview FaceIT did with him, where he told about (lol, "about") his new mouse? You could really tell that he was genuinely happy to be playing right now and I don't think that he has felt like that for many years. :)

edit: typo.

Yeah, listened to the interview. He's astonishingly frank there and telling all one needs to know when saying that he's enjoying the game again, now that it isn't his primary source of income, and that he wasn't "afraid anymore". Let's hope that he can maintain that spirit, he's clearly an awesome - if not the most awesome - player to watch when being at ease.

And I'm just as glad as you are. For many years, back to the earlier q3 (and dear gtv) times, he's been the one player whose games constantly sent my pulse through the roof.

Always a plus for another die hard Cooller fan ¦]

Friend, he's the primary reason why I'm sticking around. Fact is, I'm really not playing that much myself anymore, but rather turned "consumer". And from the consumer perspective, there's just so many fond memories I'm having from following cooller games, I just can't let go as long as he's playing. Even more so when he's possibly getting better than ever.

imho cooller now is playing more tricky, relaxed. To watch his game is now more interesting ).

Any vods of yesterday's cooller - cyhper matchup?

here http://www.twitch.tv/zootlive/b/391686799

3:43:01

Thanks ^^

Group B2 vods now cut and put on www.youtube.com/zootql & www.twitch.tv/zootlive/videos

Will be streaming today (Group C2) - Although my internet cut out again last night... hopefully it will survive the stream! :S

So we're playing tomorrow, is it Spart1e or not? :c)

hmm special spart1e tactics if it's him? take him out today and make sure he drinks enough?:]

If it's vs spart1e, try to hit my shots. if it's vs only_toxic, I'll try to hit my shots. advanced shit going on.

solid tactics. remeber to play abc game lol

Lost 7-8 to evil on dm6. Have fun guys

very close btw...

Didn't you place ahead of only_toxic?
2wins 3 losses each but you are ahead on mapscores?
Right? You are at 3rd on the group page atleast:
http://125fps.challonge.com/april_gs1_group_b

Since they did not post any rules anywhere they can say whatever to let the russian/polish players advance instead of swedish players. ;)

only_toxic beat both spart1e and etty who are tied with him so i guess that's why he got through.

keep ur cool twister :>

picmip 8+ yet zoot?

stuttering streams turn down new people before picmip ever will :D

Man, we've been over it so often regarding the faceit stream. For some obscure reason, they seem to think that turning on "eye candy" attracts more viewers. Can't quite believe it though.

For me, the two resolution options - HD and 360p - are both a total mess right now. HD lags and 360p is an unbearable festival of image blockiness, which wouldn't be the case with proper picmip settings.

And while at it, the huge flash player window on twitch pages isn't exactly genius neither. It eats lots of cpu while in windowed mode, making my machine a little laggy when trying to do some other stuff while having the stream running.

Altogether, it's just a load of crap. The russians do it right. Levelup and Holyshit did it right. But for some reason, both faceit and this one here are resistant to the idea of improvement.

Will never return to anything higher than picmip 1. The amount of people who care about picmip is completely dwarfed by the non-quakers who switch on a stream and want to have a positive first impression. Quakers watch Quake because that's what they love and have generally been a fan of for a significant period of time. I don't think you can argue that Quake needs some fresh blood on the scene.

It's not like low picmip is going to be responsible for the revival of the game... or anything near it. Although people who would usually turn it down at first glance, might spend a few extra moments to look in to the game.

Stating that "turning on eye candy attracts more viewers" is unbelievable for you is odd, considering that if production values were not valued, then we would still be watching TV in black and white.


As far as I'm concerned, stream figures have only improved since this change - any lag or stutters caused on stream are generally due to peoples connection not handling the right quality or people not having a computer that can tolerate certain qualities. Occasionally Twitch lags, but this is the vast minority of the time - considering routing to every corner of the globe is difficult to perfect, I'm pretty sure where we are now is very positive.

It has to be said that picmip16 = smoother stream in all resolutions for everyone, especially at lower res than max. quality.

and if that is even the case, it still makes the game look like shit :)

I do understand your argument, but please take a look at your stream at 360p. In-game I mean, not just you guys sitting there and talking, which is easy on the video compressor.

Now do that, and then compare your 360p to some russkie 360p stream with proper picmip. And you'll understand what "looking like shit" really means.

And no, that's not due to some client side or networking issue. It's due to the compressor not being able to deal with all the video detail you're throwing at it, at the given (server side set) bandwidth.

This is not 2005. Even I have over 1 Mbps by now.

I'm having 3MBit downstream. Yet, HD is lagging on me. Constantly, I mean.

Edit:

Brief addendum. Just checked bandwidth usage on the QLRanks twitch 720+ stream, and it's indeed maxing out my downstream bandwidth with just below 400kbyte=3.2mbit. Guess the same applies to all twitch streams of that resolution.

Yeah, streamers often set 720p+ to 3,5 Mbps (to be watchable on 3,6 and 4 Mbps links).

But 720p recode is around 2 Mbps and it's still of acceptable quality (unlike 480p and lower). Too bad only partner streams have recodes.

Just checked. QLRanks TV has nominal bit rate of 2900+128. That's less than 400 KB/s, it's basically set to 3 Mbps total.

720p recode is 1465+93 Kbps. So I was wrong - it's not 2 Mbps, it's 1,5.

Of course Twitch has this nasty habit of sending data in short bursts with pauses in between, or waiting 30 seconds when you open the stream and then saturating your connection for another 10... But that's Twitch. Normally the bit rates mentioned above would mean you're able to watch any quality just fine.

Dude, many thanks for taking the time indeed. But apart from those bursts, my nominal max of 3MBit probably wouldn't do that nicely anyway. Usually, when maxing out your dl bandwidth, the ISP starts buffering too. That's at least my experience.

Well, if they're free to allocate bandwidth to their streams at their discretion, the 360p stream could definitely profit from some beefing up. Just to get rid of the artifacts, at least partly.

Considering this is single pass on-the-fly encoding, 1.5 to 2MBit should do comparatively nicely for 360p.

I know the pros and cons to streaming in picmip 0. Evidently I've decided the pros outweigh the cons.


End of discussion

Fair enough. Just wanted to be sure that you really understood that your 360p stream is riddled with compression artifacts and "looking like shit", to use your lingo.

he's aware of that. it had been discussed to death.

Right. In the meantime, I just checked that the QLRanks 720+ twitch stream is in fact maxing out my 3MBit download bandwidth. Meaning that I'm really depending on the 360p stream, so it's not just idle talk.

I was watching 240p for a year and a half. You can handle 360

Sure. But that wasn't the issue. The issue was that - given the texture detail settings - 360p is just a starved stream given the allocated bandwidth. Resulting in huge amounts of compression artifacts.

So yeah, I can watch it without lags. But it's a constant pain to look at.

I know i was there. now imagine that instead of 360 you have to watch 240. It's not great, yeah, but it's small potats comparing to the potential benefits.

Dude, not everybody is a masochist. If you happen to recall q3 and gtv times, where you could follow games in the q3 client at 100KBit downstream at whatever video settings you liked, you'll agree that the switch to video streaming that happened with ql was already a major step backwards, visually.

And if you still - reluctantly - accommodated yourself to levelup streaming quality you'll also agree that what we're seeing here on 360p is, frankly, an atrocity in comparison.

It just gets worse and worse. Unless you're able and willing to spend huge amounts of bandwidth, that is.

it's not ideal. but I'm willing to compromise for the greater good no matter how cheesy that sounds

Well, I'm watching, right? So I'm willing to make compromises, too, even if they stack up over the years in the manner outlined above. Making compromises even if that entails some profound suffering, and I can tell you that I do suffer. But that still shouldn't prevent anybody from raising his voice where things are severely lacking and are screaming for improvement. Isn't that something you could agree with?

it absolutely shouldn't prevent anybody from raising his voice, but the voices have been raised for over a year and the matter is closed. picmip 0 is here to stay so get used to it unfortunately. there's no going back.

So? If that's decided then give the lower res streams more bandwidth. Problem solved.

I'm not asking for whatever picmip. I'm asking for decent stream options. And if one parameter is considered fixed there's still others which can be tuned. Comprendre?

comprende, comprende nevertheless I think you're waisting your time complaining. It's not like the streamers don't want to accomodate the highest ammounts of viewers some of which have trouble viewing hq streams. Not like Zoot is an asshole laughing maniacly to himself because people have trouble viewing his stream sometimes. picmip 0 is out of the debate for good, quality settings are sth Zoot say he'll try to fix and that's it. it is what it is.

I'm not complaining. I'm making suggestions. You might not believe it, but some people need some convincing before they get going.

fair enough

"Occasionally Twitch lags"

May I present you Understatement of the Week award?

Twitch lags all the time. Have you tried hashd.tv or something?

It doesn't lag all the time for me so how would I know? In fact it very rarely lags for me.

My question still stands, can you give other streaming service (like hashd.tv) a try for your private streams?

I know Faceit have partnerships and can't ditch Twitch as easily, but you can be the pioneer :)

Don't know what uplink you have there, but if you have enough, then it's totally possible to feed two streams on two platforms with same data. I think lvl^ did it a few times in the past (feeding twitch.tv and own3d.tv at the same time).

I have a contract with Twitch. There is no benefit for me at all to stream on hashd

I can look in to it, but it's highly unlikely that I'll go anywhere with this

Sorry

It lags from time to time, but it's not that big of a deal. If I just might add, you are highly delusional if you believe that picmip 1 or picmip 999 makes the difference to anyone that watches quake for the first time - game is 15 years old and looks like utter shit. So the "eye candy" argument is complete bullshit. id started it all with quakecon and you are taking advices from someone who lets carmack talk for 5 hours while the best players are playing in the background without a stream. C'mon zoot.

I couldn't care less if it's picmip 1 or 51, I'll watch it anyway. Just please stop with this "quake looks good with high details". It doesn't, it's ridiculous. To us it looks good because we've been playing it for years. Other than that, you're doing a fucking amazing job <3

I'm highly dellusional? I appreciate the rest of your comments, but your opinion on where the picmip came from is seriously misinformed.

As far as I remember lvl switched the picmip right after quakecon, look at the nations cup just a year ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCUyTndipz4), vor is still raging about it. Please correct me if I'm wrong but dis said that qc influenced this heavily.

Note that I'm not here for the "picmip war", like I said - I'll watch the stream anyway but you can't argue with the fact that shadow's stream is smooth as ins's buttcheeks. Your 360 is completely unwatchable but 720+ works fine for most of the time.

Keep doing an awesome job!

Qcon did influence it, definitely. Although we didn't take advice from someone who 'lets carmack talk for 5 hours'.

anyone who says that ql looks like utter shit is aesthetically dead in my opinion. it's one of the best looking games ever. yes some textures look veeeery old and technology wise it's not modern whatsoever, but it's not sore on the eyes at all thanks to the fantastic art direction. wether we like it or not picmip 0 helps showing this.

QL looks dated to anyone who plays 2005 and onwards games.

QL streams with picmip 0 on anything less than max. res. look hopeless, unwatchable.

Q3 is aesthetically nicer than QL.

Read my sentence again..."anyone that watches quake for the first time". Of course we think it looks good but do you really think picmip matters to the guys who came from bf3 background (for example).

For you and me it's the best looking game - for anyone that played anything else since 2005-2006 it looks like lego. Well scratch that, lego city actually looks pretty good.

we're talking about 2 different things here

you are highly delusional if you believe that picmip 1 or picmip 999 makes the difference to anyone that watches quake for the first time

You have obviously never tried watching it like a sport on a tv with friends over a bottle.

I'm doing this with some grade of success and in the old times (picmip, simple items), first thing I heard from everyone was always: "what is this shit, I had better graphics on my Amiga 500!"

Now when we watch a 40+ fps picmip 0 stream with bloom, nobody complains or asks about graphics. Now it's just unnoticeable background to the action. That's the purpose.


So far my evangelizing produced 2 friends who don't play but watch big tournaments and expect me to inform them when those happen. Hey, it's better than 0! Yes, that's because the streams don't suck (except Zoot's with simple items, fortunately he doesn't cover big tournaments :)).

ok thanks for your comment. let me know when you go picmipped again, untill that day i will be on the russians streams!

-1 viewer.

ps; 0 picmip has no benifits untill proven you get more viewers. its also lower quality due to heavyer encoding, also makes 480p and below useless to watch unless very very tiny window. oh, dont forget the reduced bandwidth requirement of an easyer to encode picture. and yes... twitchtv does lag for a large part of your following... while its always smooth on uashadows stream. and no my net is fine, i can upload/download and play quake with a solid ping, its deffo not a bw issue.

what was the benifit again of 0 picmip? 'zoot likes it' so it must be better?

Well, I haven't been getting less viewers by any means.

You clearly haven't been listening to what I've been saying so I don't feel like there's any point in justifying myself again.

hf

If you wanna do this, sure.

Will never return to anything higher than picmip 1. The amount of people who care about picmip is completely dwarfed by the non-quakers who switch on a stream and want to have a positive first impression.

-- A smooth as fuck stream > blocky old xvid dvdrip stream, by far.

Quakers watch Quake because that's what they love and have generally been a fan of for a significant period of time. I don't think you can argue that Quake needs some fresh blood on the scene.

-- You are only turning away viewers due to the low bandwidth you supply compared to the resolution/game graphics used. There aint even 576p or 480p.

It's not like low picmip is going to be responsible for the revival of the game... or anything near it. Although people who would usually turn it down at first glance, might spend a few extra moments to look in to the game.

-- Its not about the revival of the game, its about supplying an enjoyable viewing experience. People sticking around because a stream has picmip 0 is something u sucked out of ur moms titties and holds no value at all.

Stating that "turning on eye candy attracts more viewers" is unbelievable for you is odd, considering that if production values were not valued, then we would still be watching TV in black and white.

-- lol.

As far as I'm concerned, stream figures have only improved since this change

-- Proof? It could of just improved due to popularity. The quality still sucks.

any lag or stutters caused on stream are generally due to peoples connection not handling the right quality or people not having a computer that can tolerate certain qualities.

-- Yes there are some people who do not grasp this concept. Im not one of them.

Occasionally Twitch lags, but this is the vast minority of the time - considering routing to every corner of the globe is difficult to perfect, I'm pretty sure where we are now is very positive.

-- Twitch's system / your setup is far from good. Many people have issues. Just because you cant see them doesnt mean theyre not there.

All i see is ignorance. But do what you like.

Ignore yourself then :)

Out of 1000 concurrent viewers yesterday, maybe 0.01% have an issue.


There's no 480p? I'll look in to that

Try looking at chat sometimes (or maybe, just maybe, take someones word for it that there is an issue) When 50 people at once are claiming lag... There probably an issue with lag.

Not trying to start a fight, im just abit annoyed at the shortsightedness of all this. If you need help just ask the russians how to stream, they seem to have mastered it for quite a while now.

50 people?

I read the chat frequently and there have never been that many complaints unless I am genuinely lagging. To put your mind at ease I will run some tests and see if I can get it any smoother. But note that it will not be changed to your favourite picmip. (vods have always looked great for me, and people actually comment how SMOOTH my stream is by the way)

Don't complain about short-sightedness when you simply don't observe all the facts yourself.

Oh its smooth 70% of the time, and cutting out the other 30%. Its not about how smooth it is or can look, its about consistancy.

I guess it doesnt help that the twitchtv player is flash, ie shite :F

Vods also do not compare/relate to live streaming.

Really Zoot, are you even trying? Dont claim everything is perfect when it just isnt man :)

Yeah sure, I put 30-40 hours a week in to this stuff and obviously don't try at all.

You've made me aware of 1 thing I didn't realise was the case on my stream. Now you're just persisting and being rude.

I feel that sometimes ignorant people need their faces smeared in the issues before they see them. Personality trait of mine :>

Your stream has obviously gained popularity by hosting many tournaments and it shows time has gone in to it. Not trying to deny that, just wanna perfect it I guess.

edit, + what weltschmerz said.

and I'm happy to help you with that, if there is a way to make 360p look good on the stream (which by the way, in nature of 360p - it isn't meant to look good - that's why there is HD) then I will try my best to get there. Although there are several things out of my technological control that can't be done considering that altering the picmip is not something I am willing to do.

I've already contacted Twitch about the lack of 480p on my channel and I'll look in to video settings before the stream. Although I'm almost certain there is nothing I can do to make it look better. This is the problem that existed 12 months ago when people decided to try 0 picmip once again. I hope this at least satisfies your persistence, I'm just giving you the warning before you start to expect any improvements. I do always strive for perfection, but sometimes it isn't always attainable.

in nature of 360p - it isn't meant to look good - that's why there is HD)

WRONG. Please don't equalize resolution to image quality. Of course higher resolution is always preferable. But 360 can still be made to look reasonably good if the stream gets enough bandwidth to cope with the video detail.

Also, if you feel that you're already spending too much time on this, please find someone who can help you out with this stuff. I'm not a streaming expert myself, my experience rather relating to multipass movie encoding. But I know a good deal about mpeg4 compression (down to the quantization math), and I can tell you for sure that beefing up the bandwidth for the lower res (360,480, whatever) streams would improve things a lot.

hi5 :P

so are you suggesting I use higher bitrate?

Tried these kinda things before, I don't understand all of it myself - but really.. if you guys think I'm cheapskating you out of something that could be better, be sure to know it's not in my best interest to do this.

Again, I WILL try to improve it for the stream later on - but I can't promise anything by any means.

I know you aren't cheapskating. And I know also that what you're doing requires taking care of a lot of different things, and be assured we all appreciate that, and very much so.

Yes, higher bitrate would improve the streams. Any effectively, but the HD stream is good enough. The blockiness and washy images you're seeing on the lower res (360) stream though is due to what is called a "starved" stream. It's just not getting enough bandwidth/bitrate.

The "equations" here are pretty simple. The higher the resolution, the higher the bitrate it needs. And the higher the detail (texture detail, in this case) and the more movement, the higher bitrate it needs too, to get a good image. Simply because there's more information to pack into the stream.

That's also why people constantly recommend higher picmip. To reduce the amount of information, so the stream looks good at the given bitrate. But if it's possible with twitch, you can just tune the other knob and increase the bitrate, so that it's enough to properly "pack" all the texture detail into the stream. In that case you may keep your picmip any way you want.

There's really little magic involved there, just this simple relationship to keep in mind - more information (higher res, more detail, more movement, ...) requires higher bitrates to get a decent stream.

Edit:

going out right now, but just a brief addendum.

The goal with all the above is of course to find the "sweet spot". That is, you want to find the bitrate, roughly, where the stream is just looking good but not more. The tradeoff being between maximizing image quality and minimizing the bandwidth the stream requires. That's why a little testing is required.

So if twitch allows for that, I'd start with 1MBit for the 360p stream. If it's constantly looking good, I'd reduce the bitrate a little, lets say 100KBit, to save bandwidth. If it's not looking good, I'd increase bandwidth by 500KBit. And then go forth and back over a couple of weeks until I find the spot where the stream just looks about good without wasting any additional bandwidth.

You want me to use different bitrates for different qualities? Or am I misunderstanding? Because that isn't possible I'm afraid.

Will play with it later.

Play with me later

[thrown a lot of text out here cause I just looked at twitch help pages which made it redundant]

Edit:

Ok, I just took a look myself and found that, with twitch, you can use several kinds of software to broadcast games to the twitch server. Namely XSplit, FFSplit, Wirecast (and more). If you're willing to share which of these you're using I'd be willing to take a look at which options - specifically with regard to bitrate tweaking - your specific software provides.

Using xsplit :) I'd rather we discuss this in private, so pm me if you have suggestions

thanks

Sure. I'll take a look at it first and will come back to you after that, for certain. Might take a couple of days though, possibly over the weekend.

Well, as long as you know that your 720p stream isnt HD. Just because its called 720p doesnt mean any (below average) bitrate will work for it. It goes from smooth to blocky nonstop. Hence why picmip has been suggested since it takes a large load away from the encoder and allows lower bitrate streams to appear of higher quality.

360p and 480p can look as smooth as a babbies butt, as long as you give it the appropriate encoding+bitrate+game gfx settings. Theres no shame in asking someone to improve this. Trance comes in to mind, he seems capable but I dont know if hes willing :P

The real question is if twitch allows for arbitrary bitrate/bandwidth allocation or if there are fixed presets, for any given resolution. In the former case, things would be laughably easy and done in 5 minutes (well, maybe plus some testing). In the latter case we'd be fucked. Or rather had to kick some twitch ass to make arbitrary bitrate allocation possible.

yes, bring back 480 please : (

anhepotat talks good good

No, there is no 480p. There's only 720+ and 360.

And just that you know, 360 would still be perfectly fine if you could give it enough bandwidth to cope with picmip 0. With that kind of video detail, 1MBit would be about the absolute minimum to get a a consistently decent image at 360.

It's really too bad that you guys - and we already had the discussion on faceit - apparently have very little sensibility for the particulars of video compression, streaming and actual quality. I'm not meaning any offense here, really, but it's just so obvious. And the stance you're taking - either be able to playback my bloated HD stream or go fuck yourself - is frankly a little lazy, to say the least.

No need to reply btw, I know it's "end of discussion" for you.

well, you're not getting more viewers by means of picmip 0. furthermore - you repel those who have numerous lags due to EXACTLY picmip 0. Anyway, when there's an alternative to picmip 0 streams (shadow or 4ce, for instance) people with lags choose an alternative. And it's quite a number.

Quake's beauty is not in the graphics. Even for newcomers - the appealing part is intense action combined with heavy mindwork and tactical decisions behind every move (and this is where a QL streamer might open newcomers' eyes to QL beauty - in in-depth AND emotional commentating. NOT in picmip 0.)

The whole FaceIT crew is brainwashed into thinking that picmip 0 is somehow connected to 'Quality' production. The logic is the same as if Roy would command to turn 'cg_forceenemymodel 0', resulting in very 'quality' looking 'high-poly' bones or smth, merging into 'quality' backgrounds.

It's Quake, guys, people come here for Quake and smooth streams with intelligent commentators, not grafix!

inb4 we start discussing who of all had bigger success

I'd like to see pavel's facial expression after seeing he's being grouped with strenx and evil :D

His face expression was.... Medium.

Av3k games?

thx to funnyb for following zoot on twitch

imba pavel vs end boss evil - 40min game 3'rd map decider

I don't like Evil's attitude lately. Seems he is losing motivation. He is throwing all games where he doesn't have a good start. Reminds me of Cooller in his "don't care" period. Also he started to perform very poor in close battles. His "aimbot" tracking is also not there. I don't know what to think, I hope it's just temporary...

Yes indeed. Feels like he just cba to play careful and calculated game. Straight +f from respawn until he can kill or damage enemy severely. Really boring and kinda frustrating to watch that. Come on, evil, get your shit together.

The thing is - he's not even trying. Looks like he's got more important things to do IRL this springtime than Quake. He basically starts QLPrism just before a competition gotta start and then, no matter if he wins or loses - he just quits to IRL completely, until the next occasional battle.

Can't blame him for that - when you got a solid RL fun and tons of beautiful Russian girls to seduce (they're walking half-naked under the hot April sun everywhere you go, here in USSR) Quake looks to you as an occasional 'have fun'-type of game only.

As for Cula - he's married, and thus - unable to have fun anywhere, except internets. Hence - his recent skillraise (about a half a year has already passed since THE wedding, so he's already tired of fucking the same wife over and over again, but feels restricted in the seduction activities by his personal-time shortage, I believe).

As for Cyfa - he's got an LTR and a very standard way of thinking (when not in Quake), so he sticks to the first girl who opens her jade gate to him and not much time later realizes that the only manly fun he can get (besides his gf's wet holes) is QL. And QL has an advantage here:).
Cyfa's example applies to every Quaker, who gets to the top or nearby during March-April-May period. Also June:).

What the fuck did I just read.

The best comment of the thread

Behold, the Russian Jamalz

He has a very good point though.

some advanced sociological knowledge here Kappa

Evil didn't care about this games cuz its just a "Group Stage" and he knows that he comes out anyway. So, I think we'll see him in a real shape in play-off games.

meanwhile in russia - Colller misses QL :)

Haha, lovely! The Godfather, Part IV.

They say that evil is very busy at work lately. No time to train properly and he is tired when he plays.

real life problems, work, studing and so on.

ZOOT <3
O
O
T

A rauche strenx

baaahaha that baksteen ash game

CLUTCHSTEEN!!!!!

Baksteen dm13, the last minute was intense as shit, not going for RA with 180 armor, I probably wouldn't thought about it. And that lava drop. <3

and what a read in the end going for the upper YA :> Bakster <3

baksteen won because he got most lucky spawn ever, and took ra preventing ash from having full control

oh you mean that crucial moment of the game that happened because:

Ash took 30 extra dmg and lost time because he failed an RJ, then he took that bit too long to go from YA to YA and got late for the megger, then forgot about that spawn, ran away from it giving his back to it without spamming that place and then missed those extra 25 health from the RJ to go up to 100 health=a good position to damage a WEAPONLESS, trapped 120-100 baksteen.

That moment was so important in whole complexity of the game because:

Ash got Baksteen off guard something like 20 seconds later and got the frag and full control for the following 4 minutes untill Baksteen came back in the game for reasons pretty much unrelated to that event.

i would have to rewatch the game to verify your opinion :D

funnyb almost topping his group

R A P E
A
P
E

I love faceit yet i would like to know the method they used to make groups, because having killsen baksteen in one, and cooller cypher on other, sounds like the organization is trying to favor non eastern european players. Hope its just my conspiracy prone mind.

125FPS != FaceIt. And more, 125FPS is an eastern european organization. AFAIK, the groups were defined by the results of the previous qualifier.

Not faceit.
As for the cypher/cooller group, I dont mind. Having two favorites in the same group brings some drama and interesting games even in the early stage, which I like better than one guy raping everyone in his group (killsen today).
Even though Im not absolutely sure hows the playoff brackets drawn (manually / randomly), I guess it also prevents Cooller and Cypher meeting each other in the first playoff round.

HAHAHAHA EPIC FAIL

On my behalf ive been working 2x my usual time for the past 3 days /o\

i said, there was 5 seeds:
1) top-4 of March
2) top-5-8 of March
3) 1 places of 1 group stage
4) 2 places of 1 group stage
5) 3 places of 1 group stage

C O O L L E R
O M G         E
O M G         L
L O V E       O
L O V E       A
E P I C       D
R E L O A D
                

VODs to group A2 ? link doesn't work and can't seem to find it on my own. and what happened with k1llmaster?