🇨🇦 jake valianes · @mojo_ca
3rd Nov 2019 from TwitLonger
A word on the Quake Pro League (and why I wont be wasting my time going forward)
As many of you likely already know, I maintain the Liquipedia pages for the Quake Pro League and the QPL Challenger ladder. I do this because I love Quake and the Quake community. I spend 8 or so hours a day every Saturday and Sunday updating every single score for both Challenger and Pro, and also maintaining a leaderboard of the QPL Challenger standings. I do it because I love Quake.
In updating these leaderboards day in and day out for multiple weeks, I began to notice some discrepancies in the scoring. Certain pro's points totals weren't exactly adding up the way they should be. I brought this up multiple times to the pro players, and they relayed the info to the admins. This happened multiple times over the course of a few weeks, to no avail
According to my calculations the final standings shoud have read:
k1llsen should have had 79 points. 36 from Quakecon and 40 from QPL Stage 1. He had 81 according to admins.
Cooller should have had 71 points. 38.5 from Quakecon (which rounds up to 39) and 32 from QPL Stage 1. He had 69 according to admins.
toxjq should have had 56 points. 28.25 from Quakecon (rounded down to 28) and 28 from QPL. Admins say: he has 57 points.
Xron: 34 points Quakecon, 20 points stage 1 (for 54 points). Admins say: 52 points.
Whaz 12.5 points Quakecon (round to 13) + 24 points stage 1 (for 37 points). Admins say 36.
In the case of Whaz, this extra point would have led to him earning a higher seed and facing a different opponent. Instead of facing nosfa, he ended up facing baSe. Dramis would have swapped positions with him.
Eventually, the only response I got during the 10th week was:
"ZeRo4: yeah hes wrong on almost all of those"
No explanation as to why I was wrong, just a single message basically ignoring me. This wouldn't bother me that much as a 3rd party, but the big issue here is that the QPL. DOES NOT. HAVE THEIR OWN WEBSITE.
All of the stats and results available for players are available through the work I do on Liquipedia. And thats it. No official source. When you type !bracket in the Quake live stream, it links to the work I do on Liquipedia. And !bracket gets typed a LOT. The page went down for about 5 minutes today by mistake and I had 6 messages from people wondering what happened to the page. Everyone relies on the info I work on.
If theyre going to link to the work I've done directly in their livestream and not have a website of their own, they need to explain why I'm wrong so I can fix it.
Eventually, Xron's points were fixed. And I was wrong about Cooller and k1llsen. This info came to me from a player who informed me that k1llsen and Cooller swapped points at Quakecon because k1llsen defeated Cooller in the showmatch. So Cooler dropped down 2 points and k1llsen gained 2 points.
Ok, sure. Fine. But why is that rule not published ANYWHERE? NO ONE knows that's a thing that they're doing. How is anyone supposed to know whats going on if everything is shrouded in secrecy? The point system makes no sense. It changed from Quakecon to Stage 1 and now apparently its changing again for Stage 2. Rumour has it that point swapping will also be a thing during the Stage 1 finals? So all the matches all need to be point swapped? Where is that stated anywhere? Was it stated on stream? Also, no one knows the prize pool, or the prize breakdown. The players know how much money is in the pool but have no idea how much each person made because they were told the format would be different than the one they ended up using.
ON TOP OF ALL THIS, I had figured out that the FACEIT admins that run the challenger league weren't even tracking points for the challenger league events. They were just copy/pasting the work I did on Liquipedia and using it as their own. I know this to be 100% certain because I had changed numerous players names due to wiki formatting or known aliases, and every single one of those changes were exactly the same when viewed on the FACEIT website. They are LITERALLY PAYING PEOPLE TO RUN THIS LEAGUE, and they need to rip off the work I do for free.
WITHOUT asking permission or providing credit.
That's fucked up. That's really fucked up.
Obviously I've been doing a better job than them but I never asked to be paid for it. I think some of the players were actually advocating for them to pay me to do it, but I never heard anything about that.
Fast forward to this weekend. I travel to Lucca on my own dime (much like I did for Quakecon 2017, Dreamhack Denver 2017, Dreamhack Winter 2017, Quakecon 2018, PGL Romania 2018, Dreamhack Winter 2018) because as I've stated before, I love Quake and I want to support the game and the players who deserve all the support they can get. I haven't been good at Quake since 2006 but I still continue to go, all out of my own pocket, to support the game in any way I can.
I was attending Lucca in hopes of filming content for this game because it desperately needs content. It could use all the help it can get. I was hoping to get backstage and film the players and their thoughts and emotions before and after the games, and create a mini documentary/highlight reel for Youtube. I was hoping to speak to John(ZeRo4) about getting back stage but I could never find him because, well, he was always backstage.
Numerous players attempted to talk to him for me to see if I could get a pass to get back there, and the only response he gave them was "I'll think about it". He never thought about it. I was never let backstage. There were plenty of non-players at the event who were given passes to get back there, including friends of some of the players and other media people. I was snubbed because I'm better at simple math, apparently. All the work I do for this game and this league, for free, was considered pointless.
I didn't get a single word in with ZeRo4, the head of Quake esports, all weekend. I didn't even see him outside of his cave until half way through day 2. After all the work I've done to support the game and the league, I just don't understand it. Not at all.
I obviously chose to do the stats for QPL and Challengers on my own because I enjoyed doing it and the community was very appreciative. I didn't do it for Quake, I did it for the players. But if I'm going to be treated like garbage, and plagiarized by the big shots behind the game, then I truly don't see any reason to continue. The people who enjoy this game deserve a lot better from the people in charge.
If they actually want to listen to what I have to say, and how this can be done better, I'd be more than happy to help.
But I find that very unlikely.