jedi is off to mexico in a few weeks, so finally i have an excuse to update my column with some notes about american q3 :d for anyone who doesn't know, i was in san francisco for about 3 months this summer, and managed to play a load of q3 towards the end. sometimes my bro would go away to the east coast for a week or so, and i would take a couple of days off just to sit in the house playing q3 pickups non-stop on my l33t adsl so heres a few bits and pieces about q3 in usa that might interest jedi or anyone else that will be heading out there with the possibility of playing some games.

overview
the american q3 scene is surprisingly small, but very active. there are two distinct communities, east coast and west coast. since i was in san francisco, this column is concerned only with the west coast. this was mostly californian players, plus a load of canadians, ppl from arizona, washington, and the other west coast states. i'm not too sure what the story with mexico is.. i presume they have their own q3 community since they're represented by a couple of players in the wcg. depending on where in mexico you are, ping could be quite high to the most active west coast servers.. i knew a few players from arizona who had pings of about 90.

irc
if you visit the etg irc network, you might be surprised to find 50 people in every channel you go to. after awhile, you'll notice that these are the same people you saw in the last channel. the average american idles in about 5 clan channels. the thing is, there are (relatively) very few clans. while pickup servers are busy, irc is completely ghost town. like in quakenet a lot of the time, i don't understand why there is such silence. you could stay in a very busy channel for 24 hours without a word being spoken. #qwplayers on etg is a good busy channel where people talk, but there is rarely activity in the q3 channels.. .maybe they talk a lot in the clan's private channel. its cool how the topic of most clan channels gives info on the clan, like [clanx.q3tdm.west.recruiting] or [clany.q3ctf.east.invite]. i don't think that syntax is correct.. but you get the idea half the time on quakenet i wouldn't even know what game a channel is for.

tdm
the most popular servers on the west coast (while i was there) were the jade garden servers, maintained by k9. there are two of them, about as busy as the bw clanarena servers. they formed the nucleus of the west usa community. one of them was running a mod coded by moonshine which forced people to register their nicks with a password on a webpage he made for the purpose. this cut down on aliasing and it made a nice change to know who you were playing against. unfortunately, this mod is gone now, i connected recently to find the server full of unnamedplayers, and aliases, eg. myweinerburns. it was really handy to be able to join the server at any time, spec a 15 minute 4v4 and then join in the next one. the only drawback is that they only play pro-dm6, which gets really boring after awhile. we used cal teamplay settings, which meant a very weak machinegun which was hard to get used to... resulted in people using gauntlet a lot more. this low mg damage helps over there, where everyone is on l33t connections, but it would be awful in uk where theres still a lot of lagged people and isdn'ers. i liked the 15 minute timelimit, not only because it made the games shorter, but also because it ended with a quad, so if your team is trailing by 4 frags with 10 seconds to go, theres still hope.

ctf
the ctf scene, from what i've seen is totally sad and unfriendly. they play 4v4 ctf, and the "clans" are just players from the top tdm clans mixed about.

clans
most of these players were from k9, xil, fith, strz, abuse, and nova. any one of these clans would feel well at home in bwdml div1 i'm sure. nearly every player can make the rl bridge to rail jump, every time. they take the game very seriously. from what i've seen, the top eu clans are far superior, but the average west coast q3 clan is a lot better than the average west european one. i was in a clan called v3 while i was over there, which had really good potential and some nice skills. we raped clans like mob, viscious, and also played strz a few times, but the clan folded as soon as i left. players greet each other with "sup", and if you respond with "lo", they won't understand what you're talking about. they often call grenades "nades", and jokes about your mother are still quite popular

european quake in usa
european q3 was held in very high regard. it was very common to see people aliased with a c58 tag or a unr tag. the likes of moonshine and hexstatic (xsr spammer) knew a lot more about the top euro clans than i did.

irish quake in usa
most of the players i was talking to knew a fair bit about irish quake. they all knew ser and koopa, but i was surprised to hear "isn't devore one of the best in ireland?" more than once a couple of people even knew fh, having specced lorcan in the irish cpl qualifiers

thats about all i can think of.. any q's, just stick them in the comments imo if ireland had good connections like they do in usa, we'd be owning.