[21 September 2000]
Westwood support for our tourney
It looks like Westwood's ladder team has read my site yesterday once again. They saw the planned tournament and emailed me about it. This time I checked the origination of that email better than tha last time when I was fooled by someone pretending to be VTed. The mail:
From: Contests <Contests@westwood.com>
To: "'macmark@t-online.de'" <macmark@t-online.de> Subject: Your Tournament
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:41:43 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
Hey MacMark, I recently saw your posting about a tournament. Thats GREAT! If you need any assistance, Westwood Studios would certainly be willing to help out with some prizes, contacts, etc. We would need to know a little about the tournament, of course.
How will you score and store the winners i.e. what sort of scoring method will you use? What rules would you require participants to follow? Are other prize sponsors involved? Which champions would you like? If they were found cheating after they were posted, would they still qualify for your tournament? How many placements and how many prizes (do you have a scoring bracket available with potential prizes)?
If you would like some assistance from Westwood, we will need to start working on this rather quickly, as you can imagine. With Red Alert 2 soon to be released, we are limited with time. If at all possible, please submit a proposal to this address within 3-5 days. I really must have it by Sept. 26. Thanks, and good luck!
-Westwood Contest Coordination Staff
Only problem is I will be on vacancy from Saturday, 23rd of September, until Saturday, 30th of September. Then again the following weekend in October around the 7th of October.
It would be great if Westwood would give some prizes to the winner or the best 3 players. I think it will go this way:
- Everyone who wants to participiate should mail me until the end of September.
- I will make a tournament bracket and update it from round to round.
- It will be the so called KO system.
- Each match will require 3 games: 1 with settings by player A, 1 with settings by player B, 1 with neutral settings that will be determined at the end of September with help of my forum. We will discuss there the different settings.
- Until now no sponsors for prizes are available except Westwood :)
- The losers of the semi final matches will play for the 3rd place.
- The winners of the semi final matches will play for the 1st place.
- No rules are allowed. No harvester treaties, no building times, nothing like that.
- If someone is reported for cheating I will hear both sides and decide who will be disqualified. Such reports have to be send directly after the match. So cheaters will be disqualilfied before entering the next round.
It looks like the active tough players are very interested in this tourney.
[20 September 2000]
Tourney for October
I plan to set up a tourney starting in the 2nd week of October. We will need about 20 or 50 good players of WChat. I could make a tournament bracket and update the pairs for new rounds. Possible would be a everyone versus everyone set up too. Probably we will have 3 games per pair. Each one makes the settings for 1 game. The 3rd game will be with neutral settings. I has to be decided if they can agree themselves on neutral settings or if we should define them. Basicly it should be a tourney like the one RyanAT had hosted some month ago. Main idea is to have a shoot out between the best players and ensuring that noone cheats.
If You have any suggestions or comments use the forum to discuss Your thoughts in public. Tell everyone who should know it about this.
[17 September 2000]
Prices for top players back?
Rumor has it that there're prices again for the top players each month. Nevertheless the random prices will remain. Furthermore the prices for top players will be quite small. Visit Tiberian Dawn Forever and ask McCreadie for more information if You like.
[17 September 2000]
100 and more of cheaters punished
On Westwood's tournaments page a few days ago was stated they punished more than 100 blacklisted players based on information they got from emails and "from some web pages". (Punishing means several things: One would be disabling their accounts.) As I know Westwood's ladder team is reading this page, we all know what they mean ;-)
I'm wondering what the other pages with reports should be. Are there any others out there publishing blacklisted players and reports but me?
[16 September 2000]
Buttercup leaves, a new team comes
On my message board Buttercup wrote:
- Last post
Well, its been a blast, but time has come for me to move on to other things. MacMark, thanks for the site...you really know what you're doing. D, thanks for showing me the ropes of this little world. XTheManX, thanks for the kind words and much needed help with my game. Sergiy, you are the master of this game. You 4 guys made a real impression. The four of you encompass what the game is about, the reason two guys started a little company 15 years ago. It's the fun of the game, the honing of skill, the developement of a true community. My hat is off to you. Keep it up, and I'll see ya around. You've made a gamer out of me.
-Mary
On Westwood's site Buttercup wrote:
- Time has come to say goodbye. I will still be watching, but duties have changed. There will be a team moving in to continue and flourish where I leave off, and they are ruthless. If you thought I was mean, just wait til you meet them. It's been a blast. Don't forget to keep the reports coming to Contests@Westwood.com. Cya!
-buttercup
So our CnC butterfly will fly to another buttercup. We will miss You Mary. And we hope that the new team taking Your place will do the work as well as You did. I think it's not too much when I say You won our hearts. Hope to see You on Wchat again some time.
[05 September 2000]
"Westwood runs a 50000 dollar CnC tourney" - a fake mail
Yesterday I got 2 surprising emails from someone pretending to beVirtual Ted. (Ted is Westwood's "ladder man"). One was addressed to "MastaBlue" the other one to "MacMark". Both didn't came from Ted (VTed meanwhile confirmed to me that they're not real):
- Return-Path: <Virtualted@westwood.com>
Received: from mta5-rme.xtra.co.nz ([203.96.92.17]) by mailin02.sul.t-online.com with esmtp id 13WAyi-0ghFpYC; Tue, 5 Sep 2000 07:09:00 +0200 Received: from mail.xtra.co.nz ([202.27.182.201]) by mta5-rme.xtra.co.nz
(InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with SMTP id <20000905050937.YRCY961729.mta5-rme.xtra.co.nz@mail.xtra.co.nz> for <MacMark@t-online.de>; Tue, 5 Sep 2000 17:09:37 +1200 To: "MastaBlue" <MacMark@t-online.de>
From: "Virtual Ted" <Virtualted@westwood.com> Subject: Command and Conquer SPECIAL!
X-Mailer: Ghost Mail 5.1 http://ay.home.ml.org/ X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-Id: <20000905050937.YRCY961729.mta5-rme.xtra.co.nz@mail.xtra.co.nz> Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 17:09:38 +1200
Dear MacMark,
I would like to you to publish this on your site so the C&C community is aware of this competition. We are running a tournament for C&C which is going to be open to a selected few the only exception to this is ALL past champions are included unless they do not wish to be included. There will be a prize pool of over 50000 dollars in prizes. Going to the top commanders.
Your friend,
Ted
- Return-Path: <Virtualted@westwood.com>
Received: from mta4-rme.xtra.co.nz ([203.96.92.15]) by mailin04.sul.t-online.com with esmtp id 13WB0o-19TtEuC; Tue, 5 Sep 2000 07:11:10 +0200 Received: from mail.xtra.co.nz ([202.27.182.201]) by mta4-rme.xtra.co.nz
(InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with SMTP id <20000905052215.IMFX524937.mta4-rme.xtra.co.nz@mail.xtra.co.nz> for <MacMark@t-online.de>; Tue, 5 Sep 2000 17:22:15 +1200 To: "MacMark" <MacMark@t-online.de>
From: "Virtual Ted" <Virtualted@westwood.com> Subject: Command and Conquer SPECIAL!
X-Mailer: Ghost Mail 5.1 http://ay.home.ml.org/ X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-Id: <20000905052215.IMFX524937.mta4-rme.xtra.co.nz@mail.xtra.co.nz> Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 17:22:15 +1200
Dear MacMark,
I would like to you to publish this on your site so the C&C community is aware of this competition. We are running a tournament for C&C which is going to be open to a selected few the only exception to this is ALL past champions are included unless they do not wish to be included. There will be a prize pool of over 50000 dollars in prizes. Going to the top commanders.
Your friend,
Ted
[Sorry didnt change name at the top]
I have further information now. Usually I don't look at the details in the header of each email. But as You can see by the parts I marked in lime, this mail didn't come from Westwood. I compared it with original mails from VTed and found the differences. Another strike from a New Zealand hacker? I guess so. ".nz" is New Zealand.
The guy in my forum was right too: This isn't the style of VTed. He don't write this way. And this email was faked. I was too happy about the mail to realize what I could have seen.
Does here someone try to get the old top players back onto the fields using a bad trick? |