UKTerrorist

I founded the Cyberathlete Professional League in 1997, and I am the president of the CPL. I'm involved mostly in strategic alliances and business development dealing with both potential partners and sponsors.

I think there are a few reasons but the number one is the dedication and focus of the CPL team. Our team has been intact for almost 5 years and we truly enjoy working with each other. It's interesting because we all laugh at each others idiosyncrasies and have heated arguments about certain issues, but at the end of the day we interact more like a family than business associates. Another reason is that from the very beginning we insisted on location-based events, in spite of the many critics that expounded with apparent knowledge that our business model was seriously flawed and that we would not make it past our first anniversary.

Well if I told you that then I would create my own competition, right? :) All I will publicly say is that the CPL generates revenues like any other sports league: ticket sales, merchandising, licensing, sponsorship and now working on broadcast rights.

That and the rights to record our events and broadcast them later.

Well, we have a different concept on reaching other countries. The CPL will soon deploy better ways to use the Internet and broadband connectivity for worldwide broadcast of our events.

We will hold several qualifiers in the UK this year but not a full CPL tournament. Tournaments in Europe for 2002 are being planned for France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Yes I am very familiar with The Playing Fields, spent a week there last year with Edward Watson and the crew. It was deeply disturbing to find out that they had decided to shutdown, which will remain in history as the first gaming center at the vanguard of developing the concept of professional computer game competitions.

We are talking to a number of organizers and centers, no final decisions have been made. It is really tough to replace The Playing Fields, as in my opinion they were the consummate gaming center.

You will have to ask the WCG organization if it was a coincidence or if it was intentional. We announced our dates in February of last year for the CPL World Championship and they announced their event months later. About which organizations came out better I delegate those judgements to the gaming community. ShackES did offer this comaprison is their review of the CPL WC event:

"The CPL, for sure, runs the best events of any organization. After more than four years of putting together events and then carrying them out, the CPL has a formula down pat. This is the second consecutive tournament where there has been virtually no controversy whatsoever (as opposed to this year's World Cyber Games where there were more than half a dozen rules or computer related controversies), and, amazingly, the CPL actually seems capable of gettin events done on time".

http://www.shackes.com/articles/cpl_recap.html

That final match was the most intense battle I have ever seen since I launched the CPL in 1997. I thought that X3 had a good chance to win but was not surprised when NiP actually ended up winning, they played fantastically well. Our latest calculations estimate that about 25,000 people were following the finals via IRC score-bot and HLTV.

I would say that people that look at our organization in that fashion should not compete in our events. Because we are unbiased we are also uninfluenced by those type or arguments. We recently did find that the "European" LAN settings were superior than the "American" settings and adopted them.

You will have to ask the commissioner of the league, Frank Nuccio, why we use MR instead of CO. That falls under his area of expertise and responsibility. I have no voice or vote in matters of that nature.

Edward Watson manages that scoring process of our world rankings. I was as surprised as anyone else, he did explain it to me but quite frankly it still made no sense to me. Go ahead and contact him for a detailed explanation.

I believe that our decisons do have an impact in the industry and that other organizations follow on our footsteps. From my vanatage point there is no reasonable way for me to judge if others see that as controling a game. That is certainly not our intent.

Four-Kings arrived at our event with a number of reporters following them. They were very cool and it was a pleasure to have them at the event, we hope to develop better systems worldwide to give talented clans that opportunity to compete in our championships.

Well.. there are a few things no one knows...

One is that I personally do not enjoy playing Counter-Strike at all and only play Q3. :)

Frank Nuccio is the real Frodo Baggins.

hahaha!

Our goal is to continue to improve. Please let us know, at the CPL forums (forums.thecpl.com), what we can do to provide a higher level of service to the gaming community...That's it :)

It was fun! :)