Before the season
A lot of thing were to be sorted out before the start of the second season in Challenge Smackdown. For myself the most important decision was wether i would continue as head admin of the north european division or not. The first season was quite exhausting and the upcoming season promised to be even more so. I like taking responsibilities in large projects but not having an internet connection at home does not make it easy to get things done on the net. After a few days of consideration i decided to give it a try once again. I knew the season would be long and hard to admin but the reward would be to see some great qw action for at least another season.
Quite a lot of things were subject to change before we were ready to start. First of all we needed a much better and working homepage. We soon found people willing to make a design and a backoffice for us. Cyklops made us a really nice looking layout for us (i remember bugging him about making the SD2 logo look similar to the Terminator2 logo) but we had problems with our coder. He promised to make abackoffice for us in time but 2-3 weeks before the start of the season he disappeard and was never to be seen again. Gacel, the former south eu admin, stepped in and delivered the work we needed. But starting late it was not nearly finished at the start of the season and it took several weeks to get it working as it should. Instead of last season the homepage visitors did not notice that much of our initial problems though. It was just that the admins had to do more things manually. But in the end the homepage and backoffice turned out to be very nice and i think we will use this version in the next season without many changes.
Some of the rules were subject to change. We still think that our rules are the best in the "business" so far but there are still things to fix. We removed the players per team limit and also made it possible to let teams add players during the season. There were other fixes and clarifications but nothing significant. A major issue would be the "map issue". A lot of people, especially in europe, complained about having to play dm6 and e3m7 in teamgames. We were not willing to give up our 5 map system and decided to just ask the teams what they wanted to play again. So every team that signed up was asked for two additional maps to be playe din the tournament. We limited the choices though. I was quite surprised to find out that the teams had voted for dm6 and e3m7 again. Some people in europe claimed that it were the aussie/na "newbie" teams that voted them in. All i can say is that the vote was rather close and the euro team could have easily outvoted the other divisions teams.
I did not quite like the fact that there had been 6 groups in the season before because that causes some confusion about who is going to advance to playoffs and who will be playing whom in the first and following rounds. So i decided to have just four groups and decide who will be playing each other before the start. I even seeded the top four clans of the last season in a way that they would meet each other in the semi finals the other way round. And that really happened in the end :-)
Some people told me to make the division more "elite", similar to villains which had been invite only. I wanted to leave Challenge Smackdown open to everyone but having the competition on a higher level was also a good idea. So i limited the number of clans in the tournament which made qualifiers necessary. All teams that proved to be reliable last season or which were without doubt good enough were qualified. Everyone else had to win their qualification game. This worked out very well. Although there were still quite a few teams who could not match the good teams in the league we got rid of most of the most annoying teams - those that never play. The teams that lost their qualifier matches were given the chance to play in the new "b-division". They would not be able to qualify for the playoffs but instead they could gather some international experience. They were also promised to be able to play in SD3 if they proved to be reliable.
A lot of teams signed up, i think it was about 60. It was nice to see a few comebacks by teams who had not been active for a long time for example Orkney Clan or Firing Squad. On the other hand i was a bit disappointed that two famous teams that competed in the season before did not sign up: Imperial Bounty HunterZ and Clan Z. Both were missed by alot of people but overall we had all the best teams from europe competing in the league.
So after a lot of meetings, preparation and ph34rrr the second season of Challenge Smackdown was ready to kick off!

During the season
The group games went underway and took us about 8 weeks. All in all they went pretty smooth. As mentioned before we had some small problems with our website but they were soon solved. There is not much to tell about this stage of the season. There were many games played and the reports will tell you the story of them much better than i can do. I want to mention just two things about it here. First of all the group games showed that having qualifiers was really a good idea. There were still a handfull of teams that dropped from the league during the first weeks but not as many as in the previous season. This way i think more than 75% of the games were actually played opposed to less than 50% last season. I also want to point out that the group games were in no way less exciting than the playoffs. The amount of great and exciting games played was just enormous. In SD2 the best teams from europe competed and this was evident from the first game on. Actually i saw the best game qw game ever (imho) during the group stages and when they were over there were a lot of great teams who had not made it into playoffs.

The b-division
When almost 60 teams signed up for SD2 it was clear a few teams would not be able to qualify for the 32 available spots. I wanted to give those that wanted the opportunity to gather some international games and experience though. Thus i offered every team that did not win their qualifier games to play in the "b-division". There they would have games under the same rules and circumstances as the regular teams, the only difference was that they could not qualifiy for playoffs. Every team showing that they were actually better than they showed in their qualifier game and proved that they are reliable were promised that they would not have to qualify next season.
Now looking back on the b-division it shows that it was not very successful at all. Only about three of the teams in it showed real interest in getting their games played. ZAK from sweden were the ones who got the most games played and in the end "won" the b-division.
I am pretty sure we won't organize another b-division in the next season because of lack of interest. It was just an experiment that went somewhat wrong but did not hurt to do either.

Who frags the mostest?
During the season i had many ideas what else we could do to support qw in other ways than organizing a league. One of my favourite ideas was to have a ffa (free for all) tournament. Usually these are organized on lans only and i can not remember that a single tournament of this kind took place ever since i got online in late '97. I liked the idea and eventually i just announced it in the news. Players had to register for it by sending a mail to me and i think i never got that many mails in such a short time. The interest was just enormous.
Anyway when the day for the tournament had come i thought everything was prepared more or less but i was wrong. We had some big trouble with the server we wanted to play on. I asked the server admin to add the kteams ffa mod and also for rcon and he did both. But when we wanted to start it showed that the ff kteams mod was not suited at all for the kind of tournament we wanted to do. After some stressful minutes and me almost cancelling the whole thing aKKe from Flaming Fist stepped in. He had rcon to another port of the server and set everything up the way we needed it. So the tournament could finally start. We had four groups and each group played two 20 mintue rounds on death32c. The players with the most frags from both rounds advanced to the final 30 minute round. The overall winner was Pietro from Flaming Fist. You can find more info in the news and there are also demos available at challenge-tv.
Overall the tournament was very well received by the players and i guess everyone had a fun night.

A day in the life of an admin
How did i work during the season and how would a typical day look like for me? One of my main problems during the season was (and still is) that i do not have an internet connection at home. Thus i always had to drive to my university where you could play and admin form a T1 connection. Not all my days looked like this but many did. It starts somewhere in the early afternoon with watching demosfrom matches i had to write reports about. While watching the demo i would regularly pause them to write down notes. From that small manuscript i wrote the actual report. A typical report from a match going over three maps would usually take about 1,5-2 hours (i admit that i often watched tv or ate something while doing this). In the late afternoon i would go to university by my bike which is a 35 minute trip. After arriving, going to the comp room and logging in the first thing to do was to add the report through the backoffice. Now i would check my mail and news, chat with clanmates and people in #smackdown. Often enough i would also play some duel or ffa. At about 20:00 hours the first matches would take place which i either adminned by myself or just watched. A few hours later every SD2 action in the north european division would have ceased and it was time to play some early morning pickup matches for me, usually on a barrysworld server. When that was over (it was early morning by now) the people on the other side of the globe would wake up/repogo online. Then i often chatted with the na and au guys in #smackdown, #challenge and #qwplayers on the enterthegame irc network. Sometimes i even managed to watch a match of the na division. By now i had turned really tired and after saying goodbye to my clanmates on #ravage who had just gotten up to go to work i went home again.
I am not quite sure why i often stayed online that long when it was not even required. Either i am totally addicted or it was more comfortable to stay in the warm university computer room. I remember that it was often very cold in the first weeks of the season and two times i got into a nasty snow storm when i went home :-)

Playoffs
The playoffs were really exciting for me to experience. The league was racing to a breathtaking climax and almost every match was about to become a classic when the best clans from europe clashed. The first game fas FF versus 4K and as expected it was a blowout in FF's favour. But still i remember that there were lots of specs and that trend continued throughout the playoffs. All games were really great but you can convince yourself by going to the reports or better by watching the demos, they are all excellent displays of highly competetive qw teamplay. Like the group games the playoffs went really smooth - up to a certain point. I was not careful enough with the shedule. Initially i wanted to get each round finished within a week. But some teams requested more time to be able to field their best teams. i wanted to have the best possible matches and agreed not realizing that this would cause soem seriuos problems a short time later.

The infamous SD2 final
All you you will know by now that the final between Euthanasia and Flaming Fist did not take place. Sad as it is it's a fact. Everyone will tell you a different story about it, all i can do is to tell you mine. It all started with me joining the channel #tvs to ask them if there were any news about their semifinal match versus Flaming Fist. It turned out that there were serious problems sheduling the match. While TVS wanted to play in the upcoming weekend (they wanted to prepare and to play from lan) FF wanted to play as soon as possible because one of their starters, aKKe, would leave on the upcoming friday and they did not want to play without him under any circumstances. What followed was a long and heated discussion and no solution was found. Returning on the next day i hoped that both teams had calmed down and that we could find a date now. I was wrong though. The differences were still the same and no agreement was in sight. I wanted to make sure the game was played in the interest of the league. So i decided that the game had to be played until the upcoming sunday, if not both teams would be out of the league. That made them finally agree to play o n the very same night. I also decided that the final had to be played until the following sunday maily because several suggested to finally set some tight deadlines and to be strict about them. I was not very happy with the semifinal because neither team was able to field their best lineup or to play under the circumstances they'd prefered. Especially i felt that TVS were forced to play on that day even though they did not want to. But FF had promised to make sure they will be able to play the final and i was pretty convinced they would win anyway, which they did. After the match was done i was starting to look forward to the final. The other divisions were also nearing their final stages and we even prepared a press release which we sent to all news sites all around the world announcing the finals. I also started to work out the cams, we considered doing live commentary wia shoutcast, in general we were prepared to make the final an even better experience that last seasons. I did not hear anything from either clan until about two or three days before the deadline. Euthanasia were basically willing and able to play any time and were just waiting for FF proposing a date. Flaming Fist on the other hand informed me that they were not willing to play until the set deadline, mainly because there was a super important holiday going on in sweden. Not being a swede i did not know of the midsummer holiday of course or that it was apparently that important, neither was i informed by anyone... I was not willing to revise my previous decision though (and imo the match could have easily been played on a weekday before the holiday which was on saturday) and so the match was not played. I felt deeply disappointed because running the league meant and still means a lot to me and i wanted it to end with a great final :-(

East vs. West (aka allstar game)
The final was not played and the season was somewhat "unfinished" to me. I did not want it to end like this an after thinking about what could be done i thought some sort of allstar game would be nice. I have had this idea in the previous season already but i dropped it. After the successful ffa tournament i thought that an allstar game could be just as much fun. Of course the allstars had to be voted upon but due to lack of time i made a quite simple vote. Everyone could vote on their favourite player from each team that reached the playoffs and the players with the most votes from each team would be allowed to play in the allstar game. Unfortunately some of the players that got voted could not make it to the game because they went to army or whatever. The games was to be a 30 minute death32c game with 8 players on each team. The teams were decided by a random draw. It looked like one team was highly favoured because of the player sin it but in the actual game the difference between the two teams was not that significant. Again we had quite some problems to get it going and i have to thank everyone who was involved in making it happen. Actually i was prepared very bad and all the other people did the work for me this time. But this way i could sit back and enjoy the game. So did quite a lot of other specs and the game was really nice to watch. In the olden days there were often games like this, mostly with national teams playing each other. The allstar game showed that this is still fun and i hope some people will get those nation versus nation amtches organized in the future again.

Was SD2 a success?
There are a few people out there who keep saying that SD2 (north eu) was a failure due to the final that was not played. I was very disappointed about that, too. Organizing this season was a lot of work and i really wanted it to be much better in every aspect than the previous season. And it really looked good up until the semifinals. Nevertheless, now a few weeks after it, i feel quite pleased about how the season turned out. In the first place we are organizing this league to make sure the qw scene survives. I think we have succeeded in that. In europe we have a strong qw scene with lots of clans and several national leagues beside challenge smackdown. I don't think we would still have that without challenge smackdown. Like every other qw player all around the worl i would have loved to see Flaming Fist play Euthanasia in a five map thriller again but even without it there were still so many great games played this season. That's why i think that overall SD2 was a success and even better than SD1. If we continue to improve in this way SD3 will be full blown success and by the time of SD4 _everyone_ will be playing qw and we have divisions in japan, antarctica etc :p

Favourite people and moments
My favourite game of the season has to be the group game between Tribe of Tjernobyl from Sweden and America Must Die from Russia. Even more than that. It was the most tense and exciting qw game i ever watched. Both teams played really great and even though the match ended with 2-0 in favour of TOT is was really really close on both maps. The second map e1m2 was even played twice. In the first time after about 16 minutes all AMD players dropped because their connection had apparently died. Since the game was ultra close noone could tell who would have won the map and so we decided to play it again. I highly recommend to watch the demos of that game. It did not get as much recognition as other games but for me it is an alltime classic. What should also not be forgotten is that both clans consist of some of the nicest people i ever met on the net. Be sure to check their channels #tot and #amd_clan when you are on quakenet.
My newcomers of the season are not newcomers really. In fact they are pretty oldschool. I am speaking of Firing Squad from the Netherlands. They were inactive for a long time and returned to play in SD2. There they played really strong, for example they were the only ones to beat Flaming Fist on a map (e1m2 in their group game). I expect them to be even better in the upcoming season.
I can't really name the most valuable player of the season because there are so many greatr players in europe nowadays.
My favourite place of the season (and it still is) is #smackdown, the leagues channel on quakenet. Intended to be the meeting place for the teams before matches it developed to be THE channel of the qw scene on quakenet. Nowadays there are members of almost every european qw clan in there chatting with each other. I especially like the "european" flavour of the channel. We have so many nationalities in there and all get along with each other very well (ok, except that sweden vs. finland thingy). It is really nice talking to the people in there, not only about qw but also about all sorts of other things that interest us. I remember getting introduced to finnish humppa music, discussing about politics early in the morning and laughing about jokes until i fell off my chair. Great place, love it.