Challenge Smackdown Headquarters

Overview by Jjonez

Hi! Welcome to the archive of the Challenge Smackdown Headquarters site. During season 2, this is where we made official announcements and gathered some general QuakeWorld news. You can check those updates through the link on the left: News Archive.
As the main admin, of Challenge Smackdown, I will give you my impressions of the past season of our league below.

Introduction
Challenge Smackdown is an on-line QuakeWorld team deathmatch (4-4) league with divisions around the world. It is run by QuakeWorld players and its sole goal is to provide entertainment to QuakeWorld players by allowing them to play games, to follow the progress of teams in the league and to enjoy reports and demos of highly competitive QuakeWorld games.
The Challenge Smackdown league is hosted by the Challenge Network, which allows it to integrate with regional gaming news sites.

The first season of the league was officially announced on 28 May 2000 with divisions in Australia, North America, North Europe and South Europe. The main achievements of the first season were showing the feasibility and viability of a worldwide on-line league for the old (by gaming standards) game of QuakeWorld. It managed to set a global standard of rules for the game and last but definately not least, truckloads of exciting games were played throughout the season, proving QuakeWorld is still as fresh as ever. (You can find a link to the Season 1 archive and the Challenge Network in the On-line links page).

Challenge Smackdown 2
We, the admin team of Challenge Smackdown felt the first season had been a success, but that we could also improve a few things here and there. To prove that to the world (but mainly to just have more fun with QuakeWorld), we decided to go ahead and set up a second season. In November 2000 we announced that season 2 would start in January 2001, and we started working on a league backoffice (to make keeping track of scores, reports, etc. easier) and new homepage right away. Somehow the guy doing the backoffice disappeared however, and we had to start from scratch while the new page layout (by CykloP) was officially launched on the 1st of February 2001 on our new domain: www.challenge-smackdown.com. Luckily one of our admins, Gacel, was able to cook up functional backoffice in less then three weeks, so there was only about a month delay in all. This time we had five divisions: Australia, Brazil, North America, North Europe and South Europe

I won't go into detail about about what happened in the divisions throughout the season. You can find a recap of the events by the division admins on the division main pages on this CD.
Although the progress in the Brazilian division has been very slow (it has not finished at this moment), and a few problems occured with delays in most other divisions, I think this second season was a success and an improvement over season 1 for Challenge Smackdown. We saw even more teams active, many more QuakeWorld games, better reports and far more demos available. While all divisions did really well, the Australian one stands out for, compared to its size, the amount of games played and with the number of reports written by the admins. The sheer size of the North Europe division could not be beaten of course.

I'ld like to thank everyone who contributed to Challenge Smackdown 2. Thanks to all division admins of season 2: Apollyon, Judge Dredd, Wart, Ztranger, ZzJohnzZ. Thanks to CykloP for designing our functional websites and to Gacel for setting up our very own backoffice. Thanks to all admins for helping out with games and writing excellent reports. And thanks to the players for providing everyon with exciting games.

At the time of this writing, Season 3 registrations are well underway, so it looks like Challenge Smackdown and QuakeWorld will still be around for a while...

The Challenge Smackdown 2 CD
The past few weeks Hoony and I have been working on getting this CD ready. Our goal is twofold: first provide a lasting memory of the second season of the Challenge Smackdown league and second help cover the hosting costs for our league and the Challenge Network in general. The demo downloads, which I'm glad to say we have many of, cost a fair amount of bandwith which has to be payed for somehow. I hope this CD can help to keep the Challenge Network around, including Challenge Smackdown.
We have collected all the demos we could find, all the webpages of the league (reports, news updates, etc.) and I hope you'll enjoy it. Thanks for supporting us!