James Galvin

Any of you who have played a bit of QuakeWorld in the past but found that the standard online was too difficult to compete against - now is a good time to give it another shot. There have been a few mini-revivals over the last few years, but this year in particular a small but dedicated community of new Irish players is growing.

There are games on Irish servers every night which will cater for all Irish players regardless of their ability or experience. Any oldschoolers looking for a blast of nostalgia, or any of the new generation who wonder what all the fuss is about, I urge you to dip your toe into the tempestuous water of Irish QuakeWorld - theres a good chance that you will be swept away. Myself, I have taken part in the nightly pickups upon occasion during the past two weeks or so, and am impatiently waiting for tonight’s game.

Coinciding with the renewed activity in the QuakeWorld scene, season 19 of the Jolt Quake 3 CTF League began on Sunday. The league is stricter than before, indicating that perhaps bigfoot is becoming fed up with his duties, but this ensures a higher degree of activity and promises fewer drop-outs. I nearly got my clan, TS, booted from the league just because I was 10 minutes late for the game, having rebooted into Linux because my sound wasn’t working properly in Windows, only to find that PunkBuster anti-cheat program wasn’t updated in Linux, and when I rebooted back into Windows, as you would expect my mouse would not work - Razer Copperhead’s fancy firmware can be troublesome at times. A final reboot into Windows allowed me onto the server, but if I had been one minute later, one of the oldest clans in the league would have been dumped out needlessly.

Bigfoot redeemed himself with a quality review - no fewer than six mentions for the Last of the ISDNers (thats me btw). Remind me to gloat to Aly about this one

Players of the Week:
TS – killy – Despite ongoing connection issues looked a real threat and could fire TS to the title if he gets enough support.

Which brings me onto the connection issues… for some reason Irish ISDN has gone down the tubes in the past four months. Even at its best, ISDN is barely usable. I have complained so much about the lack of bandwidth, bad quality of routing and connection flooding in the past that I swore I would endure it silently, but for some reason, ping times (even to Irish servers) are twice what they should be. With the increase of bandwidth and reduction of latency on Irish ADSL in January, Irish internet connections are now better than ever. So why is it that the performance of ISDN is steadily degrading. To compare, I used to get 27ms ping times to Irish servers, and 33ms to Jolt in the UK - now I get 52ms even to an Eircom server. Oceanfree is no better, and I have tried this on both Windows and Linux with different internal TAs without improvement. Latency is bad enough, but to make matters worse, my connection can no longer take the higher rates in game that I have been using for the past five years. I wonder if this is the case all over Ireland, or if its just the wonderful Donoughmore exchange. I have not been able to find any other ISDN users to ask.