After recent announcements from the CPL regarding the postponing of the first World Tour stop in Turkey, and pushing back the Spain stop to April, many people from the community, and the gamers here, have had a handful of questions about this Qualifier.

Today, after talking to Scott Valencia and people setting up the competition area; I have answers to most of the questions.

The CPL Qualifier event in Turkey will be held with Painkiller version 1.61 on Windows dedicated servers. There will most likely be no demos from the event, since this version of the game has severe FPS drop issues while recording. Server FPS, which was a hot discussion topic today, due to everyone practicing at different server FPS settings, will be set at 60. There are currently no talks of removing DM_Psycho out of the map rotation due to the railing FPS bug. The seedings will be announced in a couple of hours, after the registration closes. There has yet to be a confirmation whether the CPL is going to use the actual World Tour points system to make the seedings at this Qualifier. There is no confirmation of which World Tour stop this event will be a qualifier for. Lioukin from TsN is here, and he will be solo casting the Painkiller event, if our connection here allows him to.

The tournament is scheduled to start 8 AM CET (2 AM EST), tomorrow morning (Friday), and it looks like the Counter-Strike, Warcraft III and NFS:U2 tournaments will also be held in the same ballroom as the Painkiller matches. There are around 40 machines being set up at the moment, which look to be enough for the event to run smoothly for the 27 registered Painkiller players and eight Counter-Strike teams, so far.

The weather isn't as bad as everyone thought it would be down here. It's been snowing frequently, but it's not sticking to ground, and the roads are clear. I will be able to upload pictures once the 5 mbit connection is setup in about 8 hours. Right now the whole hotel shares a one half mbit wireless connection, which makes it impossible for us to have a reliable and stable connection.

Update: The Counter-Strike tournament has been postponed until tomorrow due to technical issues involving the tournaments internet connection and Steam. Many Painkiller matches have been played in full force today. More news to come.