Today marks the conclusion of our Year One Event, I hope everyone has
enjoyed the first year of Beta and was able to earn their Year One
award.

I know twelve players who certainly earned their awards this week as
the world's best faced off at the ESL Intel Extreme Masters Seasons IV
World Championships in Hannover, Germany. Earning the first IEM World
Champion title was Shane "rapha" Hendrixson of the United States who
defeated Anton "Cooller" Singov of Russia. Maciej "srsav3krazer"
Krzykowski of Poland seized third place after his victory in the
relegation match verses Alexey "Cypher" Yanushevsky. Congratulations to
all of the ESL IEM4 participants and best of luck in future
competitions. We have added four new awards to recognize these twelve
professionals, shiny flair for their profiles.

In other recent news, the venue and dates for QuakeCon 2010 have been
announced. This August 12th-15th, the event returns to the Hilton
Anatole Hotel in Dallas, Texas and is FREE to all attendees. We hope to
see you there.

Also included in today's update are some additional improvements to the
Duel Spectator function, extensions upon the existing AutoAction record
features, and some improvements made to diagnose and improve PunkBuster
interactions. Check out our Devblog for a full list of changes.
Game Updates

* Spectators in duel now persist across map switches. So an idling
spectator should not get picked as a viable player if they have
previously selected "Spectate" from the join menu. Spectators will now
be shown with (s) appended to their name in duel.
* cg_autoAction will now work for matches that are already in progress.
For example, if you set cg_autoAction to 1 or 3 prior to joining a
server where a match has already started, a demo should begin recording
upon connecting.
* Fixed the "3 Second Respawn Delay" message from appearing at the end
of CTF matches in situations when the match is not going into overtime.
* Gametype-dependent menus, such as Join screens, should now display properly.

Web Updates

* Added four new awards to recognize the participants of the ESL Intel Extreme Masters World Championship:
o ESL IEM4 Champion
o ESL IEM4 Challenger
o ESL IEM4 Contender
o ESL IEM4 Professional
* Password entry fields are now masked on the Join Private Server dialogue.
* We have further expanded upon our client error tracking to help
diagnose and support users obtaining PunkBuster communication related
kicks.