Sunday, 29 August 2010

How Infi helped me to love SC2 even more

When SC2 first started to kill off my beloved WC3 i was naturally upset. So many great memories, so many legendary matches consigned to memory - never to be added to. Luckily, it turns out that SC2 is a fantastic game anyway (surprise, right?) but at times i still pine for the old WC3 days.

Ironically, it was a replay from a WC3 pro - WCG winner, Infi - that helped me move on. I was watching a game of his against an Asian zerg named PanDaLuffy (at least that's what the website said, the in-game text was Korean). His playstyle transcended the boundary between the War- and Star- prefixes. I've noticed that a large proportion of ex-WC3 players pick up terran in SC2, especially the human players. But Infi was the first that i've seen actually make building armour upgrades. Masonry for life, baby!

So thank-you, Infi for reminding me that no matter how cheesy SC2 can be at times, at least building armour upgrades is totally ineffective (in case you were wondering, he lost the game). Raise a glass to a competitive RTS future free of mass towers - cheers!

Wednesday, 18 August 2010

If you get unlucky often enough it ceases to be luck

One of the earliest and most important lessons you can learn about life is that when you get lucky often enough, it stops being luck. In esports this is especially true; your opponent's 12th "lucky" headshot is probably not luck.

But getting a bit more meta, this also applies to tournaments and organisations. ESL is a great company, doing wonderful things, but their tournaments do seem to suffer horrendously from network problems. At IEM Global Finals this year the WoW tournament was set back by six or so hours, for example, and back at the American qualifier last season things were even worse. Today is the 2nd event of the new season and they're having more problems (glad i got up early to watch -_-;).

I've generally been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. WoW is not a good tournament game in many ways, and one of those is the lack of LAN capability. But there is no WoW today, and although Quake Live's offline mode is fairly new there didn't seem to be any problems at QuakeCon last week. So when does bad luck stop being luck and turn into incompetence? I'm not sure, and without being much of a tech-head myself i'd hate to point the finger, but my good will is starting to run out.