I’m sure most people who haven’t used a mechanical keyboard before would ask exactly the same question: What’s the big deal, AND what’s the difference between all of these different switches? Not to sound too cliché but in this particular case it really is a ‘You need to try it to understand’ sort of thing. Therefore, because I saw about 20 different keyboards on the wall and a chance finally to compare and contrast many of them, I jumped at the chance to try them out and possibly buy one, while I had the opportunity to gain a bit of an understanding of how mechanical keyboards work.

Filming and exploring Gadget Show Live was a lot of fun over the weekend; the final product as you can see is here, with Sam presenting – I hope I did the video camera justice!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It was a lot of fun and I had an absolute blast – and my reward for my efforts was a final day to do whatever I wanted, and I spent a good hour or two at the Keyboard Company’s stand to try out and talk about the various different mechanical keyboards.

For the record, I would recommend anyone wanting to read up on mechanical keyboards check out these links:

- Overclock.net Guide to Mechanical Keyboards
- DasKeyboard Mechanical Keyboard Guide

To cut the long story short though, I was really enjoying myself trying out the different keyboards on their test computer (does anyone remember The Typing of the Dead and how it was the BEST GAME EVER?) and in the process appeared to accidentally draw a crowd.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The above run was done on Cherry MX Browns; I was about the same speed with Blues and Browns, but shortly after this video was taken I was offered a discount on a new keyboard if I could somehow hit above 750 accurate characters per minute – by the awesome managing director Bruce. After some finger flexing, I managed to accomplish this a few attempts later with the Browns and those were the ones I went with. I personally love the Blues and enjoy typing with them a bit more but they were simply way too loud for any sort of sensible streaming so I got the Browns instead which were a good compromise.

We had a great afternoon and I thoroughly enjoyed myself – but as I wrapped up my keyboard, I had one cheeky special request – in the spirit of FPS gamers who love brightly coloured WASD keys, I thought something similar could be done for Starcraft II; something a little bit unique. Possibly something to remind me I still need to get a lot better at the game and spur me on a bit as well (sadly my current level really isn’t where I want it to be; something I am aiming to rectify in the coming months). Sure enough, two weeks after my keyboard was home with me, I received a small parcel in the post from Bruce – and now the keyboard is definitely mine. ;-)

Looking forward to using it a lot more on the ladder – although that may have to wait for a little while as from this Thursday onwards I will be travelling to the U.S. for a month on an eSports pilgrimmage of sorts, and I’m not sure how much free time I’ll have to play.

I will also be attending MLG Anaheim, so hopefully I’ll be able to meet some of you there. See you soon! :-)

Multiplay’s Insomnia 45, then, was a natural progression and a chance to step up my game in the face of a lot of unknowns – but before I got there, that’s all I really knew. I had train tickets booked and a suitcase packed, and that was about it. I’m really pleased, therefore, to share a little of what turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life with you here and a few of the little stories over the weekend that perhaps weren’t seen so much on-stream.

Arriving in Telford on the Friday afternoon an hour later than expected after a few interesting train interchanges, my nervousness in meeting a co-caster I had never met before only increased when I entered our hotel room to see that we had a double bed and a sofa-bed. I left my luggage in the room and charged my almost-dead smartphone for a few minutes to keep it alive a little longer. Upon hopping over to the conference centre and meeting the i45 staff and Martijn, I discovered to my relief that he was a very laid back and pleasant guy (we ended up flipping a coin for who got which bed, haha).

We spent the early evening making sure the stream would be set up for the Saturday and generally getting used to our surroundings at the tournament. We were in the caster’s room which was separate from the tournament hall and with a dedicated desk space for us to cast. The room was also shared, however, with casters from all the other games which was initially worrying as we could basically all hear each other casting! There was a running joke that the casters would try to out-shout each other over the weekend to see how many simultaneous streams we could be heard on, but thankfully everyone was extremely nice and we even made random guest appearances on the other streams every so often after games were complete – the Team Fortress 2 casters in particular were a joy to hang out with.

Despite the time being 10:30pm with an early (that’s before 2pm to all you non-gamers) start the next day, I suggested to Martijn that we head out to have dinner and a chat, to which he agreed. Hotel reception then directed us to an American diner that was about twenty minutes’ walk away but through a network of roads that almost had us lost on several occasions. Confirmation of this happened when we were feeling very good about ourselves for helping a lady towards her hotel…until we passed the hotel in question ten minutes later and realised we had sent her in the opposite direction. Er, whoops!

After this realisation, my smartphone was used to confirm the rest of the route to the restaurant, except there was only 3% battery left on it because I hadn’t charged it for very long when initially in the hotel room. We eventually found the restaurant with 1% battery left on my phone, and then discovered that we were eligible to receive a discount on our food bill if we could produce a voucher obtained via my phone. With about a minute’s worth of battery life remaining, I don’t think the world has ever seen fingers on a touch screen quite so fast – but said voucher was successfully obtained. Let this be a lesson to always keep your phone charged as you never know when it could come in handy!

Dinner was both hearty and hilarious, with Martijn and I exchanging stories about casting, eSports and life in general. We finished up at around midnight and began the (fuller and much slower) walk back to the hotel while simultaneously discovering that dessert (Martijn was sensible enough not to order dessert, this bit’s purely me) was probably an overextension of my body’s opinion on being generally comfortable.

And then, lo and behold – we spot the most glorious road sign. Missed on our initial walk to the restaurant because of our eyes being fixed on our smartphone maps, we find the perfect place to set up a Starcraft team house. Considering what we were there to do, what an awesome coincidence!

For an idea of just how ‘clutch’ my phone-charging was earlier – not only did it get us to the restaurant and just about get us a discount while we were there, the battery died on the phone just as I was going to take a photo of this road sign, so the above photo was taken with Martijn’s camera. You couldn’t have scripted it better!

The sign was also just off a roundabout, so what you don’t see from this photo is that Martijn jumped in and out of traffic three or four times before successfully capturing this shot. Likewise, my photo of him involved dodging not one but two articulated lorries, and trying to work out if several family cars were being honest with their indicator signals. Let’s be honest, though – totally worth it, right?

Completely exhausted when we finally got back to the hotel, we quickly went to sleep in preparation for a long day of casting the next day.

We were set up with stream details and overlays on Saturday morning, and Martijn performed some impressive last-minute miracles with contacts at TeamLiquid to get the event listed properly as well as with TheGunRun to get the stream delay set up properly – many thanks to all concerned! Given the sheer scale of the tournament hall I was actually surprised the admins were able to find all the players and get everything running smoothly, but that is exactly what they did to their tremendous credit.

The live casting had begun for day one, and despite being trolled by the chat early on to mispronounce Martijn’s name for a while (well played, you cheeky bastards – hahaha) things were going swimmingly indeed. Dinner the previous evening was definitely a good idea as we conversed with fluency and looked like anything but a combination that hadn’t cast with each other before! It was both exciting and enjoyable in equal measure.

Group play on day one came and went quickly, mainly because there were so many games being cast that we didn’t realise until about 3:30pm that we hadn’t been able to get a bite to eat yet! Even the games that weren’t at the absolute tip-top level were still very closely contested and provided real excitement to the stream, showing that you don’t need to have two top GM’s slugging it out to produce a nail-biting game of Starcraft. Things went quite well for us, and we spent Saturday evening having dinner at the venue so we could be close to the hotel.

Oh – that, and the pub quiz! Insomnia events are famous for their pub quiz events and i45 was no exception to the rule. The entirety of the event converged onto the main stage at roughly 9pm to take part in one of the most enjoyable evenings out I’ve had in quite a while. As I write this there are no edited official clips from the pub quiz yet, but here’s one taken by one of the participants on a phone stuck on YouTube to give you an idea of the atmosphere. A few songs may have been played in the warm-up to the event but this one appeared to generate the largest volume:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The production team (Team name ‘Smashing Pasties’, obviously) didn’t quite make it into the top three and the cash prizes but fun was had by all, especially with the quizmaster on stage continuously getting trolled by both the production crew and crowd alike. We just about managed to stumble back to our respective hotels between 2 and 3 in the morning. :-) Speaking of trolling, here are a few gems that were on-screen during the pub quiz…

The pub quiz winners receiving their cash prize on stage

The double elimination bracket started on Sunday (after insufficient sleep, of course!) with some impressive results, most notably Lau going on a strong run before finally being taken out by BlinG, and JonnyRecco unexpectedly falling to the lower bracket but having a strong run once he got there. Games were of high quality and at times extremely close, resulting in time flying a lot faster than expected. The stream eventually finished at about 8:30pm after which we would then be reappearing on the main stage for the Grand Final – where top seed BlinG took on Fargo.

The actual final was delayed until 11pm due to the League of Legends final overrunning (and it was an extremely tense final game as well!). I could confidently say before the final that I wasn’t nervous but a 45-minute wait while watching the previous game’s final gave me just enough time to realise just how large the stage seemed, haha. Thankfully as we started and the sound-checks were completed, A-Spec began the player introductions and we were flying into the first game before we knew it. All nervousness disappeared and I began to really enjoy being able to cast in front of a live crowd – audience interaction became that much more real and every cheer and gasp could be heard as BlinG swept Fargo to take a long awaited i-series title! He had been waiting for this for some time and completely deserved the win with a dominating performance, dropping only a single map the entire weekend.

Proof that Archons are more imbalanced than MULEs.

The celebrations did not stop on stage, however. The prizegiving ceremony concluded but the party was just beginning for a lot of the Starcraft folk, as the bar area became packed until well after the bar itself shut at 2am. It’s worth noting that it was around this time I may have done a little bit of hustling and challenged our undefeated Protoss player to a little 1v1 on the advice of GGAndyPandy, who for the record destroys me at the game. Little did I know that Team Dignitas already had a camera set up for the occasion after hearing about the potential challenge, and it appeared this video was circulating around TeamLiquid and Reddit in no time.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Well, somebody had to beat BlinG this weekend!

Myself with AndyPandy, my DDR sparring partner over the weekend.

I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at i45 and cannot wait to attend another i-series event in the near future, hopefully i46 at the end of August. It was the most enjoyable gaming weekend I’ve ever had and I look forward to trying to top this at the next event I attend! Many thanks to everyone that made the event so fantastic – Kharne, A-Spec, the production crew and staff, all the organisers and admins, D-eSports and Team Dignitas for their excellent tournament coverage (and in the case of the latter, tournament winning!), Team GG for a wonderful social weekend, and Martijn for generally being excellent and a great guy to work with. There are so many more people that I keep thinking of to add to this list – let me know if I’ve missed anyone out. It was a fantastic event and I hope to see you all again soon!

From left: Geo, A-Spec, Kharne, myself

Some select Starcraft II VoDs from i45:

• Group stages – funkay vs Lau
• Winners bracket – BlinG vs Lau
• Grand final

Hello everyone! In case you’re looking for a quick-and-easy list of my VoDs at the Dreamhack EIZO Open in Stockholm, I’ve compiled a list for you here (spoiler free, don’t worry).

All links will open in new windows, and if there is a subsequent game in the series I’ve made sure a link appears in-video towards the end so you can jump right in, and that way the results aren’t spoiled. :-)

Group Stage #1
MVPMonster vs Sihoe Game 1 – click here
Liquid’TLO vs prOpBobson Game 2 (jumped in mid-series) – click here
Liquid’TLO vs BullzZ Game 1 – click here
FuRy vs SirLoui Game 3 (jumped in mid-series) – click here
aTnCloud vs ALMaddelisk Game 1 – click here
GLSnute vs jimpo Game 1 – click here

Group Stage #2
Quantic.NaNiwa vs MVPGenius Game 1 – click here
EG.PuMa vs TSL.HyuN Game 1 – click here
Quantic.SaSe vs TSL.HyuN Game 1 – click here
Group G 3-way-tiebreak Game 1 – click here

Round of 16
aTnSocke vs mouzMorroW Game 1 – click here

I hope you enjoy these matches as much as I enjoyed casting them! :-)

The last few weeks have been a complete whirlwind to me as I have been in discussions with a lot of lovely people simultaneously for a variety of reasons, but I am now pleased to announce that I will indeed be casting a variety of events over the next two months. It may mean that the amount of time I spend playing takes a hit, but in order of my casting, I can now present to you:

ALL TIMES BELOW ARE UK TIME (GMT)

Stream Address: www.twitch.tv/jorosar
Stream Times: Sat 21/Apr/2012 from 10am to 11pm; Sun 22/Apr/2012 from 9am to 1:30pm
Details: Does Dreamhack need an introduction? This will be an amazing open tournament – things will start slow with fewer games in the initial groups on Saturday, and heat up on Saturday night towards an action packed Sunday morning and afternoon. I will be casting up until the Round of 16 on one of the stacked community streams. Come and support me!

Stream Address: www.twitch.tv/esluk2
Stream Times: Every Sunday from 22/Apr/2012 to 10/Jun/2012 starting at 6pm (I will be skipping 6/May for reasons below)
Details:  The Blizzard World Championship is upon our doorstep in lieu of Blizzcon in 2012, and I can now announce I’ll be casting the UK qualifiers for this tournament! It will be eight week’s worth of Sundays (so a big weekend commitment!) but we will be seeing the top two players in each Sunday’s tournament get an expenses-paid trip to the final event at the prestigious BAFTA venue on Piccadilly in London!!

Stream Address: To be announced
Stream Times: 4-7th May 2012, All Day (exact times to be announced)
Details: Insomnia is the UK’s biggest LAN tournament and I am excited to say I will be headlining the event on the main stage over at the Telford International Centre! There will be group stages on the Friday as well as the main bracket on the Saturday and Sunday. I’m super excited to be live at this tournament – it will be a fantastic experience!

I look forward to seeing you guys on stream at these events! :-) Thanks a lot for supporting me – I will keep bringing you great matches to watch! <3

I has a sad.

Thanks to eventual troubleshooting efforts with a big hand coming from Yogmark, a Playhem viewer who offered to help me diagnose the problem, I isolated the issue to one of the two ‘Generic USB Hub’ items on my computer which I believe are the USB controllers attached to my motherboard (or something technical that sounds similar to this). They were responsible for a certain number of USB ports on the back of my computer as well as the front of my tower case. I moved all my essential components like my input devices, speakers and mic to the non-affected USB ports and disabled one of the USB hubs for my cast last night, and got through a rather epic solo-cast with 17 games cast and a lot of exciting close series without any major hiccups or problems – whew! The final Bo3 between MorroW and DreAm was particularly exciting and I may be putting those games up on YouTube at some point soon.

If my motherboard has to be replaced though, it means I may be without a computer for up to 2-3 weeks as the defective motherboard is sent back to ASUS and a new one sent back to me and fitted. This led me to think about the topic of today’s blog post.

When it comes to buying run-of-the-mill computer equipment, the vast majority of consumers are used to the ‘oh well, if it breaks I can buy another one’ approach. This works for most cheap laptops if you’ve had it for over a year (or two without heavy use) for instance, older desktop computers, and almost all computer peripherals like cheap mice, keyboards and headsets.

How far would you go for your dream gaming rig?

eSports and gaming applications however demand better quality and enhanced features from many of these products. We can witness this in the extreme as soon as you take a look at some of the stupidly-pumped computers out on the market at the moment – my own computer is arguably one of those, or at least my laptop is – and the sheer amount of money some higher-end peripherals like mechanical keyboards, ‘gaming’ headsets and mice, etc. can cost.

With this increased expenditure and quality though, companies need to realise that the pressure put on their customer suppose can and should increase proportionally. There are both good and bad examples of this, but just to name a few of the dodgier ones I’ve encountered recently:

- I recently inquired about a particular gaming accessory (which will remain nameless) from a company that produces them. I asked if a particular pair would be compatible with me wearing headphones, to which the curt reply was ‘no’. After about four e-mails worth of prodding I finally found out that about five of their models were similar and would actually be compatible, but during this process I received one-liner e-mail responses and the only reason I eventually found the information I wanted was because I really wanted their product. I was never sold on anything nor were any suggestions offered up to me – in fact it almost felt like the company wanted me just to stop bothering them. If it came to judging them on their customer service alone, I would have been turned off from buying any of their products a long time ago.

- A new desk was recently acquired by myself in order to improve my gaming rig (metal frame to improve stability and a stand for my monitor so my casting mic won’t block my view of the bottom of my screen). I’m really happy with this but my mouse mat would sadly no longer cling to my desk surface for reasons I don’t understand. Given that one of the selling points of this mouse mat is that it would ‘stick to any surface’ and I had a normal wooden top to my desk, I started inquiring about getting it replaced or suggestions to get it fixed. The company in question (a well known eSports peripheral manufacturer and sponsor) kept batting e-mails around asking me to produce receipts and finally referring me to the store where I bought it from instead of dealing with it themselves. I’ve done as they asked and hopefully something will come of my efforts, but needless to say I was not particularly pleased with the attitude.

To balance this out though, I also want to highlight (this time with names!) some incredible experiences I’ve had with some companies that mean that even though their equipment isn’t always the best (although in most cases they are so woohoo!), I will be going back to buy again from them in the future.

- ThermalTake advertised an eSports mouse (Tt eSports Black for anyone wondering) as particularly durable because of its braided cord which I must say is marvellous to use. However, despite even keeping the mouse in the carrying pouch they provide with it to avoid any external damage, after nearly a year of use I found that if the cord strayed to certain positions the mouse would malfunction, suggesting that there was something wrong. As soon as I mentioned something to them, they immediately asked me to RMA with the store I bought the mouse from with no questions asked. There was no messing around or long strings of e-mails, because I suspect they simply know what they’re dealing with and value repeat business. It probably also helps that that particular mouse is the nicest one I’ve ever used with my laptop and I can’t wait to get it back – but I’ll certainly be continuing to support them.

- ASUS are possibly the best company I have ever dealt with in terms of dealing with finicky computer internals. They are in fact the motherboard manufacturer of my current gaming rig so you may find it surprising that I’m naming them here considering I may be out of the casting circuit for the next 2-3 weeks – but the fact of the matter is I’ve used their motherboards in no fewer than four of my gaming desktops to date, and even though I eventually had problems with two of them they have been very quick to try and help me identify problems and sort out replacements if necessary. Even when I don’t deal with them directly and I go to a store, the staff regularly tell me that where an RMA is required ASUS are one of the companies that get stuff returned stupidly quickly to them. I do not know if this is Taiwanese professional ethic showing in their customer service or if this is specific to their company, but they are one of the fastest and no-hassle companies that I know of in the computing industry and I feel that much safer against unnecessary expenditure when I buy one of their components.

- Alienware (Dell) gave me one of the most impressive customer service experiences I’ve ever had in my life. To cut the long story short, I suspected a fault required a component needing replacement in my laptop after only 90 days of use (I believe it may have shipped with the problem and I only picked up on it after using it for a while because the symptoms were from a feature I rarely use). After giving them a ring, an engineer not only came to me to fix it, but managed to do it on the next business day as well and swapped out the component on-the-spot. Even Apple don’t do service this good – and that’s saying something, because they are famous for that sort of thing.

- Finally, as it currently stands I only buy Western Digital SATA hard drives (for secondary drives). I have only ever dealt with their customer service directly as opposed to going to a store – why? Because I actually find it’s faster, which is sometimes difficult to believe. They have the most flexible and ridiculous returns policy in the world as far as I know, even allowing you to return a product without a receipt (well, maximum of one per consumer per year, but still) if it has a WD stamp on it and you think it’s defective. Nobody ever likes losing a drive or losing data, and admittedly I rarely do – but I also don’t have to worry about buying drives immediately when one of my backup drives goes bust, for instance – their customer service to be honest is just excellent.

Am I endorsing the above products and companies? You bet I am, and it wasn’t prompted either. However, individual companies aren’t the point of this post – my point is that when somebody buys a premium product, it’s important to remember that you’re buying the service as much as the product itself. If I’m spending way more than I need to on a product because I believe it’s better, I also expect decent (or at least better-than-indifferent) customer service to go along with it because that’s how I can justify continuing to spend more money on them in the future.

As much as we love supporting eSports organisations, it’s important to vote with your feet. eSports is still a growing industry, and no doubt many gaming peripheral and higher-end computing component companies are still infants compared to a lot of established names. Help them become better and help make standards higher – by letting them know when they let you down and supporting the companies who do a good job of supporting you post-purchase as opposed to only caring about the money at the till.

Ciao for now – I’ll be attempting to stream from my laptop occasionally until C.H.L.O.E.2 is back with me, so feel free to tune in when I’m about. I’ll usually tweet about it when I do. :-)

Never have I been more proud to be part of an organisation such as Playhem – what stemmed from a fairly low-key and happy-go-lucky casting ‘career’ has taken me to working with this fine group of casters from all over the world, and I consider myself super lucky to be a part of this wonderful family. Not only do I get a lot of casting practice and support, but it’s a great showcase for all the players who come through onto the world stage through our tournaments as well – remember, we were casting Empire.viOlet long before it became cool to cast him, and I’m sure there will be many more in the future! ;-)

In other news (It seems the music is a direct reference to where I live and my accent) a good friend of mine decided to spend an afternoon trolling me in quite possibly the most skilled fashion possible. Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to check out Neal Tse Johnson at some point – fellow Starcraft enthusiast and as you will see, pretty darned good with those drawing things. I urge you all to give him a nudge of appreciation on Twitter at @NealTse – for reference his website and portfolio is at nealtse.com.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I hope everybody is having a fantastic MLG weekend – and if you’re in London at Barcraft, pop on down and see the gang!

Oh – and for anybody who’s lazy to watch the video, here’s the picture. And yes, apparently I say “And the answer is…” a lot. :D

I’m sharing my thoughts today on a topic that first came to mind a few weeks ago but I haven’t had the time to write about (and also with the entire world writing about the 1.4.3 patch changes I figured I’d do something different). Towards the end of 2011 and into the new year, both the GSL and MLG announced changes to the way their tournament formats would be going forward. The new systems seemed complicated but stood to promote lots of good and exciting things. Without going into detail, the changes in format will lead to a lot more matches being played, and ‘safe’ player spots in both tournaments will no longer be that safe:

• It’s now a lot easier to drop out of Code S in the GSL as only the top 8 are guaranteed to keep a place automatically for next season’s Code S (All other Ro32 slots are filled through people coming through Code A and Up & Downs)
• MLG events now have qualifiers going through to events such as the Winter Arena which in turn go through to the actual MLG tournament where there will still be an Open Bracket – so the amount of games and how players get through to the final bracket will be a lot less certain before the weekend.

People at first seemed somewhat confused, and then Season 1 of 2012 got underway in the GSL and viewers for the most part got their heads around the new format quite quickly – and the feedback was positive. It’s a lot tougher to be a regular Code S contender now, and we are seeing more fresh faces emerge through the ever-tougher Code B tournament as well as having the potential for more foreign invites.

Similarly, viewers to the initial qualifiers of MLG have been largely positive about the new format, and it also gives people something to view in the off-season. This will of course be building up to the MLG Winter Arena event in a few weeks’ time, where the MLG format will be further tested.

One thing to note, however, is that armchair-viewers at home (of which there are millions!) now have a major tournament of some description to watch almost week-in, week-out. This does not include a plethora of excellent regular tournaments such as Playhem (not that I’m bias or anything), the ZOTAC cup, the Korean Weekly broadcasts, and many more. My question is simple: by expanding the major tournaments to such a large degree, and with lower-level tournaments regularly mixing it up and clashing inevitably with some of these dates, is the community allowing some of its tournaments to lose a little prestige simply because so much is out there?

Take GSL for example – there are now so many Code A matches that they have to be split between two simultaneous streams for games to be played in a timely fashion. As much as we all love the dual-stream to bits since we can watch both at once, in reality it’s difficult at best to focus on watching two epic games at once (and make no mistake, pretty much all the games are really bloody epic!!). It could be argued that this is adding value for the viewer, but I wonder if we risk falling into an attitude of “Oh, there are so many games on anyway, I can afford to miss some” and growing slightly apathetic simply due to the sheer quantity of content. MLG of course did this first with the Red and Blue streams (along with the beta streams on quad-view), but there was sufficient downtime between matches on the two main streams that you could almost get away with channel switching whenever something wasn’t on and get some decent action – it wasn’t exactly wall-to-wall on both streams and I believe that is a large part of why it worked so well.

One thing that has come from all these fantastic lower-level tournaments, however, is emerging names – for instance, I’m sure the entire Playhem caster roster knows that we were casting and supporting viOlet long before it became fashionable to do so (hipster nerds unite!) and no doubt there are countless other soon-to-be-large names now coming through the ranks thanks to the number of new tournaments and avenues to get noticed becoming available.

I should mention that I believe the expansion of tournaments and the growing number of them is fantastic for eSports and that I am most definitely supportive of this. I also absolutely adore both GSL and MLG and if it wasn’t for the human requirement of sleep, I would watch everything live. Rather than seeing what I’ve spoken about above as a problem, I see it as more of a ‘growing pain’ as eSports continues to expand. However, what exactly are its implications and is this an issue that needs to be addressed? If so, how?

Just some food for thought. :3

A hectic start to 2012 has been in order for myself but I’m really looking forward to doing a lot more in the coming year! Over the New Year’s break I was attending a chess tournament (7 hour games, for those of you who complain TvT’s are slow!) and am now back home and ready to rock. I tried my best to bleed some games onto YouTube over the last three weeks, and the results were a fair number of EGL4 games as well as some highlight games from the qxc vs CatZ showmatch.

No, not like that.

Over the next week (two maximum) I will finish uploading the rest of qxc vs CatZ highlight games as well as casting the grand finals of EGL4! For those of you who would like to watch some games without spoilers, links to various videos uploaded so far are below. All links are to a single game, there should be links to subsequent games at the end of each video (with the exception of the Lower Bracket Final, explained in-video. Damn you corrupted files!):

• Click here for EGL4 Winner’s Bracket Round 3 – BlinG vs orly
• Click here for EGL4 Winner’s Bracket Round 3 – Tan vs DreAm
• Click here for EGL4 Winner’s Bracket Finals
• Click here for EGL4 Lower Bracket Finals
• Click here for qxc vs CatZ highlights – Game 1
• Click here for qxc vs CatZ highlights – Game 3
• Click here for qxc vs CatZ highlights – Game 4
• Click here for qxc vs CatZ highlights – Game 9

As mentioned above, expect some more highlights from qxc vs CatZ and the EGL4 grand finals to be on YouTube soon, but in-between other commitments (see below!) it’s going to be hard to fit them in a few days – definitely by the end of next week though! I’ll also update this post with additional links when they get published.

It’s Playhem in Here!

In an extremely exciting example of putting yourself out there and being set new challenges as a result (see my credits page and props to MrBitter for this golden rule!), I was recognised as the qxc vs CatZ caster just days after the match was complete. The people who recognised this were some of the wonderful people who run and commentate the Playhem daily tournaments! Before I dashed off post-Christmas to go play chess, I cast my first live tournament in the Playhem EU daily on Boxing Day with Lyrlian (follow this fabulous nerd at @Lyrlian on twitter!) which was super exciting and a lot of fun.

After this trial, I have been asked back to become part of Playhem’s official caster roster and I am extremely excited and happy to say that I’ll be casting regularly for them in 2012!

For those of you that haven’t heard of Playhem before, they run an awesome matchmaking website that expended into SC2 a while ago at playhem.com. You sign up and link your Battle.net ID to an account on Playhem, and you can then enter tournaments as organised by whoever chooses to set one up!

Playhem themselves run daily cash events from Bronze-Silver level all the way up to GM (the Open tournaments) and it is the Open tournament I will be casting regularly, mainly on the EU server but perhaps the odd NA event as well. These tournaments regularly attract a large showing of respected and established SC2 names; for example just last night I had the privilege of casting Empire.hobot and Liquid’Sheth! I also believe on Boxing Day I cast HwangSin and viOlet’s games among other top GM players – so the Open tournament is definitely not for the faint hearted!

I highly recommend signing up and supporting these guys who pour so much money into eSports. The prize pool doesn’t sound that large, but when you consider they run 4-5 tournaments almost daily and have a cash prize pool in all of them, the amount of money monthly going into making these tournaments engaging and exciting is tremendous and they deserve every bit of praise they get.

For now, though, I’m very pleased to be able to present myself as part of this wonderful team and I hope that I meet your expectations in the future! You can watch the Playhem EU dailies at 7pm CEST (6pm UK time) live at playhem.tv.

Laddering Like a Boss

As promised at the end of last year, I intend on significantly stepping up my play into 2012 and getting better at being a caster as an indirect result of this, through deeper understanding of the game. So far this is proving successful, and in just a few short games after returning to 1v1 play in the new year I have sprung from a rather lowly Gold-84 to Plat-13!

Given that this was only day one of me coming back into the fray, I hope to hop into the Diamond league soon with regular play and the occasional top-player-build-snatching. The amount of casting I’ll be doing will also give me a decent level of insight into build orders and timings from a lot of great players, and I hope to use this to also aid my playing strength! The synergy between casting and playing is a lot larger than I originally gave it credit for, and I hope to spring up to a high level as soon as practically possible while juggling my other commitments. :-)

JoRo – Coming at you like a speed-bane on creep. Don’t say you weren’t warned. See you lovely people soon, be on the ladder or as part of a broadcast!

It’s been a while since I last posted here and for that I apologise; various real life commitments (including but not limited to processing problems with my passport which has taken way too much time – fortunately it was all worked out in my favour now) have meant I’ve had less time for playing Starcraft recently, although a lot of things that aren’t exclusively about playing have been happening!

The Apprentice Star League

The Apprentice Star League has been restructured and the league restarted. This was mainly due to huge problems with players failing to play their matches and coaches continuously realising they didn’t have enough time to properly coach a team and dropping out. This was always going to be a problem with a free model but Alan (the founder of the ASL) has made the brave decision to cut the number of teams to four with all the most active players on the rosters, and have community coaching sessions rather than a large number of dedicated coaches. I think this is a positive direction for the league and while things haven’t gone as smoothly as possible so far, it was a brave and correct decision for the ASL to make.

I actually fell into the category of active players, but because I was playing from England it meant that the community coaching sessions each week would fall at a somewhat untenable hour for me (something similar to midnight-3am). This wasn’t something I could commit to in the long term so I’ve unfortunately had to bow out of the league.

It is consolation, albeit small, that my record in the league is an unbeaten run. I wish it could have been over a larger number of matches but I have a 2-1, 2-0 and 2-0 (walkover) record and managed to keep all my time commitments to the league. I hope that the new format serves them well and that they enjoy a greater level of success. GoSu.tgun to my knowledge will still be coaching each team’s hardest working players at the end of the season although this will now obviously be reduced to four.

Should you be an improving player who is serious about putting more time into practicing Starcraft II and are able to commit to a league-type format, I would highly recommend you contact the ASL and let them know you can be a committed player. They’re always looking for potential new players and the more dedicated, the better.

London Barcraft

November was an incredibly busy month as well thanks to the presence of not one, but two Barcraft events in London. Conveniently located on two weekends running, MLG Providence and Dreamhack Winter 2011 meant that there was going to be little time to rest. The week started off for me on the Friday before Barcraft started (it was a Sat + Sun bar event) – a group of students from where I used to study organised a “Housecraft” throughout the weekend and I made it a priority to visit them as well as play a few games on the many computers present.

As it turns out, I really enjoyed myself and the addition of several computers made an in-house tournament possible throughout the evening. It also meant that the evening was guaranteed to go the entire Friday-broadcast distance (into the early hours of Saturday morning) and so food and drink were obviously required.

The above photo may or may not be me holding a kebab takeaway bag with two wine bottles doing an Immortal impression. I couldn’t possibly confirm one way or another.

The Saturday and Sunday proved to be a lot less tipsy but this was because I was occupied with the epic London Barcraft event for Providence. The sheer number of ridiculously high quality games made the weekend absolutely amazing and I had my camera in-hand to capture the atmosphere at the Assembly House for the MLG Red stream that ended up showing this photo live on-air on the Sunday!

We also had a fantastic team from CNet UK (mad props to them!!) who popped down to do an article on Barcraft and record a video with interviews. Take a look at their report and the sexy London Barcraft video over here.

There was even a lock-in arranged for those who were sufficiently keen (and had no desire to sleep!) to stay up and watch the finals on the Sunday evening into the early hours. Quite a few of us managed to survive the night, and some of the survivors can be seen diligently cheering away long after the mere mortals left the pub.

Crates of wine + Projector = Standard. Obviously.

Dreamhack the following week would prove to be an even more epic affair than Providence was, because of an upgrade from a 91″ projector to a 10-ft behemoth! It was also a slightly more sober affair as I arrived early to help set-up and would also be setting up a live webcam feed of the crowd for broadcast! It was great to see people popping in and out of the stream throughout the day to take a look at what people were doing in London and elsewhere around the world!

The crowd were also honoured to have special guests popping in and out throughout the weekend including Susie Kim from IPL and Dignitas’ team manager Odee all dropping in for a drink or two (or more!).

Graduating from wine crates to old books. We’re getting good at this.

Some of the swag on offer that was given away during the Dreamhack weekend. Yes, that’s a Collector’s Edition box in the background!

Huge Screen Is Huge.

London Barcraft have a lot more photos and information on their Facebook page and you can also follow them on twitter at @LondonBarcraft. If you happen to be in England and would like to pop down for a Barcraft weekend in 2012, please do drop in and say hi!

The venue is:

The Assembly House Pub
292 Kentish Town Road
London NW5 2TG
(1 minute walk from Kentish Town Underground station)

Keep watching Facebook / Twitter etc. for when Barcraft events will be organised in the new year!

CatZ vs qxc Best-of-31 Showmatch and the Drinking Game

Warning: Spoilers of the result of this showmatch later on in this section. Feel free to keep reading until you next see this bold text – I’ll warn again exactly when the spoilers start.

For those of you who follow the TeamLiquid forums, you may have noticed in the last week that CatZ decided to challenge qxc to a ridiculously epic Best-of-31 showmatch on the 22nd of December.

The question everyone wanted the answer to – who looks better in shades?

I was incredibly pumped and excited to be casting this event live, and also promised qxc beforehand that I would be around for the entire series – but did not realise what that would eventually entail! Three streams were simultaneously up: CatZ and qxc were streaming their first-person views and I was streaming the observer with commentary.

The event started at 7pm with an odd opening going into a long macro game on Shakuras Plateau. My voice unfortunately felt like sandpaper thanks to the typical winter illnesses that tend to spread everywhere this time of year and I wasn’t able to leave my desk to get to the kettle due to how long these epic games were! :D I’m pleased to report that after the first couple of games people on stream were watching me get myself tea and honey on a regular basis as well as a box of cold-and-flu tablets to chug my way through the cast.

A few London Barcrafters were kindly in chat to moderate because I was completely underprepared for the sheer number of people that would tune in – I believe at one point 1,700 viewers was surpassed (and many more of course watching the player’s first person streams). I didn’t notice this because I was so busy trying to keep track of everything in the games that I barely had an opportunity to even take a sideways glance at the stream.

Firstly, I think it’s appropriate to say I owe an apology to the viewers in the first set of 4-6 games where I was missing some stuff during the cast on the minimap – there were several reasons for this, but two main ones. The first was that I had only just taken the medication that would allow me to keep going for the rest of the cast and it hadn’t quite set in yet (my nose was still completely blocked and my brain only half-working) but secondly because qxc seemed to be so good at being everywhere at once that I could barely think fast enough to keep up!

However, the flu meds eventually kicked in and along with a hot drink (and another metric ton of honey) things were going smoothly from about the 6th game onwards. The sheer number of proxy barracks and proxy hatcheries flying around everywhere also eventually gave rise to the CatZ vs qxc drinking game which I devised with the viewers on-stream. The rules were very simple and went as follows:

• If a Hatchery is destroyed, take a drink.
• If a Command Centre is destroyed, take a drink.
• If an in-progress Hatchery or Command Centre is stopped WITHOUT cancel, take a drink.
• If a Command Centre or Orbital Command is forced to lift up to avoid being destroyed, take a drink.

Starcraft drinking games can lead to interesting times.

This doesn’t look in itself to be that dangerous, but anybody who was watching the stream will know how ridiculous it turned out to be. I would say that in an average game, a drink was being had every 3-4 in-game minutes – and occasionally several drinks (multi-pronged drops and counter-attacks mainly) were consumed within a single minute. With many of the games lasting impressively long (including a 25-minute brilliant match on Novice Blistering Sands…yes you heard that right!) this led to several dedicated ballers in chat exclaiming “JORO Y U GET ME SO DRUNK” (spelling corrected) by about the halfway point of the evening.

A great time was had by all and the match lasted a streamed total of 7 hours and 21 minutes – the biggest break we had throughout the series was about four minutes so this really was a marathon Best-of-31 in every sense. I started streaming at 19.00 UK time and the match ended at about 02.30 the following morning. With various K-Pop related sing-and-dance-a-long’s afterwards as well as a NA-server monobattle that I played with some of the viewers, I eventually packed up the stream at about 04.00 and crawled into bed to crash.

To those who were watching and were continuously giving feedback in the chat, I thank you greatly. I hope that throughout the evening you saw me adopt most of what you guys and girls said to me immediately and I really appreciated your input – most importantly, I hope it resulted in a better show for you! ;-) Kudos as well to those who kept playing the drinking game and hung on like troopers until the end – you will forever be the Unsung Heroes of Starcraft casting. :-D

An extra shoutout to those who took part in the dance-a-thon with various songs littered throughout the cast. I wish I took a screenshot of everyone typing ASCII dance moves into the chat, because that was absolutely epic – sadly I didn’t think to do this at the time. If anyone has a screenshot feel free to send it in and I’ll add it to this blog post. :-) A final list of what was played throughout the evening is below:

• Hyuna – Bubble Pop
• Beast – Shock
• Super Junior – Pyjama Party
• Men Without Hats – Safety Dance
• The Gag Quartet – Internet Medley

Warning: Spoilers Incoming Below!

You all love Microsoft Word clipart, really.

The final results of this epic match then, are listed below. I want to thank Djeez on TeamLiquid for diligently keeping track of and compiling the games to post in the official TeamLiquid thread. I have copied over the results from his post below:

GAME 1 - Catz > qxc on Shakuras Plateau
GAME 2 – Catz < qxc on Novice Steppes of War
GAME 3 - Catz > qxc on TPW Odyssey
GAME 4 – Catz < qxc on Shattered Temple
GAME 5 – Catz < qxc on Metalopolis
GAME 6 – Catz < qxc on Tal’Darim Altar
GAME 7 – Catz < qxc on Antiga Shipyard
GAME 8 – Catz < qxc on Daybreak
GAME 9 – Catz < qxc on Dual Sight
GAME 10 – Catz < qxc on TPW Ohana
GAME 11 – Catz < qxc on Crevasse
GAME 12 - Catz > qxc on TPW Emerald Jungle
GAME 13 – Catz < qxc on Testbug
GAME 14 – Catz < qxc on iCCup Neo Enigma
GAME 15 - Catz > qxc on Scorched Haven
GAME 16 – Catz < qxc on Terminus RE
GAME 17 – Catz < qxc on TPW Overgrown
GAME 18 – Catz < qxc on Steppes of War
GAME 19 – Catz < qxc on TPW Concrete Dreams
GAME 20 - Catz > qxc on iCCup Sanshorn Mists
GAME 21 - Catz > qxc on Crossfire SE
GAME 22 – Catz < qxc on Lost Temple

Final result – qxc 16-6 CatZ

An absolutely wonderful evening and despite the exhaustion I’m pleased to say my throat didn’t quite feel as bad afterwards as I thought it would (this morning when I woke up was a different story though but I won’t bore you with that!). I’m really pleased that I was able to bring some enjoyable commentary to so many people and I look forward to doing it again in the near future.

In the mean time, however, please do check out my YouTube Channel at youtube.com/jorosar as I’ll be posting a lot more replays including the EGL4 London finals (!!) in the coming days. Finally, thanks to everyone who said they would refer me to competitions etc. as a caster – I really appreciate this, and please do e-mail and encourage people to get in touch. I love the game and community, and would be more than happy to cast tournaments big and small if there’s a need. :-)

Thanks once again to qxc (what a multi-tasking baller), CatZ (what a gentleman – and a very insightful interview afterwards as well for the stream, many thanks sir!) and all the viewers for making the evening such a great one.

What Now and The Future in 2012

Looking forward to beyond the holiday season and into 2012, I’m looking forward to really ramping up the time I spend developing my own game and doing an awful lot more casting. With the ladder season five commencing as well, it will be a good time for me to gauge my progress and hopefully play and stream more online tournaments for anyone who cares to watch.

I’ll do my best to make these entertaining of course, and I will be continuously adding to YouTube in-between direct casts and streams. Many thanks for everybody’s support, and here’s to a fantastic incoming year not for me but for the entirety of the SC2 and eSports community!

I don’t have the PhotoShop skills to easily change the logo to “JustLost”, so here’s an image I found on Google search instead.

Despite my time for updating my blog being sapped, in real life I have done my best not to neglect the eSports scene. I have tried my best to help, photograph and report from two consecutive London Barcraft weekends (more on that in my next blog post) and the Apprentice Star League is now in week 4. I have since played week 2 (retrospectively in place of the player I replaced) and week 3′s matches, and successfully managed to beat my Protoss opponent in “Team Brotoss” (appropriate!) 2-1 in week 2, but my week 3 match was the subject of some serious eSports stamina for all concerned.

My opponent was none other than DiscoRax (Follow this amazing gentleman on Twitter at @DiscoRax) who I effectively ‘beat’ in a race to get into the league when the slot opened up for me a few weeks ago! DiscoRax got in through another opening a short time later but I wasn’t to know this until the league admin decided it would be amusing to pair us together for our week 3 matchup. Because of our US-West Coast vs UK time zones, we agreed to meet in-game in the evening his time and morning my time – which meant waking up at stupid (also known as ‘before noon’) o’clock. I streamed our game live and had several ASL observers to watch our match, but I had absolutely no idea that it would turn out to be as crazy as it did.

The map was MLG Antiga Shipyard, and before this game I had never before in my life decided to go with a pure-mech build before (I was a beta bio-abuser, I admit it! Or rather, I’m a faithful student of Polt…yeah, right). I quickly teched up to siege tanks and later Thors, but what ensued was a ridiculously nervous back-and-forth game where Disco’s superior upgraded bio couldn’t quite break ground against my pure mech, but I also couldn’t move across the map without getting hammered from all directions. Multiple mistakes were made (we’re both Gold, remember!) from both sides and I had tremendous difficulty trying to re-take the centre of the map. Then, one hour and four minutes into the game…DiscoRax disconnected. That’s right, you heard me. Below is a screengrab that was taken and posted to me on Twitter of my reaction when this happened – still in my pyjamas and half asleep.

Fortunately for us, the league admin himself, Alan Lefleur, was spectating the game, and from the observer’s point of view declared the game a draw after concluding that the game could have gone either way at the end and neither of us was definitively ahead. While a part of my brain wanted the win (oh why deny it), I recognised that was a fair result and if I was to win I wanted to earn it in-game!! So when my opponent came back online, we re-made and played Game 1. Again. And I was more determined than ever.

Except this time I went on tilt. What people don’t understand when they watch TvT matchups is how unbelievably nervous the players can sometimes be. It may well have been superbly boring to watch but I promise I was alert, nervous and on-edge through the entire hour of the first game. For this reason perhaps, I decided a switch of strategy was in order and attempted a very early bio all-in, which failed catastrophically due to my opponent’s ability to, er, build tanks. Game 2 lasted under 20 minutes with a quick tap out from myself.

What happened next would (with hindsight) change the matchup considerably. DiscoRax was now 1-0 up after almost 2 hours of being online from both of us, and we got into game to play Game 2. Unfortunately, twice in a row there were quick disconnects from DiscoRax, and we determined that we had to put the rest of our match off for two days (Not our fault, blame Comcast!).

The next day, I watched both replays, and once more with our team coach. While there was no super-in-depth analysis of what went in due to time constraints (I didn’t have much time then), I took one all-important phrase from my analysis session: “You didn’t build any Hellions.” The simple idea of keeping my factories more active and also using Hellions would turn out to be the key to improvement in my play, at least mentally, when we reconvened to play game 2.

Problem, workers?

We met online once again to play games 2 and 3 on what was Friday afternoon for myself, and Friday morning for DiscoRax. However, before I go any further I want to give this fine man ALL THE PROPS for offering to go in to work at a ridiculously early 6:00am to play our remaining games on a work computer so that the temperamental home connection. Not only was he waking up at an hour that would probably make me want to strangle kittens, but he would be playing on a computer with a fresh SC2 install that he isn’t used to playing on.

We did both get onto BNet, though, and said games were indeed played. The difference in my play this time was that I was happy to sit back and prepare slowly in my play with my mech, but with Hellions being the mobile extension to my army. Game 2 turned out to be a good solid game from me where I took a positional win after getting siege mode and keeping him to 1-base – and this tied up the scores at 1-1. Game 3, however, was an epic nail-biter as far as the person in my seat was concerned! It turned into an almost-base-race scenario where my Hellions were destroying his mineral line simultaneously with his siege tanks sieged up and IN MY BASE ($%^&*). Regardless of the result, it was an absolutely epic game.

…and the result is…well, I’m not going to tell you here. ;-)

For those who would like to see the result, the Week 3 results are on the Apprentice Star League website at this link. If you want to see the games themselves, however, I have been asked several times on Twitter to release the replays from these games, and will submit to this request here.

Download Replay Pack Here: ASL Week 3 – JoRoSaR vs Discorax

Before you download these replays, please note that the players are two Gold league players. Don’t expect master-level play, but hopefully you’ll appreciate how tense and epic we felt while playing them!

Kangaroo Rocket Punch Fighting!! ;-)

In more ASL-related table-flipping news before I head off, I spoke to my Aussie brethren GoSu.tgun who has stupendously-kindly agreed to provide a coaching session for FREE to the hardest working / most dedicated player in every ASL team at the end of the season! The lucky players will be decided between the ASL bosses in consultation with the team coaches and members. Check out the official announcement here. Baller-Zerg gonna show people how it’s done! You can also follow him on Twitter here.