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.

I was in bed at the time and about to doze off, but as soon as I read this I immediately replied in the positive and learned a short time later that I was in! This was all very exciting for me and I read up a bit more on the ASL the next day.

The ASL is the brainchild of Alan LaFleur, who decided that the game needs to focus more on its core group of players – the foundation and the masses of non-pro gamers. The important point of recognising that the gaming community cannot thrive or grow if the amateur playerbase is neglected is a refreshing one, and the league format is a fantastic idea. Each team has a number of players who are in the following leagues:

• 1 Diamond
• 1 Platinum
• 2 Gold
• 2 Silver
• 2 Bronze

Each team will also have a Masters level coach, and meet for periodic practices on Battle.net. Each week, the teams play against each other and the scores are tallied in a table. A play-off happens post-season to battle for the team prize of ASL Champion. The onus is obviously on improving because if you are the Silver level player for a team but have improved to pretty much Platinum standard, then this will bode you well towards the end of the regular season and help your team reach the playoffs! This is what excites me the most: I’m technically a Gold level player but if I can reach a playing standard that somebody in Platinum or Diamond would have in the coming weeks, I will stand in good stead come crunch time in the league.

Our first practice session got off to a slightly bumpy start on the grounds that our coach unfortunately had to quit after Week 2 of the league because of unforeseen real life commitments. This was a real shame too because his name was FruitGG, which had me nerdgasm-ing at the thought of FruitDealer and ForGG having some sort of love child. Alas, this was not to be – and an assistant coach to the team arranged for a micro battle to get things warmed up between the players in our team. All did not go well for me as I was given a baptism of fire; our supposed ‘Bronze’ player seemed to be able to regularly wipe the floor with my face.

I will now utilise the power of…MICRO!

This will prove to be a big challenge but one that I am seriously looking forward to. A solid plan to help amateurs in the game improve and get more involved with the community is exactly what Starcraft 2 needs in the long run to ensure it will flourish for years to come. I’m looking forward to playing more and improving my casting as well, as a direct result of improved knowledge and insight into the game that comes via a higher playing standard. Let’s see how this goes! :-)

On the Friday evening, sixteen computers were ordered in by EGL. Given the strict times where people had to leave the hall, there was a very limited amount of time to set up. This would not have been a problem had all the equipment been there but for some reason only eight of the sixteen computers were delivered to the SC2 tournament hall. These computers were set up anyway for a 36-player tournament on the Saturday morning, and were in-place just before the team had to leave the venue.

On the Saturday morning, another problem quickly materialised. These computers were previously used in a “speed-building” event at the previous week’s LIT, the London International Technology show. Contestants would race to assemble the PC from basic parts and the fastest were the ones that won prizes. This in itself is not a problem as none of the parts were physically broken from abuse – however, it transpired that the computers did not get re-tested before being sent to EGL. Therefore, of the sixteen actually delivered, only eight would boot up – down to 50% capacity before the event ever started. In addition, several minutes into the games from Group A and Group B it was quickly discovered that sound was not working on four out of the eight PCs left, so down to 25%. Finally, two more computers throughout the day died completely and I believe were completely stripped and reformatted. This means at one point there were only two computers available for use and of course this was unacceptable. Quite a bit down from the original sixteen, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Insert hero decision number one from the staff, who made the brave move of dismantling the stream and disappointing the viewers worldwide in favour of getting more computers to the players to run the tournament. The four computers on-stage meant for the casters and observers were brought down so that more games could be played while the other computers could be fixed.

Near the end of day one, despite the fact that we should have had 36 (including the casting lot) computers running for the entire day, we had 10 working for the end of the day (and at one point in the morning we were down to 2). There was even a point in time where the possible decision to cancel the tournament was considered. Thankfully, the organisers pulled through thanks to the quick thinking to stop the stream to use the extra computers, and all but four group games were finished on the Saturday by 22.00. One of the organisers was forced to crash at his hotel early (18.00, when all the group stages were originally supposed to conclude) once double-digit PCs were working as he was on two days without sleep and exhausted because the problems that EGL faced were frankly completely unexpected and ridiculous, which is entirely understandable. As for what went on Saturday (all the good stuff) in the mean time, check out my previous blog post.

Going into Day 2, the tournament was going strong as all the remaining computers had their problems fixed. The main issue now was that the entire tournament was still behind schedule because of yesterday’s issues, even taking into account the six hour ‘buffer’ of games finishing at 22.00 instead of 18.00 (that’s how big the delay was; not too surprising considering we had a quarter of the computers we wanted for a lot of the day).

Setting up the projector for the stream on Day 2

In light of the lack of PCs I offered the previous evening to lug in my old desktop computer (for those who have seen my Equipment Locker page, I’m referring to the original C.H.L.O.E., who recently got replaced and was sitting idle in my room waiting to be sold / passed on) and was told by text at squeaky-o’clock-in-the-morning on the Sunday that it could be used as the second caster’s observing computer. I duly brought the computer in and we were thereby able to use all 10 PCs that we had the previous day as well as a new PC for casting up on stage – with C.H.L.O.E. as the backup for observing. As many followers know, the stream was up on the Sunday and things, while behind schedule, went very smoothly indeed.

In fact, not only did this happen but I found myself with a reasonable amount of time to walk around between games since there were no longer problems we could solve flying about! In addition to taking photos I managed to sneak in a reasonable number of interviews with some great players and personalities on the EGL4 SC2 scene, including in no particular order:

• Michael “dignitas.Odee” O’Dell, team manager of Dignitas
• Javier “LndnBarcraft” Lee (London Barcraft’s sponsored player)
• ShiJie “4k.DreAm” Zhu
• Jay Smith, Co-Owner of BinaryBeast
• Andrew “Sombrero” Philippou (One of the head admins of the SC2 tournament)
• Samayan “dignitas.BlinG” Kay

A massive shoutout is required here to Robin Lomax Bjerke, who I met at EGL4. He is a fellow London Barcrafter and is also an audio engineer who happened to have the correct equipment to record fantastic quality audio for the interviews! It is thanks to him that you will hear actual voices in the video as opposed to background noise and random cheering.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I was also privileged enough to get up into the balcony overlooking the main stage, in time to watch the closing stages of the Halo: Reach tournament where Dignitas would take the final in an EPIC encounter with Infused. The game was so intense in the final that even as an RTS gamer (okay, so I have history with Counter-Strike…) I was completely glued to the action, and the crowd were incredibly enthusiastic and cheering many of the ridiculously awesome plays we saw out of both teams.

I was not forgetting the incredible Starcraft II games that were now progressing steadily through both halves of the winners brackets, though! After watching the epic conclusion to the Halo: Reach final I dashed back to watch incredible emotional scenes as the brackets slowly progressed.

Team Dignitas’ TanDongHo, BlinG and R2k chilling out between games

(Spoiler Alert – This paragraph only) One of the upsets occured early on in the winner’s bracket where 4k.DreAm, who told me via interview earlier in the day that the player he fears the most by far in the tournament was Dignitas.Tan, manages to overcome his anxiety and pull out a 2-1 win, relegating TanDongHo (the clear favourite of the tournament by ladder ranking, top-10 GM in Korea means an awful lot!) to the lower bracket where he would go out in a shock loss against team Infused’s Lau later on.

4k.DreAm holds his hands in emotional release immediately after an epic Game 3

In the breaks while some of the preliminary lower bracket rounds were being cast by the wonderful team of Leon and Adrenal (who did a phenomenal job by the way, and were there throughout the entire tournament including during the downtime on Saturday!), some good humour shenanigan-ry was also on the cards.

Tan…your build orders are MINE!

“What do you mean, we shouldn’t have let JoRo borrow the pen?” (And yes, this got onto the live stream – kekeke ^^)

Though we were all having a lot of fun and things were running smoothly, a lot of constructive work was obviously getting done. The casters were doing their thing, the admins were ensuring the player-flow at the computers was optimal and I was running around like a headless chicken with my camera. That is, until I unexpectedly heard the most exciting phrase I’ve ever heard from anyone at an eSports event, ever.

“Can you be on stage in five minutes?”

Erwut.

As things transpired, LeonStarcraft’s voice needed to take a small break due to the accelerated day of cast after cast attempting to run the event back up on schedule. As the other caster at the venue (albeit as a visitor originally!) I was called up to cast alongside Adrenal for the remaining lower bracket games – with Leon coming back to cast the Grand Finals. I was ecstatic and want to thank both of the scheduled casters and EGL4 for giving me the opportunity – I only hope I did the community proud. I’m incredibly happy that the initial feedback I received from the community and those on London Barcraft’s facebook page (who unexpectedly saw me on stream and collectively went “Wut!?”) was very positive.

As an added bonus, I was observing on C.H.L.O.E. in what would be her last hurrah as my gaming PC – a fitting tribute!

I am sad to report, however, that this is where the tournament encountered its final hurdle that it sadly could not pass. If you recall at the beginning of this blog post I mentioned that one of the problems with the hall on the Friday night was that set up could only be done until 22.00. This was also the case on the Sunday of the event where we would be forcibly evicted at 22.00. These were not EGL’s rules but those of the venue at the Emirates stadium and to be fair, what was outlined in the agreement to rent the venue. This meant that the stream had to be put off-air so that the stage could be dismantled, and thus the viewership lost out on watching the Lower Bracket Finals and Grand Final. Not only this, but power and network connectivity was removed to the hall, meaning that we had no way of communicating to the outside world or updating the brackets (I tried to keep updates going via Twitter for a while but in case the games got cast later I gave no spoilers. I also posted a bit on the TeamLiquid thread).

When they said “We need to pack up” they weren’t kidding – this was the original SC2 room just 30 minutes after the stream went offline.

Thinking on their feet, the admins made their final hero decision of the evening and quickly dragged two computers to another event hall where we could try and hang out until midnight, and no later. In a room full of monitors and XBoxes, two lone PCs kept going as the Lower Bracket Finals were played to their conclusion, and the Grand Finals began at 23.15.

(Spoiler Alert – Reading past this point *may* reveal implicit spoilers about who participated in the Grand Final. However, the final result will not be revealed. Scroll past the next image and the paragraph after it if you wish to keep reading this article spoiler-free)

The Grand Final being played in an otherwise deserted XBox gaming hall on the last two networked PCs in a race against time

If you don’t want to know who won the Lower Bracket final or who is participating in the Grand Final, do NOT study the preceeding image, by the way. For those of you with sufficient nerd-knowledge to recognise both players participating in the above photograph immediately, my apologies but you were previously warned.

This is where unfortunate circumstance comes in for its final call of the evening, sadly. In large part due to the lack of computers on the Sunday still (remember, 10 working is still less than the 16 originally hoped for), and also due to some incredibly long games earlier on in the Lower Bracket including an hour-long epic, at midnight the Grand Final had to be halted after five games had been played out of a possible seven (the score was 3-2, which isn’t giving anything away seeing as it’s the only score possible with five games played). Many of the venue staff had worked a 17-hour shift (not the EGL guys, the Arsenal stadium staff) on the Sunday and we were soberly informed by the duty manager that we would simply be breaking UK law by continuing to use the venue beyond midnight. It was with a heavy heart that we decided the remaining games of the final would be played online in a few days once the two finalists have had a chance to rest.

There was zero choice but to apologise to the players and pack away as quickly as possible. The mood was obviously sad and especially so for the finalists who were understandably frustrated, but we huddled together and all agreed (players as well as the EGL staff; there were probably about 15 of us left) that given how ridiculously far behind we were on Saturday and were at one point considering cancelling the tournament altogether, we had done a tremendous job to get this far. It’s unfortunate that another half an hour would probably have concluded the tournament entirely but there was simply nothing we could do to prolong our stay at the venue as once again power was switched off to the ‘backup’ hall where we were trying to blitz out the final games of the evening.

Given that there was nothing else we could do, the EGL crew, casters and players went back to the hotel in a minibus to reflect over pizza and drinks in the hotel lobby. A lovely scene at the hotel was where the third placed player in the tournament (no spoilers for those who don’t want it; those that know who the finalists were can work it out) was presented with his giant cheque by Nick Baker. Afterwards, more reflecting and relaxing (which was sorely required after such a stressful weekend) was the order of the evening.

Some of the heroes of EGL who, despite all the event’s problems, stuck around until the very last seconds to try and get the tournament finished.

At this point I would like to point out that on the whole, the EPL4 Starcraft event was a success. We had some ridiculously epic games and a very tight bracket that made for incredibly close competition, as well as a tremendous team behind the scenes on top of Adrenal and Leon who raced through Sunday to power through as many games as possible. The players themselves were supremely patient with the organisers as they jumped what seemed like a million hurdles and the staff hauled arse to ensure as many games as possible were played.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that failures did occur and need to be improved on for the next event. It’s unfortunate that most of the problems stemmed from a basic lack of computers (ignoring the quality problems of having them built at speed in a competition and then left unchecked) but these issues can be fixed, especially if an agreement with a venue is reached for EGL5 where the admins are given a bit more time to initially set up beforehand. The players had to wait a long time between games and as we know the tournament was not even fully finished on the night (but came oh so close).

Personally, I believe it’s of paramount importance to note that every single person involved in the event gave a 110% effort to trying to make it more successful, and it was truly unfortunate that not all the problems could be overcome by the end of play on Sunday.

• The event could have simply been cancelled on the Saturday,
• People could have gone home sooner on the Sunday,
• The final two series didn’t have to be moved to the next hall (especially since it wasn’t on-stream anymore)…

But no – all possible stops were pulled in a gargantuan effort to get as much done as possible. The EGL team, organisers, referees and casters deserve nothing but our highest praise. The vast majority of the problems encountered by them on the weekend were not their fault – but still they fought through and ended up giving the participants the best experience they could muster. As far as I am concerned, despite all the problems I can’t wait for the next one if the same passionate, hard working and enthusiastic people are involved.

Finally, the real reason for no result spoilers – thanks to C.H.L.O.E. being used as an observing computer and also a quiet word to the players before the ‘missed’ games (LB Final and Grand Final), I am actually in personal possession of all the replays that were played at EGL4 over the weekend (although I need to plug in and extract them from the depths of the computer). I intend on creating a replay pack (but won’t release it without EGL’s consent) and to try and make a little something up to the non-attending community, I hope that I can arrange for the games that weren’t cast live on air to be re-cast at some point within the next week. These may also possibly include the final one/two games that weren’t played at the venue on the night. I do ask that you bear with us on this, and I promise to update this blog post when I find out if the games are being cast, and if so also with a date and time.

Thank you all for making the weekend what it was – things didn’t go flawlessly by a long way, but the people involved and the concentration of passion in the SC2 hall were second to none and I can only hope that all events have people like this involved in the future.

UPDATE: I have been informed that the Lower Bracket Final *and* every game from the Grand Final (including all outstanding games) will be cast at some point after i44. This may be a few weeks, so don’t hold your breath (It depends on EGL’s schedule and many of the staff are doing i44 so that’s why it could take a while) – but they WILL BE CAST! For the same reason I’m holding off doing any casting of EGL4 replays until after the official Lower Bracket Final and Grand Final casts are over.

(A footnote / disclaimer: I am not officially associated with EGL4 / organisation of the event nor was I brought in for any specific purpose; I was originally a spectator and I volunteered to help out where I could. This blog post should be considered solely my opinion. I apologise in advance if this blog post contains any factual errors and will correct them if notified. I’ve done my best to be 100% accurate and honest throughout)

The layout of the venue was surprisingly useful – we were effectively occupying some of the VIP suites of Arsenal FC and as a result the halls were divided as large rooms in a circle around the pitch – perfect for segregating different games into separate areas while still giving a lot of room for people to walk around and mingle.

It became immediately clear entering the tournament venue that FPS was the order of the day, with masses of serious fans lining the Halo and Call of Duty tournament halls. In the first hall, sharing the honours with the main stage and CoD: Black Ops were the Street Fighter crew who were knuckled down and looked like they meant serious business. Behind them were the SteelSeries stand showcasing some of their awesome Voice Activated Gaming technology and other gaming equipment. RockStar were also conveniently on hand to allow gamers to sample (and then drink more of to keep them going!) their energy drinks.

The next hall was entirely dedicated to FPS gaming, with some big-name teams including Fnatic and Dignitas fighting it out on the consoles.

Also of incredible nerd-noteworthiness was the retro gaming section which showcased (and allowed you to play!) games from older generation consoles open for play on the back wall. Nobody beats my time on Chemical Plant level 1 on Sonic the Hedgehog. Sadly, I won’t mention how poorly I fared even with the golden gun on Goldeneye 64…

The next hall was where the Starcraft action started. Technical issues meant that a lot of the group play was delayed, so a number of players were warming up and looking reasonably pumped up for a full afternoon and evening of qualifying group action.

A group of local Barcrafters were following Javier Lee, a player nominated by London Barcraft to represent them during the event as a competitor. Javier won his competitor pass by winning a preliminary tournament hosted by Gamerbase – and was playing under the handle “LndnBarcraft” to help spread awareness of Barcraft events lined up for Providence and Dreamhack.

Javier was unlucky in group selection, being in one of the groups that had five players (rather than four for some groups) as well as being in one of the hardest groups he could possibly be in, with 2 out of 3 Protoss in the tournament inside his group and ZvP being his weakest match-up. In addition to this, one of the Protoss’ was the former Warcraft-3-turned-SC2 pro 4k.DreAm who was favourite by a country mile to walk the group. As the top two advance, it would be a challenge to get out of his group but the determination and energy was there. Having the account for merely two days he had already made it into the top echelons of Master League so confidence was high and ambition was ever-present.

The first match pitted Javier against DreAm where the first game was lost unluckily quickly due to an ill-scouted 2-base 9-gate all-in from DreAm. The second game, however, proved to be an epic. After macroing his heart out on Metalopolis and coming out on top in a few opening skirmishes, Javier was looking good to go into the mid-game with a reasonable advantage in both economy and army.

The game was a long one and Javier was potentially on the brink of victory but an unfortunate decision to move up a ramp in the wrong direction resulted in some stunning force fields that turned the tide of battle in DreAm’s favour and he clinched the game giving him a 2-0 series win. After the series DreAm shook hands with Javier and even commented that the second game result should have been reversed.

Javier continued to struggle against Protoss going down to Nem 2-0, but came back emphatically against CLN (who beat Nam earlier) in a brilliant ZvZ 2-0 to bring the group to a 3-way tie for second place. However, CLN goes through on game points as he was the only one of the three tied players to take a game off 4k.DreAm earlier on in the day, meaning that Group E was undoubtedly the tightest group and most difficult to advance from.

A disappointing result after so much fighting spirit but an incredible well done to Javier who diced with some of the best players in the tournament and came literally within a hair of advancing to the main tournament bracket.

After a hearty Barcraft late consolation dinner in Chinatown we made our ways home to come back tomorrow and enjoy the rest of the tournament. Our player was out but we were very impressed with the games and look forward to seeing more exciting Starcraft action in the rest of the tournament. Also note that I will try to get a hold of the replays and cast some in the coming week after the tournament is over :-)

For now, though, the training is at its beginning state. I’ve taken a screenshot of my Battle.net profile and this will be the foundation of what I’m improving on:

I should point out that the above is no fluke – I have neglected 1v1 in favour of playing more social team games for the last few months and the 3v3 and 4v4 ranks are Random Teams. The 2v2 rank is with a practice partner / coach (Theovide, who I will heap praise on in a later post) although my regular 2v2 rank is still high Diamond / low Masters. I got back into 1v1 at the end of the ladder season, where despite being in Diamond last season and *winning* my placement match, I was unceremoniously dumped back into Gold. I guess the good old MMR has been steadily increasing for the rest of the world while I was away – quite a lot, in fact.

My goal, which is important to state now, for Season 4 of the SCII ladder is to become Master’s level with my main race (Terran) and play at a comfortable Diamond level at least with both of my off-races. In the process of improving my gameplay, I hope to not neglect my casting – and in fact not only cast online games but do the odd local LAN event as well.

I will update on both my playing and casting (and put into both categories if the relevant post applies to both, such as this one) on this blog as time progresses. Let the training commence!

My name is John (aka JoRoSaR) and I’m a London-based Starcraft II fan, player and shoutcaster. I’ve been playing the game since the beta and fell in love with it straight away. In addition to playing, I picked up streaming and casting towards the end of ladder season 3 (Sep 2011).

Unlike many other SCII fans, I did not actually play Starcraft I or Brood War. My gaming history is colourful; I remember playing StormLord on DOS when I was a little boy (if anyone reading this recognises the game, I probably should owe you a drink!) and graduating to Super-Famicom and the Super Nintendo where I was brought up on console games all the way up to the Sega Saturn / Nintendo 64 era (For the record, I am the King of battle-mode on MarioKart 64 and no, this will never be contested). It was only really then that I got into computer games properly in high school and left console gaming.

If you know this game, I love you already.

My first pursuit was Command & Conquer: Red Alert and later on, Age of Empires I, II and the Conquerors expansion. A friend and I would regularly partner as a 2v2 team to win local LAN tournaments. Back then, these eSports prizes would be in the form of a free week’s access at the local cafe, not like the big-bucks money of today. Still, we were pretty good and entirely satisfied with our geeky pursuits.

Things got slightly more serious for a while with Counter-Strike, where I was also briefly a member of a team that came 3rd in the regional WCG qualifiers. Towards the end of high school I cooled off to focus on studies, however, and instead picked up Warcraft III in my spare time as a throwback to my RTS days (I discontinued playing AoE after the release of Mythology) and in the midst of all this, got to a pretty respectable ranking over time playing as Random, which if I recall correctly was round about level 30+ on ladder. I also discovered DotA in its infancy and played that casually.

Throughout university and now, with the odd throwback to the odd FPS game such as the Call of Duty / Battlefield franchises, I exclusively picked up Starcraft from when it was released in beta.

Away from the game, in my spare time I enjoy photography, travelling, motorsport, basketball, bowling, music (guitar, piano and singing) and chess.

London Barcraft @ MLG Orlando 2011

My goal through this website is to chart and document my development through the game as a player, shoutcaster and general involvement with the community. Where this story begins today, I am a Masters/Diamond level 2v2/3v3/4v4 player but Gold level 1v1 Terran player on ladder (dropped from Diamond in season 2, so QQ). I have also started casting replays for YouTube (check out youtube.com/jorosar) and I stream online whenever possible (at twitch.tv/jorosar). Most recently I was involved with shoutcasting for the London Barcraft scene (seeLondonBarcraft.com) as well as being a photographer at local events. I hope to gradually transition into a deeper understanding of the game by playing at a higher level and as an indirect result, casting at a higher level as well.

Here’s to my improvement, and hopefully yours too – I hope that I am able to inspire even a few of you to take your game or even hobbies outside of gaming to the next level.

-John