StarcraftChicago January 2012 newsletter

One year ago the Starcraft Esports scene in Chicago was non-existent.
There was this thread, but no collaboration. There was no way to contact each other, get together, exchange information, etc.

So I made my own thread in TL Community. I strongly believe other regions/cities should have a thread like this: BEST REGIONAL THREAD EVER!

My original intent was to have LAN parties for team games, but the majority wanted 1v1. Fine! I organized two LAN tournaments, even though I had never organized one before - I even asked for help with the rules, in this thread - the tournaments were ... okay, but not great. There were more time consuming than I thought. Only a couple of people showed up. Things were slow, but catching on.

I created a facebook group with the same intent as the TL thread - to get together for LAN team games in Chicago! But people wanted 1v1, and I stepped down as an admin of the group to catch up with real life issues. For a while Starcraft in Chicago was... stagnant. But the group kept growing, and growing, and today it's at 400 people!

I really want Starcraft Esports in Chicago to boom. I even went to MLG Providence and showed these signs for hours (I got a lot of camera time, I know)
[image loading]

That's me holding the "Chicago wants MLG" sign:

We've come a long way since I started. I'm so proud of us. As Day9 said, Esports is us! Don't wait for others to do it for you. You want something done in your area Starcraft related? Do it!

Matt Pearson (cyberc0re) organized a tournament at Ignite, which had 31 participants. It was a blast.
Matt Christenson set up starcraftchicago.com
Michael Rakers (Elysium) started casting
Megan (Silvare) promoted barcrafts (or wingcraft) like crazy (made front page on reddit with her awesome wingcraft menu).

Two weeks ago we had the biggest tourney so far. Unfortunately, drama happened:
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/oitq0/how_blizzard_killed_a_tournament/

I'm really proud of my Chicagolanders for organizing such an event, all community-driven. Whoever says Chicago can't thrown a LAN (*cough*Slasher*cough*), Matt C has proven him wrong. He has put a lot of money out of his pocket to make it happen. Hats off to you Matt! Thank you!

Now, I want to share with Team Liquid the newsletter that was sent to all of the subscribers to starcraftchicago.com; I am posting it with the permission of Matt; it's his work after all:

[image loading]

NEWSLETTER HIGHLIGHTS:

Website Improvements are up!
January LAN Tournament, and Re-Tournament results and writeup.
Exciting plans for February: Barcrafts and Tournaments. $1225 in prizes!
Exciting plans for March: More MLG, and another tournament
www.Twitch.tv/StarcraftChicago accepted into the partners program!
Thank you to our sponsors!
Volunteers needed!

It's been one heck of a month for most of us at www.StarcraftChicago.com, word must be spreading of our efforts because we have over 200 people signed up on the website for these updates. (205 at the time of writing this). The success of the community is entirely because of you and your efforts to spread the word, so THANK YOU!

So much has happened in the last month, it's hard to figure out where to start. We had over 80 people enroll to the January LAN Tournament which was hosted at a new venue to many of us, Game Pazzo. We expected only around 40 people originally so the final days left of scrambling to find tables, chairs, and extension cords so that everyone would be able to fit. I can't say THANK YOU enough to all of the organizers who helped this happen. Here's just a glimpse of how it started out.

[image loading]

Unfortunately as many of you are aware, the tournament did not go on. As we begun the first round many experienced lag issues – the technically inclined of us were baffled as we ran diagnostics. It seemed like the internet was working perfectly except for our connections to Battle.Net. After over an hour on the phone with Blizzard we figured it out, the venue address had been blacklisted because all of the traffic was interpreted by their routers as a denial-of-service attack. We had to make the hard call to send everyone home around 5:30. Murphy was laughing at us when we got a call back from Blizzard at 6pm saying that the venue had been permanently white listed. We were all very frustrated with Blizzard (even more so because we DID go through the process of obtaining a license with them to host the tournament, and we event asked about a white list and were giving the response that it shouldn't be necessary.)

[image loading]

Matthew standing in the background as Pazzo's Tournament Organizer Patrick is on the phone with Blizzard's technical support.

The good news is that despite several frustrated players (and organizers) many people seems to have a good time anyway. We attracted some pretty well known players such as QXC, Everize, RSVP, WBC, Ver, and Arcanne. It was great to see such a crowd surface in Chicago.

We had 64 players setup and ready to go... How many do they have at MLG? 128? What's that say? Starcraft 2, meet Chicago.

Chicago can't get ALL of the credit, though. We have some hard core 'foreigners' who ventured in from outside civilization: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, the Quad-cities, and Champaign. We had 10 people who drove over 3 hours to get to this event. Joe and Thomas drove 7 hours from Northfield, MN for this event.

We had ages 15 through 44 attend the event, with the average player around 20 years old.

[image loading]

Not giving up completely, we decided to throw the tournament this past Sunday as an online event. We had 34 players able to participate online. Our winners were:

First Place ($125): Everize
Second Place ($50): Ver
Third Place ($25): wbc

A very special thank you to our sponsors:

There are a LOT of people that have contributed to the success of the last few months. I first want to thank everyone who left donations with us at the Game Pazzo event. We collected $160 in donations in amounts as little as $1 and as big as $20. This means a lot. It all went towards PC rental at Pazzo and towards supplies we purchased for the event.

Next, I want to thank the following Starcraft 2 enthusiasts, in no particular order:
Silvare
Elysium
Dalmatica
Isocraties
Regenerit
DXM

I'm sure I missed someone on this list, and for that I apologize, support help was so overwhelmingly positive that I had a hard time keeping track of what everyone was doing to help.

As you'll see from the Calendar, we have a LOT of upcoming events in and around chicago:
[image loading]

2/7 - we are having a FREE online tournament with a $25 prize. It's free, so there's no reason NOT to play! It'll be a chance for fame for the pros, and a chance to learn for the lower leagues in the group (like myself!)

On saturday the 12th, the StarcraftChicago.com team is putting together a $200 tournament at Game Pazzo. Entry is $15 and will support events directly. The players are MAXED at 32, so sign up now if you're planning to attend. There are 8 PC's at Pazzo available for rental, and you're welcome to bring your own as well.

On the 18th, LANTASTICGAMING.NET is putting on a $1000 tournament with a $50 entry fee; it'll be one of the first high-stakes events we've hosted in Chicago, thank you to them for putting this event on, more details are available at : http://www.lantasticgaming.net/windycity/

We're also hosting spectator only Barcraft events for the two upcoming MLG streams. These will be at Game Pazzo and we'll be broadcasting the event on many of their TVs. The prices at Pazzo are very reasonable (many food items under $5!, alcohol beverages around $3-$4). We hope to see everyone there for this event. Myself and other organizers are looking forward to an event where we can put our feet up (not literally!) and enjoy the scene. Come share some drinks with us and root for your favorate player.

Special thanks to all of the support that Game Pazzo has given us, in addition to letting us host their events, they are graciously giving back to the community by sharing a small portion of their proceeds so that they can help to support more low cost tournaments. They also recently gave one of our members a free party pack for 8 people ($140 value includes pizza and soda) just for liking their page on facebook!

We've had positive feedback recently from Blizzard as well. After numerous phone calls end emails trying to get to the bottom of the whitelisting issue that happened during our January LAN, I got a phone call directly from one of the top members of the eSports team, and we talked about how to avoid this scenario not only for our events but for the community as a whole. They've already changed their license process to ask for IP addresses of the venue, as well as issued a public article helping organizers to prepare for an event successfully.

I also want to give a big shout-out to www.Twitch.tv , who recently upgraded our account at www.Twitch.tv/StarcraftChicago to a partner level account, despite not already meeting their minimum streaming requirements, they acknowledge the value we're providing the the community and gave us the account anyway!

Please take a minute to show your support to twitch by creating an account if you don't already have one, and then adding our stream to your “Following” list. This will notify you when we're streaming live events, and also help to show twitch that they made the right decision in supporting us!

What does this partner program do for us? For starters, it will allow us to broadcast our streams in FULL HD, but then give viewers a choice of which resolution to view it in. This way for those of you on slower connections, you can now watch a lower res while we're broadcasting full HD for those who can support it. It also allows us to implement an 8 minute delay in our stream, which will help to prevent any stream cheating for our online events. Finally, it allows us to collect small amounts of revenue as people watch our stream through preroll advertisements. These advertisements were present before but now we get a small cut which will go directly to supporting more events.

You'll also see that www.StarcraftChicago.com has seen some major improvements. We ironed out some graphical issues as well as improved the calendar system and added a photo gallery. If you were at one of our events, there's a good chance you'll see pictures of yourself! Go check it out!

There's a whole lot more that I wanted to cover, but this newsletter is already late being sent out and I need to wrap things up with this for today.

One last big THANK YOU to everyone for helping this community see positive growth. Remember that the event calendar is open for ANYONE to post Starcraft2 related events, so if you're throwing a small LAN, a public barcraft, or a tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us and we'll set you up with the ability to list your events!

Good Games!
Starcraft Chicago's Matthew

P.S.:
Older announcements are here, they're worth reading
http://www.starcraftchicago.com/Forums/tabid/83/forumid/2/scope/threads/Default.aspx

P.P.S.:
[image loading]

StarcraftChicago January 2012 newsletter

Completed

Ongoing

Upcoming