EPT
(and my two years with TeamLiquid.net).
I joined TeamLiquid.net two years ago after lurking a couple of months. I'm one of those guys who came with the StarCraft II release and were oblivious to ESPORTS prior to that. Of course, I knew that ESPORTS existed, but I didn't know that much except that Koreans are the best StarCraft players in the world. After playing a couple of games in the beta, I wasn't sure whether I would really get into this game and didn't buy it immediately after release. Only after I played a bit of the Campaign with my flatmate's account I became hooked and bought the game. A bit after, I was introduced to TeamLiquid.net and became a regular lurker. The first tournament I watched was http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEM_Season_V_-_Global_Challenge_Cologne Other than that I watched a couple of YouTube casters..
I've made my first edit to Liquipedia exactly one year ago. It was an score-update to the
2011 DreamHack Valencia Invitational page. As it was a European tournament it wasn't really an update battle like it is for some American tournaments, so it was fairly easy to get an edit through first. But it wasn't like I was hooked on editing right away, it actually took a few more months before I was sucked in this strange, sometimes masochistic, hole of awesomeness that is editing Liquipedia.sameI did a few more edits to tournaments here and there until I finally found something that was important to me, though probably not to most viewers: consistency. I saw that many player pages of the team had different team-names. For example, some Team Liquid players had "Liquid'", some had "Team Liquid" as their team. So I began to streamline this across the player pages, to have it consistent and correct. It didn't take long to get the first entry on my talk-page by Noam lecturing me about linking to redirects and some mistakes I made.
As I was grinding edits with, for the most part, small changes, I was a bit of an pain-in-the-ass for the staff and editors as they had to approve every edit manually, which gave me my second talk-page entry this time not so nice :p. I was also joining our Quakenet channel more often and started to get to know some of the awesome people better.
The funny thing was, that I was making a lot of, small, edits, earning coin after coin, but still not making editor. I think I've made about 700+ edits in under one month until I finally got auto-promoted to Editor I was still mostly doing consistency-edits like adding/deleting TLPD links, making sure the format for managers, coaches, and team captains in team articles were consistent. Small, probably not very much noticed stuff like this, but it was indeed kinda fun. Especially the feedback (mostly in coins) you get is amazing. At this time I also made my first tournament page, which was something I was really proud of, even though the event itself was quite meaningless, but it was something bigger than just editing one line of text.
After about six to seven months of active editing, participating in IRC, helping contributers out the best I could I've gotten a query from Pholon asking me if I would be interested in joining the staff. Woohoo! This was definitely my proudest moment in my StarCraft II journey and online-life. So I joined the staff as a junior staffer in July 2012 and got promoted to full staff just four weeks weeks ago (and my fourth gold coin came a few weeks after that \o/).
All in all it was (and still continues to be) a great, sometimes exhausting, often satisfying experience and it hasn't become boring in the slightest. I've met so many cool people in this community and I'm sure I will in the future.
I would really encourage everyone to try it for themselves. I always wanted to contribute in some way to the community and ESPORTS and this is definitely a good and easy way to start doing exactly that. Even if you suck at this game (like most of the staff) you can help us, the whole community, out. You can start and fixing small stuff like typos,
update scores, make your favourite players page more awesome or maybe create a tournament page yourself. If you are good at this game (even if its just on a theoretical level) you could help us out with our strategy portals (which really need some love, especially the Terran and Zerg ones). And if you don't care for StarCraft II, the Brood War Wiki still needs contributors, and with our new Dota2 Wiki, you can help make Liquipedia become as important in Dota2 as it is in
StarCraft. This is an especially great opportunity to leave your mark on a newer scene.
I promise you, it is more rewarding than you think. You can earn shiny coins and a lot of respect from your peers in Liquipedia. The feeling of seeing a tournament using Liquipedia on stream and seeing an edit YOU made on it is just a great motivation-boost and can give you nerd-chills like an http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/MMA drop in 2011.
+ Show Spoiler [Shoutouts] +
I would like to thank a few people for this awesome journey until now:
salle, for being always helpful with everything related Liquipedia.
Pholon, for being the most idealistic Liquipedian and helping me with this blog.
Koorb, for being one of the hardest working guys in Liquipedia, and his great writing skills.
PhiLtheFisH, for being my German brother-in-arms against the Swedish oppression in Liquipedia and creative mastermind behind a lot of great features we have.
Noam, for all the help with everything and my first lecture.
DivinO, for always being there when we need some cool GFX and being always super nice.
tofucake, for being the grumpy old man every community needs.
blahz0r, for being the Liquipedia rolemodel of everyone.
ZodaSoda, for the shitload of reviewed edits of mine and help with the Template:Team page.
GHOSTCLAW and silverfire for the awesome pics.
zere, for being zere. (although he is an TLPDien and therefore an arch-enemy)
fusefuse, for being just fun and his amazing GFX skills.
and the rest of the awesome guys: ChapatiyaqPTSM & miwi (welcome to the team, guys!), pPingu, wren, and everyone else who I forgot.
Thanks.
Now go edit your Liquipedia of choice!
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