EPT
Anyway, not many of you may know who I am, but I've been lurking TeamLiquid for years now. TL was my portal into eSports, which has without a doubt become the defining aspect of my life. I currently do feature writing and a little bit of editing for TeamLiquid's Dota 2 coverage crew.
The first exposure I ever had to eSports was SCLegacy's Pimpest Plays video from 2005. At the time, I was a hardcore Brood War player (on Battle.Net, of course, how would I have known any better?) but I was blown away at the skill of the plays in that video. I knew at that point that there was definitely something more to the game I was playing so much, so I searched these cryptic player names out on the Internet. These searches brought me to a then much smaller site called TeamLiquid.
I would lurk the forums and slowly gained knowledge of the professional scene. I taught myself hangul so I could read the players' names on the Korean VODs I saw ("Wow, Koreans take this stuff way too seriously!" I originally thought), and I began losing more and more sleep to watching the Korean leagues (Eastern Standard Time was not the optimal time to be catching Korean progames, but whatever.)
I remember the event that made me truly fall in love with the competitive scene. 2006 GomTV MSL Season 1. Anyone who was following at the scene at that time can remember the finals of that league vividly if you merely mention "The Revolutionist." As a Protoss player myself, I was completely enraptured by Bisu's play throughout the finals against the Maestro himself. I remember reading a TeamLiquid hype thread about sAviOr and went back through VODs, watching how sAviOr effortlessly demolished so many of his opponents, just to be trounced by super aggressive Corsair-DT style of Bisu in the finals.
I suppose it was that tournament that flipped the switch for me. I think at that point, my primary goal of watching VODs changed. Originally, I watched plays and followed players just so I could adopt their styles and get better at the game, but I began to watch streams more and more for my own enjoyment. My time spent actually playing Brood War began to decline, and I became a stream monster. #teamliquid on IRC became my home, and I absorbed media non-stop.
At this point, my friends and I in high school were playing a lot of Warcraft 3 and DotA, so the transition into following those scenes became extremely natural. Through TeamLiquid and some posts I found there, I was tuned into WCReplays, a site I perused for a long time although I never ended up making an account there.
Brood War, DotA and Warcraft 3 were my primary games for the longest time until I got an invite to the beta of this game called League of Legends. The names Guinsoo and Pendragon were names I knew well - I had been a Bug forum moderator on DotA-Allstars.com back when the project was still under their purview, and I jumped on the opportunity. I played that game day-in and day-out and eventually got all of my friends addicted to it as well.
Starcraft 2 came out shortly after, and I began streaming the early beta on Twitch.tv. It was a given that a competitive scene would spawn from the game, and I soon found myself cheering for both the Brood War players I knew of days past as well as the Warcraft 3 players I knew and loved as well. Starcraft 2's competitive popularity skyrocketed, and I soon found myself watching streams non-stop. When League of Legends's competitive scene rose, I was there to follow it as well. And then Dota 2 was announced, and the competitive scene immediately followed, and, like any true fan, I followed them there, as well.
The advent of streaming on Twitch.tv brought my attention to a myriad other competitive gaming outlets that I continue to follow to this very day. A quick nibble of what I peruse on a weekly basis - competitive Magic: the Gathering streams, speedrunners of all sorts, World of Warcraft streams (both raid content and competitive PvP), Starcraft 2/Dota2/LoL matches (keeping up with this is a part time job in and of itself), fighting game streams (The Break, WNF and TRB in particular are always part of my weekly schedule) and pretty much anything else that tickles my fancy. CS? Sure. Shootmania? Why not. Hell, when attending MLGs, I've found myself increasingly attracted to the Halo and Call of Duty matches as well, and I was bereaved to find out that Halo was no longer in the competitive circuit.
Competitive gaming has become a focal point of my interests and my life, of all sorts. I love all games, and I'm addicted to competition. But all of it started here, on TeamLiquid, about seven years ago. I've graduated from watching blurry 240p Afreeca restreams of Korean games that I couldn't read or understand to having a strong foothold and knowledge about, well, pretty much everything competitive nerd-dom related.
Even though my gaming these days is limited to a few Dota 2 queues with friends, ARAMs in League of Legends, or the occasional race on SpeedRunsLive, I will never distance myself from the competitive gaming community. Dota 2 may be my game of choice in play and in coverage, but my true home is in the competitive gaming scene in general.
