EPTCompetition, Exposure and Personality
Right now Starcraft is in a very scary place. HotS is out and it is a much more competitive game than WoL. It provides so much more room for micro, multitasking and variety in strategy that it has shattered the skill ceiling and built a skyscraper where the ceiling once ended on the 6th floor. The Koreans have already scrambled up to the 12th floor. Most of the foreign scene is barely out of the 5th floor. A scene that was dominated by ESF Koreans with relaxed training schedules is now inundated with KeSPA Koreans whom are the spitting image of professionalism and competition. An entirely new tier, completely above the former gods of Starcraft, has opened up and it has left the foreign scene in a very scary place.
As important as personality is in building sports-personalities, most events do very little to build up the players. Many fans care more about the commentators of a tournament rather than the players. The foreign community has grown to enjoy the high quality production that is the GSL and adapted to watching alien personalities so long as they are commentated by lovable and intelligent foreigners. Once in a while at an MLG or a Dreamhack a story unfolds of a Stephano or Thorzain slaying his way through this slew of Koreans and we feel a whole new level of excitement take over us. In the following days we absolutely devour anything that tells us more about who these players are and what they think about anything and everything.
Where am I going with all this? Well, here we stand in a world where most foreign players struggled to gain the level of exposure that even B-grade Koreans held, and now we are shown a new game where the skill ceiling appears to be limitlessly higher and a whole new tier of Koreans has been unleashed on the scene. To top this off, WCS 2013 was announced 2 weeks ago with little warning and the details un-finalised. It was revealed that the 2012 system that found national champions all over the world would be replaced by a 3-continent system, just European, North American and Korean leagues. No New Zealand champion, no Australian Champion, no Singaporean Champion. SEAtizens would be forced to compete in the incredibly stacked Korean qualifiers or play in the North-American competition in the dark hours of the early morning. The European League is ruled out by unplayable latency, yet both the others will still incur a latency disadvantage. With the American competition as our only realistic option, we are forced to accept a latency and timezone disadvantage.
We are then told that there will be a horde of Koreans competing in the North American competition. There is no region lock and players can play wherever they wish. The Koreans are spreading themselves across all 3 continents to increase their chances of winnings and so our major competitive outlet is now obscured by a third hurdle.
Time to Step Up
This is a scary time for a professional Australian Starcraft player. The future holds hope of region-locked tournaments, but for the moment that is just a hope. The organisation of the new WCS format promises doppleganger GSL's to be set up in Europe and North America. The advantage of teamhouses, constant exposure and reliable, high quality production is a huge pull. It screams of growth in the exposure of the foreign scene and with that growth more opportunities for progamers. However there are growing pains. The competition in Korea is at an all time high, with a brand-new game being competed amongst by well over a hundred pro players living in teamhouses and training long, hard hours. At this time our chance for exposure is highest, but we must rise to the challenge. If we cannot win games and sets against this competition the opportunity will be wasted. Further, as players from one of the forgotten corners of the globe, we must fight our way into this competition to even gain a chance to play on this new stage, and that looks to be a harder battle than it ever was before.
My own development and ACL
At this frightening time, the 2013 SEA Starcraft season kicked off with a bang at ACL Brisbane. In the lead-up to the event I trained quite hard. In truth, my training has steadily become more and more professional since Korea and I was hitting 30 games a day without stressing myself from practice. Nonetheless there was stress, and a good deal of it. I had to do well at this event. The competition at ACL would be the Mr Potato Head compared to the Buzz Lightyear of WCS. If I couldn't do well here then the coming year was not looking so great for me. I didn't need to win, it's a new game with wild strategies, but I needed to see a huge improvement in my mental, mechanical and strategical gameplay as compared to 2012.
I showed up to Brisbane with roughly 10 A4 pages of notes on build orders, more then I'd ever had before. Some of you may be familiar with my sort of improvement as a player who used to have 1 build for each matchup that I would execute repeatedly until I knew every situation intimately. When I realised I was being blind-countered due to predictability I learnt a few cheeses to mix into my play. However they were ridiculously all-in and my transitions were non-existent. I would rarely hit a timing before I had a huge economic lead, and was completely uncomfortable swapping between aggression and defence. Nonetheless having practiced these one-dimensional and limited styles, they gave me some success, in part due to the strength of the WoL Infestor. This tournament I came in with a much bigger playbook, and planned to make use of it.
As time has gone by I feel I've developed the ability to transition somewhat smoothly in and out of cheesy or aggressive builds, using Life as the model to base my play around. I got two accounts on Korea to rank 1 masters, one using mostly aggressive or cheesy openers and the other with more macro-oriented play. I was finally at the point where I would almost exclusively play GM players and regularly run into a variety of top streaming Koreans and have good games, even winning a decent number. Now, with dozens of builds at my fingertips and a good amount of practice under my belt I felt in shape to test my skill.
With the weight of my hopes for this ACL on my shoulders I actively focused on staying more reserved in conversations, avoiding long talks with people and tried to spend as much time in the quiet, with noise-cancelling headphones on or sitting and watching replays or listening to music. In the past I've been extremely sociable, loving interacting and chatting with everyone, cheering on players in the other matches and rarely bothered watching replays after games. However, I now know how these events can drag on and how fatigued I can get later in the day. So I focused on conserving energy and avoiding junk food as much as possible. Thankfully, Shinkz from Exile5 not only let me and Dot stay at his apartment but he also bought me apples, bananas and some Asian takeout that was far better than the standard LAN KFC or Maccas run. This was especially preferable to Dot's idea of snacks, she brought: Snakes, Chocolate and chocolate muffins!
I avoided these as much as possible. Without the processed sugar highs and lows and by conserving my energy I found myself in much better physical and mental condition whenever I had to play my matches. Less nerves and more focus made me feel much better.
My results on the day
At the end of the day my play at the event was a massive step forward and half-a-step back. I felt very strong against Terran and Protoss even though the usual LAN-jitters made some games feel much sloppier then my ladder practice back home. I was happy that I was able to make comebacks, incorporate early-pools and generally keep my multitasking up throughout the games, compared to 2012 where I would often barely scrape victories (and often lose convincingly) against the Terran and Protoss in SEA, and be dominated outside of SEA, despite how "imba" zerg was. Now in HotS, where Zerg is supposedly weaker, I feel much happier in the gameplay and the options available to me and this seems to be reflected in a huge jump in my ZvT and ZvP confidence.
Yet when push came to shove and I was forced to play tough opponents in ZvZ, my old specialty, I didn't deliver. NXZ defeated me 2-0 in groups with a game 2 where I scored a massive 12 drone kills with a 4 baneling pressure and yet was slaughtered by the counterattack. Later in the game, after a ling runby, I never remembered to put drones back on gas in my main and, whilst I was proud of my muta and ling counterattacking, my priorities and overall game-sense were off. The one thing I can say about this series is that rather than be mad at my loss, I watched the replay immediately and realised that my key downfall lay in a habitual supply block at 44/44 right as the counter came. Since then I haven't been supply blocked at this count. Learning from all my losses... finally.
As the finals came around I was confident but, as it turned out, Kingkong just seemed to have my playbook. I won't go into many details except that my scouting and multitasking was a little off, and that's all he needed to make me look silly. I took certain things for granted and every time seemed to be wrong about my assumptions. Essentially, KingKong knew exactly how to dismantle my play and never even let me get into stride. He anticipated my aggression and surprised me with his own in almost every game. I got overly stiff in my play and began second-guessing my decisions, something one can never afford in ZvZ. And so I was crushed. The upside was despite the crushing shame of losing 0-4 to KingKong, I opened the replay immediately and studied what my opponent had done and what I had failed to do. I identified exactly what went wrong, committed it to memory and since have avoided those same errors.
The future
At the end of the day people tried to comfort me with news that KingKong still practices with his old teammates back at Startale, such as Life and Curious. I already knew KingKong was a fantastic player though, and I didn't need to hear that to know. I saw real art in his play and a unique perspective which one can't really understand until they've been dismantled by it. I also know I need to surpass his level if I want to achieve my goals in Starcraft. Quite a few people congratulated me on being "the top placing Australian" or the "top placing non-Korean". But this year, those words mean nothing. This year, Koreans are truly merged with the foreign scene and I won't settle for second behind a player whom hasn't enjoyed a Korean practice environment for the last year. The time when we could be happy with that sort of result is over, it's now time to eat and breathe Starcraft, and if I have to starve, then so be it.
I just want to say a huge thanks to Shinkz for letting myself and Dot crash at his place for the duration of ACL. I also want to note that ACL Brisbane was amazingly well-run and still maintains its place as the only major event I've ever attended where players are paid on the day or within a week. The setup for spectators at this event was fantastic despite the venue being quite small. The atmosphere was electric and I'd like to thank all the volunteers, admins, staff and everyone that worked to make it a possibility. Thanks to my team and sponsors, Exile5, Western Digital, Nvidia, Cooler Master, CMStorm, iinet and Gigabyte Notebooks
. For the MLG quals I remember Rossi saying his first 2 opponents were silver and plat, can't beleive they would not have some imposed league requirement like the code A quals do (theirs are masters with 200 points).
hope it inspires some of our locals
