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My journey in the world of StarCraft II esports has been so many things at once. Some days playing the game is the most frustrating thing I could have possibly chosen to be doing, while others I sit in bed at night thinking about how lucky I am to have learned so much from the community and competition.
As time has passed, my interest in the game has fluctuated heavily. In 2013 and 2014, playing, watching, and competing in StarCraft II was what I lived for. I got heavily involved in two North American organizations, Clarity Gaming and Solaris Gaming. Both were teams comprised almost entirely of NA players, bankrolled by a few passionate guys who had a dream to create premier organizations in esports. While both teams were at some point or another listed as “premier teams” on Liquipedia, there was still an obvious gap between us and the top teams. Nevertheless, I will never forget the friendships I made from these two teams; my best friends today are former players, managers, and owners from these teams.
I think in writing this blog, it’s important to highlight the fact that like many others in the scene, I had the passion. I had so much passion. During the interim winter term at my community college, I took physics at 8:00 AM instead of 2:00 PM so I could get home in time to play the WCS North America challenger qualifiers.
Fast forward to two years later. I decided at some point that I had no reasonable path to improvement left (from low-ish Grandmaster to anything higher) without heavily altering my lifestyle. I transitioned into managing Flipsid3 Tactics for the entirety of 2015 with my good friend Cav. It was a fantastic experience, and I’m glad Cav talked me into staying in SC2 esports in at least some capacity. In general though, my esports passion was on a gradual decline.
We designed and held tryouts Flipsid3 Academy during April and May 2016 in hopes of rejuvenating our StarCraft II presence, which had been dwindling after the turn of the New Year. I wrote a blog about that previously, which goes into detail about the software and methods for selecting our academy team.
As time has passed, my interest in the game has fluctuated heavily. In 2013 and 2014, playing, watching, and competing in StarCraft II was what I lived for. I got heavily involved in two North American organizations, Clarity Gaming and Solaris Gaming. Both were teams comprised almost entirely of NA players, bankrolled by a few passionate guys who had a dream to create premier organizations in esports. While both teams were at some point or another listed as “premier teams” on Liquipedia, there was still an obvious gap between us and the top teams. Nevertheless, I will never forget the friendships I made from these two teams; my best friends today are former players, managers, and owners from these teams.
I think in writing this blog, it’s important to highlight the fact that like many others in the scene, I had the passion. I had so much passion. During the interim winter term at my community college, I took physics at 8:00 AM instead of 2:00 PM so I could get home in time to play the WCS North America challenger qualifiers.
Fast forward to two years later. I decided at some point that I had no reasonable path to improvement left (from low-ish Grandmaster to anything higher) without heavily altering my lifestyle. I transitioned into managing Flipsid3 Tactics for the entirety of 2015 with my good friend Cav. It was a fantastic experience, and I’m glad Cav talked me into staying in SC2 esports in at least some capacity. In general though, my esports passion was on a gradual decline.
We designed and held tryouts Flipsid3 Academy during April and May 2016 in hopes of rejuvenating our StarCraft II presence, which had been dwindling after the turn of the New Year. I wrote a blog about that previously, which goes into detail about the software and methods for selecting our academy team.
Assuming you skipped the somewhat sappy intro, this blog's focus is on the period of time immediately following the establishment of Flipsid3 Academy, the subsequent creation of DGiT, and how I used programming to reignite the passion in myself and the team I manage.
Long story short, we worked really hard to breathe some life into the Flipsid3 Tactics SC2 division by establishing the academy team, and for a little bit, it worked! Unfortunately however, organization support continued to wane. Don’t take that as a complaint—F3 SC2 had a really great 2015, but it simply wasn’t returning any money, nor even breaking even on the organization’s investment. I wouldn’t expect Flipsid3 to continue funding something unprofitable. PuCK left following no offer to renew his contract, and Bails sometime after for Elevate. I put a lot into that team, and I thank the players, owners Hector and Dana, as well as any fans who supported us along the way. I regret none of it, learned a lot, and I think F3 SC2 had a really strong run.
Formation of DGiTClan
Sometime in the decline, F3 Acad team captain and long-time DGiT member Kevin “Paperboat” Cosgrove and I began discussing what to do next. We still had this B-roster of players who simply wanted to play and continue to improve. We both decided that it was time to return to our roots and bring the team under the DGiT name.
Keeping it as short as possible, DGiT was the “team” I formed with childhood friends Silky and Momoking in 2011. As we made more friends in the scene, DGiT became our friend group where we chatted and played mostly StarCraft II, but also dabbled in other games like CSGO, Hearthstone, HotS or Super Smash Bros. Melee. From 2012-2016, it functioned entirely as a Skype chat, not a competitive team.
Paperboat and I met over ramen one night in San Mateo after work to discuss exactly what we wanted to accomplish with this new DGiT team, and what kinds of benefits we were going to offer our players. Our main tenants for a bona fide competitive team were that we wanted to provide our players with jerseys, in-house ladder competitions, stream overlays, and to just play a lot and have fun. We met with our Flipsid3 Academy roster to discuss becoming our own brand; we were a little nervous about what the team would think about leaving the Flipsid3 brand, as that was what attracted many of them to trying out in the first place. However, with the perks we agreed on, they seemed really excited to represent DGiT.
Current DGiT Roster
kel
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/n4lVWJJ.png)
Goky
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/m00T4Bs.png)
Rengen
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/qgDqRoc.png)
Seryph
Priest
friedpork
picur
Gochuboi
Paperboat
Padre
NeXa
BonkerZ
Tumult and Decisions
Almost immediately after this meeting in mid-August, there was a bit of a lull in the passion once the autumn school semester started. I fell into this too—this is my first semester at UC Berkeley, and I also started an internship where I regularly commute 90+ minutes each way, on top of working there 30 hours a week. Most people were also getting adjusted to school again. During the month of September, passion levels could only be described as low among the roster.
We came to a crossroads of whether to disband without even starting on the goals we set out to achieve when starting the team. I asked myself a few times, “well, no one is playing the game, so why would Paperboat and I shell out money for jerseys or spend time getting overlays or running regular ladder competitions?” I made a deal with the team: if our 12-person roster (including me) could collectively play 500 games a week for two weeks, we would begin to initiate the process of establishing ourselves as a competitive esports organization.
During the next week, I went to work figuring out the Battlenet StarCraft II API. I taught myself some Python over the course of the past year, but this was the first time I worked on anything like this completely from scratch without any help.
I created a script that compared a player’s games played to the value at which I started the session at. So for example, if I had 50 games played on the season on Sunday at 12:00 PM, and then the next time I ran the script I had 57 games played, I knew I had contributed 7 games toward the team goal. I was working on this in very limited spare time, so for the first week of the 500-game goal, I was simply plotting the CSV data in R and then posting the image in our team Skype chat. It was pretty fun—every day I’d get home from work to everyone excitedly asking, “how many games have we played Padre!? Post the updated graph!”
Needless to say, we were able to reach the passion milestone for two consecutive weeks. These sessions ran the first two weeks of October, and in between now and then, I’ve been making updates to our in-house team software.
Team-Specific Software
I think what most people will find interesting about this blog are the internal ladder competitions we run. To preface this section, I want to first give a huge shoutout to Ravi aka FearDragon64 for Ladder Heroes, as that is where I drew a lot of inspiration for our format (with some obvious differences).
We run the in-house ladder competitions in the following format:
- We run two sessions each month, each lasting two weeks.
- For the First two weeks of the month, we have a competition to see who can get the highest MMR. There is also an activity clause which states that you have to play 50 or more games on any account you wish to enter into the competition.
- 1st highest MMR gets $15, 2nd highest gets $10. No person can win 1st and 2nd place on two separate accounts.
- After getting 1st place, you are placed on a “cooldown” for the Start of the next month in order to motivate players who otherwise wouldn’t think they had a Chance.
- 1st highest MMR gets $15, 2nd highest gets $10. No person can win 1st and 2nd place on two separate accounts.
- The second two weeks of the month are a contest so see who can play the most games across all their accounts. It’s mostly an honor system: the money isn’t really enough to entice people to cheat against their friends, and our Zerg player Priest seems to play considerably more than anyone could even hope to cheat against.
- Like the MMR challenge, 1st place gets $15 and 2nd place gets $10. There is no cooldown for the most games played contest, as anyone can take it upon themselves to win.
- Like the MMR challenge, 1st place gets $15 and 2nd place gets $10. There is no cooldown for the most games played contest, as anyone can take it upon themselves to win.
We keep track of games played via a web app I made with RStudio’s web framework Shiny. Starting on the 1st and 15th of each month at noon, a Python script runs every 30 seconds to see if any new games were played, and updates the database that stores the running player totals for the ladder contest session. R and Shiny have some really nice built-in tools for plotting data—I use Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 package currently, but I may switch over to Plotly at some point in the near future for interactive graphs.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/lefnesR.png)
This is what the app looks like in its current form. It updates every 30 seconds and adds games as they're played.
You can check out the current site here: https://dgitclan.shinyapps.io/dgit/ (I plan on adding a region filter function, as well as clean it up cosmetically. For now, it serves its function well).
Future Plans
There are some issues with the script in its current form. I've added some more advanced error handling over the past couple weeks, but some accounts will randomly break. For example, I've been playing some ladder games here and there, but my account data returns an error when contacting Blizzard's servers. They're aware of this issue, so hopefully it is resolved soon so my app is a little more accurate without any intervention.
Also, now with Blizzard restructuring their endpoints to include MMR, I am super excited to get to work creating an automated leaderboard for the MMR portion of our ladder challenges. As the team owner, I set out to create a dashboard for my players that allows them to track their progress and compete internally to become the best they can be. So far, I’ve received some really good feedback from them, and we really are enjoying these unique competitions and data analyses. I can’t wait to add more to it.
Overall, I’ve had a ton of fun implementing Paperboat’s and my software to create awesome team environments. Starting with the in-house league we ran over six weeks for the Flipsid3 Academy tryouts, and now transitioning to our own in-house dashboard for player involvement, I think it’s really helped to keep myself and the players interested in growing as a team. It is a dream of mine to turn what I’ve been working on into an application where other team managers can create their own dashboards and manage team stats quickly and easily in-browser, without having to code anything themselves.
So, what’s next for DGiT? We are going to be competing in WardiTV’s upcoming Americas team league, as well as rejoining DuSt Team League for the fourth season. In 2017, we will be at offline events including Dreamhack, LAN ETS and Cheeseadelphia. We are in the process of setting up an actual website, where team information as well as ladder statistics will reside. The entire roster is really looking forward to an awesome year of StarCraft in 2017!
TL;DR
If you want to keep the passion alive, build something. Contribute, collaborate, and create. There are still so many amazing people in the scene pouring hours and hours into events for players of all calibers. Wardi, Feardragon, N3rdStreetGamers, the guys behind The Gauntlet, and so many more inspire me every day to keep playing this game. I only hope to be able to offer something back to this community that has given me so much.
