EPT
Don't Fear the Staff: We're Just Like You
This blog should serve multiple purposes but all working towards a common theme. It will chart my time here on TeamLiquid; from regular user, to staff member, to 'quitting' TL back to today. This isn't meant to be an autobiography, rather an indicator to all that you aren't that different from the staff on this website. Why do this? Because an alarming number of you seem to be living in fear of the mod staff. While TeamLiquid has a reputation for harsh moderation, as long as you don't behave like an idiot and abide by our no-memes customs - then you will have no problem staying around. In particular, it is okay to openly challenge a staff member on the forums and it is okay to criticise TL's moderation (provided these are done in an appropriate way).
Pre-staff
We probably started out posting very similar. I came to TeamLiquid because I was (and still am) the worlds largest PuSan fan. Who is PuSan? He played Protoss in SC:BW and was originally on Plus (now Hwaseung Oz). In 2005 he transferred to POS (now MBCGame Heroes) and has stayed there since. He was known for his macro - his nickname, 'spirit toss', was given to him because as an amateur he would concentrate more on macro rather than controlling his units - leading to many many dead zealots (hence spirit - because it looks like a spirit when they die).
PuSan made his OSL debut in So1 OSL. While I had known about TL for the past year, I didn't really visit too often as there was little of interest to me (at the time), but with Pusan playing - how could I miss it? Unfortunately, I was stuck on a 56k modem (yes, in 2005, welcome to New Zealand) and could only read the LR thread. In the semifinals between Pusan and Boxer I made my first post:
On October 21 2005 05:26 Plexa wrote:
cmon PuSan, do it for all the protoss out there!
we have faith!!~~
Yup... It gets worse.cmon PuSan, do it for all the protoss out there!
we have faith!!~~
On October 21 2005 05:32 Plexa wrote:
lol theres another kiwi floating around here somewhere....
who won the league??
die boxman
lol theres another kiwi floating around here somewhere....
who won the league??
die boxman
That was post #3. Ugh. Anyway, here is the LR thread for the lulz (featuring tons of staff that weren't staff then, classic rekrul posting and quality LRing).
Having moderated the SC2LR threads on occasion I know that many of you have made posts like that as one of your earlier posts. Most people come to TeamLiquid because they love esports, not because they want to get good at SC2 (well, those people are in the minority anyway). The same goes for pretty much all of the staff here - they're all passionate fans of the game. While I don't know how many have started their careers in LR threads in such shameful manner, all of them have demonstrated their fanboyism in one way or another over the years.
Pusan subsequently lost to Oov, 3-2, in the 3rd/4th playoff (and I'm still bitter about the map order, if Forte was played twice like it should have been then Pusan would have won
) but managed to requalify for Shinhan 2005 OSL so I stuck around on TL for a while, and got addicted in the process. For those of you who have been around for a year or so, there comes a time when you feel like you want to contribute to this community in any way you can. I don't really know why this is but I have one theory. TL is a website which celebrates and respects it's contributors. If you are a solid contributor you become known on TL and everyone respects you. I think thats something everyone strives for at some point. But hey, I could be way off.
Pre-staff I felt this urge too. Like many of you, I have no amazing talents. I can't draw like Silversky or pachi. I can't code like R1CH or Bob. I had no way of helping with VOD distribution. My first and only language is English and back then I wasn't even a particularly good writer. Yet I still had that desire to contribute. I did, however, have access to international students and some of those were Korean. I managed to register an account on mapdori.cc (where they design/create proleague maps along with intothemap.com) using their KSSN and eventually made it public which lead to the mapdori mappack. It was only something little, and I only contributed a tiny bit towards it, but I had helped make TL a better place.
![[image loading]](http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/8179/draft1pn8.gif)
It was probably that which made Mani choose me and Brood to help guide TL's progamer picks during blizzard's sandlot tournament. The details are here (Plto = jinro btw!) but this was the one time when TL got trashed terribly. Basically we got fucked over by players and had a bad picking strategy. Oh well.
In 2007 I discovered ultrasurf which allowed me to tunnel through my schools filter (websense ftl) and watch the OGN stream. The 6-8 months that that worked were amazing and I essentially had the stream on all the time. For the first time ever I was able to watch live Starcraft (remember, 56k before this) and as such I LR'd many threads. That boosted my post count well into the high thousands. Again, with my severe lack of talent I had found a way to give something back - even if it was as small as LR'ing a thread. Oh, and I also retroactively created the Uzoo MSL R&S thread.
I make it sound like I was a model poster in the years pre-staff. Well, I wasn't terrible but I wasn't amazing. My lowest moment was this:
+ Show Spoiler [long post] +
On May 15 2007 02:54 Plexa wrote:
Goodluck, i doubt there will be any exceptional circumstances (which we had) which would propel interest
To find a dedicated group of full-time nz gamers is bloody hard,
skill base is also a concern; i doubt there a (m)any B-teams we could beat
if you think about it the answer is obvious...
So because a korean lives in NZ, with NZ citizenship it makes them not-applicable for the team? Goodlove, rookie, beautifulgame are 3 koreans with decentish skill and im sure there are more...
the latter two being semi-active at times
In observing the last team, there were real commitment issues.
eRaS did not particpate
Goodlove did not participate
eun_ji did not participate
Lang was unrealiable, he showed up and was a force but never showed for games
GAG is a one trick pony
Rookie was a one trick pony
Sky was a one trick pony (didnt see his tvt though)
R_I's forte was tvp, but tvz/tvt were decent
fortissimo moved to italy
beaut has commitment issues because he plays at work (internet cafe)
Nexies was almost impossible to track down
80% of the people in NZL-1 are ums
5% BGH
10% FPM
5% Low-moeny
Your also asking at a particularly bad time; semester 1 is drawing to a close rapidly and hence mass exams are on, also many highschools have midyears etc
didcated players around this time are scarce at best
I suggest if you are really serious about this that you assemble 5 reliable players (lol goodluck) and get some games going; in ASEAN we won 1 set (thanks RI!!), dont over estimate our skills, we are very much a weak nation. Goodluck regardless
Goodluck, i doubt there will be any exceptional circumstances (which we had) which would propel interest
To find a dedicated group of full-time nz gamers is bloody hard,
skill base is also a concern; i doubt there a (m)any B-teams we could beat
if you think about it the answer is obvious...
So because a korean lives in NZ, with NZ citizenship it makes them not-applicable for the team? Goodlove, rookie, beautifulgame are 3 koreans with decentish skill and im sure there are more...
the latter two being semi-active at times
In observing the last team, there were real commitment issues.
eRaS did not particpate
Goodlove did not participate
eun_ji did not participate
Lang was unrealiable, he showed up and was a force but never showed for games
GAG is a one trick pony
Rookie was a one trick pony
Sky was a one trick pony (didnt see his tvt though)
R_I's forte was tvp, but tvz/tvt were decent
fortissimo moved to italy
beaut has commitment issues because he plays at work (internet cafe)
Nexies was almost impossible to track down
80% of the people in NZL-1 are ums
5% BGH
10% FPM
5% Low-moeny
Your also asking at a particularly bad time; semester 1 is drawing to a close rapidly and hence mass exams are on, also many highschools have midyears etc
didcated players around this time are scarce at best
I suggest if you are really serious about this that you assemble 5 reliable players (lol goodluck) and get some games going; in ASEAN we won 1 set (thanks RI!!), dont over estimate our skills, we are very much a weak nation. Goodluck regardless
On May 15 2007 03:01 Manifesto7 wrote:
Hey Plexa way to be a total cock to a guy wanting to try again. Perhaps the reason NZ has a tough time is that attitude?
Hey Plexa way to be a total cock to a guy wanting to try again. Perhaps the reason NZ has a tough time is that attitude?
In general, the staff are a bunch of level headed cool guys who aren't out to fuck over anyone. In addition to the incident above, there have been many times where I've debated with staff as a regular user and come off with no repercussions. The only thing to remember about posting anywhere on TL is to not act like an idiot, and admit when you are wrong!
Joining TL Staff
We constantly get asked "what do I need to do to become staff?!". Funnily enough, prior to SC2 the answer was "if you're asking, then it isn't going to happen". What is it that separates TL's top contributors from staff members? It certainly isn't insanity or wild uncontrollable patriotism for TL. It is actually really hard to say exactly what is the differential. I'll hazard somewhat of a description to the best of my ability.
Every staff member has had extremely humble beginnings. When I first joined TL I remember reading PoP's LR in the tourneys forum. 4000 or so posts later and PoP had joined the staff as a writer. That was short lived, as he quickly found his place as one of TLs coders. Carnac too was involved in LR as well as creating nice OPs. He was brought on to write and eventually mod and stream stuff. Hot_bid made it on staff for his wit and charm, but was kept on for his incredible ability to drive the staff harder and actually make us do work (hi TSL).
So the common theme is that everyone contributed to TL in whatever way they could. But that alone isn't sufficient for staff. There is something else... that X factor. As this is a forum, this is mostly determined by post count, post frequency and reply speed. When we are deciding whether to bring someone on as a staff member (I guess, promotion to red name now) someone nominates the person and provides a few reasons why they deserve it, a bit of discussion happens and then people vote on it. This has proven to be a very effective method of maintaining a high quality staff.
So how did I get on staff? Well obviously I wasn't aware of all of this. In Jan08 I realised that there were a lot of new followers post-SC2 announcement and that a lot of them didn't know their BW history. Finally I was able to contribute something unique to this website - I had been around long enough to have seen quite a bit of BW in my time and enlighten the many newcomers and remind the old vets of the brilliant games of old. I ended up writing a blog a day for a month - each blog getting no more than 10-20 comments.
I started out simple; provide a bit of context to the match and why the match was significant and post a link to the vod. It started out with Savior vs Nada in Uzoo MSL which was one of the first progames I watched. I did a week long tribute to kingdom because he had surgery and he is a baller. Around half way through the month the 'context' behind the vod started to get longer and longer. My blogs turned into articles; I worked out the origins of the bisu build, documented the holy wars, looked at the rise of the neo emperor, retold july's royal road run and analysed the strategic developments in PvT on 815.
Eventually Fakesteve saw my blogs and after a while he was like "yo you should write a TLFE" and that is exactly what I did. But before that, Manifesto7 invited me to join the staff (along with pachi and Daigomi <3). And the rest, they say, is history.
![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Hot_Bid/windowcover.jpg)
This was my first TLFE: read it here
If you want to go far in this community, just do what you can and be respectful. Don't contribute because you want to grow your e-peen - do it because it makes the community a better place. Particularly you BW guys, in BW's darkest hour it is up to it's fans to keep the fires burning. Not everyone can be as amazing as our forum stars, but you all can do something if you want to. The easiest way is to contribute to Liquipedia. While it doesn't look like people are taking notice of your edits, the LP staff are. There are other ways as well. Writing quality blogs is a great way to contribute something if you're nervous about making a new thread - the way blogs is coded means that its a good place to start building a reputation for yourself. And people do read them, I pretty much read every blog on the sidebar haha.
Quitting TL & Today
I'll keep this brief since I don't really want to dwell on it. You may recall my last post, which obviously didn't turn out to be my last. But it did for a long time (damn TSL brought me back, I'll blog about that at some point as well). So why did I leave? In short, my health. Things spiralled in and out of control this year culminating in emergency surgery. I'd rather not go into details at this stage, but you can probably work it out if you try hard enough. Leaving TL was an attempt to try bring my life back into order, turns out that TL is more a part of my life than I had anticipated. While I'm still incapable of contributing anything more to the community for the time being, it's an absolute pleasure watching over all the staff sub-forums and seeing all the great things they are doing.
I hope to one day write another TLFE, hopefully I get to do that with heyoka because we've been meaning to sit down and do that for a while now. Until the day I can do things again, I'll just be doing easy jobs like moderating and helping plan things here and there.
With an influx of many new users on TL it may seem like an impossible task to become a notable member of the community. This is far from the truth. People like Drazerk and Moonbear have made an influence on the community through LR'ing. Dakota obviously has made his mark via sc2gears. The blue posters in the strategy forum are doing what they can to make it a better place. I mean these things may seem so insignificant, but really TL depends on people being good model posters for its success. We've always said that TL's biggest strength is its community, and I don't see that changing any time in the near future.
Aside from the getting on staff bit, I'm sure me and you are not so different. We're both fans of the game and we both love TL (I assume!). Everyone can bring something special and unique to the table here at TL. Everyone has their own unique viewpoint on esports - from their differences in favorite players, to differences in opinion on why certain things happen (e.g. development of the 1/1/1 build). It's these differences that we can all too often take for granted. In hindsight, my blogs and TLFEs expressed my own unique viewpoint on the state of SC:BW and really anyone can do the same. It doesn't even have to be limited to BW, as this blog illustrates. But for those of you content to sit back and enjoy the benefits that TL has to offer just remember this simple rule - which I must have said like 5 times now - don't post idiotically and you won't face the hammer.
Plexa
