[Interview] Lastshadow with Project Dove!

Gamegene

United States8308 Posts

January 25 2013 17:55 GMT

Listen to the live audio recording here!

Could you introduce yourself to people who may not know you, or have only heard of your name?

My name is Nick De Cesare, I am a SC2 progamer, and most recently, over the last few months I’ve started playing League Of Legends. I have lived in Seoul, South Korea for the last year and a half, and I have lived with team MVP for the last nine months.

If you were to describe yourself outside of Starcraft in a few short words?

Conserved, melancholy, and introvert.

You are from Rhode Island in the United States yes?

Yes, I lived in Rhode Island for the first sixteen years, and then I was living in various states for the last two before I came to Korea.

Did you enjoy your childhood and life growing up in Rhode Island?

My childhood was really rocky to say the least, it was a constantly up and down roller coaster. I mean, some aspects yes, but for the majority no. Not at all.

When did you first start gaming, and when did your gaming career really first start? Was there anyone who kind of help you get into it?

My gaming career started probably started when I was three. My uncle growing up was very good at Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct, back when the... Super Nintendo I believe it was? And he would travel around New England, the northeast, whatever for tournaments with a group of his buddies and they would always win.

I probably started playing with Final Fantasy III on the Super Nintendo or Zelda: Link To The Past on the regular Nintendo etc. Anything like that, Fantasy, Zelda, Punch out, Super Punch Out. And as I grew up I would start to play other famous titles like Goldeneye that would be on those consoles, and I never really stopped gaming.

I played Starcraft 1 highly competitively, I tried to come to Korea for it but basically I couldn’t because of my age. I had a lot of other stuff going on in my life, but basically to my knowledge: everything was set up for me to come here back when I was like sixteen, but I wasn’t able to for Starcraft 1.

Could you give a summary of your Starcraft 1 career? Where it all began and the major events that happened in it.

Starcraft 1... I first saw the game in 2002. My first sighting of it was on the N64. My uncle, my younger uncle, and his friend were playing and it was the first time that I had saw it, I never actually played it. And then a friend up the street from me played it on US East. I would watch time from time and then later on I first saw a match between Xellos and NaDa on Korhal Of Ceres, it was a TvT and it kind of just sparked my interest because I saw that there was a pro scene.

I saw the salaries that the Korean pro gamers could make, so after that I started playing it competitively in the winter of 2006. I played for about 3 years until I quit in the winter of 2009. It took me about a year to start playing against top foreigners. Because back then foreigners could only really play against each other, there was no way to really branch out and play the Korean pro gamers. You could play Korean amateurs but it wasn’t the same as playing the big names you would see on OGN or MBC at the time.

I ultimately quit Starcraft 1, because basically after playing the game after 8 months into my career, there was a lot of stuff going on and I wanted to be more well known and liked by people I looked up to in the foreigner community. And then there was some other stuff that was going on in Starcraft 1. I had some vindictive nature towards someone that had been teaching me at the game. So ultimately I rigged maps to give me an edge in custom games. I never used them maliciously in tournament games or leagues or anything. But that kind of stuck with me throughout the career, so it kind of made everything I did in that game a struggle.

It was hard at times to keep going but basically in the winter of 2009, after Infernal had been knocked out of the TSL tournament, I stopped then because there was no real opportunity in Starcraft 1 for me anymore because my age prohibited me from going to Korea, and with Infernal being knocked out of TSL, and everyone thinking that was the final tournament for foreigners I just didn’t see a reason to keep playing so I quit.

I came into Starcraft 2, literally at release. I had played two days of beta, and I had played as Protoss in the Beta. With only three weeks of game time, I took fourth place at MLG Raleigh, versus people who had been in the Beta for eight plus months. I think eight plus months... six plus months, but whatever and then that goes into my Starcraft 2 career.

You mentioned before that you looked up to people in the Starcraft 1 community. In a lot of interviews you say you have a lot of respect for mostly three players: Ret, Mondragon and a player called Yosh especially. Could you explain why you admire these players so much?

Yosh...

I had a lot of respect for foreigners who were able to be on top in the Starcraft 1 community such as Yosh, Mondragon, Ret etc. And you can tell if you heard them talk about the game, you could tell that they see the game in a much higher and deeper understanding than almost anyone else that had played the game.

In Starcraft 2 we have a lot of people who are able to mimic, copy build orders and strategies, but they’re actually not able to think for themselves. They’re like puppets in the game, and like puppets you can’t ascend unless someone ascends before you. Whereas Yosh, Ret and Mondragon they don’t need people to learn from, they’re able to figure it out on their own. Sometimes they get stuck, but they’re the type of people who can take a year break from the game, come back and within three weeks be right where they were before, above everyone that they were above before and that was very admirable.

Yosh, to my knowledge, is the only non-Korean to honestly get A+ with the exception of IdrA against pure Koreans. He also had a private invite from SK Telecom T1 to their A team, which is unheard of because not even IdrA was capable of that in Starcraft 1. Some people confirm that, some people say it’s not true, it doesn’t really matter. Anyone that played Starcraft 1 knew that Mondragon Yosh, etc. were the elite of the elite.

And it wasn’t just about mechanics. It goes way beyond mechanics. So when I see people that are able to talk like them or talk similarly to them, I know that even though mechanically they’re not as sound as those players are...

Anyone can get good mechanics. Not everyone can think the way that they did. So it’s just a different level of respect that I give to them.

Do you still think they’re the people you strive to be like still? Is there someone else now? Are they still those idols you want to become when you reach the end of your career?

As far as idols and everything, I never really had idols. I think if you idolize someone you create a pedestal that you can’t reach. It’s nice to look up to people, but to idolize them or want to be like them you limit yourself, so that’s not beneficial. You have to have a bloodlust, you have to want to be able to beat them but respect them at the same time.

As far as me, my career is coming to an end. I only have a few years left. Anyone who thinks they can keep playing into their mid twenties is just delusional. Right now there’s fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old Korean highschool boys playing from home and the only thing they have to really worry about is school work and the game.

Here I am I have to worry about bills, rent, visa runs, food etc. I can’t have that same bloodlust and pas- incentive to win that these kids can have because they have so many more years ahead of them. In the same contrast, I can have an incentive to win because I have to win to survive, but that still doesn’t equal that bloodlust for a person that’s completely new to it and doesn’t know defeat. It’s like an innocence, that gives them such an advantage, that older veteran players they just can’t do it.

In Jinro’s retirement, he said some line about NaDa and Boxer and all that. “Where did you find the ability to dream again?” Because if you don’t have the dream, you don’t have that passion, that bloodlust, you’re never going to be on top. You can be a winner, but you can’t be a champion, and there’s no reason to play if you can’t be a champion.

Do you think that that bloodlust is just winning? Or is it also enjoying the game as well. There’s some mixed thoughts on whether or not you actually enjoy this game. Whether you hate this game, but keep playing because you want to keep winning, and so when you keep on winning you keep on playing.

Bloodlust... I mean you have to enjoy the game, you have to love the game. You can’t just enjoy it you have to love it. You have to... you have to care enough about the game to get angry at your own shortcomings.

I mean a lot of people used to flame IdrA for when he used to be so bad manner. And a lot of people see IdrA not be as bad manner anymore, and some people think it’s because EG’s conditioning him or something. But the truth of the matter is, I think, I mean I haven’t talked to Greg personally in quite some time, maybe like six months or something but. I think it’s because he’s kind of given up. You’re not going to get as angry at a game anymore if you’ve given up. Not like giving up the game, but giving up trying to be top one, number one or something.

Because if you see someone like Parting lose, obviously we don’t have people translating his personal Facebook statuses or his personal tweets or whatever, they only translate when things like “I left Startale” comes up. But if you see that, you see that he gets legitimately, extremely angry if he makes even the shortest mistake, like a micromanagement error. You have to have
that anger towards the game and towards yourself.

You can’t... it’s weird. You don’t have a lot of time in Starcraft. Like Bonjwas in Starcraft 1, they only lasted about a year. And with Starcraft 2 and how it’s going, and there’s so many new faces popping up and there’s so many new materials to be better: replays coaching staffs, Korean team houses, you have to have something that keeps motivating you and keep striving you. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to go anywhere.

I would like to shift gears a little bit. You mentioned earlier that there were plans for you to go to Korea, and they ultimately didn’t pan out. In Starcraft 2, where did this idea of going to Korea come up again, and where did it materialize for you?

Me coming to Korea, it was... forced. It wasn’t an option, I mean it was obviously an option but it was more forced than it was voluntary.

Basically I was in a pretty dark time and in between me quitting Starcraft 2 and transitioning to poker back in 2010. And a lot was going on, and I got an offer to come out of retirement by GosuGamers.net. I knew the manager before, marCoon and some of the very very good elite ToT Templar of Twilight Starcraft 1 players were on the GosuGamers roster such as Infernal and Naugrim. And there was incentive to pick up more- Zpux was there too- to pick up more of these old legendary gosus that hadn’t transitioned yet to Starcraft 2.

So I came back to Starcraft 2 because I needed something in life but I also missed the community, I missed my friends and stuff. Because there’s nothing comparable to getting online, and someone’s always up in a different part of the world and you’re very close with them, you share a very common shared interest, passion hobby whatever you want to call it and being able to play talk whatever.

So anyways, over the course of me joining GosuGamers, coming back to Starcraft 2, I was bouncing around living places. And basically I found myself without a home at one point. Sixjax Skew, former Sixjax player Skew from Starcraft 1, flew me out to Arizona on a plane literally next day and I lived with him for a month.

During that month I tried to talk to various Korean team houses because I was like: I need to find somewhere. Skew was helping me out for a very short period of time and I needed something to come through. And at the time there were no team houses in America and nothing going on anywhere. There was the team house in... Sweden I believe? With TLO, MorroW, Cytoplasm, that thing going on in Sweden. But basically I looked at Korea as a new opportunity but at the same time it was forced.

So it was kind of like I had to find passion, find an ability to want to go there. But it kind of helped that it was forced. I ended up coming after I passed a series of trial games, sixty or so games against former ZeNEX, former MVP, NEX clan, Pro S clan, former LG I- you know, former LG-IM members etc. etc. I got a spot in MVP’s previous B team house, which later became the Pro S house, which later became the League Of Legends house.

So do you remember the first time you came to Korea, getting out of the airport. What were your first thoughts when, you know this was the dream you had in Starcraft 1, what were you thinking at the time when you realized “Wow I’m actually in Korea”.

I remember getting on the flight, and I was actually pretty scared. It was my first international flight so that was pretty worrying. I remember when the announcement said that we were landing in twenty minutes, and I’m looking out the window and I’m looking at all the landscape of Korea and it’s all mountains and stuff. I started getting chills, or goosebumps. All I was thinking about was when I used to set up the alarm clock for three or four AM to see iloveoov or SaviOr play in Proleague or something. And here I am about to land in the same country where they all are. Where they all were from. I felt like a little kid when I landed.

I went out the south gate, terminal gates, and the two coaches were there and one of the MVP players, MVP Yoshyua better known as Clash Mook? I don’t know if Clash is still alive as a team. They were waiting and we got back to the house and it was like everything I had expected for team houses or whatever. So that’s pretty much how it was going to Korea coming in.

What was the team house like? How was it like what you expected.

When I first got to the team house, you know you go up into the apartment, all team houses are apartments in Korea. Some of them are building apartments which I guess is a little different, but we came in there was a lot of shoes in the shoe place thing, because of asian culture: you don’t wear your shoes inside.

I go in and everyone turns around. It was the first time that a non-Korean, at least for that team, a non-Korean was stepping his foot into a team house. They all turn around and just stare, because it’s awkward for them or it’s like disbelief. Some of the members started speaking english, what they could, what they knew from school. Others didn’t speak any. Galaxy, MVP.Galaxy, was fluent he was living there. Former RS.Soulman was living there.

MVP.Galaxy

A lot of players, they were all really friendly. We were all like the same age. It was like a giant sleepover is the best way I can describe it.

I know you speak Korean, and you’re actually pretty good at it. When you first came to that team house, how did you communicate with the other players? Did you try speaking broken english, try and speak Korean, where did your learning of Korean begin?

Basically I was at a bar with Tasteless and Artosis, and I’m like “How do I learn Korean?”. because they’re ordering food and I’m like “You guy’s speak Korean!”. “Yeah a little bit” and I’m like, “A little bit?” because all Korean sounded like blah blah blah blah. I couldn’t understand fucking anything, I could only pick up bits and pieces like what snow was or how to say hi. I thought Korean was like Chinese because I’m like stupid, I never actually bothered to look up the language. So I thought it was like a character for a word, a symbol for a sound or something.

And so like what I had tried to do in subways, I would try to match the characters that flashed up on the screen with what they were saying (Editor’s note: probably talking about the TV’s), and I would match it with the English translation.

So then Artosis tells me “There’s an alphabet, just go home, it’s online, there’s like twenty four letters, but then there’s double letters so there’s twenty eight. Just take thirty minutes a day for two days and then practice. So I did that but I never actually practiced it, I just learned to read and write I could not say anything.

Then in Feburary of 2011, I was living alone, I was living in a friend’s apartment but I was basically living alone and I just had to start learning. So I would just like... trial and error I guess using Google Translate, or seeing Korean friends type, copy pasting into Google Translate, trying to pick out minor vocabulary words.

For communication before all of that happened, we relied on google translate, body language, Konglish, like their broken english but using weird words to try and get their point across? Like if a Korean didn’t know the word “dark”, I could just say like “Black”, “sky black”, and they would understand that it means dark. It was basically using massive amounts of synonyms to get points across if Google Translate was failing us or just a translator.

Where did you stack up in Korea? I know a lot of team houses have ranking games. Did you lose a lot of games, were you actually as good as them, a lot worse, a lot better?

When I came to Korea, I played, like I said, close to 60 trial games. A lot of them were against like MVP.Galaxy, now-StarTale Avenge. I played against DongRaeGu, I beat DongRaeGu, in the trial games I lost more than I beat him, but it was the principle because back then DongRaeGu was something really really really big. He wasn’t Nestea, but he was close. I played against a lot of players of that caliber, I played against GuMiHo, other MVP players like Keen. I won more than I lost, and that’s why I got the invite.

My Terran versus Protoss was absolutely abysmal, but my Terran versus Terran and my Terran versus Zerg kind of carried me through the trial games. That and they also took into consideration that I had only been playing Starcraft 2 X amount of months in comparison to these players that had been playing a year plus beta.

When I got here to Korea I had like a seventy seven percent win rate on ladder, the first month or two that I was here. Was constantly hitting players like MarineKing, Nestea, DongRaeGu, you know all those big names back in that time, and I had a seventy seven percent win rate. I remember that Grand Master had come out the day before I arrived so Grand Master was full by the time I got there but I was constantly rank one rank two masters on the Korean server. Always playing them, always playing MVP (team), customs or whatever. Then I switched races to Zerg in October and stayed as Zerg until December and then I switched back.

A lot of stuff happened in Korea, that just... it didn’t... it didn’t go well for my career, I couldn’t really be a pro gamer. I mean I wasn’t even really a pro gamer, but I was... it’s a really weird thing.

So, you were really proficient at the game, but a lot of external factors tore you away from that?

Right.

Were there any misconceptions you had about Korea before you came, and/or are there any misconceptions you see online about Korea that you want to clear up?

There are a lot of misconceptions I guess, one is that Koreans are not good mannered. They’re just not good mannered. A lot of people claim that me, IdrA, whatever, mostly notoriously bad mannered people like IdrA, Nerchio I think was bad mannered I don’t know if he is anymore, are the ones bad mannered, that it’s a foreigner only thing.

That’s just bullshit. Koreans are extremely fucking bad mannered. They’re almost racist towards non-Koreans when you hear them in private. They don’t think that they should lose, they know that they don’t deserve to lose. It’s basically: anything that I’ve ever said, most of them think it. Like that they just don’t deserve to lose. They play harder, they practice more, and they don’t deserve to lose because they messed up a timing by fifteen seconds or something. Or like a Zerg or Protoss player did some sort of all in against them in a random tournament. So that’s one misconception.

Another misconception is that, even though some of them do play as much as they say, a lot of them don’t play as much as they say. Some them only play two hours a day, and these are like Code A, Code S players only playing two hours a day. Some of them will play a lot one day and then not play for a few days. So the whole Korean practice regimen shit, that’s all just bullshit and fabricated.

When they say that they practice fourteen hours, they mean that they sat in the computer chair for fourteen hours. They don’t actually mean playing playing playing. That might apply to Starcraft 1, however MVP.Galaxy who was temporarily on KT Rolster claimed that when he lived in KT Rolster it was very lax. That only Flash, Lizzy (E/N: Motive), and Wooki would play in their free time, but everyone else would be on other games like League Of Legends and all the other crazes going on, so I guess that’s another misconception.

Foreigners have talked about how Koreans don’t like foreigners that live here, that’s bullshit. If you don’t show them respect, if you don’t want to adapt to their culture; if you don’t want to respect their culture, not even adapt to it then, who the fuck are you? You’re a guest in their country. You don’t come here and expect to be treated like royalty because they’re opening the door to you and not vice versa.

So when you heard about people like Naniwa or Juan’s falling out with TSL, or you know Drewbie or Trimaster with MVP, they didn’t make efforts to learn the language. MVP liked Naniwa, he just didn’t like the social awkwardism I guess, don’t think that’s even a word, that Koreans give you if you don’t want to speak, but it’s not like that at all. I’ve lived with MVP’s League Of Legends team and I’ve lived with other team houses in my stay here and I’ve never had an issue at all, and I feel MVP LoL, they’re a family to me. They’re brothers to me, it’s really close. That’s enough misconception: that Koreans will reject foreigners. I mean, they will, but not in the way that it’s meant to sound.

Foreigners in Korea, have had somewhat of a legacy, starting with the first generation with players like Elky, Grrrr, Nazgul, and the second generation with players like IdrA, Ret, I think Juan. Have you had any foreigner mentors in Korea take you under wing and show you how to make it in Korea? You mentioned Artosis and Tasteless before.

Artosis and Tasteless were probably my biggest lifelines in Korea the first year I was here. I would say around May or June, stuff was getting way more hectic in my life and I didn’t want to bother them with anything going on with me. I was started learning Korean more, I didn’t need anybody to go out with me, I was able to go to restaurants and order food on my own. I could get around travel around Seoul, Busan whatever. Once I started learning the language more, I didn’t need mentors as much.

But basically the first year I was here, I relied on them for guidance, so I owe them a lot. Not just as gaming related, but life related. They’re really great people. Wolf was really good to me, SloG was really good to me, SloG4[PG].

A lot of people don’t know this but SloG, and this is one of the most beautiful aspects of Korea, is that if I said SloG was one of the best Protosses in the world, like top twenty, two months ago three months ago, everyone in the foreigner community would have been like “No, no he wasn’t”. On the Korean ladder, SloG is the only non-Korean- well he’s Korean but he’s non-Korean his flag is American (E/N: SloG is Korean-American), the only Korean to top eight Korean Grand Master during the most active period, this is going back three months. And he did it with a very high win percentage. He was one of the best but he doesn’t get any knowledge or recognition for it, he was my mentor too in that sense.

Who are your closest friends in Korea? Koreans, non-foreigners.

I have a lot of Korean friends, some of them are not even pro gamers, they’re just friends that were friends of pro gamers that are around my age. I’m still really close with Oasis who was formerly with MVP who has since retired from Starcraft 2 and all games. I’m still really close with him, I’m really close with Galaxy. Soulman.

Oasis giving Lastshadow the bird

I’m still close with a lot of Koreans that I had met when I first landed here, but now I’m super close with all of MVP League Of Legends, so that’s like ten more Koreans. And then I have a bunch of random Korean friends that I just met through them that aren’t related to gaming in any way. They’re like same age, they speak good enough English or I speak enough Korean plus they can speak enough English to where it’s not awkward at all. Language barrier has never been an issue for me so I guess that’s good.

I apologize for being a little dramatic here but, going about a year: things were looking really good for you. You had one of the most popular unfeatured streams on Team Liquid. A lot of Terran players loved your V-Logs and analysis of the game, your experience in Korea. People were interested in this player with a really controversial past, as a Starcraft 1 cheater. He was showing a lot of skill against the best in Korea, you said you were topping the ladder.

It seemed like the LastShadow brand had a lot of momentum behind it, like you were going to breakout into the mainstream with your invitation to the Red Bull Battlegrounds.

How were you able to develop such a following among your fans? It seemed like they were always so passionate, always wanting to support you. Was this all a conscious effort to build on your marketing? Or did you just solely focus on improving your play, becoming a better player, and just let the stream bring in fans on it’s own.

Basically... hmm I guess this is going to be a long answer.

I started streaming because when I came to Korea, I was with GosuGamers. And then GosuGamers ended the contract, they ended the entire team very premature. It threw me and the other Koreans kind of under the bus in a little way but it wasn’t their fault at all. In fact in hindsight it was my fault and the Koreans fault that it ended the way that it did.

But basically I started streaming because I needed to survive. First five months in Korea I basically had no money at all. I had enough to live. I started streaming to get income, but the V-Logs I started because GosuGamers had asked me to. Because there was no Terran that really spoke out about strategy or advice. I remembered back to when I was fourteen, fifteen, I always wanted to... If I ever got to a high level where I understood the game better than most that I would want to give back to the community. Because I remember looking up to Testie, Mondragon Yosh Ret etc. etc., and very rarely would they post anything. Strategy related, advice related, absolutely anything. I didn’t want to be like that if I ever got into their position. I always wanted to remember where I came from, you know remember your roots. Because I too was once a forum goer that was a trash player that didn’t have anything. So that’s where the Vlogs came in and I just kept building on that.

I had a large following, when I was unfeatured. And to be honest my Starcraft career has always been a two pronged sword, a double edged sword, whatever you want to call it. Because I constantly feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle constantly because of the cheating scandal four five years ago, and I feel like it’s really draining. I remember being completely exhausted with everything. Every time I would play it would just be in my head that I have something working against me that I can’t do anything about. So that was a hinderance to anything that I was doing, anything beneficial.

And I would release these Vlogs that would be fifty minut- I think a few were fifty minutes I don’t really remember, they would get a lot of hits and that was good. People learned from them, people liked them so I kept doing them. And I tried to make them more frequent because there was no Terran speaking out, and in my opinion, there were only a few Terrans who were even able to speak out about the Terran race that actually understood it. For non-Koreans anyways. And sometimes I didn’t even understand it, as I said in some of the Vlogs, like when it came to some match ups or some situations I was completely clueless in comparison to a lot of the Korean terrans that were better and greater than me. I tried to give what I did know, and it kind of trickled off after the whole Red Bull thing because Red Bull was a whole incident in itself where people don’t actually understand what happened there.

Could I ask you about that?

Yeah sure.

There was a stir in the Starcraft community when your invitation was announced, and on State Of The Game, maybe some other talk shows, a lot of the big fish were a little upset that you got this invitation because it didn’t seem you were more deserving over other professional players, and people were just like “Day[9] was just biased over your mech play”. But I don’t think anyone really understood what kind of impression you would leave on the tournament.

Results wise, you came into the tournament and lost every game. The games themselves looked really bad, but no one really knew what was going on with you since you essentially disappeared after the tournament. If you would like to just give an account of what happened then, because I’m sure a lot of people still remember and would like to know what happened.

What happened... well I talked about it in the AMA, I did an AMA on Reddit in August or September, I talked about it in depth.

Basically what happened was prior to joining Red Bull for about a month or two, I was supposed to join TSL, supposed to test in to TSL. I had people setting that up and with Heart Of The Swarm coming around the corner I didn’t think I could get into a position where I could be anything on TSL roster in Wings Of Liberty, because there were other Terrans just starting to show their fruit, or their worth. Like TSL.Center, he got played a few times, and now I think he’s on some other team. And I was friends with him, I used to play with him I used to practice with him because he was on TSL B team. Soulman helped me get into communication with stuff going on in TSL, Former TSL Dream who has retired. So I was supposed to get into TSL before the Red Bull thing even came up before it was an invite.

I was playing pure TvP mech, on a smurf account in Korea. Then I got the Red Bull invite from the guys themselves before Day[9] even brought it up to me. So I had nothing to do with Day[9], Day[9] got a lot of flak for it because it happened to be at the same time Day[9] was promoting me.

Basically when I found out that my group was going to be Parting, Puzzle, Ret, which later got switched to Parting, Squirtle, Ret I basically knew that there was no way for me to beat Parting with Bionic, and I was only playing mech this whole month before I even got the invite and then Red Bull was only another month away. So I decided that I would continue to play TvP mech and take them out of their element. Because they would view me as a non-Korean whatever. Parting knew my main idea on ladder, I’m not sure Puzzle did, and Ret’s not really relevant because he’s playing on America or Europe so he doesn’t really know anything about me aside from what people can tell him or what my stream shows. So basically I decided that I would only play mech TvP. I asked MVP.TAiLS, Genius, and all these other Koreans to help me. Some of them wouldn’t help me unless I agreed to not to use mech against Parting on Cloud Kingdom. There was a build order that MVP.KeeN came up with that had like a one hundred percent win rate on ladder against opponents that didn’t know you were capable of doing the build, and then they showed me that but told me I couldn’t use it on Parting but it was fine to use it against Squirtle. It was just like Korean culture, Korean manner.

So I played with them only using mech, I did the ins and outs of mech, I was playing like fourty fifty games a day of mech TvP only because I had it in my head that I just had to beat Squirtle with mech, I didn’t think I would beat Parting. Realistically I thought that it just couldn’t be done. PvT was his best match up, he was a PvT expert. Even using mech I thought he would just notice that I was using mech and he would so something that these other protosses weren’t capable of doing. Similar to Starcraft 1 where all these people could practice against Terrans but the Terran was Flash, and at the time Parting was basically the Flash of Protoss. I just didn’t think I could beat him.

So my goal was to beat Squirtle and Ret, and I wasn’t worried about Ret because here I am in Korea and I’m beating Zergs better than Ret so Ret, it would be just like playing any other Zerg and that’s just how I had to view him: just any other Zerg who’s on a Korean level. So I completely neglected any special practice for Ret because all I would do is just play mech TvT, TvZ, TvP on ladder, so I was only playing mechanical.

Finally I get to Red Bull, I flew over, I was a little sick, whatever that’s not really an excuse. I get there two days early and GanZi was my roommate. Sam Keen, Red Bull manager- or digital manager, director whatever, picked me up at the airport dropped me off at the hotel etc. And then I found out it got switched to Parting, Squirtle, Ret. Previously Parting, Puzzle, Ret. That didn’t really affect me too much except that you know Squirtle was a GSL Code S finalist so that’s a big boomerang my way. It changes a lot, it changed a lot.

So in the warm up room for Red Bull we were supposed to get our computers a little early so we could prepare on them. It ended that up the trucks were late getting to the venue so we couldn’t practice. I start setting up and the Kinzu mouse that I was using, and the DPI got messed up. So I got on Skype and asked the MVP coach to log onto my computer tell me the DPI settings I had on my computer but the Kinzu was supposed to be a smart plug and go. Something happened to the DPI, so basically I got really freaked out and anxious because it’s like: what’s wrong with my mouse. So I spent twelve hours the next two days when I was able to practice playing against like Scarlett, Ost- no I don’t think I played with Ostoijy, I think I played against him twice actually on ladder because he was also at the event. And various other friends that came on to NA server to help me. I think Cytoplasm played against me. Trying to adjust to the mouse. The mouse wasn’t really the biggest issue in the grand scheme of things, so I was just practicing trying to adjust to the new DPI, because we couldn’t figure out what the DPI was at the house, something was going on at the MVP coach, that’s irrelevant.

I go back to my room and as I’m leaving from practice one day, I get physically harassed in the elevator. So Red Bull security gets called, hotel security gets called, and that was just really startling. It was actually pretty scary, and that it actually happened at a venue because someone disliked me because of my past as a cheater. I didn’t actually know the full reason, I still don’t know the full reason.

I go back on to Skype to talk to Soulman and try to message TAiLS to ask what they think I should do regarding the matches. GanZi later came up and told me that my smurf ID on Korea had been leaked to Parting and Squirtle via Twitter that shows only mech TvP in my match history. Absolutely only mech. Now I become riddled with... I don’t even know. What kind of anxiety it was because the two best TvPers, the two best PvTers in the world now know I only play mech TvP for the last two months. Not only that but they see that I only open fifteen CC. That’s just how I was at the time, I was only opening fifteen CC. I didn’t play bionic, I never touched bionic. That was more anxiety inducing. So I was talking to Soulman and other people like: what the hell do I do? Do I play bionic, I haven’t touched bionic. I was trying to message ToD. I was just panicked with anxiety because I didn’t know what I was going to do in the games.

So I end up coming back to the venue, and SaSe is coming down the steps and tells me the Red Bull people are looking for me, because I have to play my match four hours early because something with the venue. So I go into, I’m back at my hotel and everything is going on, and I get a message from a real life close friend that something had happened to someone who was really close to me. And I was located in the US at the time, and they’re in the US, and I’m overtaken with like... I don't’ even know what kind of depression. It’s just so much stuff going on at once. And then I’m told on Skype by Hanbin who’s now on Woongjin Stars, that I didn’t have a house to go back to in Korea. So I start to get to the verge of crying, because I came to Red Bull, I’m in America, I might not have a house to go back to in Korea.

I don’t have anything, I’m about to lose fucking everything. Now I have to go in and play against these world elite players: Ret, he was and is one of the best Zergs in the world, and Parting and Squirtle two of the best Protoss players in the world. Any Terran in the world. MVP himself could have gone 0-6. MarineKing could have gone 0-6 in that group. Any fucking Terran in the world could have gone 0-6 at that period of time when Parting and Squirtle were seemingly untouchable. And I already knew how idiotic the community would react if I did poorly so it was just more stress. I wasn’t worried about nerve issues, I don’t get nerve issues inside the booth, but my mind was clouded. It was completely overwhelmed.

So I remember going into the booth and telling Ret: “I don’t want to play these games”. I felt like I was going to throw up, I felt light headed because of everything going on. Being afraid that something was wrong in my stay in Korea now, that I was going to be homeless. Because a lot of people don’t know that I was temporarily homeless in Korea for three weeks. I was living in motels, hotels playing poker at a casino trying to stay afloat. And then MVP let me move in with them and then everything changed, it got a lot better. So everything was about to just come crashing down, like in a period of forty eight hours my life was about to be flipped upside down. And it’s scary because I had some income coming in, I had poker but that didn’t mean anything if I had everything flipped upside down. So I had to perform... I couldn’t perform. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my body with anxiety.

So I told Ret that I didn’t want to play these games and he was like “Don’t do this to me”, “I really care about the game”, “This is disrespectful for you to say this to me”. So I kind of just nodded my head and I remember telling him “ok I’ll play”. So the games against Ret they look like... game two look one sided, game one I kept mismicroing banshees and they kept dying. And Ret hit a timing, if I hold off the timing I’m on three bases with five command centers, and he’s on three bases on lair tech with nothing else and I have superior through upgrades on the armory. Didn’t matter because I missed the defense, I miscalculated a defense timing.

Game two, he goes straight to roaches with one one. Ranged, carapace, no scout no nothing, doesn’t even come into my base. He just goes straight two hundred two hundred Stephano style ZvP roach and slams into me hoping I went mech. And he later says in the interview that he had hoped that I had just gone mech. And I lost the same way MVP did two weeks later in a European tournament to a European Zerg. To the same exact build order, I lost the same exact way that MVP lost. But to the public they can’t see these delicate details of timing, economy, so it looks like a one sided rape. They can’t understand that attack, Ret is in a world of pain. Like it’s all about holding the attack. And that build that Ret used would have been used by Korean Zergs versus mech all the time. And you would just see Terrans get hit by this wall of roaches this tidal wave of roaches, and they just have to type out GG because some mech timings are vulnerable to this timing that-

Sorry for interrupting you but, I’d like to talk about the game later but I’d like to keep going with the Red Bull Event. If you don’t mind.

Yeah, ok.

So the Red Bull Event, after I lost to Ret, I ended up having to play against Squirtle. I remember the lady, the girl, asian girl, I don’t remember her name, came into my booth to check on the score and stuff. I just remember telling her: “I don’t, I can’t... think. I want to forfeit.” And she’s like, “What?” and I tell her I want to forfeit the next games. And she’s like ok hold on wait a minute. So Day[9]’s mom and talks to her about ten minutes, maybe not ten minutes, maybe just five minutes. She comes into the booth and talks to me and I agree to play the next games against Squirtle. But if I lose the games against Squirtle I’m going to forfeit versus Parting. Because it was talked about if I forfeit to Parting after going zero two to Squirtle then it is irrelevant that I even play Parting. The group would have been decided, there would be no reason for me to play Parting.

So in Game one against Squirtle, what the public didn’t see is that, ok so it’s forced cross spawn Antiga Shipyard. He goes twelve gateway, triple chronoboost zealot, fourth chronoboost stalker. Now any high level Protoss player in the world, any high level terran, anyone with a brain, anyone in high Grand Masters... They all know that if you do this build against Terran, if you... Like they have to be going proxy raxes, or they have to be going fifteen CC. They have to be doing one of those two builds. If they don’t, you are behind in probes, you are behind in expansion, and you’re even behind in tech.

So you’re saying... that Parting metagamed you and hit you hard with a build order counter (E/N: Sorry Chill).

Squirtle.

Yeah, it was just a complete build order counter. I don’t care if you were MVP yourself, because you are going to lose to the zealot and the stalker because the zealot and stalker are showing up thirty or forty seconds faster than they should be. You’re not going to have a marine out. If that happens to you, and that happens to you it’s not your fault: it’s just how the build is. Like there’s no control in the world. I mean I held on and killed the stalker and the zealot but it’s Squirtle, I’m not going to waste his time. I’m down on workers, I lost too many workers. I just GG’d.

In game two, everyone forgets that I had Squirtle beat, that Squirtle is completely destroyed, that he has absolutely no chance of winning barring that I go into a coma. He’s about to blink up twelve stalkers into a pack of siege tanks and marines, and a raven. And he’s about to be left with five gateway and a robo, with only two gasses going, versus: three factory, two starport mech in two minutes. And I had done the build order two hundred times in practice against Genius, TAiLS, Soulman etc. He’s not holding the attack. High level casters later said, “There’s no way that Squirtle can hold the attack.” The game drops. The game disconnects. Everyone forgets that game. Everyone forgets. I had the GSL Code S finalist beat, but it was all forgotten.

So my mentality is completely destroyed. Like everything is just gone. I had to decided to use mech, even if I thought he would just blind counter it again because he knew my match history and I caught him with mech. So in game three, I wa- not even game three, regame of game two, I was just like “whatever”, and I just all inned. I was... I was broken. I was broken mentally. I was legitimately broken.

You just wanted to get it over with as fast as possible.

Yeah. I just had too much going on in my head to think straight. I was too overwhelmed with fear. Just about life. It went beyond Starcraft 2 at that point. And, I don’t even know. I wasn’t going to go mech again, because then it’s the same map, same thing, and that point he’d probably just prepare for it. At that point I had shown that I was going mech two games in a row, because on Antiga Shipyard he could see the factory. So I was just destroyed.

So I went backstage with Day[9] and his mom and I talked fifteen, twenty minutes and I just broke down everything that was going on since I landed in Texas. I ended up having to be escorted back to my hotel room because of harassment that was going on towards me. For the rest of the event I was held in Day[9]’s green room because of severe harassment. My email, my facebook, my twitter were all getting littered with hate spam email. And I remember just sitting there thinking just: people must forget my age or something.

They must think that I’m some grown adult that cheated in his twenties or something and that he had a fully developed conscience. But like everything... I don’t know... I know that it was mentioned on States Of The Game by iNcontroL that I didn’t deserve to be there whatever and so everyone just dug up everything about my past up. It all came in shining glory, in emails, tweets, messages to my facebook inbox. I remember showing them to Day[9] and Husky, and I kept my social media down for a while. Then... I remember landing in Japan and I was stopped by security because someone made a suicide video or something about me. So police stations at Dallas, Fortworth Texas International, were looking for me. So when I landed in Japan I had this whole fiasco with airport security, then I went back to Korea. When I went back to Korea everything was fine... but the damage was done.

Joining TSL didn’t fall through, Coach Lee’s mother got sick. He was running a PC Bang, and his mother’s job so he was doing three jobs. He ended up cutting a lot of B team members. Joining TSL did not fall through. I was supposed to join Woongjin Stars, in July of 2012 because I failed the Korean test. And then Hanbin, who is now on Woongjin Stars, never followed up on trying to help me with Korean or ways for me to get in the team.

So, I’d like to go back a little bit. That... was some heavy stuff man. What was your mentality like after that? Were you severely depressed after that? Were you able to function normally as you were before?

I got attacked... for like everything. For my cheating. For my bad manner, because I always say what I think. I don’t see why being honest is a bad trait in this society but it is. But... I don’t know.

I remember just being crushed. On a lot of fronts. When I came back to Korea and incident where I lost a lot of real life Korean friends. Like there was a big fight that broke out between all of us so a lot of my social network fell apart. My life just crumbled at one point. And Starcraft... It would be like I would log in, and there would just be hate. And hate. And more hate, and more hate. And it’s all because of something that happened, four five years ago that was made to make it seem like I did it maliciously but I never had malicious intent behind my cheating. It was all because I wanted to be friends with the people I respected. I never used the maps in leagues, I never used them in tournaments, and then I did cheat in WCG.

I was fifteen, I was so hell bent and I was using Ventrillo which is like Skype, and I was so hell bent on getting to the offline qualifier and prove everyone wrong, quote on quote. I cheated on Ventrillo in two of the of five games. In two of the five games I had a friend telling me what my opponent was doing, which was about a year after I cheated with the maps. And it was because I was just so hellbent on offline because that was the only way for hackers, cheaters, to redeem themselves, with offline performance. So impulsive decisions, wrong decisions, not really understanding the consequences of stuff.

I’ve constantly been met with disappointment and struggle my entire Starcraft career. Starcraft 1, Starcraft 2, nothing has ever changed. And through it all-

How do you cope with that?

I guess... I guess I don’t cope with it.

You don’t have like a defensive mechanism, something that you can go to and you’ll feel a little better... you don’t have anything like that?

I don’t... I don’t have anything (laughs). I mean, I just ignore it. I just kept pushing. No progamer would have put up with with what I did put up with. And still been where I was. No progamer would have done it, unless they were given another chance. You saw this many many a time, with other past cheaters, hackers, whatever. They just kept giving up because they got scolded, scorned. I never gave up. I never quit. I just kept pushing. It was a struggle basically. And I had no intention of being a struggler or anything, and I don’t mean to make it sound like that... But that’s just how it was.

I always had to go uphill. My starcraft career has always been uphill. So a lot of doors were closed to me in Starcraft 1. A lot- well not alot, but some were opened in Starcraft 2 and I’m really grateful. But I still feel like there was a lot of unfairness that went my way, when it was a completely different game and I had shown that what had happened five or six years ago clearly did not show who I actually was.

You stated once that you were homeless in Korea and I’m not too sure about the timeline of this. To paraphrase: “Since I didn’t have enough money to eat, I would guzzle down water to try and ease the hunger pains.” How did the situation deteriorate to that point? And could you give us a timeline from the Red Bull Battlegrounds to making it to the MVP League Of Legends house?

I was living at the GOM house. When I was living at the GOM house I was sick a lot. I had gone back to America in December of two thousand and eleven to get my hands fixed because the tendons... I had a severe case of tendonitis. I needed steroid injections into the hands, and then I needed to wear special taping any time that I played Starcraft. When I came back, and I was playing Starcraft 2 at the GOM house I was sick a lot. And there was obviously a lot of drama that came out at the GOM house.

But basically I was so sick: I had pneumonia which I didn’t know about. It went undiagnosed for about two months. I had bronchitis... well I had tonsillitis which later developed into bronchitis. I was just completely sick all the time. So when I would play, I would two rax, I would cheese or I would all in. I would make jokes about it with Cytoplasm and ToD. We would say that I was leaving a stain on the Zerg. Any Zerg that I played I would always just proxy rax and I would always make it a point to leave a stain at their natural like the dead hatch, and then I would go back to bed.

So GOM house, basically I felt Juan was coming and I would stay in the GOM house to learn what I could off of Juan before I would decide whether I would leave or not. Because a Korean friend from Starcraft 1, who was fluent in English, wouldn’t be an issue to move in with him, offered to let me move in with him because of everything that was going on in the GOM house. Basically: ToD was leaving because Fnatic was opening up a house in February. Cytoplasm left because he couldn’t find a Korean team. I can’t... remember who wa- Carn wasn’t there, Wolf and Moletrap had already left, Doa had already moved back to America.

Left to right: DeathAngel, ToD, cArn, Lastshadow

So I was only going to be left with: SloG, Khaldor, Desrow, and Juan. And I thought that I would grow as a person, and in Starcraft if I went with my Korean friend. So I kind of waited to see what I could learn off of Juan. And then when Juan got there I noticed he actually wasn’t better at timing or understanding the game. His mechanics were just on another level from mine. And this was like: me, Juan, Cyto, we would all talk about the games when we went out for Korean BBQ or whatever. So when I came to that realization, obviously he was a better player, but I didn’t feel like there was anything I could learn. The only thing I think I really took from Juan was how I make SCVs, which is using my ring finger instead of my middle finger which gives more versatility to my hand (E/N: They both put their CCs on 0). That was the only thing I really took from him.

So I moved in with my Korean friend and while I was living with him, I ended up being on my own a lot at his house. He was constantly out, but it was kind of good because I could just practice on my own. I could practice my Korean at the market or whatever and he would help with minor Korean stuff if I ever needed it. Then after living with him for about a month or so, he ran into health trouble and family trouble, and you know other stuff going on. And then something had happened to one of his real life very long time long term friends, so basically he was going to be leaving the apartment soon, and other things were going on with his friends so basically: I wasn’t going to have a house to live at.

Going back to the GOM house wasn’t really an option, Tasteless and Artosis were traveling a lot during this time, so they really weren’t around to talk to. So basically I had less than a few hundred cash. So I took my luggage and I put in various places in Seoul because I didn’t want it to risk it being seen and having it all thrown out so I would put it... I would put one suitcase here, and another suitcase at another station away or another a block or two away. Random stuff. In the end I ended up losing two bags.

Are you talking about the lockers? (E/N: Lockers at the subway stations)

No luggage, luggage.

No I mean, where did you put this luggage.

Behind the most random stuff you can think of.

Oh you’re not talking about... Oh...

Yeah. Like behind a car that clearly hadn’t used in ages, stuff like that. You know actually that fucking bad. Ghetto.

And I was living out of hotels or motels. Basically I was involved with some at the time, and they were helping me a lot so I owe them a lot too. So I got into an extremely low point: March, Aprilish. Talked to a lot of people who kind of gave me a lot to think about. Rekrul was one of them. And I came to a really low point, and I took everything I had and sat down at the poker table at Walker Hill Casino. I bought the motel that was really close to it. I got a full night’s rest, ate up, whatever and went to the casino with like everything and I ended up going up a few hundred that day.

Anyways I kept doing that. I kept going to that motel, going to the casino, losing some days winning other days. After a few weeks, I made enough profit to move into a one room place in Korea and be stable for two to three months until I could figure something out. And then I got an offer from the MVP coach about a computer. Like an actual computer because I had just been streaming on my laptop which was not good. And I went back to the casino, I made more money, I got the computer and I started streaming full time.

Because poker... as much as it can help me, and as much as it did help me in that situation. If things had gone the other way, if I had lost everything that day. I don’t know what would have happened. But basically as much as poker can help me, I don’t have the proper bankroll management to keep doing it. Bankroll management is extremely important to playing in poker. And on top of that I need, I medically need adderall for ADD and ADHD. So when I’m trying to visualize the numbers or recall past hands and memorize layouts of boards, you know the flop, the turn, the river; memorize how people are acting try to photograph it in my memory because at the time it was so important to actually have to care about all of that.

It was too stressful. It was like my mind was racing too much, too much pressure. So while poker can be helpful, it’s not safe for me to keep playing it because I didn’t have the bankroll, I wasn’t stable. I wasn't’ emotionally stable. I was really prone to tilt. It just wasn’t very smart. I’m very lucky that it went the way that it did and that I was able to play well, and I was able to not get unlucky. Which can happen if you don’t have enough buy ins, you go in there with not enough, you can lose three buy ins really fast, it happens sometimes.

So after living in the one room for a little bit the MVP coach saw me, and I had lost forty pounds, or close to forty pounds in one month and a half because I couldn’t eat. And he saw me, then he messaged me on skype and was like “Do you want to live here?” and I said “yeah that would be good.”, that would be great. And so I’ve lived here since, and I couldn’t be luckier that he offered me that.

And that coincided with your switch to League Of Legends right?

Eventually yeah. Basically because of how the Starcraft community is, or at least what was happening with me. It was really disheartening, it was heartbreaking. People in Korea... people never knew how good I was. The people that did know continue to support me. You would see Artosis, Tasteless, Day[9] etc., they’re not idiotic people. They won’t just randomly support someone. Koreans kept me around custom games, practice games whatever. Almost got into Woongjin, TSL. Foreigners... that wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t actually good. And just because I didn’t play in tournaments and the one tournament I did show up to I go zero four, which any Terran in the world could have in that situation, ut doesn’t mean anything. It just disgusted me because the community they’re so tunnel visioned. I was streaming a month ago, two months ago and someone was like Grubby is one of the best non-Korean protosses. Which he is. He is one of the best non-Korean protosses. Someone in the chat, some asshole in the chat like, “he went zero five in his group. He’s not good!”. And then you have four five people agreeing with him! I’m just like flabbergasted as to how... The only thing that was going through my head was the EG, iNcontroL “cursed” video where he’s like “Now ThorZain can’t win one hundred percent of his games, clearly he’s all washed up.” Like (laughs) how retarded can you be- Sorry, I shouldn’t say that but, how stupid can you be? I mean, because someone loses five games it means they’re not good? I mean there would be times where I would have a five zero win rate against Losira on ladder, back when Losira was in Code S. I wasn’t fucking better than Losira. I wasn’t never anywhere near Losira. It happens. It. Happens. Sometimes you don’t win. Just because... you can be good and still not win. I mean look at the New York Yankees-

So, because you didn’t like the Starcraft community, you never get anything out of it, you just decided to switch games. Right?

I switched because I couldn’t play Starcraft without playing focus. I was paranoid about so much with so much stuff going on in life. Like life not even Starcraft. Because it’s scary to be in a foreign country at my age without a sponsorship. Like a real sponsorship paying for everything I’m doing. So I had a lot more on the mind, so I couldn’t be the player I would want to be, or that I could be. I played Starcraft 2, as one tenth as much as other people on the ladder and I was still able to keep up with them, that’s why I continued to play. That’s why I will continue to play after long breaks and jump right back in. I don’t know. It’s something else for me to keep playing this game and not having to play much to keep up, with other people. I was never best in a class of the best or I was never in Code S level. Or anything like that. I wasn’t an IdrA or a Stephano or anything like that. I never played as much of them, and yet I was able to keep playing at a very high level.

So I hold it: what would have happened if I was stable, and I was able to play... like what I dream, ten to twelve hours a day. I hold that in my mind. And that’s why I keep playing sometimes. But League Of Legends, I switched because... I don’t know the whole house plays it. When you have fifteen Korean boys your age playing League and you can’t really talk to them about anything it’s kind of weird. And my only friend here, I only had two friends: AlanKing, MVP.AlanKing and MVP.imp who’s now my undisputably my best friend in Korea. I wanted to connect more and more with them. And as I’m getting closer to the team, the coaches start asking me for stuff regarding non-Korean stuff: media, twitter, MLG’s information, translations stuff and I kind of help out that way. And I couldn’t be happier like living with the MVP players.

So... you never considered going back to America this entire time.

America... is not an option for me. America would break me mentally if I did. I don’t like the country.

So do you see yourself like Rekrul or Jinro and just staying in Korea for pretty much the rest of your life? If you can manage it?

Well I’m trying to get PR, I think I have three more years until I get PR. Permanent Residency. So that’s what I’m aiming for. I don’t want to return to America.

What was your standing with the MVP team then, and what is your standing with the team now? Were you just a guest, a practice partner, an actual part of the team. What was your official position with the team then, and what about now with Starcraft 2.

I just knew the coach. That was the only connection, basically the coach was the former MVP B coach, and the former Pro S coach. He’s also considered... “god-tier”? In like games. He’s actually the owner of the Brain and Fish clan which a lot of the pro gamers grew up on. A lot of them remember him. So I respect him a lot and he’s helped me out a lot. So he was my only connection coming into the house. I was obviously friends with Coach Choi, well I mean that’s how non-Koreans will say it but it’s Coach “Cheh” (최), but obviously that’s kind of irrelevant since I was living here. That was my only connection to this house.

The view outside the MVP house

Since coming here I have a lot of stability. My financial situation was improved drastically. And I’m very stable now. But, the stability it doesn’t repair damage done. So returning to Starcraft 2, I’ve been slow returning since I’m stable now but it’s not there’s still so much damage. So much weight still from like everything. So, even though I slowly started playing again, I still play League, I still hang out all the members here, I still talk to all the members. I pay attention to that but, you know Heart Of The Swarm is coming out soon and some stuff with KeSPA, so there is chance, if there is a timing to come back it’s going to be within the next month or two. To really, full heartedly coming come back.

Could you describe your experience playing League Of Legends then? Give us a quick summary of your career. What brought you back to Starcraft 2 even though you were disgusted with the community.

I wasn’t disgusted with the community. I was disgusted with how some of the community acted towards me. Like they don’t realize that the way that they act towards me isn’t even relevant, just the way they act in general is killing the game. And it’s not about me, it goes beyond that. It’s how they act about everything like how “Starcraft 2 is dying” or like the whole Destiny post. Like you can’t act like that, it’s not good for the game it’s not beneficial.

For League Of Legends I had zero experience in any MOBAs. I started League Of Legends in August or September. So I’ve only been playing three or four months if you include breaks. I hit 2K ELO on the NA server with like 300 ping? And I did that in eighty games from an account that was stuck in quote in quote “ELO hell”. And on the Korean server I peaked at 1790 ELO. Which. Anyone that understands League Of Legends ELO, understands that Korean server ELO is drastically different from the other servers.

But I never. I never considered myself professional in League Of Legends, but I did play a lot. I do un derstand the game a lot, obviously I’m very grateful I’m able to live with the MVP LoL players. Learn off of them. But I’m not anywhere near professional but, I only played it a few months. I only have less that two thousand games at this ELO. You have people like Destiny who switch and three thousand normals, over thirteen hundred ranked games and can’t break out of fifteen hundred playing Draven. At least I’m not that.

Your popularity took a big hit after the Red Bull Battlegrounds and the switch to League Of Legends. Some of the SC2 fans felt that you betrayed them, switch over to another game because you didn’t care. How are you going to rebuild the fan base you had before? Or is it more important to prioritize increasing your skill and being the best player possible in Korea.

Are you talking about my viewer base dropping?

Yeah, and... Do you have any plans to try and bring it back up or are you going to just focus on being a better player and not worrying about your fan base whether it’s big or small.

I never really cared about popularity or stardom. If I did I would have been whoring myself out like the other “personalities” that stream. I would have been making Vlogs daily even though it would be stressful to make the Vlog like something goes wrong with the audio, and I have to restate everything again. But I like, if I cared about my fame you wouldn’t see my talk honest. You would have seen me bullshit. You wouldn’t have seen be honest. You wouldn’t see the comments I used to make, because they were facts or just how I thought. You wouldn’t see that.

I said I’m not going not be a superficial barbie and be like “Oh! He’s a really great player and I think, I’m the underdog going into this match!” Even though in the back of their head they’re saying that they’re going to completely destroy the person they’re going up against, and they probably don’t think very highly of them. So rather than talk like that I figure I’d rather talk honesty.

Do you think there’s anybody in the community whose honest and opposite of those people you just described?

Hmm...

I mean if there are any.

No well of course there are. IdrA is honest. IdrA got a lot of shit too, I mean I don’t know why IdrA got shit too. IdrA spoke his mind and he got shit for it. Stephano to my knowledge used to speak his mind somewhat. There’s people you just have to look for.

Basically the public will see only what they want to see. I remember there was a scandal where Total Biscuit said “faggot” on stream or something. Stephano was then livestreaming and called someone a faggot and no one gave a shit because it’s Stephano. It all depends on who you are and that’s it. That’s really all it really is. Like Parting, if you look at his Korean interviews, people think he is like kidding with his pseudo-bad manner and calling people out. He’s not kidding. He’s actually bad manner (laughs)! He’s not kidding. There’s a lot of Koreans like I said earlier in the interview that are extremely bad manner. Like they just don’t care! They’ll say they’re bad or whatever. They are there, it’s just a matter of: do you want to see it or not.

What are your goals for 2013, and your Starcraft 2 career? Where do you want to be in the next year, in the next two years.

I don’t even know how to answer that. I mean, I go back three months and I’m playing LoL. I go six months and I’m still playing Starcraft 2. I go back nine months and I’m streaming a lot and I have high numbers in viewers and whatever. My life changes way too rapidly for me even entertain the idea of trying to predict anything in my life. It’s too weird. I have a lot of potential stuff that could come at the end of this year but. I don't’ know. Nothing that’s factual, or... I don’t.

So there’s nothing you’re strivings towards. You’re just playing and doing your own thing?

Yeah pretty much much. I can’t really, I can’t strive anything when there’s so much uncertainty.

How do you measure your progress in skill, when you’re not playing in tournaments like other players are. Do you just base it on the ladder, or how you think you are playing?

I think... judging skill or measuring skill or anything like that. Basically a lot of people make comments like: “it doesn’t mean anything to be a ladder king, blah blah blah”. And while that’s true in SEA, NA, Europe in Starcraft 2. It’s something different on Korea. If you’re beating these Koreans when they’re in their most comfortable environment. They’re on the desk and the chair that they play on sixteen hours a day, you know, everyday, for months on end. When you beat them in that setting over the course of thousands of games.

Because I’m not a foreigner that plays... Polt at MLG in a best of three and I get lucky two games in a row with baneling bust or something. That’s not what I did in Korea. I played these Koreans in Code A, Code B, Code S whatever tons and tons and tons of times. More than any other non-Korean, maybe except for Juan, MajOr. I played more, which means I have more games and it also means I have a lot more losses than any other non-Korean. But I know who my friends were in Korea, in customs and practice games. I know that Koreans used to request me and practice with me whatever. I know the truth. It didn’t really matter. People that were important knew the truth: Tasteless, Artosis etc., People who actually knew the truth, and that’s why they supported me. So that’s all that mattered.

A lot of the big name Starcraft 2 players are starting to switch over to Heart Of The Swarm, players like ClouD, Ret, IdrA, DemusliM. What are you doing to prepare for Heart Of The Swarm.

I think a lot of foreign players are switching over to Heart Of The Swarm because they recognize there’s nothing for them in Wings Of Liberty. That’s just the god honest truth. And they hope to get lucky the same way some foreigners got lucky in the early release of Starcraft 2 with foreigners versus Koreans; So they can have their fifteen minutes of limelight basically in Heart of the Swarm before the Koreans again catch up.

Because Koreans aren’t playing the beta. Tier three Koreans are playing the Beta. No one really important is playing the beta, so foreigners again are going to have a head start. And they’ll have their little wins over Koreans at major international events in Heart Of The Swarm because they’ll come up with a build that no one discovered yet and they’ll get a lucky win whatever. And they’ll be hailed for because that’s how people look at it.

What are you doing though?

I’m playing Wings. I’m playing Wings Of Liberty. I don’t want to touch HOTS until it’s complete.

Is it because you only want to play with Koreans in Wings Of Liberty?

No, it just has to do with maintaining mechanics. I recognize there’s nothing there for me in Wings Of Liberty so the strategies part is irrelevant in Wings Of Liberty just like it’s irrelevant in Heart Of the Swarm right now. So it has nothing to do with what game I’m playing it’s just mechanics. I’m only playing to just retain mechanics right now. It has nothing to do with builds, it’s just to keep my fingers nimble I guess.

Where would you put your skill right now. In the grand scale of the Korean Ladder, where would you put yourself right now.

I’m nowhere I used to be. My focus is all over the place so, I’ve fallen off quite a lot.

In the community, we always seem to be striving for “balance”, but there’s a lot of opinions on what that even means. Some say it’s win rates, some say it’s the better player always winning, some even say it’s just natural that one race will always dominate another at a given point.

What does “balance” mean to you?

Balance... I mean unless you are amongst the top of the top of the top... there’s no real right to talk about balance unless you’re educated in the subject. High masters, low Grand Master, even mid Grand Master don’t really have a right. Unless they’re playing on an international scale, regularly playing against these really high caliber highly skilled opponents. Balance shouldn’t be... It should be talked about, the attention should be brought to it of course. But, you should also just approach it the way that some of the Koreans approach it that you just haven’t found the answer. The solution to whatever the imbalance is like in Starcraft 1. Until SaviOr came along there was no solution to Terran until SaviOr pioneered this... this... solution ZvT. That’s how Koreans approach the game, not just constantly complaining about balance so you have an excuse to feel good about yourself at night.

2012 was a rough year for Terran in general, with Protoss and Zerg players developing better builds and overall styles. Having access to some of the best Korean Terrans, you practice with them, you know them, you look at their games. Why did Terrans struggle so much in 2012, could you give us your thoughts on that?

Terran overall, it’s no...

Everyone says it, Koreans say it. Terran is a harder race to play than the other races. That’s just factual Your eyes have to at different parts of the screen, whereas Zerg doesn’t really have to look at the center or other parts of the screen. One might ask: how does this affect balance? But it actually matters a lot. Because the Zerg player can look literally just at the minimap, and not have to worry about going back to the center of their screen and worry about planting supply depots or pylons gateways assimilators, nexuses, tech. I mean they do have to go back for tech but that’s it. The queen, the inject larvae that that thing is just not acceptable. Each race has it’s own macro mechanic, but the queen by far is the fastest. You can even suck at injecting and get a free creep tumor or something. Or be bad and when a drop comes you magically have transfuse when you shouldn’t. Every terran knows about that. But basically: Terran is a harder race to play. It has nothing to do with players or whatever. It’s just an overall harder race.

The other thing is that basically Terran for the last two years has been doing the same exact shit. For two years. It’s only recently in early 2012, late 2012, that Zerg and Protoss discovered all the cute answers to these Terran builds. And Terran players are just like “Oh they found an answer, let me try finding an answer for their answer!” And there’s not one. Terran doesn’t have an answer to their answer. Terran just has to play better. Terran actually just has to completely outplay and outmaneuver their opponent. Using a completely predictable and completely methodical style, whereas Protoss and Zerg they have fifty billion things they can do. Obviously they’re all scoutable, I’m not trying to talk like Avilo who says that there’s fifty billion things they can do, Protoss players that is. That’s not true, you just have to look at their mineral counts and their assimilators mined. And it tells you what they can and can’t have. You just have to learn to look at the game differently.

But basically, Terran it’s just like... I don’t even know. If I want to compare this to poker, it would be like how all the old poker players, if you had top pair, top kicker, ten years ago you were golden. But now in this day and age if you have top pair, top kicker you’re still probably behind. What I mean by this is that while these old poker players can still play their old predictable methodical styles; You have this new gen, which are the new builds of Protoss and Zerg, with these weird angles of you know, bluff catchers, catchers, semi-bluffs... whatever. And the methodical style actually has to outmaneuver the maniac and just outplay him and win. That’s just how it is.

Terran doesn’t have a way to play crazy. Well, I mean they can play crazy, obviously. But all of their builds are solved. All of their playstyles is solved. It’s just a matter of playing better than the Terran or the Terran playing better than you. The answers, the builds that answer the Terran builds, can not be solved. There is nothing that Terran can do to answer them. Except play better. That’s why Terrans struggle.

Right now, what are modern Terran players trying to do to overcome that problem in the metagame besides “playing better”. Stylistically are they trying to focus their efforts on something to overcome the race’s weaknesses? Is there some shift occurring in Korea that we aren't’ seeing in the foreigner community?

In... In the foreigner community? What do you mean? Like how Terrans can

Is it-

The reason foreign Terrans suck is because they don’t have mechanics. But the reason why they don’t have mechanics is because they’re not living in team houses and they’re not learning mechanical things.

If you take a Korean Terran’s left keyboard hand it’s going be a thousand times more advanced than a non-Korean Terran’s. It’s going to be more dexterous, it’s going to be more versatile, it’s going to pull off more things. In a faster cycle or rotation or cycle than a non-Korean’s. The Korean’s accuracy is going to be better. His precision is going to be better. Basically in Korea: Terrans will do the same build. Every day. Every time. They just refine and it over and over and over because they know that there’s nothing new for Terran to do. They just have to keep getting better at the keyboard.

Non-Korean Terrans are inept to this concept. And they try to win with these random ass builds instead of working on their mechanics. If you look like Juan and Kas... or ThorZain. The three best non-Korean Terrans or whatever. They don’t do any flashy things. They do same boring dull shit over and over and over the way Terran should be played. The way that Koreans play it. And they just happen to be the best. That’s it. You don’t say that Terran has to be the strategically out thinking race etc. etc. You just have to improve mechanics. The problem is non-Korean Terrans don’t have mechanics.

In fact, non-Koreans in general don’t have mechanics except for a few of them: Scarlett, Stephano, IdrA, Ret etc. People don’t know how to get mechanics. My mechanics improved a lot because I lived in a team house. I got to see all these different styles of screen control, mouse control, of hand control on the keyboard. Things I never would have learned without Korea. Non-Koreans just don’t have that. And it’s not their fault. It’s not their fault that they’re bad at mechanics. It’s just how it is.

But then you have these non-Koreans making these team houses, sometimes. Not all the time. I’m not talking about proper team houses like the Evil Geniuses’ Lair, which is a proper team house. I’m talking about like Complexity. Now they did pull GanZi in. But GanZi was not known for his mechanics. Obviously he is an excellent player but the thing is, you can’t make a team house. Put a bunch of C and B grade students into it and expect them to get an A. You have to put a bunch of C or B students, and put two or three A students to show how them to be A class students. You can’t like-

So you’re saying they need a role model, someone that can teach them how to be like them.

Right! Because any mechanics they would be learning off each other is improper mechanics. It’s not. You need Koreans, who actually have been in Korea and knows how to coordinate true mechanics and whatever. You can’t just watch a livestream and learn by watching their screen, first person view. Because you can see the mouse clicks and how they’re doing it, but you’re not seeing how they do it physically. And that actually matters. Like I said earlier with something that I pulled off of Juan is that. Actually I pulled two things from Juan: how to hotkey “0” without right control (E/N: Again, they put their CC’s on 0) and how to build SCVs in a way that allows me to hit the F4, F5, F6 keys for location screens at the same time. Which is really vital to transfering SCVs the fastest possible way. So that’s good. That’s a little niche thing. And that’s what matters at the pro level. These little niche things. Microtechniques that snowball like a snowman into an advantage.

I’d like to talk about strategy in the game, specifically mechanical play, because I know you are a big believer in it, and watching your stream you are always going for these mech plays, even versus Protoss.

So I’d like to begin with: why does it appeal to you so much? Why keep going mech when a lot of Korean Terrans just treat mech as something you throw in a best of five to throw off their opponent. Why do you keep going back to mech as your “base”?

When I was going mech around Red Bull, I did it just to throw them off. I think mech is horrible, TvP. Flat honsetly: mech is absolutely fucking terrible (versus Protoss). When I was preparing for Squirtle, Parting, Puzzle whatever, or Parting Puzzle which later became Parting Squirtle, I had a loss rate in practice. With mech. Mech isn’t good (versus Protoss).

What about the other races then? Versus Terran and versus Zerg. What do you like about it.

Terran vs Terran it lets the better player recover in the same way that mech versus bio, the better player wins. That sort of thing. In TvT in the greatest thing, which I want to bring up, is you never see a non-Korean Terran take down a Korean Zerg Protoss or Terran. Very very rarely will it happen, and if it does it’s often a top top non-Korean Terran taking out a tier three or a tier two Korean Protoss Zerg or Terran. You never see a non-Korean take down a top tier Korean Terran, except for ThorZain versus Polt that one time. Like a really long time ago, that was it.

Basically, the thing about mech is that better player will win. It gives them ability to recover, be safe and outplay, outmaneuver. And use the greatest strengths of Terran: which is timing, methodical nature, etc. etc. When it comes to TvT, bio versus mech. If the bio player is better the bio player will win. If the mech player is better the mech player will win. If the mech player and the bio player has a small lead, then the mech player can come back. Because it’s mech. If the bio player is better than the mech player, and the mech player has a small lead, it’s a bitch to come back, but not as much as it is with mech.

In Terran versus Zerg. I believe that if you make a dream composition or a perfect composition in TvZ. With Zerg, with the units that it has and the way that it works. Unlike Starcraft 1, Zerg does not have an answer for mech. If you build it perfectly. If you make all the correct decisions. If you play perfectly, which is what all Terrans should aspire to. Which everyone should want to do. Then it is imbalanced in favor of Terran. I’m not saying perfect AI, perfect micro whatever. I’m saying you’re in the right places at the right time, you’re hitting in the right times, you’re expanding correctly, you’re upgrading correctly. You’re making the right composition. Terran versus Zerg, mech, I did not believe Zerg had an answer to it. Heart Of The Swarm obviously things are going to be different but in Wings Of Liberty that’s what I honestly believed and that’s why I played it.

What are the vulnerabilities of mechanical play? When you are playing mech, what are you worried about in TvT, TvZ?

If I’m playing against Protoss it’s just going to be are they flipping a coin and magically make three robotics. All I’m really worried about. If I’m on the ladder and I’m playing mech versus Protoss it’s generally because I don’t recognize their name, and I don’t want to play against them because it’s a waste of time. It’s just how I view it, that’s how a lot of other Koreans view it if they don’t recognize the name. Just try to all in get the game over with. Use it as a test. Can you survive this? Can you survive this cheese, can you survive that cheese. Then the next game I’ll show respect and play bionic or something.

Versus Zerg the only thing I’m really worried about is the raven transition, that would be the thing. If I made it to the raven transition I won most of the time. In TvT, I never really felt worried playing mech. I would play against really high level Terrans like IM.Happy, IM.YoDa, Gumiho, ASD etc. I was never really worried about TvT. I’m not as good as them, I never was good as them but. I wasn’t worried in TvT. The only thing I was really worried in TvT was build order loss but I found a build towards May, June, and found a build that counters 90% of the builds in TvT. Some players have started using it, it’s just a variation of a 15 CC. But yeah. That’s all that I was really worried about TvT.

IM.MVP at IEM Cologne popularised the Hellion Thor Banshee mixture of mech, and I think more importantly he really showcased the power of ravens, even for Blizzard to prevent giving them a balance update.

Everyone knows ravens are the ultimate end goal for Terran versus Zerg, but it seems like no one really knows how to get to that point. With considerations to mechanical play, how does a Terran player in today’s environment get to those ravens, how does he get to that end game?

I mean, getting to ravens is all about understanding timings, gas control, economy management etc. For instance if a Zerg has, only- If you’re containing him to six gas geysers, and he’s shown you, let’s say you scan his base at 9:30 and he has 250 gas mined out of both extractors. That means 500 gas is coming out of those extractors. He had 300 from the first scan at like 5:30. So that’s 800 gas. So you put 100 into metabolic boost, 100 into lair tech, let’s say he has glial reconstitution, and then he has plus one melee, plus one carapace, that’s almost eating up all of his gas. And that’s at 9:30 ok? Now let’s say at 12 minute, you know he’s on six geysers, you can assume that he’s mining 120 gas per minute is coming out those geysers ok? So that’s roughly 490 gas whatever, but you also have the six geysers coming in. So that’s about 620 per minute. So let’s say at 15 minutes he shows up with 15 infestors. You don’t have to worrry about 12 broodlords morphing in, you don’t have to worry about 8 corrupters waiting in the horizon.

This is what, what people don’t understand: the Zerg can’t control that. He can’t magically show up with 1000 extra gas. He can’t control that his drones mine at a fixed rate, he can’t control that he can only get 180 gas per minute per vespene geyser. That means if you can lock him, with vision and timing on a set amount of bases, you can always mathematically know exactly what he is capable of, and exactly what kind of gas composition he can, which all you need to worry about with mech.

With all that we have said in consideration, where is your play at right now? What are you doing in each of the match ups, and what are you focusing on in each of the match ups?

My playstyle is how it’s always been: very passive, defensive trying to get to the end game Flash style. Starcraft 1 Flash style. Obviously I find a lot of inspiration watching Flash play in Starcraft 2. But I still love doing craziness, crazy proxy barracks, into banshees and whatever. It’s still the same defensive, hyper defensive thing that I’ve always done.

There’s a lot of complaints from Terran players right now that Heart Of The Swarm doesn’t feel really new, that the new changes to Heart Of The Swarm aren’t very signifigant compared to the other races. And I know you haven’t played a lot of Heart Of The Swarm but I’d just like to ask your opinion on the expansion. Anything you like, don’t like?

I haven’t payed attention to any of the balance changes. I just don’t pay attention to HOTS.

Well how about with Wings Of Liberty in perspective, what would you like Blizzard to kind of address in HOTS.

To my knowledge they’ve added a lot of micro intensive and multi task intensive things to Protoss and Zerg, whereas they’ve added a lot of straight foward A-Move braindead stuff to Terran. So in a weird, weird way, they’ve kind of taken some of the pressure off how Terran has to be looking at all different parts of the screen due to how the race is. Like I said this goes back to the whole eye control thing. Which I think at some tournament there was some eye scanner thing (E/N: Lone Star Clash 2) which measured how the players were looking at the screen. It showed where their eyes were looking wherever. All that was going through my head was, was how if you put a KeSPA player up against a Korean player. How different the screen would look under that eye scanner thing.

But basically the way I see it is that they’ve added a whole lot of multitask intensive units to Zerg and Protoss. And they have seem to added braindead or luxury skills to Terran units, or already created Terran units. So basically they’ve taken some pressure off how Terran has to be all over the place, by adding that similar pressure to it’s opposing races.

Would you still play the game if it stopped becoming fun? Would you just play the game to be competitive? Do you still enjoy the game right now?

I only play games for their competitiveness. I can’t play a game just to have fun. I’ve said this many many times. If there wasn’t a pro scene I wouldn’t play. That’s just how it is. If Starcraft 2’s pro scene died tomorrow I would just completely stop. I can’t play a game without a highly competitive scene in it. Even if it’s just for fun I can’t do it.

Do you have any closing thoughts or comments? I think we’ve reached the end of this interview.

Nothing off the top of my head I guess.

Where can we follow you? Social media, Facebook, Twitter?

I don’t use twitter anymore. I mean I still accept friend adds on Facebook and stuff. I stream from time to time. My facebook, everything is public.

All the links are on my twitter which is just @Im_ls but I don’t tweet anymore.

I have a twitch.tv which is just im_ls and then Facebook: imnadc.

Do you have any messages to your fans or the readers of the interview or maybe the people watching the livestream right now?

I don’t know. If people are reading this interview, I hope you can view it from a... a different standpoint. That there’s much more going on, that there’s much more than meets the eye. Not just for me, but for everyone. So judgements shouldn’t be passed, and additionally like... I don’t know. I mean there’s more to say, but I don’t know how to actually word it.

I think we’ll just leave it at that.

Yeah that’s fine.

Thanks for answering all these questions, you practically gave the interview yourself!

(laughs)

Haha, yeah. Thanks.

Lastshadow and MVP.Ming (Support)

This section was recorded a day after the original interview. LastShadow felt very strongly about the topic of this additional piece, and wanted to share his thoughts on the matter.

A branch off what I said in the interview before with Grubby going 0-5 and people saying that “Grubby isn’t good because he went 0-5”, and how I got flamed for my performance at Red Bull. There’s a lot of instances in the world, in the eSports and games; Where professional players can be made to look like completely amateurs because of random variables.

The most recent example that comes to mind because it happened in a finals. And it was the most one sided domination that I had seen in pro gaming in a very long time: it happened at the most recent IEM, in the League Of Legends finals between M5, or now Gambit Gaming and Azubu Blaze. And basically if you watch those games start to finish, it was... I mean I shouldn’t say rape in an interview but that doesn’t even begin to touch on how badly M5 completely obliterated Azubu Blaze.

If you were to watch Azubu Blaze for the first time and you were a new spectator and picked up and watched it for the first time you would assume that Azubu Blaze is actually this tier three Korean team that was bad, because they were being made to look by fools by M5. The truth of the matter is, is that Azubu Blaze is probably one of the top three teams in the world in League Of Legends. And they just had off games or M5 just had god-tier games.

But even that’s irrelevant because what happened to me at Red Bull, Grubby in that group where he went 0-5, and people flamed him; What happened to these other players... I think there’s some player named Monchi or something who recently had a good showing. But 2 months ago he went like 0-10, or 1 and 10 in some group. Just because people lose on one day. You can’t judge a player by 10 games. You actually just can’t. You have to judge them over the course of 100’s of games.

It’s why Koreans don’t care about whether they lose to a foreigner in a Bo3 at an MLG. It’s why they won’t admire a foreigner unless they really- There’s a quote by Stu Ungar, who’s a legendary poker player, that "any idiot can win a championship, but it takes a true champion to defend his title". If you were to be a poker player and you play heads up 1v1 versus someone. If you beat them 10 heads up in a row sit and go style, you still couldn’t tell if they were good or bad at poker, you actually just couldn’t.

Any poker professional, any semipro in poker will tell you it takes tens of thousands of hands against a single player. Maybe not tens of thousands, maybe just thousands depending on the level but to understand where they are in poker takes a very long time. Poker is faster than Starcraft, it takes a lot longer to see if someone is incorrect. It just doesn’t apply to me like I said.

And there are numerous examples where good players are made to look like complete newbies. I could list so many examples of players like Bomber, one of the best TvPers in the world losing in 8 minutes, like a complete platinum player in TvP or something. Which I actually think happened in the Red Bull touranment with an all in.

People just don’t understand that you can’t just view someone with one game, it just wouldn’t be right. Anyone with a brain can’t cognitively state someone’s skill level based on a series of a few games, it just doesn’t actually mean anything. And the biggest example of that, most recently; Yes it is in a different game but it’s M5 vs Azubu Blaze at IEM.

So you would just like people to stop judging players on just: a bad day, a bad showing, bad result.

Until there’s a mass consistency. Obviously if Grubby went 0-5 at that tournament, 0-5 at the next, 0-5 at the next, 0-5 and the next. Yes, it would be safe to say that he wasn’t a good player. But the truth of the matter is that Grubby is one of the best non-Korean protosses hands down. There’s no arguing that. Even if he’s bad mechanically, his knowledge of the game is still sound.

Knowledge is what people strive to build, not necessarily mechanics. Obviously mechanics are built through mass repetition, muscle memory whatever. But the strategy, and how he understands the game is so many levels above non-Koreans. So it doesn’t matter if he performs mechanically poorly that day, he still retains all the knowledge that day and learns more so that’s kind of irrelevant.

But if you have these people that are typing up on TL live report threads about how bad people are about how a player’s doing poorly in one tournament or how someone is washed up because they can’t win 100% of their games. It’s just not good for the game, because they appear like those 50, 60 year old grandpas at bars drinking whiskey, telling football players why they’re making mistakes in the game, yelling at the TV screen at the bar. When the truth of the matter is, is that if they were anywhere near their level, they wouldn’t be sitting at silver, gold platinum. They actually can’t comprehend what’s going on so they shouldn’t even open their mouths. They should accept that they can’t think at that level, they can’t play at that level. And thus they should reserve their comments and not want to sound like ignorant idiots.

I got so pissed when they were saying that about Grubby because he went 0-5 in a group. I can’t stress how ridiculous that comment is. But it doesn’t just happen to Grubby it happens to so many people. And it’s just not fair, it’s just not right.

I completely forgot yesterday. I want to thank Cara, Day9's mom, who basically acted like a mother to me at a lot of various times and whom I'm really grateful for all the support she has given me with talks and such since I met her last year. As well as Tastosis/Wolf/Day9 for everything they've done for me and much I'm grateful for their friendship. I'm also super regretful about how ungrateful I was about being able to talk to and have guidance from previously, Victor Martyn, prior to entering into 2012, I wish I could've acted differently, as I recognize everything now.

Song Ho Young, was a veteran of the SC1 scene. Having lived the progaming life for nearly ten years, he had experienced many things, and carried with him the burdens of the B - Teamer.
Hopes and dreams that he had when he began his journey, the crushing realities, and the hopes and dreams he had when he decided to start again.

When Song Ho Young first decided to switch over to SC2, he seemed a little lost. Playing on the NA ladder for an unknown team, losing the support of the many SC1 fans on Team Liquid, he didn’t look like the former professional SC1 player streaming his Fish games on Afreeca and teamliquid. There had to be a reason for this, there had to have been a story to tell, and so on Feburary 21st, three young Koreans came together to share the story of SKT T1 In_Dove, and the hopes and dreams he had for SC2.

The next day, the SC2 community was introduced to a man from a different era. Receiving interest from players and fans, Song Ho Young was surprised and humbled by the support he received.

But the fairy tale wasn’t meant meant to be. Unfeatured by Team Liquid, cast aside by foreign teams, and continually frustrated with the game, In_Dove, the progamer who had given everything he had for years chose to retire. 23 years old, with no education, employment or work experience, Song Ho Young chose to put his progaming past behind him.

We name Project Dove after him, not because we have regrets about his career, but because we respect his decision to move on with his life. We were happy to have been able to let In_Dove’s tale be told, and even happier that Song Ho Young was able to set aside old regrets and burdens for his own sake and future. And so we wish for others to have that same opportunity to share their story as well.

Ji Hoon Park (박지훈), affectionately called “totteur” by his younger sister, and known as “Rylzey” elsewhere, is a young teenage graphics designer from France. Volunteering his services for his online friends, he hopes to one day make a living as a professional graphics designer. Jihoon enjoys Korean and other Asian cultures, playing the PS3 and watching/playing SC2. You can find his twitter here.

Sang Hoon Park (박상훈), known as “Gamegene” in the SC community, is a Korean American student living in Los Angeles. Developing a passion for Starcraft 1 after living in Korea for half a year, he now plays SC2 semi-competitively on his livestream. A former running athlete, he enjoys the challenge of the game. You can find his twitter here.

Christopher Jo, better known as “rotinegg”, is a Korean software engineer living in the United States. Experiencing the PC Bang craze first hand as a kid, he has an amazing passion for Brood War. Enjoying playing and watching it the most out of any game, he does his best to give the SC1 scene whatever support he can. Despite his incredibly busy schedule and his self admitted bias towards SC1, he has agreed to lend his superb translation and conversation skills to Project Dove. You can find his very intriguing blogs on Korean culture here.

Long ago, the journey began with one man's dream: SKT T1 In_Dove

The man, the myth, the pizzamaker?! ST_Legend

Be sure to follow us at @ProjectDoveSC for updates, upcoming interviews. Tweet at us and let us know if you have any questions you would like asked, or if you want someone to be interviewed!

Have a suggestion? Do you know an interesting person in our community? Are you able to introduce us? Contact us at ProjectDoveSC@gmail.com OR PM Gamegene on Team Liquid.

John Madden

American Samoa894 Posts

January 25 2013 18:14 GMT

Goddaamn, girl you got it going on.

BisuDagger

Bisutopia19141 Posts

January 25 2013 18:24 GMT

I actually came here because I thought this interview was about In_Dove. This was very long so I didnt read it all but Lastshadow interviewed really well and I liked his responses to the red bull lan.

phoenixfeather95

665 Posts

January 25 2013 18:41 GMT

Oh wow.
Sorry to hear about the Red Bull LAN...

NervO

Netherlands511 Posts

January 25 2013 18:45 GMT

Really awesome

I love LastShadow :D Even though I got mad at him when he switched LoL (I still understood the choiche though). I really hope he can come back to Hots because I love him, his play is so smart ^_^.

KaiserKieran

United States615 Posts

January 25 2013 18:45 GMT

I hope he does well in the upcoming months. He deserves it.
Imls fighting

Talack

Canada2742 Posts

January 25 2013 18:46 GMT

More evidence of how horrible the starcraft community can be, guy goes to an event to try and play professional starcraft and doesn't do that well. So he gets his entire career ruined over it.

StarVe

Germany13591 Posts

January 25 2013 18:47 GMT

That's one in-depth interview. Good content, didn't expect such a long text when I clicked this.

MayorITC

Korea (South)798 Posts

January 25 2013 18:51 GMT

Once you go Korea, you never go back. I'm glad to hear he's loving Korea. Underneath all atmospheric racism, there are genuine individuals who don't care about stuff like that. Glad to hear lastshadow found himself good friends/family.

Emzeeshady

Canada4203 Posts

January 25 2013 18:53 GMT

#10

--- Nuked ---

AyaaLa

Spain629 Posts

January 25 2013 18:55 GMT

#11

awesome interview. thanks for doing this

rawb

United States252 Posts

January 25 2013 18:55 GMT

#12

I just spent my entire lunch break reading the entire thing. I can not even imagine what it was like having to deal with a string of events that crazy, then having to play back to back bo3s vs some of the best players in the world. Let alone being flamed for doing poorly in them.

Finalmastery

United States58 Posts

January 25 2013 19:07 GMT

#13

As always it's very interesting to learn more about the players we have all come to know in the community. Great work as always!

neoghaleon55

United States7434 Posts

January 25 2013 19:10 GMT

#14

Thank you project dove!
This is absolutely astonishing material that you got here.

That being said.
It seems Last Shadow is just playing without purpose.
What's the point, then, of being a pro-gamer?
He should quit and do something else.

iTzSnypah

United States1738 Posts

January 25 2013 19:14 GMT

#15

Holy damn, this is the realist interview I've read.

Masq

Canada1792 Posts

January 25 2013 19:16 GMT

#16

He makes it seem like the world is out to get him, when in reality he brings most of it upon himself.

Hes easily the most BM person I've ever played against, and thats saying a lot. If he stopped acting like a child maybe things would go better for him.

Mongolbonjwa

Finland376 Posts

January 25 2013 19:18 GMT

#17

Lastshadow always gives the best interviews. Interesting to know that koreans dont actually put 10 hours day into sc2

AnachronisticAnarchy

United States2957 Posts

January 25 2013 19:18 GMT

#18

Woah. That was one hell of an interview.

Saechiis

Netherlands4989 Posts

January 25 2013 19:20 GMT

#19

Really enjoy reading in depth interviews like these, thanks!

Splitting the interview in 2 or 3 parts would make things easier to read though.

On January 26 2013 04:10 neoghaleon55 wrote:
Thank you project dove!
This is absolutely astonishing material that you got here.

That being said.
It seems Last Shadow is just playing without purpose.
What's the point, then, of being a pro-gamer?
He should quit and do something else.

Clearly he has a passion for the community and Starcraft, just had a bad start.

Kasaraki

Denmark7115 Posts

January 25 2013 19:25 GMT

#20

This is an extremely huge amount of text, kudos. Very awesome content. I will try to chew through the rest later, I am only a third through or so, and tired. (Friday TT) Not really fond of Last Shadow though, his tendency to contradict himself irks me, as well as a ton of other things... I find him very hard not to dislike. *shrugs*

1 2 3 4 5 9 10 11 Next All

Please or register to reply.

[Interview] Lastshadow with Project Dove!

Completed

Ongoing

Upcoming