EPTMY STAY AT THE MINISTRY OF WIN
PREFACE
- Hi there TL!
I'm a long time lurker but an avid player and fan of Starcraft 2. I doubt anyone here really knows me, but I actually spent 3 months in the Ministry of Win gaming house in Poland last November - this January. Hopefully my thoughts don't seem too scattered in this post, I'm kind of writing things as they come to mind and then trying to organize them chronologically.
It was an amazing experience, and I wanted to share some stories and great memories of my stay. I hope you'll have as much fun reading this as I did putting it together. This really was a really amazing 3 months of my life.
BACKGROUND
- A little about me, for those that are curious: I'm currently 23 and have been playing Starcraft 2 since the launch of Wings of Liberty. I started off in Silver league and worked my way up to Master's league season one. I've always loved the game and wanted to improve, but never really got much better on the ladder past the mid-master's level on NA.
After graduating from Worcester Polytechnic Institute I went straight to work at the travel search company KAYAK, which I'm sure a lot of people may have heard of before. I stayed there for about a year and a half before deciding it wasn't quite the place for me.
Back when the Ministry of Win was running their promotion where 3 players could go stay for free for 3 months, I applied thinking, heck, why not. I didn't get picked, but Maciej did email me back saying that if I wanted to go stay in the house and pay rent, I could. He said that he could guarantee that there would be space for me in the house, and I started thinking about going.
A totally random coincidence happened around that time. A friend of a roommate of mine happened to be looking for a place to stay for 3 to 4 months, and the dates that he needed housing happened to line up perfectly with the months I was thinking about going abroad for. I woke up one morning and shot Maciej an email. Let's do this. I was excited. I was thrilled.
I left KAYAK late September and headed down to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky for two weeks with a friend of mine to go rock climbing. Those two weeks were an experience of their own, but that's a little off topic for this post
I came back up to Boston on October 22, which happened to be my birthday, and the next morning I got on a plane from Logan Airport to Warsaw. It was a pretty long flight, stopping in Iceland where a border guard that looked and sounded like Grubby stamped my passport. I landed in Warsaw and Maciej and Oliver picked me up from the airport.
GETTING SETTLED IN
- When I first arrived in the house there were quite a few people there, including:
- Targa
- fraer
- LiveZerg
- TitaN
- desRow
- MorroW
- Sage
- Destiny
- Wilko
- David "Kamacho" Lewallen, another American who was from California
I was the quiet guy when I got to the house. It took me a little while to really get to know everyone. Part of this was because I'm not a very outgoing guy in the first place, but the other part was this feeling of intimidation when you go to a gaming house and know that you are absolutely without a doubt the worst player in the house
Thankfully Wilko and David started to talk with me, and eventually I started to get to know the other players in the house. Everyone was awesome. They're just normal people that also like playing games and just happen to be really damn good at it.
There was a player manager named Michal at the time, who really helped me out when I got to the house showing me where everything was, etc. He even took me to the climbing gym that I found in Warsaw and showed me how to buy tram tickets and things like that. This was my first time in Europe; I've gone to Asia multiple times and around there I can speak Chinese and also English tends to be enough to get around. It's not quite the same in Poland… most of the younger people are happy to speak English and are pretty good at it, but the older generation seemed to mostly only speak Polish. Polish is not a language that I know how to speak. To this day the only thing I learned to say while I was there was Thank You. Dziekuje (sounds kinda like jin-ku-ya).
The routine in the house was pretty free form: mostly people got up whenever and practiced a bunch and then slept. When I got there the new cook was just starting, and the portions were a bit small since she wasn't quite used to cooking for 10+ people yet, but that only lasted a few days and honestly the food was pretty good throughout my whole stay.
For the first two weeks or so I was getting up pretty early at 10am to eat breakfast. I'd grab food and head into the gaming room where usually only a few people would be awake, GSL would be playing on the TV and we'd watch it together. I think watching GSL with the other players in the house was one of the places I learned the most. Just listening to the discussion going around significantly improved my play. Some times it's really about listening to good players discuss things just so you can start to see how they think. One reason why these guys are so good is because they see things in a different strategic light and it's really awesome to be able to learn from them.
REAL QUICK, ABOUT THE DRAMA
- I don't know exactly what happened before I was at the house, but clearly there were some problems. I just really want it to be known that Maciej the "boss" is a good guy and really is passionate about what he does regardless of how disorganized and slow to respond he can be some times
Also he liked Chrono Cross so that's a win in my book any day. A lot of the stuff that happened in the house was blown grossly out of proportion and I'm happy to answer any questions about it if people are still curious, but I really don't think it was that big of a deal.RANDOM MEMORIES FROM BEFORE DREAMHACK
- I kind of see my stay at the Ministry of Win in a few different parts, so here I'll talk about some memories I have of before I went to Sweden for Dreamhack Winter.
MorroW was in the middle of his 100-hour streaming-mcdonalds-sleeping at-least-the-stream-was-on-marathon when I got there and some time during the first few nights him and Sage were going to McDonalds and I ended up going with them. On the walk there MorroW asked me: "Are you gosu?" I laughed a little and told them I wasn't. But that I hoped to be.
As the days went on I got to know everyone better. We would often watch movies in the basement and occasionally drink together. Let me tell you something that I learned: If a Russian wants to do shots with you be damn careful with how many shots you'll end up drinking
Living in a house with a bunch of people from all around the globe is awesome. Everyone in the house spoke English, or at least tried to. I want you to be sure that I'm not making fun of people not speaking their native tongue at all, and in fact living in the house with everyone was both incredibly endearing and absolutely hilarious.
GOING TO TO THE GYM WITH TITAN
- Some of the guys in the house would go to the gym just down the street every now and then and I went with TitaN one time. TitaN is a really cool guy. Very sociable and really nice. On our walk to the gym we talked about a bunch of stuff; TitaN had been in the house for about a month and a half at that point, but before that he had never spoken even a word of English. And here we were talking about random things with a problem. Another interesting thing that he told me was that he played Starcraft because he could make more money doing that than anything else he could find in his home town in Russia. In fact as a career the only thing he could make more money doing is playing online poker. As a result there's a constant battle between wanting to play the more fun game of Starcraft and making more money playing online poker.
It turns out he has a background in health and fitness and he made quite an intense workout for the two of us. My arms were sore for days after. To add this this, we did a leg workout a couple of days after in the house. No weights involved, just things like squats and stuff… but I actually had trouble walking for a week after that. It was definitely one of the most intense workouts I've ever done.
SAGE
- I have this really funny memory of Sage playing in some random online cup and in the first round he played against a diamond zerg on Metropolis… who 6 pooled him. The room was mostly quiet during the day when people were practicing, but all of a sudden Sage is almost screaming "f'ing diamond!" We all gather around to see what is going on and he's like, almost losing because he tried to go gate-nexus, didn't scout, and lings had killed his pylon before the zealot came out. He ended up winning anyway, through some ridiculous micro.
There was this one day in the house when some Polish television station came to do a news segment on the Ministry of Win. They interviewed everyone in the house and stuff and looked around, but the funniest part came when they tried to interview Sage. Sage's English is not the best… it's good enough to communicate but they were having some trouble doing the interview, both getting the questions across and interpreting his answers. After about 10 minutes of incredible language clusterfuck MorroW leaned over and asked if they needed his help. He said he was really good at speaking retarded English and proceeded to translate the interview questions into something akin to the Simple English wikipedia pages. This still didn't quite work, and they ended up google translating the questions to Korean, having Sage answer in Korean, and saying they would translate it and put subtitles on it later. I got the feeling that they were just going to slap random subtitles on in the end though.
I'm really happy that Sage managed to find a team some time after he left the house. Around when Alt-Tab disbanded he was still in the house and agonizing over whether or not to go the Acer Cup that he ended up winning. Sage wanted to stay in the house for longer but he was going to have visa issues, and Alt-Tab only had enough money to send him back to Korea and not to the tournament. He ended up biting the bullet and paying his own way to get there and fortunately ended up winning it. We watched his games from the house, especially a nail biting series between him and HasuObs where they had this crazy base trade game on Entombed. Actually we were all ripping our hair out because both players were making some really questionable decisions, but it was a really exciting game none the less.
I moved into Sage's seat after he left so I would be a little less isolated; I was at the end of the table on the other side of the room before but now I sat next to MorroW and Destiny. MorroW hadn't realized that Sage wasn't coming back, so he was a little sad that he hadn't said a proper good bye to him
DREAMHACK
- In November I went to Dreamhack Winter in Jönköping with TargA, TitaN and fraer. It was an awesome experience. The town was pretty cool, there were cobble stone roads all over the place and it was super cute in general. Sweden is damn expensive though! Everything there was more expensive than in the states and a LOT more expensive than in Warsaw.
Dreamhack is nuts; it's a gigantic LAN party, except it's a little different than other LAN parties in that there are like ten thousand people there. I got to play in the open bracket of the SC2 tourney. It didn't go so well, the tables were really high and the chairs super low; I ended stacking my jackets and bags to sit on. The laptop I brought to play in the BYOC wasn't really up to the task either. It was fun anyway though.
TitaN didn't make it out of the open bracket and TargA didn't make it out of his group, but fraer got pretty far and we all watched him play against Nerchio. It was pretty close… fraer won the first game with a cool build that including starting +1 to show a +1 4 gate, building the 4 gates and doing the pressure but canceling +1 to throw down a dt shrine, which caught Nerchio off guard. I think that fraer was actually ahead in some of the games later in the series, but he ended up losing some long games.
Random other memories: We would go to the twitch player lounge to hang out when nothing was happening. I technically wasn't supposed to be in there since I had a normal player pass and not the green pro player pass, but I just walked in with them and pretended to look like I belonged there. At one point in the player lounge a bunch of people were crowded around Naniwa watching him play something… we walked over and he wasn't playing Starcraft, he was actually just playing Robot Unicorn Attack.
The Starcraft finals were pretty cool, we watched the semi-finals and they were exciting. The venue was huge and super awesome. We were actually really tired though, and ended up going back to the hotel to watch the finals on TV.
We stopped by the twitch after party just to check it out. There was a HUGE line at the door but TitaN pushed past and showed his green bracelet to get in. The woman at the door asked to see my bracelet and unfortunately it was orange so I technically couldn't get in, but she asked me if I was a player. I said yes. Then she asked me where I was from and TitaN was like "he came ALL the way from America!" Apparently that was good enough so she gave me a blue media band instead. The party was alright; open bar stopped like 5 minutes after we got there and TargA and I had to catch a bus at 3am to get to the airport so we didn't stay that long. We bid farewell to the Russians at the airport since they were flying straight home.
After Dreamhack the house emptied out a bit. It was just me, Wilko, Destiny, desRow and MorroW remaining. Destiny sort of kept to himself, since he was streaming all the time every day, but he was still a cool guy to talk to during meals and such.
MISTER MORROW
- MorroW is a hilarious guy. During weekends with big tournaments like MLG or BWC, we'd basically all not play a lot and watch all of the tournament games. I had a little google doc with some funny quotes that I wrote down during all this time. During Naniwa vs Flash at MLG Dallas, Naniwa won the first series. When the second series rolled around MorroW was like: "Flash is going to invest one of his fucks into the series and rape now." And he did.
A couple other hilarious things happened while we were in the house. If anyone's ever heard of the pretty well known GM map hacker Gerudo or NMxTricky there was a point where he was streaming himself hacking on own3d.tv. I don't remember exactly how it went down but we ended up in his chat and MorroW challenged him to a game. The hack that this guy uses is ridiculous. First of all it's a map hack, but it also gives him a production tab in the upper left and also has a blink hack built in. On top of all of this it auto makes workers for you, warns you when you're going to be supply blocked, and forcefields even have a progress bar on top of them so you know when they are going to run out.
Anyway, Gerudo tried to get us in a Skype call with him but in the end MorroW ended up just playing him on Shakuras as Zerg. (Side note that MorroW switched to 100% Terran some time when he stopped playing HoTS beta and went back to WoL for the end of it). Gerudo kept boasting about the "Gerudo Build" and how he would rape MorroW. Here's what the Gerudo build is in PvZ… FFE into stargate and robo and twilight… make 1 void ray and try to harass with it and then sit around on 2 bases and max out on blink stalkers and some immortals. 1A and let the blink hack win the game for you.
David was actually spectating the game and so I guess MorroW was cheating just a little bit but mostly MorroW just kept asking "did he take a third yet?" all the way until like the 16 minute mark when Gerudo finally attacked and MorroW just absolutely completely steam rolled him with better macro. It was a pretty hilarious night.
In December when Naniwa started streaming MorroW would hang out in his chat a bunch and one day after hearing Naniwa complain about the people on EU were too easy, MorroW was like "why don't you play a game against a real programer?" They played an impromptu game on Ohana which MorroW was completely expecting to lose but some how he eked out a win. They were talking in Swedish a bunch so I'm not sure exactly what was going on but it was a pretty funny experience nonetheless.
Oh I'd like to mention that I beat in MorroW in his last streamed game as a Zerg player. It was on TL Attack though… and MorroW was only allowed to make infested terrans (couldn't even fungal) and on top of this it was on Kulas Ravine. InControl made fun of my sim city on Kulas. To be fair it was absolutely awful but who knows how to FFE on that map anyway. I'm the "Thomas" that MorroW refers to in the video. I was going to do something fun as well but CatZ told me to just win so I did.
Go to 1h3m3s, I couldn't get the embed to start at a time correctly.
Wilko and I liked to watch anime, but MorroW was super against it. "Anime is for rapists," he declared. We were some what determined to get him to watch some thing. One night we watched the movie Brave and afterwards I suggested we watch Spirited Away. I forgot how weird that movie is and also how long it is, so that didn't quite count, but later on we'd gotten a copy of the Hobbit and MorroW really wanted to watch it. I was asleep, but apparently here's what went down.
Wilko said to MorroW: "we'll watch the Hobbit but first you have to watch an episode of Death Note with me." They watched the first episode of the show and then Wilko asked him if he still wanted to watch the Hobbit… when I woke up they'd gone through like 10 episodes of Death Note already.
And that's the day that MorroW became a rapist.
The walk to the gas station/McDonalds was about 15 minutes or so. We'd go there to get snacks and stuff and also a nearby super market. We'd noticed before that from outside the house you could see the McDonalds sign that was pretty close and that the way to get there was actually pretty roundabout. At some point desRow manned up and went straight through the woods behind the house to get there and it turned out that going that way was WAY shorter. The walk shortened to about 5 minutes, but the route involved a few really steep hills, a creek that you had to cross over on a thin plank of wood and also the area just kind of looked like post-apocalypse also.
I woke up one day during one of the MLGs and for some reason desRow, MorroW, and David had decided to drink a bit already. We ended up drinking during the tournament and later that night we were all pretty drunk and decided that we should go to the store to get something to eat. I walked out of the house and was like "let's go the fast way it's way better!" It was really dark outside and I was really the only one in the house with appropriate footwear for mucking through the area so no one really wanted to go. I declared that I was going to go anyway and MorroW just ran over and tackled me to the ground and wouldn't let me go. He kept on saying that I shouldn't go that way because he was worried I would die.
Overall sitting next to MorroW was a blast. Thanks MorroW, even if you are a self-declared soulless ginger.
MINISTRY OF
- Around Christmas time only MorroW, Wilko and I were left. Most people had left at the end of November due to hitting their 3 month visa limits. MorroW left the house for the holidays and went home to Sweden, so for a week and a half or so it was just me and Wilko in the house. We got pretty close and it was great to have someone around my level to talk to about strategy and stuff. Wilko brought back a game cube with him when he went home to Germany for a bit and we played a bunch of Smash Bros Melee.
JANUARY
- In January right after new years two more players came to the house, BabyToss from the Czech Republic and Cube from Austria. Around this time the final season of WoL was starting so I got on NA before ladder lock and played a bunch of games. The night of the ladder lock I ended up playing a total of 55 games and finally got this:
![[image loading]](http://tliu.org/rank1.png)
I also played in a few IPL 6 qualifiers and took a game off Hendralisk in one of them so that was cool.
I got to know Cube pretty well too, he is a cool guy. He was a medic for a year before he started to play Starcraft full time and has some really crazy stories about it. We trolled Wilko's stream one day when he disappeared randomly for a bit and played some unranked games on his account. This pretty funny video came out of it:
The last two weeks or so that I was in the house Millenium's League of Legends team was also around. They ended up being pretty cool guys, despite being pretty noisy when they were practicing
Karim "ImSoFresh" and I some what hit it off since we were both climbers. We actually got to go climbing at one point at a random gym in Warsaw and that was pretty cool. Haydal played a bunch of Mario Party with us as well, there was one ridiculous night where something possessed Haydal, Cube, Wilko and I to try to set the record on this mini game called Snowwhirled (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sslgAPNWRgA awful video, I know). It's a mini game where you have to press A B X Y in sequence on the controller to get your character to spin and you try to spin as many time as you can before you hit the ground. I think we tried to do it for like 6 hours maybe. We got so intense that we'd turn the sound off so that we could hear the rhythmic button mashing. I don't know exactly how long we were in the basement trying that for but it was pretty light outside when we finally stopped.
The Millennium guys threw a bunch of parties for random reasons so we had quite some fun with them. It happened more than once that we'd have drunk some and Cube and I and some times Tabzz would go into the sauna and talk about random shit. Good times
COMING HOME
- I left late January to come back to the States. I remember specifically giving Wilko and Cube hugs and Wilko telling me he would miss me. I miss you guys too
I actually accidentally overstayed my visa by 3 days and I got caught up in Helsinki on the way out where they fined me 60 euro. Oops.WHERE I AM NOW
- I'm not playing Starcraft full time any more. I found it hard to motivate myself to play all alone in my house without anyone to talk to, so I ended up going and getting another job. I absolutely don't regret going. I learned a lot and met a lot of awesome people. It was an experience of a life time and I really had a lot of fun.
I started a new job recently at HubSpot and I'm pretty happy and learning a lot. It's hard to juggle multiple passions and be really good at everything, but I try. I'm still playing Starcraft and HoTS is a lot of fun
Maybe some day you'll still see me at an MLG! And hopefully another day I'll get to hang out with everyone from the house again. As I wrote this I started to miss those days in the MInistry of Win, it really was a great place.
-Thomas "Hispid" Liu
![[image loading]](https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/528850_10151432364076419_1808742786_n.jpg)
