I've watched all the big Beta tournaments, paid for every season of GSL, and followed most of the BW leagues since the start of the SC2 beta. I'm fucking terrible at the game (cheesed my way into Plat at the beginning but fell to silver when I switched to Zerg and started trying to macro), but I've watched so much SC now that I feel like mechanics are the only thing that really hold me back. Well, that and my inability to put my ego aside and just ladder like a fiend without worrying about losing. ANYWAY
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Fast forward to today. I missed Friday cause I had to work this weekend, but felt sick that night and decided to call in Saturday to go and see the event and get a bunch of signatures from my favourite players for me and my friend who couldn't come on a count of him being in Austin. Speaking of signatures, I got both my CE of SC2 and my mousepad signed by the following players:
Liquid Huk
Tyler
Ret
Haypro
Fnatic Fenix
FXOQXC
DignitasNaniwa
EGIdrA
LZGamer
Gretorp
ROOTKiwiKaki
Catz
Day9 cut me off twice for signatures!!!!!!!!!!! At least I got a picture...
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Pics!
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Here is my initial runthrough of the MLG Dallas floorplan:
Here's another video of me bitching about MLG:
Not bad. The player area was nice and large-ish, the main stage was actually pretty nice, and the featured match area was even better I think since you could stand right next to the best players. The anterior areas where all of the sponsors booths and stuff were actually kinda sucked. There were no interesting game demos, most of the sponsors no one cares about, and the merch sucked. Not enough giveaways (literally like none that mattered). Infinite Dr. Pepper was fucking awesome because it's the greatest drink on the planet, but that doesn't make up for the biggest problem: Lag.
Sure, the main stage was shut down for most of the day because of lag issues attributed to having casters in the game observing and their excuse was that they were just going to cast replays until they could work out the network issues. That's fine. I just made sure that I hung around the player area and ran behind the terminal of the player I wanted to watch instead. Ultimately though, as the day drug on longer and longer, the lag became worse and worse.
At the end of the day, MLG decided they were ready with the lag issue and tried to host HuK vs. KiwiKaki on the main stage and 2 minutes into the game it starts lagging. Bad. They wait 3 minutes, try again, and it lags again in 30 seconds. This time they leave poor DjWheat and Day9 to fend for themselves and fill time for THIRTY MINUTES while they wait for the lag to magically fix itself; like the problem was just going to disappear. After trying again and the lag persisting, they decide to drop Wheat and Sean out of the game and finish Game 1 then move the players back to the secondary feature stage where lag hasn't been that bad of a problem.
Fast forward, and the game starts lagging again once Huk had decided to aggressively go into blink tech before Robo while Kiwi decided to rely on observers and immortals before getting blink. Requiring more intensive micro, lag is just going to destroy you, and that's exactly what happened. I know people are going to watch the replays and it won't exactly translate there because the lag is all crunched together and you don't see it, but trust me: if there was no lag HuK would have 2-0'd KiwiKaki.
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Did I enjoy myself? Yeah it was actually a lot of fun despite the bitter finish. Talked to a few gamers, saw some fucking SICK ass games (lolololololololololololol Huk vs. IdrA), found that most of the players are actually really cool people, drank a fuckton of Dr. Pepper, and now have a pimped out mousepad and CE to give to my friend. Fuck you MLG, Fuck you Blizzard for hobbling the legitimacy of your game for the sake of a buck, fuck you haters that don't support e-sports, and <3 to everyone else. Especially the ladies. No seriously, if you're in Dallas look me up; I'm a really cool guy. I cook food for a living and I will make you dinner then take you dancing. Peace.