Gamers are a suspicious lot. They don’t trust developers to look after their interests, and they trust publishers even less. But one party they do put stock in are the administrators and organisations which run competitions and events on their behalf.

That bond of trust was severely damaged this week after a member of the eSports Entertainment Association discovered that the software required to play in the organisation’s pick-up games and tournaments doubled as a bitcoin miner.

The scandal broke late this week when a forum user published a log on Pastebin that outlined a number of connections from his computer to a bitcoin server in Czechoslovakia.

ESEA owner Eric Thunberg replied with the perfect example of how not to respond to a crisis: by belittling users for uncovering the mistake, refusing to apologise and telling unhappy users to contact him so he could “attempt to buy back your love”.

To his detriment, Thunberg claimed that the bitcoin process within the ESEA client — which the community pays US$7 a month each to access — was only operational for 48 hours, had only mined the equivalent of US$280 and that all proceeds would be reinvested into the community. No acknowledgement was given to the fact that the software functioned as malware for that period, although Thunberg did admit that the idea of introducing bitcoin mining code to the client was discussed as a potential joke for April Fools.

As you’d expect, Thunberg was later forced to change his tune.

He publicly revealed that the code had running since April the 14th, far longer than the 48 hours initially stated. Over this time, ESEA users unknowingly helped the company mine just over 29 bitcoins, equivalent to just over US$3700.

Cue the pitchforks.

One forum user even encouraged others to join a class-action lawsuit. “Two weeks ago my Radeon HD4890 a $300+ card when I got it, fried with no explanation while I wasn’t using my computer,” wrote Tumn1s. “I kept smelling something burning coming from my computer and it took me a while to figure out that my expensive video card was overheating.”

After all and sundry were well and truly blanketed in the proverbial, ESEA co-founder Craig Levine, owner of the league’s parent company, stepped in with a statement denying any knowledge of the incident but promising to investigate and make amends.

That sentiment was followed by an official ESEA statement, which blamed one “unauthorised individual” for “acting on his own … to access our community through our company’s resources”. To make amends, the entire proceeds earned from the code will be donated to the American Cancer Society, along with an equal amount of money from the company’s own pocket. The prize pool for the 14th season of the league would also be raised by the same figure.

Admirable, but insufficient. Firstly, there was a clear line of communication between Thunberg and Sean Hunczak, the coder behind the ESEA client. Thunberg admitted as much in his first response to the fiasco by saying that he told the senior programmer that he “shouldn’t be lazy and run the miner in a separate process”.

If only one person was responsible for the drama, he certainly didn’t keep mum. More depressing is the indication that no one will be fired for the incident, and that Levine felt the need to not reveal the name of the person responsible.

ESEA’s reputation will be irreparably damaged. But the major problem here is not so much that the community’s trust in ESEA will be undermined, but that its faith in third-party programs like the ESEA client, which doubled as an industry leader for anti-cheat software will be undermined.

This is bad, because, frankly, there’s little competition. ESEA completely dominates the North American scene, in a similar vein to TeamLiquid’s status for StarCraft outside of South Korea. To paraphrase one user, even if gamers were disgusted by the whole affair, resigning from ESEA leagues and events was easier said than done. Competitors don’t have the reach, infrastructure or funding base that ESEA has built.

The entire debacle highlights a systemic lack of proper process within eSports. Having organisations profit from an event while maintaining responsibility for its integrity is not an unreasonable premise. The industry is not large enough to support a global association that could sustain the employment of independent administrators, as is the case with FIFA or the Association of Tennis Professionals.

Another view is that gamers were effectively punished for their compliance and blissful ignorance. As ESEA’s own statement admits, gamers have been swindled before by those who claim to have their best interests at heart. But until players get a clearer picture of what happens to the money they give eSports organisations, what information those companies collect and how both are used, scandals like this will continue to unfold.

It’s always a good day when I get to talk to Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender, Australia’s and Queensland’s most recognised professional gamer around the world. He was in good spirits the morning after the Heart of the Swarm launch, albeit a very tired spirit: Pender only slept a few hours that night, having gotten up early for a live cross to ABC News 24 that morning.

Blizzard had kindly stocked the conference room with drinks and jelly beans, so everything was ripe for a nice little chat. And considering you don’t see gamers on national television a great deal, I decided to ask what it was like dealing with the media these days.

GON: You did the interview with the ABC; basically almost as long as I’ve been around, you’ve been representing Australia playing WarCraft and so on. How’s it like, how’s the media relationship changed especially when StarCraft has been such a big part of it?

Andrew Pender: It’s definitely getting a whole lot more professional. There is just so many more people interested in it, so many more companies interested in covering it. I’ve been on TV twice in the last two days! It’s taken off a lot more since WarCraft 3 days at the very least.

GON: Technologically it’s grown a lot. Back in the day it wasn’t quite as easy to play in international competitions, and one of the interesting things is when you were sort of on the rise the big competition was something like the World Cyber Games. I remember you going over to Germany and playing in things like that and WCG was the main interest for media here locally, but now as a competition it’s faded away. How do you feel about that; that was a big thing for you, always representing Australia?

Andrew Pender: Yeah it’s disappointing that its faded away so much but I guess the tournament stuff is a bit outdated, the format and all that sort of stuff it really never changed. It’s a shame, it was like the centrepiece, the tournament you would want to go to and win because it was just like The Olympics, but there’s just so many other tournaments which have taken its place now. There’s constantly international tournaments for different brands and there is no real main one I guess except for maybe the Blizzard run one. But it’s a shame that WCG has fallen off.

GON: Do you find it a bit draining that there is so much to play in these days?

Andrew Pender: Yeah absolutely. I guess it’s a good and a bad thing it’s good to constantly be working towards something, travelling and getting exposure and all that but, yeah, there is just so many tournaments to attend that you gotta really pick them. I think these days you can’t go to all of them.

GON: And it’s not just being able to play in the ones overseas; the number locally has actually grown quite substantially. Do you plan ahead, like you have a calendar and you work out “this is the hours I am going to practice, I have this tournament coming up” ?

Andrew Pender: I always definitely base the level of practice on when a tournament is, what it is and I kind of definitely chose my tournaments so they’re not too close together. It’s probably the worst thing having like a tournament back to back or a week apart; you don’t really get practice for the other one and you get tired and you obviously just play bad in the second one. I think it’s very important these days to plan ahead, because it does take a lot of planning coming into these tournaments for both the players and just practice in general.

GON: Do you have to change your sleeping schedule a lot to accommodate playing in tournaments for different timezones?

Andrew Pender: Yeah, especially if you’re travelling to like Europe or something, it’s very brutal from Australia.

GON: Especially the Poland trip. (Pender played in IEM Katowice earlier this year.)

Andrew Pender: Yeah believe me, I suffer greatly from jet-lag. I’m probably one of the worst sleepers out there when it comes to [professional gamers]. It’s something that I really need to get better at, either by finding some awesome sleeping tablets or something. It’s a big factor for everyone who pretty much travels.

GON: Have you spoken to a lot of the other up-and-coming Australian players like MaFia and PiG and Tgun and given them advice on how to deal with travelling overseas and playing at big events? Have they come and asked you for advice?

Andrew Pender: They very rarely go to international events to be honest. Not that they can’t go but I don’t know sometimes they just choose not to. They never really ask much advice about it but I am always happy to like tell them what I think, or what they should do, or like how they should practice, or what to expect. But they kind of keep to themselves and have their own kind of ideals about it, as most of us do: we are all very solo players.

GON: Do you think that’s a bit of a mistake that they don’t travel internationally as much as they could?

Andrew Pender: Its gotta align with their goals. It depends what their plan is, if they really want to be international players, if they want to take it to the next level, if they don’t think they can, if they don’t have enough confidence. I’m not sure but I definitely think they should try to go as to as many tournaments as possible, and we don’t get that many opportunities in Australia especially if we don’t have a sponsor that can pay for it, so I think it’s important. I think they should be trying a lot harder.

GON: Do you think it would be better in their position to go to an international tournament and risk a really bad result as opposed to just staying home and just picking one out and just betting everything on that?

Andrew Pender: I think experience is very helpful in an international tournament. It’s something that I have a great deal of, coming from WarCraft 3 and being travelled a lot. I came into StarCraft II very prepared for international tournaments or tournaments in general: I don’t get nervous, I understand what I have to do, I understand when it comes to travelling what it’s going to be like, and I know how to network and all this kind of stuff that’s very, very helpful.

I think going to as many [events] as you can, even if you are going to bomb out … if you are practicing very hard there is a good chance you won’t bomb out, so it’s all about preparation too I guess, but they should be going to every single one.

GON: You mention networking. How important is that for a professional gamer these days? Because the scene is so much wider than it used to be five years ago.

Andrew Pender: I think it’s incredibly important. There is so many people you can talk to when you go to like a MLG or something, there is so many sponsors that just wanna have a beer and chat. If you are chatting to them and they like you, you have a contact, you have a Skype contact, you have a business card, you can talk to them down the track if you want to get your team sponsored or if you just wanna know something. It’s incredibly easy to do: you’ve just got to talk to them. None of these guys are really bad people and they’re very open to chatting to players, especially players that have travelled from somewhere far away.

I think it’s essential to be honest especially for Australians because we’re coming from not much. We have a very small scene here, though its growing. We have a small amount of sponsors here but that’s growing too and I think it’s really important to try and get your name out there, whichever way you can.

GON: The scene is quite big but the environment has changed too now, especially with Heart of the Swarm. How do you feel about the changes and the new toys?

Andrew Pender: It makes the game very more dynamic, a lot more interesting. It really gets the Wings of Liberty, kind of, staleness away cause some match-ups were just getting a bit bland and they weren’t really changing anymore. But the new units kind of directly fix those problems; they were kind of introduced as these counters to certain strategies that made the game like really stale.

GON: There’s always been that sort of dichotomy too between match-ups. You have Protoss versus Zerg which is almost more a WarCraft 3 style kind of match up in that the focus is more centralised on one big singular battle. Where as you have Terran versus Zerg where there’s much more adrenaline, there is more focus everywhere. There is multi-prong attacks, there’s drops and there is kind of that constant battle for control. So which one do you prefer and how sort of has it changed in a way from a Zerg perspective? Is it something you know you’re more comfortable with now, looking at the changes in Heart of the Swarm, or is it more something you know that is going to be more of a challenge?

Andrew Pender: I think Zerg vs Terran is pretty similar to Wings of Liberty and, and that is kind my preferred game play style where it’s like very fast paced, very demanding but fun. Zerg vs Protoss in Wings was just yeah as you said, was just fighting a death ball or like trying to stop the death ball being formed in general. I think it’s kind of changed a little bit in Heart of the Swarm though it is a bit early [to tell].

Vipers, for instance, are good great at picking, picking apart death balls and Swarm Hosts are good at pushing before death balls form. It’s still kind of the same deal with Protoss though; they still gotta make a death ball or they don’t really have much other option and they do have the units to make a good death ball  in Heart of the Swarm, like Void Rays being incredibly strong these days. I think we will just have to wait and see what happens if it’s going to get more dynamic than that — I really hope it does.

GON: As a Zerg player, does the recall mechanic kind of bother you? That has the potential to really sort of change the focus of fights.

Andrew Pender: It’s, a very, it’s a very tricky thing to play against. I think we are gonna see it utilized a great deal more in the future. I mean, it does have its flaws, like they can’t attack or do anything for a few seconds when they warp out and when they warp in, so it’s not as bad as it could be but we will have to wait and see.

GON: In terms of the new units, which ones have you been thinking about the most in terms of strategies? What do you look at and go, “OK, this is something I’m going to build around”.

Andrew Pender: To be honest, both of them are very interesting to me, for my race anyway. From the moment I saw a Viper could cast abduct, I was like, “I want that unit in my army every time.”

GON: (laughing)

Andrew Pender: It’s the kind of unit that I love, it’s got such a cool ability, it looks great, it makes for really exciting games, it’s micro-based, it’s very accurate and fast so it feels like it’s right up my alley.

That’s my favourite kind of unit but the Swarm Host is also like a very cool pushing unit, it can really add something to your army, some free fodder that is pretty much desired for Zerg because it’s when you’re going up against like Colossus or something you really need something in front and if it’s going to be Hydras then it’s terrible. So I think the Swarm Host has its place, though I haven’t really gave it as much nearly as much thought as Vipers, but I definitely plan to use them a lot.

GON: Do you feel you have to take more risks as a player now?

Andrew Pender: More risks you mean with the new units?

GON: Yeah with the new units and just in general, because of the changes that the other races have gotten in terms of power and the timing of when the units come into effect as well.

Andrew Pender: Mmmm.

GON: So for example the Viper and the Swarm Host you don’t get them where as you get the Widow Mine a lot sooner.

Andrew Pender: Yeah, yeah. Well there’s a lot more risks I guess. I guess it’s just more about trying to understand it as fast as possible, like, what is this Widow Mine capable of — is it gonna kill me if it drops right now? You have to understand these situations as a Zerg player and you gotta really be prepared for it as best as you can, though there are still, for instance, the six queen Wings of Liberty strategy opening for Zerg [which is] still effective against everything. You can still do some similar things like that to counteract so there’s not that many risks involved; you can still play pretty safe but it’s kind of understanding where it’s gonna lead.

GON: How do you think the rest of the Australian contingent will do throughout Heart of the Swarm, because we have such a large Zerg army?

Andrew Pender: (laughing) Yeah it’s gonna be interesting because Zerg is not really the flavour of the month anymore, it’s kinda changed with the balance changes in Heart of the Swarm. Hopefully more Terrans pop up, for instance, and hopefully our current Terran players start to flourish a bit more cause it would be nice if the scene had more of a balanced race distribution.

GON: Be nice to see some Protoss.

Andrew Pender (at the same time): I dunno, Protoss.

GON: (laughs)

Andrew Pender: Protoss isn’t very fun, but yeah I really hope that they do flourish. I hope some Zergs at least drop off or decide to change race because it would make, it would make it a lot easier for me [since Zerg vs Zerg] isn’t always the most fun.

GON: That’s an interesting thing too in Australia we essentially have two matchups because we don’t have any high level Protoss players. Is that something from a career perspective that will make your life a lot easier in the next year?

Andrew Pender: I guess it makes it easier for the local tournaments but not so easy for international tournaments: if you’ve got no one to really focus on for that race you [don’t] really have any requirement to prepare for it. Maybe like some tournaments here you only need to prepare for [Zerg vs Zerg] so you’re like, “Great he’s good at [Zerg vs Zerg]”. Then you go to an international tournament and get schooled by like a Korean Terran and its like “well this is pointless”.

I do look to international tournaments beyond local though. I do think it’s really important to win local tournaments but unless it’s something like Blizzcon, for instance, I don’t wanna like rack my head over it compared to like an IEM or something.

GON: Where do you get your inspiration when you are looking for solutions? Do you keep grinding at the ladder and just try little adjustments, or do you look at the big tournaments, watch GSL, copy that and then start working from there?

Andrew Pender: It kinda varies. It really depends on what I see [and] what clicks. It’s either if I’m like grinding out games, I have like my own little quirky style going and this really works against this kinda style [so] I kinda go with that or I see something in GSL and I take that onboard and I kinda make it my own and do whatever adjustments I need to do to it. So it’s kinda inspiration from everywhere I’ve just gotta find it and it kind of just works with me just like that.

I don’t really like sit there and like write a hypothesis and think about it for hours or something, but I feel it’s kind of an epiphany more than anything if I’m coming up against something.

Thanks to Andrew for taking the time to chat with us!

Competitive gaming has been around for a long time, but its players, tactics and infrastructure can be little mystifying to the layman. People scream a lot; it’s a little intimidating. There’s a lot of action on screen; it’s a little confusing. It’s very in-depth and without prior knowledge, difficult to report.

Covering gamer rage has never been a complicated matter.

Eurogamer and the Penny Arcade Report highlighted the issue recently when they examined the behaviour of players at the Electronic Sports League’s Call of Duty European Championships in Cologne.

The furore was largely provoked by a recording of what happened, so before I unload with both barrels, here’s the video so you can make your own judgement.

Putting things in perspective, the behaviour isn’t a surprise. It’s not even shocking. What’s bizarre is that it took so long for the mainstream gaming media to catch on, even with their heightened interest. Major League Gaming has regularly hosted Call of Duty tournaments for years; surely a few teams have been caught swearing blue murder at their opponents.

MLG competitors can be heavily penalised. The league specifically prohibits “excessive” profanity, defined as a “consistent” use of swearing and anything directed towards admins or fellow players is forbidden. Referees are more lenient in practice, but the regulations are there for the most extreme cases.

Australia banned swearing once. In 2004, the Intelligent Home Show at Melbourne decided to run a Counter-Strike tournament amongst hundreds of businesspeople and the unsuspecting public.

The principle is sound, proven by the Intel Extreme Masters’ numerous events in trade fairs around the world. It’s easy to sit back and watch video games after looking at gadgets all day. The model even worked in Brunei; the Brunei Cyber Games was held in the middle of a consumer fair. Mops and tile cleaners weren’t quite as spectacular as the offerings at CeBIT, but the idea works.

Nevertheless, most of the spectators will be adult professionals. I’m sure most swear in the privacy of their own home, perhaps even copiously. But you try not to do it in public, out of courtesy to bystanders.

Teenagers never quite grasped that concept. Memento Mori, one of the two best teams in Victoria at the time, had eight rounds deducted purely for profanity violations. They would have won their match by a landslide if they’d took a trick from Battlestar Galactica. Hell, they would have won their match on de_train against the West Australians at all if the captain took a swift backhand to the mouth of his teammates. Or himself. Just once.

(The link above only contains the final scores but no discussion surrounding MM’s penalties. I was in close contact with the leader of MM, who was an old friend of mine that kept trying to convince me, for a time, to move down to Melbourne. For Counter-Strike. As a 15-year-old. We were all crazy back then.)

This was more civilised behaviour. There’s a long-running story within Sydney about a player whose tyres got slashed. Many players threatened bashings. One player, who graduated from Counter-Strike 1.5 to Call of Duty, repeatedly warned me on IRC that my face would have an unfortunate meeting with the pavement if I ever showed up.

I turned up, sat my team next to his, wiped the floor with them in the quarterfinals and finished third for the day. He stopped threatening to put me in hospital afterwards, and since mellowed into a rather decent human being.

And even this was considered mild at the time. There was one tournament where a player who travelled from New Zealand was told “he would be killed” if he left a Melbourne netcafe. The threats were backed up by a bevy of insults from — and I’m not making this up — two fifteen-year-old Asian girls dressed like Gogo Yubari, minus the psychotic weaponry.

“I just want to punch that guy,” one of them said in a rather Clueless-esque voice. It would have been one of the funnier moments, had a friend of mine — normally quite a placid and laid-back character — not tried to bash someone within the confines of a Sydney netcafe.

Fortunately, my friend’s anger was negated by the limited arsenal at his disposal. Everyone broke out in laughter after we realised he was wielding a Sprite bottle as a baseball bat — although things could have gotten ugly very fast.

Most of this wasn’t a spur of the moment. It was all engendered by a liberal, and what was considered healthy back then, use of sexist, racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic and downright offensive remarks online and at LAN. If you were simply trying to throw the other team off, rattle them up a little, then hey – it’s all fair game.

Some were able to draw a very clear line between in-game abuse and how they treated people afterwards. Whether that makes them admirable I don’t know. There were a few that absolutely point-blank refused to trash-talk under any circumstances, believing it only egged-on your opponents and made the match even harder.

That’s largely true. The competitive atmosphere usually brings out the warrior in most, and those likely to crumble under pressure are weeded out well in advance. But that doesn’t make it acceptable to volley a torrent of racist remarks because it might improve your chances.

This is a culture that has persisted for well over a decade. Propagated by individuals who accepted and even enjoyed this behaviour, others were encouraged to follow suit. It’s particularly virulent in a team environment. Everyone wants to climb the ladder, and if they’re all doing it … well, you want to fit in, right? You want to become the next upcoming star!

This is the true under-current of eSports and the structure needs to be dismantled for its own good. Such behaviour is widespread. Australia is  lucky that more embarrassing incidents, like what happened on Cross Assault, hasn’t happened here. The conditions are ripe enough — some cases I’ve seen, especially those involving women, would sicken you.

The problem is the current crop of administrators have an unfortunate habit of sweeping things under the rug and dealing with issues behind the scenes. Handling matters quietly can indeed limit the fallout, but it also abandons an opportunity to set standards and show that actions do have consequences.

Too many currently behave without fear of repercussions. There is no strong moral compass; many players are getting bullied, too many running their mouths off without penalty. Sooner or later, someone will cause outrage to a degree that will spawn a backlash large enough to significantly damage players, admins and organisations, irrespective of how swift the response.

All we can do is to prepare for the worst, and act accordingly. Warnings are effectively useless; players know when they have gone too far. They should be replaced with harsh penalties, and organisers should have the gumption and courage to strip players and teams of wins if they step out of line. There will always be a situation where one team could be stripped of a tournament win, but integrity should never be sacrificed for the sake of appearances. And Australians should demand better of their administrators and players than the behaviour shown in the video above.

My perception this week has been a little warped, courtesy of the insanely high level of pain-killing drugs I’ve been enjoying. One of the side effects is that you tend to relax — perhaps too much — and you have a slightly longer view on things. After all, it’s not like you’re in any hurry.

The same, I’m afraid, cannot be said for our lovely, local eSports industry.

Jobs can be hard to find, particularly in the creative sector. Jobs in gaming itself are even more difficult, and anything that even has an inkling towards eSports is like winning the lottery.

So I suppose the frenzied reaction when Riot Games announced earlier this week that they were looking for a community manager and a head of eSports (aka. events organiser) was to be expected.

It’s a small pie; having observed and played my small part in competitive gaming for as long as I have, it’s still amazing that there is a pie at all.

But that isn’t any excuse for the bickering and blatant hostility, where everyone took turns to one-up and sh*t-talk each other, that took place.

A couple of clarifications. I’m not going to name names, for one, since I know all of the individuals involved and I happen to like them very much. That doesn’t mean I have any qualms about calling them out publicly (they’ll know who they are), since they should know better.

If you’re going to lead a community, if you’re going to be the public face of an organisation, you shouldn’t be playing in the mud. Even if you’re the kind of unprofessional scum that likes to operate that way, you still don’t do it publicly.

The posts have since been deleted. I’ve even seen some suggestions that everyone is actually really supportive of each other, and it’s one of the hallmarks of the Australian community that everybody is so close.

Bull. The only advantage in being close that I saw this week was that it reduced the distance between a knife and the nearest spinal cord.

Imagine if you’re Riot, looking over potential applications, reading various CVs and scanning over everyone’s qualifications. Just for the heck of it — or maybe because social media is an important part of community management — you decided to search Facebook and you came across the ensuing melee.

Imagine how impressed you would be having seen public figures act like a group of pack rats. Would you want that representing your brand? Would you want someone prepared to abandon their personal integrity that quickly?

The pie is shrinking too. See the speed at which IPL 6 was cancelled, a month before the finals. Many players and fans have been left out in the lurch, with non-refundable tickets and shattered dreams.

It’s at times like these we need people to uphold their values, not throw them away. The people involved in this week’s charade are good, decent characters. So let’s set an example others can follow, instead of behaving like vultures.

This was the big one. This was the day where everything was on the table. All the showmatches, all the thousands of dollars bet beforehand was just a warmup to the main event.

You wouldn’t have guessed, watching the cheers, gasps and regular group hugs on the stage (to the annoyance of organisers and any health and safety officers in the crowd) that the final prizes were so small compared to what changed hands earlier in the weekend. Still, it didn’t dull the intensity of the matches or the passion of the spectators one iota. It was almost a kind of pure enjoyment, playing solely for the glory, something evident on the faces of particularly the Melbourne supporters.

The seeding points for EVO later this year wasn’t really a factor; most top players I spoke to weren’t planning on going. Many couldn’t fully practice for OHN 11, due to university or other work, although that didn’t stop them from enjoying the atmosphere.

Naturally, not every game received the same welcome. Marvel and Street Fighter were scheduled towards the end and they received the most ecstatic praise. The former was especially helped after Antman advanced from the lower bracket and forced Arnold Desu, the eventual Marvel champion, into a final best-of-five.

Not all matches were broadcast either, although this was by design rather than necessity. The Street Fighter 3rd Strike finals were played off-stream, and due to the schedule the games had already been resolved before organisers realised how far ahead of time things were.

To make up for the hour they’d gained — one of the hallmarks of excellent administration, a constant theme for the event — an on-the-spot Street Fighter team battle was arranged. That opened the door for fan favourites like ToXY to showcase even more of their skills, and the crowd’s roar of appreciation was a fitting reward for the admins’ ad-hoc decision.

Street Fighter produced the tightest rounds; I never expected someone playing Juri to win the whole thing. And the comebacks after the champion, gb from Victoria, popped the Korean Tae Kwan Do master’s ultimate were remarkable.

Despite getting a scare in the first best-of-five, Arnold Desu was able to wrap things up relatively comfortably. The game was peppered with instances of him eventually breaking through runner-up Antman’s guard. Both players executed their moves well, but Arnold maintained his lead through some incredible blocking; re-watch the VODs if you can. The guy is a robot, honestly.

Marvel continues to astonish me. It’s difficult enough as a spectator co-ordinating your brain with the action on the screen, let alone the sheer speed of the players. Ultras and specials being executed within split-seconds of each other never gets boring, simply because so few people can bring everything together so reliably under the pressure.

After all these years, I feel disappointed that I didn’t make the effort to attend fighting game tournaments earlier. Not only do they remind me of why I got into competitive gaming in the first place, but they’re also a hallmark in terms of showcasing a strong and passionate community fortunate enough to have organisers talented enough to keep the show running.

Sure, consoles are a lot easier to deal with than computers and the offline capability of the games removes a lot of problems from the equation. But that didn’t stop the stream from being absolute quality, and it certainly didn’t stop the admins from coping with over 210 players on the day (231 signed up beforehand).

Congratulations, OzHadou. Not only did you successfully run what was the smoothest tournament I’ve seen in many years — and that includes major events over the last 12 months — but you also made a new fan.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all again in May. And if you, dear reader, have the opportunity to come down to Melbourne for the next FGC event, come. It’s worth it.

As expected, the intensity ramped up significantly at the second day of proceedings at the 11th OzHadou Nationals. The fact that it’s a Road to EVO qualifier, where the top 2 of most games receive seeding points towards the Evolution championships in Las Vegas later this year, helps somewhat.

Mind you, a few thousand dollars changing hands doesn’t hurt either — and more is expected to come out tonight.

Money matches are kind of a tradition among the fighting game community, a way to spice up the action. Outside of the group stages, the first and second days are peppered with games that can become rather heated — although it’s the evening skirmishes that attract the most cash.

A large part of the appeal is the occasionally bristling, but usually friendly, rivalries between the states. Melbournians tend to play it up more than others, although a healthy dose of Marvel vs Capcom will always get Queenslanders riled up.

As someone who has spent the better part of a decade floating between various competitive scenes, it’s fascinating seeing the pressure applied to players by their peers, who desperately don’t want to let the state down. But the main attraction was the group stages, the first step on the path towards the top 16 and potential glory (which in turn allows the winner to talk copious amounts of smack, a commodity almost as lucrative as the prizes themselves).

And people take this seriously. In between the laughing, joking and the banter, the level of focus and concentration is at its peak. Moves need to be executed to the split-second, counters worked out to the exact frame.

Each fighting game has its own approach and calculations, and part of OzHadou’s appeal is moving from one match to another and just seeing the differences. From that, players can work out which games suit them best; I spoke to many who said they tried Street Fighter, or tried Tekken or King of Fighters but admitted that they “just weren’t very good”. In essence, fighting games are no different from your high level RTS, action RTS (or MOBA if you prefer Riot’s terminology) or a team-based FPS in regards to the level of dedication required.

But fighting games have that extra element, that additional layer of adrenaline others lack. Perhaps it’s natural considering how close many matches are; how often games come down to the wire and just how quickly things can turn in an instant.

One mistake can always, for instance, cost you a game of StarCraft. The time it takes to resolve, compared to an ultra move in Street Fighter, is typically much longer.

And maybe that’s why there’s so much more hype, so much more banter and so much more — and I agree that this is an unfair premise — passion on show.

Within the space of a few hours players were jumping (against the wishes of a distressed admin team, who were doing their best to honour OH&S laws) up to the stage to hug their recently-victorious friend. These aren’t even the finals. Like everything else on show though, the trials, tribulations, anger, relief, happiness and adulation are all spent within an instant.

You can see it on the crowd, the intense way they follow every move, become exasperated at every mistake and audibly gasp in unison at every piece of genius.

There is nothing else like it in eSports. The closest I can remember was Counter-Strike and even that was a slow burn; the players themselves were emotional and not shy about expressing themselves, but it was a different experience for the crowd.

You could see it in their eyes towards the end, when Frenetic Array’s Stef eked out the narrowest of wins against NefeliousG in the Pool G semi-finals; both had an opportunity to win, but a failure in execution saw them both throw their chances away. At the time of writing, the pair are due to face off in the grand finals for their pool; the winner will progress to the upper bracket of the top 16, while the runner-up will begin in the lower half.

This was just one of many, many nail-biters. And to think the crowd’s just getting started.

If you can’t still can’t visit York on 99 in Sydney (spectating is free!), OzHadou’s two streams on TwitchTV has all the live action and all the VODs from the games played. Go to http://www.twitch.tv/Ozhadou and http://www.twitch.tv/Ozhadou2 for more. The schedule for the whole weekend is also available on the OzHadou website. 

For those who have never attended a national championships for fighting games, let me offer you a primer: casual is not casual in the slightest.

The OzHadou nationals, the 11th iteration of which is being held at 99 on York’s Red Room in Sydney, always earmarks the first day for two things: registration and “casual” play.

But a cursory glance around the room proves that what’s really going on is far from casual. Indeed, only a couple of hours after registration began, the announcer declared that special showmatches would be taking place throughout the rest of the night. That is to say, best-of-five or best-of-ten games interspersed with copious amounts of trash-talking.

And money.

It’s a bizarre experience for me, having grown up in the world of Counter-Strike, which pre-dated a lot of these kinds of competitions when it came to establishing the infrastructure for sending players to national and international qualifiers. Because even though that system was well in place, the people amidst it all were, well … poor.

How times have changed.

Bond University certainly knows the score. According to their latest survey (commissioned by the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association), the average age of gamers is 32. 32-year-olds have a lot more money than, say, 15-year-olds.

That, of course, applies to casual gaming. But just a cursory glance at any eSports event will tell you that people are a lot older these days. And the impact of that cannot be understated.

There’s gamers walking around with cameras worth thousands of dollars. That’s just the lens, mind you. And not to mention the custom-built cabinets supplied by the organisers. The guy chiefly responsible for the stream team: he shipped down 60 kilograms of equipment. There’s a switcher worth a few grand on its own. And the venue itself; there’s something a little surreal walking into what feels like Sydney’s most upper-class RSL, only to discover hundreds of massive fighting game nerds rocking out on the first floor.

It feels amazing; it feels like I’ve come home.

Part of the sentiment in the latter stems from what a fellow games.on.net user described to me as a community that is “rough and unrefined”. A fellow organiser quipped that fighting game tournaments were more like Bay 13 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the kind of sentiment you’d expect a rowdy crowd to bellow out at the referee, than the action witnessed in other communities, which he equated to “golf”.

This is why I kept playing competitively for so long; I’ve missed the banter. The real action, of course, won’t start until Sunday.

Friday is the “casual” day, although from what I could see it was anything but casual. Most players were completely engrossed in their “practice” matches, some of which were incredibly tight.

That would ramp up later once the exhibition games — essentially grudge matches — kicked off. Some received a louder reception than most, but there was an underlying rivalry to all of them.

I heard a story a few years back about how a gamer rocked up to a nationals in a cast and decided it gave him protection from any repercussions for his smack-talk — something he promptly rethought once he was getting the crap kicked out of him. Physically.

Clearly, the fighting game community are a lively bunch. For those concerned, they’re very warm to newcomers, at least in my limited experience. Unless you’re going to start bantering with the professionals. That’s best left to the veterans — something I’ll no doubt see a lot more of on Day Two.

If you can’t make it to York on 99 in Sydney, never fear – you can follow all the action on TwitchTV via OzHadou’s two streams: http://www.twitch.tv/Ozhadou and http://www.twitch.tv/Ozhadou2. The schedule for the whole weekend is also available on the OzHadou website.

Whether you’re a fan of League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Starcraft 2, World of Tanks or even Shootmania, there’s something to whet your competitive fancy over the next month or so.

Being the king of the hill, League of Legends is getting all the attention of late. But when you kick off February with the third season of the Championship Series.

Australians, sadly, aren’t able to take part in the Championship Series, although they haven’t been left out to dry. The Australian and New Zealand branch of the Electronic Sports League have organised an Electronic Pro Series for the region.

Chiefs, Leedle Lee, Qlimax Crew, Team Immunity, Kal Vas Gaming, Exile5’s Lunar squad, Team Imperious and Volf Goes RAWR.Giga have either been invited or qualified for the finals. At the time of writing, the final qualifier hadn’t begun although by the time you read this the last four teams will have been determined.

Console gamers are enjoying plenty of love too lately, with the Australian and New Zealand qualifiers for the Call of Duty Championship announced recently. Eight teams will qualify from two separate online events, with the top two from that bracket getting an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles to compete for US$1 million.

The event’s only open to those aged 18 or over, creating a bit of consternation after several quality players realised they wouldn’t be able to compete. Nevertheless, it’s going to be a great event, complete with an Australia vs New Zealand showmatch. The Australian/NZ finals will be held in Sydney on the 15th of March.

There’s plenty of Starcraft 2 action down under as well, with the Southeast Asian Clan League (and its associated fantasy league competition) progressing smoothly.

Australian powerhouses Team Immunity and Gamecom.NV will face off at 6pm tonight in their round match; the two have had a rough road and are sitting in the middle of the ladder with 6 points apiece. The Cityhunter-sponsored Xeria Gaming are riding high at the top of the leaderboard, although their schedule will become tougher when they face off against 3rd place Frenetic Array next week.

New Zealand are putting in a strong showing of their own, with Team Iris sitting on a comfortable 10 points after 4 straight wins. The Kiwis pulled off a surprise 3-2 upset of Team Immunity in the third week, although they face Frenetic Array and Gamecom.NV back to back.

The local LAN scene is continuing to grow as well. Rural Victorians got a taste of competitive action at the last RGL event in Mildura, with almost 40 players showing up for the free-for-all Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 events.

In Sydney there’s a new type of LAN brewing, with the organisers behind MPU starting up Ctrl-Alt-Defeat. The event is a sit-and-play LAN party, rather than a BYOC event, and is being held at the Good Games store on Clarence St.

The idea is for people to come down and just enjoy some LAN gaming during the week without having to go through the hassle of lugging their gear around. $15 will get you a spot at the keyboard (spectating is free). 12 computers have been organised for Monday night, and for fans of collectible card games, miniature war games or board gaming, there’s also a 5% discount in the store for everyone in attendance.

New Zealanders won’t miss out on the LAN action either, with Adversity Gaming announcing a teaser Easter LAN ahead of their traditional annual Auckland LAN. Held on the final weekend of March, the LAN will feature 2v2 competitions for Call of Duty, Halo 4 and some yet-to-be announced fighting games.

But the biggest event around the corner will be the OZHadou Nationals next weekend. We’ve already previewed the event here at GON, and I’ll be down at 99 on York to cover all the action. The fighting gaming community’s calendar doesn’t stop there though, with the Victorian-based Shadowloo Showdown finally revealing the date for its next event.

The timing is more akin to a Battle Arena Melbourne event than the Shadowloo Showdown, but I’m certain it’ll be just as good as ever. And in case you’re doubtful on the skill and technical expertise behind the Shadowloo team, here’s a reminder.

Know of any other LANs in your local area with some eSports action? Let us know in the comments below!

The wonderful advantage of Blizzard’s methodical approach towards their eSports baby, StarCraft 2, is that it never stays the same. Take the Heart of the Swarm beta, for example. To the uninformed the game would look essentially identical, but the quantity and subtlety of some changes have made the expansion to the real-time strategy beast a completely different kettle of fish to the game which first what went live late last year.

Some units have been removed completely; others have been substantially reworked, and some haven’t changed a bit. Old strategies have been dusted off and revamped for a new age, and brand new ones are being invented every day.

To get the best picture of just where things stand before Heart of the Swarm launches next month, I rounded up some people for whom the game matters the most.

Geoff “iNcontroL” Robinson

Full-time StarCraft 2 player for Evil Geniuses

“Being able to watch replays with friends/trainees/teammates was a big deal that everyone had hoped would be implemented. We were also excited at the idea of having a function that would allow players to resume from replays, so if a disconnect were to occur that game wouldn’t be lost challenging the legitimacy of whatever competition was going on at that time. Both of these features have been added so you can count me amongst the happy folk on this one.

Protoss is a lot more fun in Heart of the Swarm. There are more options, a better synergy with late game play and a more rewarding experience for the player that can multi-task better or think further down the line. In [Wings of Liberty] we had issues with the infamous Broodlord / Infestor combo. Often times it came down to a vortex or the Zerg making a critical error. In HotS we have new options in dealing with that combo, namely the Tempest and a stronger mid game.

Blizzard has done a fairly good job of interacting with the community on developing a game that casual players and professionals can enjoy alike. I think the ability to play unranked matches and practice mode, as well as having a more in-depth experience with the AI, means that as a casual player you have more options to enjoy the game. Playability is a big deal and being able to have a nice single player experience but then also not be intimidated by the multiplayer … is a good thing.”

Jared “PiG” Krensel

Full-time professional gamer in Australia

“I was somewhat hoping that they would increase the supply cap as I feel one of the silliest features of Zerg is that they are meant to swarm. They did this in Brood War, however in SC2 as a Zerg with the new macro mechanics for each race you all shoot up towards 200 supply very quickly. Often as a Zerg you are forced to either go super aggressive or super greedy as middling numbers of units such as roaches aren’t worth their weight later on at max.

As a result you see a race obsessed with static defence to buy time to remax after engagements and battles often won not with a clean or impressive engage, but with a wall of spines buying time for your 2nd or 3rd remax to bowl over your opponent. Increasing this supply cap would mean the entire game would need to be reworked though so it’s not really a realistic wish.

Most importantly I wanted to see more variety of strategies, more interesting gameplay and more micro and positioning being relevant. Things like late game Terran vs Protoss was heavily Protoss favoured and late game Zerg vs Protoss was heavily Zerg favoured. This led to a lot of boring play and repetitive games.

I think the previous problem of getting maxed very quickly and sitting on lots of spines and large banks is still an issue. Other than that I feel Zerg didn’t have too many units that involved heavy micro. I think the Swarm Host MIGHT fix this problem, whilst combo-ing Vipers and Infestors with an army now takes a huge amount of control.

I feel that Zerg vs Terran is extremely hard with Widow Mines massacring ‘Ling-Bane so that you are forced into Roaches, which suck due to 200/200 problem I mentioned before. ZvP has been a lot of fun focusing just on masses of stuff using all types of basic units in a mix is very effective and fun to use. Adding Vipers and Infestors just as support rather than the [Wings of Liberty] Infestor core unit makes it quite exciting. Any issues with it I am confident will be fixed by release.

Giving Widow Mines to Terran is a great idea. Terran is the most mechanically demanding race and giving them a unit that can hold map control and deter an opponent from moving into their territory was just what they needed. Also they are quite micro-intensive so will be one of the many new units that allow the fastest players to show their skills. Likewise swarm hosts and to a lesser extent oracles.

The Viper was the most exciting and is very visually cool and fun to micro. I’m looking forward to Zerg styles adapting that involve waves of aggression to cover steady transitions through the tech tree and some really diverse T3 compositions with 5-6 unit types in them.

I earn my living from [StarCraft] so even though I don’t really have any problems with the interface for my own uses, I did want it to be improved to help accommodate the casual fanbase. Common complaints involved [the] custom game system being … inaccessible, ladder ranking being too prominent and not enough fun features and achievements for casual gamers.

There’s a lot of things that will help [such as] integrating eSports. Those that follow eSports and watch tournaments tend to be more excited to play. [An] interface that is easy and friendly – not too focused on ladder ranking (unless maybe Master level or higher), more achievements [and] most importantly is the interface has to lead very easily to a simple and obvious custom game system.”

Ethan “iaguz” Zugai

Member of pro-gaming team Frenetic Array’s StarCraft 2 roster

“The flaws Terran [had] in Wings of Liberty? Well apart from the fact that the race was balanced by the master race of Korean professionals who stubbornly refuse to do anywhere near as poorly as all the foreigners and thus kept the race as far away from buffs as possible, Terran had a few issues.

Against Protoss they are a very strong race but they only have about five useful units in macro games (Marines, Marauders, Medivacs, Vikings, Ghosts) which limits the breadth of strategies somewhat. Against Zerg they struggle tremendously to balance aggression, defence, economy and handling all their units correctly when attacking, managing drops and marine positioning all working under a clock of ‘if he gets Broodlords before I’ve dealt him some harm, I’m in for some sh*t’.

I think Blizzard are addressing that. They’re trying to force mech units to actually be good in Terran vs Protoss and they’re encouraging more ways to apply aggression in Terran vs Zerg and also making transitions smoother too, and more ways to play a longer game if you want to.

They’ve also done a good job of trimming some of the unit fat, the Hellion is now a more acceptable core unit thanks to the Hellbat switch, the energy bar on the Thor has been done away with so we can make them against Protoss without worrying about feedback (which is extremely helpful because Thors are so good vs Protoss normally, they just get too badly affected by feedback to show it), the Reaper is a much better scout and also much more accessible.

We even get mines to help throw in a little chaos and Medivac speed, a strict upgrade to a unit we use all the time. And they removed the requirement for siege tech and added +2 [to] Battlecruiser damage. There’s a huge amount to play around with.

Terran is a better race now for sure. Everyone’s getting a bunch of new goodies but the Terran stuff looks easily as good, if not better, than what anyone else got. I’m concerned about Hellbats in Terran vs Terran though, it seems a very common move to load up 4 Hellbats into a Medivac, apply speed boost and then murder all the SCVs. Back in 2011 there was a period of time in [the mirror match-up] where you could only play mech and games were decided by whoever managed to slip in blue flames into the other’s SCV line first. It was a horrible time and I’m glad the Blue flame nerf was able to fix it. But this seems like a return to those dark days.

It seems Blizzard are focusing on unit mobility and encouraging players to be more active with their stuff. Like Mutas are faster and regenerate quicker so you can keep harassing with them, Medivacs have this big speed boost, Reapers are faster and so on. And this is good for spectators since it means hopefully a more active game with more situations for a superior player to out-skill his opponent.

I wasn’t really hoping for any particular changes [to the interface] so it’s good they didn’t change any. Except for the idle worker button. A lot of the changes they have implemented are more targeted at really new players but not at the cost of pissing off experienced players, so that’s good.

The game looks like it’ll play out fantastically, it feels like it’ll be a fundamentally different game in a lot of ways. I’m definitely hoping for a much more bearable Terran vs Zerg match-up since that has been my major issue for the last year or so. I also hope it proves to be a shot in the arm for competitive gaming in Australia.”

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm officially launches in Australia on March 12 with a launch party at Melbourne’s Federation Square, starting from 8pm.

Throughout the course of the year, Australia has a lot of wide and varied tournaments serving gamers’ competitive needs. But none are as competitive or as fierce as those held by the fighting game community, which enjoyed a stellar 2012 by having some of the biggest and most unique events seen in the country.

The first nationals for the year, OZHadou 11, looks set to continue that tradition, having been selected as an official qualifier for the Evolution global fighting game championships at the Paris Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, in July.

I spoke to some of Australia’s most talented fighters ahead of the event and asked them what their expectations were, who to keep an eye on as potential darkhorses, what Australia’s chances at the world finals in Las Vegas were — and just exactly why they love fighting games so much.

Jake Blomberg

3rd for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 at OHN 2012 and one of Queensland’s best UMvC3 players:

I expect OHN 11 to be a fun, exciting, and entertaining time. As with the previous years they always deliver a high quality tournament. Ziggy, Yang and Yousseff make this easily the best major for Australian Fighting Tournaments except for Shadowloo Showdown of course.

The Road to Evo qualifier hasn’t changed my preparations toward the tournament. I take every tournament seriously and with a high level of preparation. Even though the EVO points are a nice incentive there are many other reasons for going to this event. The biggest reason I think for people in Australia to go to OHN is more about pride. And to prove who are the best at their respective game and who is the best state.

Without giving too much away from our scene, there are 3 Queensland players that I will not be looking forward to meeting: 2 players from Victoria and 1 from NSW.

Thomas “Nefelious G” Body is the most decorated player for Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. He didn’t lose a single tournament to anyone in Australia in Marvel vs Capcom 3, he only lost to [foreigners] at Shadowloo Showdown (Tokido and Mago) and at EVO (Clockwork and ChrisG). He is always a threat in this game and will be a really good match if I come up against him in [the] tournament.

Tyrone “OmegaRed” O’Toole aka is the Wolverine master only to PR Rog in the [United States]. His rushdown is relentless and unforgiving. He was the highest placing QLD’er at [Shadowloo] with international guests coming 7th in the tournament. I only hope that someone else takes him out and not me. Tyrone is currently my pick [for] OHN11.

Stefan “Solid Stef” Materazzo. What can I say about the kid. He is a beast to say the least. I’m going to nickname him the Interstate Killer. As he has won all of the recent majors at interstate tournaments. He will be a hard challenger and will expect new stuff from him as well with his strange team and ridiculous setups.

Michael “ToXY” Guida is what I believe to be the most versatile gamer at the highest levels. Any game that he touches he always excels at it. Recently he clean-sweeped all three fighting games in NZ for UMVC3, SF4AE and SFXT. He is always someone you need to keep an eye on and be wary of and will expect to see his name be in the top 8.

Arnold Samau (from NSW): He is a beast, the fact that he won [UMvC3 at OHN 11] last year is reason enough to look out for him. But this year lets see if he can still hold the crown. The underrated players that I think will perform better than expected will be Peter Pham “Fish” and Tri from QLD.

Australia is viewed by foreign countries as a good country, but not the best. If we were ranked by the other countries in the world I think a good estimate is probably around 5th-10th at fighting games. This is mainly because they don’t get enough exposure to our gameplay at fighting games in general. And its because that the other countries simply have a higher population than Australia in a more condensed area. So naturally they have more players than Australia.

I think if our top 10 Australian players were to enter EVO… I think there is a good chance that a fair few could make it through to the top 32. And that’s really good considering that at EVO there are usually over 2000 competitors for the one game.

Derrick Wong

One of WA’s best SF4: Arcade Edition fighters, 4th place finisher for KOF13 at 2012′s OHN

Every OHN provides a great opportunity to meet new players as well as catch up with friends from other states and I expect it to be no different this year. It’s going to be exciting to see how Melbourne’s Marvel players fare against QLD and Syd. These states have been proven powerhouses but Perth is bringing their best Marvel players this year. I am hoping we can cause an upset. In terms of KoF13, it has always been Colin (Colonov) versus the rest of Aus. A couple of us have been secretly training hard for this event. Expect some upsets!

As for [SF4:AE], ever since Johnny (HumanBomb) returned to HK, the throne has always been up for grabs. I expect players like ShangTsuang, ToXY, Robsux, AfterDeath to do well as they consistently have.

Other countries tend to view us as a “Free” country not due to our skill level (which we have improved heaps over the past few years) but based on international performances. They would need to play more international players as well as watch and study heaps of videos. Our community is a lot smaller than many other countries, and this puts us at a disadvantage.

With the discovery of unblockables in SSF4AE, the metagame has evolved into a game of counter-picking. Outside of Japan, it’s very hard to main one character and expect to win every tourney. KOF13 is slowly growing in Australia, I hope OHN 11 will encourage others and many original/old school KOF players to pick this game up.

(I love fighting games because of) the mind games, combos, and because of how it’s never the same each round/game. It’s a skillful game of intellect, dexterity/execution and reaction. Each character has a fixed set of moves, and if you delve down deeper, you will find information like frame data, hurtbox, hitbox, etc. Studying this will give you an edge, and pits you against your opponent in a high level of rock, paper, scissors. Magic pixels in the game during tournament makes some rounds super hype. Being able to show off your combos or outwit your opponent gives great satisfaction.

Colin “Colonov” Tan

Winner of the KOF13 tournaments at ButtonSmash 2012 and Battle Arena Melbourne in October

I’m expecting [OHN 11] to be a jam packed event. We’ve seen the fighting game community grow from year to year, and this year will be no exception. OHN never fails to deliver interstate rivalry at its finest, and with the way things have been going so far, this year will certainly not disappoint.

I’d like to see more cohesion and readiness to setup meets for more sessions. Given that arcades are a dying industry, most of the gameplay casual gamers get against others is online. Of course this is less than optimal with lag issues, which is why it’s so important to be able to play others in person.

On a larger scale, I’d like to see more major tournaments and more sponsors backing these tournaments. Even having on average a major every 2 months in Australia would ideally not only boost interest, but would give players something to work towards in the short term.

As [KoF13] is arguably the most balanced fighting game out there being played right now, character knowledge plays a big part in success as a player since every character in the game is viable. Internationally though, it’s mainly the Japanese, Koreans and Central Americans are the ones innovating new approaches to the game and its engine, which is a very refreshing take [on] the game indeed.

It’s not just the competition and hype that comes from it, but it’s also the people you meet and the relationships you forge with fellow players, even if they live halfway across the globe. Together we form communities, communities that support and encourage growth of not just how a game is played, but also our personal lives as well.

You can find out more information about OZHadou and OHN 11 through their website.

The reception of professional gaming within traditional and even gaming media itself has become a lot more prominent of late. Games like League of Legends and DOTA 2 have helped punishingly difficult learning curves come back into vogue, while the continued growth of prize pools at events like The International have caught the attention of traditional newswires and even business publications.

Earlier this week was a case in point. On page 13, next to the editorials, a half-page column on gaming kicked off with three full paragraphs about the exploits of Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender and his recent sojourn in Katowice, Poland, for an Intel Extreme Masters leg. Pender’s been going overseas for the better part of a decade, but even on the last year his media profile, and that of other Australian gamers, has soared.

So to better understand the change in the relationship between traditional gaming media, mainstream media and eSports, I spoke with some pundits, editors and players to see what shifts caught their eye over the last year, where they think the partnership is going and what eSports can do to make itself more appealing to the wider market.

Jared “PiG” Krensel, full-time professional Starcraft 2 gamer:

When I did a interview on ABC 24 back in May 2012 the questions were starting to move away [from] just showing gamers as different and actually gave me an opportunity to show that gamers are normal people, whilst explaining that being a pro-gamer is actually a legitimate career choice these days.

A common focus is the idea of living off earnings from playing and other gaming related sponsorships and activities like streaming or coaching. I’m happy to see that more gaming websites however are taking for granted that their audience knows what pro-gaming is and instead focus more on experiences at tournaments, training, etc. Basically what you’d expect in a tennis interview or golf interview. I think this is a good thing which one day we can see in traditional media also.

eSports is new and refreshing. In an age of constantly evolving technology I believe that even people who know nothing about eSports are fascinated (and sometimes afraid) of the idea of everyone never stepping outside their home to kick a ball around and instead competing through video games all day. I guess I think putting forward an image of healthy, mature and intelligent professionals is the best thing I can do to increase my appeal. There is a very obvious need to remove yourself from the stereotypes of fat, unhealthy, socially awkward “gamers” in order to increase mainstream appeal. Likewise the characteristics liked in an athlete are also good to have.

Jessica Rozema, head of community and public relations for ESL Australia:

Event organisers struggle to communicate to a wider audience what these events/eSports actually involve as it is somewhat an unknown industry in Australia. As major games like League of Legends apply massive monetary prize pools … the overwhelming and growing popularity of these games and eSports as a whole start grabbing media attention.

More and more we are seeing events place a strong focus on production value and building up a spectator audience, and in my opinion this is where it is at. Ensuring that event organisers reach out as often as possible to educate people about what we love and why is a fantastic way to bring more professionalism and monetary/sponsorship support to grow the industry in Australia more and really put us on the international map.

I feel like eSports has definitely struggled for years to grow in Australia, however we are on the verge of taking it to the next level … having ESL come to Australia as an internationally known entity has caught the attention of some major companies and in turn this has sparked the interest of the general gaming community. As the community grows, and companies begin to see a commercial side to the industry media will follow, and I only hope that those with a passion for gaming journalism stay in the game and continue to represent.

Ali Abdo, co-founder of ShadowLogic, organisers of the Shadowloo Showdown international fighting game events in Melbourne:

I believe the mainstream media still has a way to go before they take competitive gaming seriously. Some have stepped up and giving it a go. Maybe they didn’t get the response they wanted, or maybe they feel once is enough. But I would like to see the mainstream media give competitive gaming it’s own segment maybe after they show the sports news. Would fit in nicely between sports and the weather.

We now see gaming sites interviewing professional players, putting up results, attending events. One site that stands out for me has to be GameSpot, they’ve really stepped up their game in the competitive gaming department.

I believe the change has come from the media realizing competitive gaming isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Add in the fact that everyone is streaming these days to get their name out there and build themselves a persona and an audience.

You need to give people a reason to watch your event …  you need these main events to mean something. For example at Shadowloo Showdown, we make it Australia vs the World. We have the best fighting game players from all over Australia coming down to Melbourne to defend our soil and prizes from the international invaders! The rest of the world knows how much of an uphill battle it is going to be for Australia, but that’s what makes it more exciting once an Australian player knocks out an international player.

Mark Ankucic, contributor for Dusty Cartridge:

The last twelve months have been nothing short of game-changing for me. Being introduced to esports communities like Shadowloo, covering the Oceanic [World Championship Series] Finals of Starcraft 2 for Game Informer, and being completely swept up in [the Evolution fighting game championships], has reminded me not merely of my own competitive streak, but that the streak lies in all of us.

Before this year I was aware of Evo and simply assumed there were various competitions for other games. It was only within the last year I realised the true scope of the funds and viewership these eSports were actually bringing in. Unfortunately my industry career has been beggared by the ignorance I held in regard to these events, because they represent an aspect of the love of challenge and adversity that we rarely get reporting the news or expressing opinions.

The traditional gaming media is failing to catch up with eSports, treating the competitive side as an almost strange beast that sits to the side. Why can I pick up a newspaper and read about an event that happened in Rugby and Soccer not two or three pages from a breaking story about something that happened in Parliament, but find even the biggest sites and publications lacking dedicated eSports sections? At times, I think the industry is a much bigger beast than most of us can tackle or will try to tackle, either because the internet necessarily breeds specialisation or that we just don’t see that these vastly different aspects of games fall under the same banner – gaming.

Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender, professional Starcraft 2 player for Team Gamecom.Nv and an Australian World Cyber Games representative for Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2:

The limited interaction with traditional and mainstream gaming media [at home] is fairly limited compared to most other progamers internationally, but I would have to say it has remained fairly the same. Which the media being interested in [professional gaming] from Australia in general and how i prepare for tournaments.

I think it entirely depends on the gaming events I’m participating in, with regards to how much reporters take interest in myself. So it is a bit inconsistent sometimes, if there aren’t many competitions/events scheduled.

Because most people find it hard to believe that people take computer games so serious to the point where they are professionals, like a real sport. So it is something new that’s emerging and so different, especially in Australia.

Imagine you’re sitting down, enjoying your favourite game, on the lounge, sofa or maybe a nice comfortable computer chair. Everything seems reasonably normal, although there’s something just a little bit off. The corners of the screen are a bit harder to see, and occasionally you have to squint.

It’s like you rolled out of bed, except you’ve been awake for hours. You scrub your eyes, drag the grit out of the side of your eyelid. It gets better, your vision clearer, eyes more relaxed. You’d think the problem was gone, except it never seems to fully go away. Maybe you just didn’t sleep enough last night: the light from the computer screen disrupts sleeping patterns, after all.

We’ve all experienced something similar, feeling a little lethargic in the eyes, needing time to “wake up”, as it were. Some need more time to wake up than most; often that’s just the differences between humans.

Unless you’re 18-year-old Nick McGuffin from Brisbane. He loves his video games, as we all do, and he’s particularly fond of StarCraft 2. McGuffin may not be touring the world vying for glory at international championships just yet, but it’s a dream of his. In other words, he’s just your average, gaming-loving Australian – except his eyes never fully “woke up”.

Imagine that over a long period of time, you notice that every time you do wake up, the blur and fog lingers for much longer. Those moments of discomfort, clearing the gunk from your eyes, more frequent.

It never got better for Nick, only worse. “I was driving to work, and noticed poor vision/blurring of lines on the road, and I decided to get my eyes checked at the local optometrist. From there, he said ‘let’s see how things progress over the next few months’. It got worse, and I was sent to another optometrist in a city nearby. He was uncertain, and we left it for another 6 months.”

Nick’s mother Wendy Bertello, like everyone else, first thought it was the games. “Initially it was just diagnosed as lack of long distance vision usage, which the optometrist said was common with people these days as lots worked at close vision on computers, so he recommended him to go outside every day at least, and focus on something in the distance on the horizon and ‘retrain’ his brain to see clearly.”

The training didn’t work though, and after several months Nick’s eyesight continued to degrade. “We got Nick glasses, but this gave him headaches and didn’t appear to make his vision any better so we went back to that optometrist to see if the script was correct.  They tested Nick’s eyes and noticed his strongest eye was the right one and his left eye was trying to compete with his right causing severe headaches,” Bertello explained.

It was then that the specialists diagnosed the cause as keratoconus, a rare degenerative disease that causes the front surface of the eye to thin and form a conical shape. Along with the potential for an incredibly fast loss of eyesight, the structural change can also cause photophobia and monocular polyopia, otherwise known as “ghost” images.

One specialist who can treat the disease is the Brisbane-based Dr James McAlister. Unfortunately, even though Nick doesn’t have to fly interstate, there’s a good chance the procedure to treat keratoconus – cross-linking – might fail. “My own experience is that the risk of continued progression after corneal cross linking is 20% for juveniles rather than 5% for adults with moderate progressive keratoconus,” Dr McAlister wrote in a brochure about the disease. On top of that, cross-linking only has a 5% chance of improving Nick’s vision.

If the treatment succeeds, it’ll halt the progression of the disease; any reversal would require stepping into the territory of miracles. Even then there’s a chance that Nick will need a corneal transplant later on, and that’s just in his right eye. If the left continues to degrade, it will need the same treatment.

But because the cross-linking procedure hasn’t advanced past the trial stages, the procedure isn’t covered by Medicare or private-health insurance – and it’s a cost Nick’s family can’t afford right now.

“Our situation is that his father lives overseas and doesn’t want to help out, I have had a knee replacement at 45 due to sporting injuries in earlier life and it has since prevented me returning to work,” Wendy said. “My husband has been working 12 hour days, 6 days a week, trying to cover costs but is a casual employee and as the sugar season has finished in our district (which is the main employer in our area) his hours have been reduced to 4 days a week. He has tried to gain further employment however due to Christmas, nothing is available for him.”

It’s that kind of hopelessness, the inability to protect your family that is absolutely soul-destroying as a parent. The one objective in life, my mother once told me, was to ensure that anyone who came after me had a better life than I did, and it’s something Nick’s mother understands. “I feel terrible that I can’t provide for my son in this time of need as the doctor has said this is something we can’t postpone,” she admitted.

Luckily, Nick’s family wasn’t the only ones who wanted to help. Left with no other choice, Nick decided to make a post on SC2SEA, the hub for all things StarCraft related in Southeast Asia, explaining his situation – and the response was incredible.

Alicia Oliver-Walker, a New Zealand-based commentator for StarCraft 2 and a content editor for pro-gaming team Frenetic Array, helped to marshal those looking to answer the call. “[Nicholas] Russo, the Frenetic Array Team Manager, contacted me to say he would like to donate a signed shirt to the charity, but at that stage nothing had been decided on,” she recalled.

“I had a chat to Nick to see how he would like to proceed, a charity auction or raffle. We decided to go with a charity raffle to appeal to those who wouldn’t be able to bid on a high priced item but instead to have a chance to win with any donation made.”

It wasn’t just players and random spectators who stepped up: peripherals manufacturer Razer contacted Oliver-Walker to donate a set of Star Wars: The Old Republic mouse-pads, retailing at $50 each, and the community also provided signed shirts, free coaching, StarCraft-themed apparel and their own hard-earned cash.

“For the most part, people have been amazing … some people like myself are not financially able to support the cause so have given up their time, spread the word and made donations in the form of prizes instead. We have a very close-knit community who are always supporting our own members. I try never to focus on those who want to bring something like this down, I think it is really important for us to focus on the fact that there are so many amazing people who want Nick to have his operation,” Oliver-Walker added.

The support has been inspiring, even if the end goal is a lot of money for a community comprised mainly of teenagers, underage gamers and struggling students. “Nick didn’t tell us about this until after his first donation came in … I felt terrible that he had to do this but very proud of him at the same time,” Wendy admitted. “We are constantly told how people these days are selfish and don’t want to help others and with people who scam others, this is truly understandable, but this support is beyond my comprehension and we cannot express how honestly thankful we are.”

Around $1000 has already been raised — covering around half of the first operation — although the family has admitted that there is no guarantee their situation will improve, which is almost grotesquely ironic considering how difficult things have been already. Since the middle of last year, for example, Nick has been battling depression after a lack of funds forced him to drop out of university.

While that’s slowly being conquered with the support of Nick’s girlfriend, the after-effects of the procedure are excruciating. “The treatment, although not painful in itself, is supposedly very painful the night after surgery, equitable to childbirth or a bluebottle sting … no mother wants to see their child go through that,” Wendy explained, adding that Nick will require follow-ups in three months, six months and a year’s time.

But if Nick and his family have shown anything so far, it’s that they’re built to survive. And despite a reputation for lobotomised misogynists, incessant trolling and a stereotype threatened by colour, gender, race and a can of Lynx, gamers are sharing what little funds they have to stop Nick from going blind.

That’s a gesture which sings loud and clear above all the recent hatred and drama, and the first chorus may have just begun. There’s several days before the charity draw comes to an end and another fortnight before the first step in a long and painful chapter of Nick’s life. But there’s no doubt that if Nick walks away with a functioning pair of eyes, it isn’t religion or philosophy or even family that he has to thank. It’s the most unlikely saviour of all: gaming.

Anyone wishing to help can donate directly to Nick via his Paypal at nickmcguffin@me.com,while those looking to participate in the charity auction can find all the relevant information at SC2SEA.

Emily Gera, a senior British reporter at Polygon, recently coded an interactive fiction game emulating the “mind of a Kotaku commenter” — shorthand for what she sees as some of the best lines from the internet’s most bigoted, misogynistic pigs.

There’s only one emotion at play here: disgust. And since the motivations of women-haters are about as reasonable as those of racists — that is, completely unreasonable — I’ve never really understood how anyone could feel anything else.

We’ve all been here before. And we all keep revisiting the same bloody topic, talking about the disgusting, abhorrent behaviour of lobotomised trolls. But what’s so confounding and infuriating about the entire affair is not so much that it keeps happening, but that it seems almost singularly impossible, almost as if the internet itself wills it so, to have a constructive discussion on the matter.

The world of eSports had its own distasteful exchange recently when Kim “Eve” Shee-Yoon — the first female player contracted to the Slayers professional gaming team in South Korea, announced she was closing down her Twitter account due to “sexual harassment”. It was quickly revealed that said harassment consisted of a guy showing off his — shall we say, wares, with a photo of Eve.

Sadly, this isn’t a new phenomenon. But I want to move away from the horrors of the act and focus around the events that took place afterward, because it’s important to understand just how difficult it is to engage in a mature debate even among level-head gamers.

As the various Australians I followed on Twitter began to discuss the fallout, one gamer made the unfortunate mishap of remarking that every bigoted act they’d seen inevitably traced back to the StarCraft 2 community. Stirring up the hornet’s nest, accidentally or otherwise, is never a wise move unless you have a rocket launcher or some other equally explosive device for online arguments.

The person in question was forced to walk it back and apologised for doing so. And by and large that’s how things turn out when one person makes a mistake. But in accidentally stirring up a group fervently trying to defend itself from an unreasonable allegation, the main game — getting rid of the boorish last-century behaviour that infests every nook and cranny of the online world — was completely forgotten.

People become so easily sidetracked that a great opportunity to actively debate codes of conducts, moderation policies and general standards of behaviour, was run over by a train of inconsequential bullshit that had as much relevance as a fart in the wind. And this isn’t unique to this particular situation: it happens every goddamned time.

Earlier in the week, a more important discussion kicked off surrounding the disadvantages and advantages faced by women in eSports, although the topic could have applied to gaming in general just as well. Most of the heat played out on Twitter, where Rachel Quirico, a reporter for the Cybersports Network, began arguing with Cadred editor Richard Lewis over the “leg-up” women receive in the industry. I won’t recap what was said; you can read a screenshot of the conversation here.

Some thoughtful replies did rise above the fray; Teamliquid.net administrator Hot_Bid gave the most neutral summation he possibly could, while Melbourne-based writer Sunset for pro-gamers Team ROOT penned a well-written reply of her own.

This is all well and good, but the problem was that none of it was connected to each other; it was broken apart by the tens and hundreds of posts filled with absolute rubbish, and that’s not even accounting for comments deemed too off-colour even for Reddit.

When you’re being debased as someone who “dresses like a slut for attention” or someone who is “so ignorant and feminist that it actually discomforts me” you have to respond. You’re not a human being if you don’t. And yet the mere act of defending yourself against such unqualified crap — because ignoring it will simply lead to arguments that the charges are indeed true, since you never denied them — moves the debate into a completely different arena.

It’s amazingly paradoxical that the internet’s unlimited capacity, with all its potential to facilitate discussion on any topic imaginable, is actually the worst possible place for dealing with serious issues. The constant, never-ending flow of information makes it a certainty that punters move on to another topic before coming to terms with the immediate issue.

Worthwhile points were raised in the last week. Women almost undoubtedly do receive an advantage over men when entering the industry — but almost all cases they also weather an exceedingly greater amount of flak simply for being there.

Part of it is really just supply and demand: fewer females means lesser competition for on-camera roles, hosting gigs and general opportunities, but that also means the spotlight and criticism is intensified for that smaller number.

And you could probably quantify that fairly accurately too: just think about the ratio of male to female gamers at any competitive LAN. If you were to say the anger and unwarranted rage received by women was about 1,000 times worse — take a look at the next major LAN tournament and see how many females there are.

But even this is diverting from the bottom line — that all of these points deserve thorough, intelligent discussion. But intelligent, reasoned people can’t have that discussion on the internet because they’re constantly having to dance from one extreme to another having to fan the flames from whatever controversial point was just raised.

Direct conversations like Twitter aren’t appropriate: this is something that’s really best suited for a panel, or at very least a face-to-face debate. That way, at least people are afforded the chance to slowly and properly address issues one at a time. You can’t solve the whole problem by tackling the entire beast head-on; it’s too large, too unwieldy.

Coming to a consensus is much easier to do after listening to an hour of structured reasoning: doing so after an hour of reading people pick apart and take every last line of an article out of context is not. And while reason is certainly not always a guaranteed method of combating the inherent savagery and unsubtle nature of sexism and bigotry, it’s a much better starting point than hoping for sense and sensibility to somehow stand out in the sea of the Internet.

Back in June, we spoke to some of Australia’s top female pro-gamers to get their thoughts on females in competitive gaming. Click here to see what they had to say.

There’s been plenty of commentators hopping on the StarCraft bandwagon since its barnstorming release a couple of years ago. Some have made it, some haven’t. But the one consistent force in Australia throughout this whole time is the ruggedly handsome and charming Leigh Mandalov from South Australia, better known as Maynarde.

He’s been in the game, so to speak, for longer than most. And that experience and his reputation was fully appreciated earlier this year when Blizzard hired him as the master of ceremonies for the World Championship Series finals for Australia and Oceania. I sat down with Mandalov to ask him about the event, commentating and how it all came to be.

Describe yourself and your background as a gamer.

I’m [in my] late 20′s now, and I’ve been a gamer since I was old enough to use a controller, getting my first console at the tender age of 6. It wasn’t until WarCraft 2 when I first dabbled into competitive online gaming; it was mainly single player until that point. I’ve never been top-class at anything except for being decent at Quake 1 but I got a lot out of it due to my competitive nature, which just got me wanting more and more.

How did you get involved with competitive gaming and StarCraft?

I got involved in competitive gaming in other games (Quake especially) due to playing a tonne on local servers, and discovered local LAN contests via the other regular local players. Since the old WarCraft titles though, nothing has ever excited me more than a new Blizzard title. I can safely admit that I am a huge fan of every title they’ve brought out. Brood War was the best RTS title I had ever played until that point and I left the FPS scene to play this as competitively as I could (not very competitively) and casually with mates.

Signing up an account at TeamLiquid changed everything for me. I got to see VODs of the professionals like Savior, Boxer, Flash, Jaedong, Bisu etc all show me how high level RTS is meant to be played. Never have I been more captivated by watching a game instead of playing until that moment. Thanks to Husky and Day[9] I was sufficiently hyped for SC2, and instantly went to every local LAN I could. Within a few months I was already completely hooked, and became active on the sitesc2sea.com in an effort to help and be a part of the more local scene which wasn’t really doable on TL unfortunately.

What inspired you to cast, and at what point did you start taking it more seriously?

Because I was so passionate about SC2 and no one was really running tournaments at the time, I ran my own. It was a small private tournament between myself and a bunch of my friends that all worked at EB Games. Someone suggested I should cast the games, so I did. I never really took casting seriously until I realised that people who weren’t my friends actually genuinely liked my casting; very heart warming! I started to get bigger gigs, each and every time being shocked that someone would suggest me for anything. I then also realised that my goal to help the community would be better achieved via casting and promoting tournaments rather than being a competitive player, luckily I enjoyed playing and casting equally!

Did you study other commentators in StarCraft or sports when starting out?

Not at first, but I did once I started to take casting a little more seriously and didn’t want to let people down. I felt very mediocre and never listened to my own casts cause I hated them. I mainly listened to and took notes listening to Artosis and Tasteless who were and continue to be an inspiration for me.

What preparation is involved for an event, and how much technical work is required behind the scenes to bring everything together?

I just have to make sure I remember my suit jacket for a live event! I already know most of the local players and their play styles from watching local tournaments and talking with the players themselves on a daily basis. Then yeah, it’s all freestyle baby. I just watch as many tournaments and games as possible to keep up with the metagame and such.

Regarding technical work behind the scenes? I’m not involved in it, I’m just the caster. My job is the easiest compared to others, I would HATE to have the responsibility of a stream director or admin of a big production.

How do you warm-up your voice before casting and how do you maintain it over the course of a day without getting hoarse?

I don’t actually. I have some weird genetic ability to not get hoarse for a long time. One weekend I cast two 8 hour days back to back, smoking and drinking Pepsi Max pretty much the entire time which I later learned to be the worst possible thing for voice preservation. I used to be in a metal band, maybe all that screaming hardened it or something.

How does a commentator improve? Do you have other casters that you trust and rely on or do you prefer to get your advice from players who know the game better?

I can’t speak for others, but for me I think just playing the game, watching the game, and being a part of the community has been the way I improve.

I mentioned Tastosis earlier, I had the pleasure of meeting those guys recently and hung on every word of advice they gave me. Not every day you get to meet and talk to the people that are the best at what you do. My weak-point in casting is definitely my analysis, so I always prefer to talk to players over other casters for game knowledge advice, I do however have ONE caster who I co-cast with often that I respect greatly and rely on for analysis during and between casts. Her name is Zepph [a commentator for Team Immunity] and she’s awesome, deserves to be big time.

What was it like going from casting online events and tournaments for the Australian Cyber League to being the MC for the World Championship Series?

These have been the greatest experiences, especially WCS. I honestly didn’t ever see this being possible, like I said I think I’m pretty mediocre compared to other casters. I pretty much owe it all to local community hero Dox (Derek Reball, read our interview with him here) who grabbed me for his own tournament, then recommended me for ACL who were behind the production of WCS Australia / Oceania. Until that point I was casting clan leagues in front of ten live viewers. The moment I walked out on stage with a microphone at WCS and the entire 300 strong crowd exploded into a cheer before I ever said anything was a moment I’ll remember forever, I was nearly in happy tears. I was honestly starting to feel pretty disenchanted with the community due to whining and bad personalities, but that changed for me. I never realised how many people there were as passionate as I was. It’s an amazing feeling that’s mostly indescribable.

Did you get any advice from Tasteless or Artosis while you were at the event?

I sure did! I got told to drink warm water, whether that be straight warm water or preferably tea during a long live event for voice preservation. I got tips on how to bounce off your co-caster more than I already was, and to talk before the cast about what your strengths are if you haven’t cast with them previously. I also got tips on how to multi-task keeping an eye on the mini map while listening to the co-caster to try and make sure as much is covered as possible. Last but not least; keep up with the game. Play it and watch it as much as you can.

What advice would you give someone if they were looking to become a caster?

I would say first of all think about why you’re becoming a caster. Is it because you want fame or is it because you want to make things better? If it’s the former then please stop, if it’s the latter then think about what you can do that other casters don’t and what YOU can do to make the tournament experience better for everyone. What do you bring to the table? Think about those things, build on it, and cast as much as you can and promote through social media. I did casts for a year without getting any form of social media lol, noob mistake! Practice makes perfect. Other than that, don’t emulate anyone and just be yourself, read the tips Tastosis gave me, and hopefully people will like you, gl hf :)

Thanks so much for your time Leigh, do you have any shoutouts or final words?

A lot of love to everyone that I’ve worked with over the past couple years within the SC2 community. The past couple years being a part of this game’s community have been on the whole very awesome. Special shout outs to Dox, Zepph and Tastosis who have helped me the most as far as casting goes, and last but definitely not least to my wonderful better half Kalikah for being supportive and very understanding on those weekends I’ve sacrificed for eSports.

You can also follow Mandalov on Twitter to keep track of all his upcoming events.

Maybe this is something that’s just infested the communities I’ve experienced over the last decade, but one of the absolute worst traits that has been allowed to fester and spread has been the delusion that gamers over the last few years have adopted when it comes to what defines a professional.

The words “professional gamer” get thrown around like candy these days. I can understand the appeal. I remember watching videos of the early Cyberathlete Professional Leagues and thinking “Holy crap, that’s amazing, how can I get in on that?”. I was so inspired that I ended up spending entire school holidays practicing just to try and climb up the ladder a little further.

But I, nor anyone else that I played with or against, was stupid enough to assume that we were “professionals” in any sense. It wasn’t a question of attitude (a benchmark we would have failed spectacularly) or behaviour. It was just a simple reality.

We were doing this for fun. There was never enough money in it to make a living and, sooner or later, we’d all have to give the game away and begin walking down our own paths.

Over the last few years though, that perception has changed and been warped completely out of proportion to the point where getting $2 gifts from a sponsor and wearing a shirt with some tags on it somehow makes you a professional.

Let me be very clear on this: if you are not earning enough money to make a living, you do not, in this realm or any other that exists, qualify as a “professional”.

Hell, if you don’t earn enough money to pay tax back to the government you can’t really call yourself a professional. You might as well be on welfare (and the sad truth is that a lot of purported pro-gamers were just that — living off the government).

This isn’t some elitist view; it’s pure, cold, hard fact. The literal meaning of a professional, according to Wikipedia, is someone who is “paid to undertake a specialized set of tasks and to complete them for a fee”. Dictionary.com is just as precise: “following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain”. Other dictionaries that I looked at reiterated the same theme.

It seems fairly clear — and yet people have been happy to re-write the definition and market their new one as fact, even if it is about as far from reality as my keg-like gut is from the cover of GQ.

I understand the value of recasting yourself as a professional instead of a competitive enthusiast. It’s more appealing to sponsors, for whom the word professional is associated with certain standards of behaviour, skill and marketability. None of those factors actually change if people start describing themselves truthfully, but it’s all about the perception.

By my count, only around 20 gamers in Australia from 2000 onwards can actually describe themselves as true professionals, ones who earned enough money to actually have to file a tax return (or ones that were in situations where they were living abroad for extended periods for the sole purpose of gaming). And the reason for that pitifully small number is because most of the gamers that received a “salary” received such a small amount of money that they’d have earned more by collecting the dole (I wouldn’t be surprised if some did both).

We are not professionals; we’re enthusiasts. This is a hobby for us. A very competitive hobby, no doubt, but a hobby nonetheless. That may change in the future — gaming isn’t going anywhere, which will only lead to more eSports fans — but the community does itself no favours by closing its eyes and pretending that black is white.

It was both disappointing and amusing when, after finally receiving my copy of Black Ops 2 in the post, I started going over the feature list and began wondering what kind of competitive life it would have.

The original Black Ops was heavily anticipated around the world, in part thanks to the massive backlash against Modern Warfare 2 and the lack of dedicated servers, a console and other simple features (like not being matched up with gamers in the United States).

People were hoping that it would have been a return to old, something that might finally unify and supplant the original Modern Warfare. I am, of course, talking about the state of things on PC. The console community has grown into a beast of its own, although their hand is often forced. They don’t have the luxury of remaking maps from other games, adding new textures or rewriting balance with mods.

But the difference between the needs of the developer and that of a vibrant competitive scene are often at odds. The latter requires continuity and time: a commodity that many studios can ill afford or tolerate.

Free-to-play business models are starting to change that equation, but even then the environment is tightly controlled and too reliant on their owners’ graciousness.

This was the great disappointment of Black Ops. Treyarch threw enough ingredients into the pot for a truly delicious recipe, but left it sitting for far too long, with full mod support only eventuating a year after release.

To fully understand the effects of this, you need to go back and look at the differences between the second and third Modern Warfare games. Despite the myriad of problems with the consolification of what began as a PC franchise, the game was still perfectly functional as a competitive game.

But what made it work was the fact that you had enough variety across the different maps and modes that it wasn’t a big deal if one or two levels didn’t work. It wasn’t game-breaking if there was a gun or an item that didn’t quite fit; you could easily regulate around that.

My major problem with MW3 was that the entire experience was homogenised to a series of close to medium-range battles, excluding some of the more expansive maps that you’d traditionally see in, well, any shooter.

Size doesn’t mean you can’t make an amazingly memorable map. To this day, I still think Backlot is one of the most well designed levels in any FPS ever made. It’s small and has all those pokey fights but enough variety in the angles to allow for snipers and long-range players to make space for themselves.

Larger maps force you to play differently, and that’s why developers usually offer a mixed bag so that everyone gets something to their taste. Compare Afghan with Terminal from Modern Warfare 2. Or de_nuke with de_train from Counter-Strike (de_cbble being an even more apt comparison).

When everything is shrunk down, so is the distance from one spawn location to another — even more so when playing modes that routinely rotate spawns, like Domination. Now this naturally brings the fight to your doorstep a lot sooner, something Activision is obviously targeting because it appeals to the twitch-frenzied teenagers that make up the Call of Duty market.

But it’s downright awful from a competitive aspect — because it limits the amount of downtime between each actual firefight, which in turn hamstrings the time either side has to strategise.

Downtime is important, for several reasons

Part of the fun of a scrim (or a war or a prac; scrim being more common in North America, while the latter was more local terminology) was adapting to the situation as a team, working through your opponents and playing out the rest of the match in your head while you waited to respawn.

If you’re playing something like Capture the Flag or Domination, there’s less time and complication mid-game. It doesn’t also play out quite as excitingly for the spectators, save for those rare moments at the end where a flag’s about to be capped on the last second.

Most matches are decided well before the last thirty seconds though, especially in the case of Domination where the end is often like reading the last rites before putting the wounded out of his misery. Search and Destroy is more volatile, depending on the score, although the suspense builds up much more slowly and therefore lasts much longer when a comeback is on the cards.

It creates stories. It makes stories that are unfolding that much better. It gives team leaders a chance to second-guess themselves and a chance for the underlings to bite back and fight. And if you’re sitting at home or spectating live at the venue, you get to watch this all unfold in a myriad of consequences, missed shots, bizarre movements and various nervy responses.

Why would you want to compress all of this action out of the game?

The simple reason is that Black Ops 2 and MW3 before it are symptomatic of a philosophy that is completely adrenaline-focused, one that finds any lull in the action not related to the deployment of some overpowered helicopter or death robot to be coma-inducing and antiquated.

Instead of being a well-rounded tale of battle — and an engaging, entertaining match should unfold like a story, with teams pulling each other forth and back and big individual plays settling the score — what we’re left with is more like a Michael Bay movie, a never-ending collection of explosions, headshots and gunfire.

If you’re happy to load up a game in a public server and play for an hour or two until you’re exhausted — which is literally the case for a lot of people, so much so that it has turned people off the franchise altogether — then that’s fine.

But I want my stories back. I want my developing narrative that ebbs and flows throughout the course of my game. I want the time to sit back and ponder how the next three or four rounds will play out. I want to picture my enemy’s response, read it completely and have ten or twenty seconds the next round to enjoy the moment. Because that’s what really keeps eSports going: the memories and the stories you tell with your friends that make every game different and that make it not only worth playing, but worth watching.

Right now, it’s more like two seconds. And that’s not enough.

Australians have always been a talented lot, but our geography has an awful habit of getting in the way. Flights and internet cables are just a little too long for our liking, making it difficult to fly the Southern Cross and show our true colours on the big stage where we belong. Fortunately — in the world of pro-gaming, at least — America got a little reminder that we exist, ignoring that time where some people wanted to migrate because of our male, Christian President or something.

Let’s start from the bottom up, by going to France.

With eight players already booked in to go to Dallas last weekend, the EB Expo StarCraft 2 qualifiers were always going to be a little anti-climactic. The tickets to Paris were going to be handed down a few times, and it wasn’t until they reached the hands of third-placed Mack Smith that they found their home. It wouldn’t be the teenager’s first foreign outing – he’d already put in a good showing at the Tokyo Game Show by finishing third behind Australia’s Tim “MaFia” He and the cheerful Taiwanese Zerg Yang “Sen” Chia Cheng.

Unfortunately, when he got thrown in a group with probably the best foreigner on the planet – Frenchman Ilyes “Stephano” Satouri, who had the advantage of the home crowd — and another highly talented Zerg from Europe, life was looking difficult. But things turned out better than expected for the Frenetic Array player with a 2-1 victory against the resident ragdoll of the group, and a narrow loss in the 3rd game to SortOf, the Swedish Zerg who ended up qualifying behind Stephano in the group. People on the ground, from what I’ve heard, were quite taken aback by the New Zealander’s performance — and on another day he could have quite easily advanced to the next stage.

At the same time, a strong contingent of Australians were making waves in Dallas where the final leg of the Major League Gaming’s 2012 pro circuit was taking place. Four Australians made the trip under the banner of Team Nv for the StarCraft 2 tournament: David “Rossi” Rossi, Daniel “deth” Haynes, Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender and Yojun “YoonYJ” Yun. Joining the fight was Team Immunity, which sent along their Halo and StarCraft 2 teams, including Tim “Mafia” He, Ray “Light” Zi, Bradley “tgun” Seymour, Matt ‘Voltage’ Barker, Aaron ‘Benno’ Bennett, Dan ‘Ogre 1′ Ryan and Matt ‘Heff’ Hefren.

Light and Tgun had a difficult run, with the former falling in the second round and the latter dropping quickly in the lower bracket. Even though he was only a couple of rounds away from the Championship Bracket, Tgun would have been bitterly disappointment not to qualify, having done so a few times before. Light got a couple of walkovers and made it as far as the 5th round before hitting one of the many Koreans in the bracket – Stardust – that would later qualify for the Championship Bracket.

Deth and YoonYJ got paired in the same bracket and were scheduled to meet each other in the fourth round. YYJ ended up hitting QXC, a member of Team Complexity and a popular regular on the State of the Game podcast. I was talking to my housemate, a fellow eSports advocate, before the match and I predicted that YYJ had a strong chance of winning 2-1, thanks to his goofy, reckless style that can pay off big.

I didn’t get every call right, but YYJ did end up in the fourth round. Deth had a harder time against Insur, who qualified for Blizzard’s World Championship Series grand finals next week (more on that later). Insur ended up knocking both Deth and YYJ to the lower bracket, and neither of them progressed much further afterwards; Deth ended up hitting QXC,

Like every other Australian, Rossi and Mafia were paired in the same bracket. They met in the fourth round, which must be a horrible feeling — it’s annoying flying interstate to play a nationals, only to get drawn against a team or a player in your own state. Mafia and Rossi few a couple of thousand kilometres and got the same result.

In an excellent series, Mafia won the right to play against Suppy in the 5th round, with the winner progressing to the group stages of the Championship bracket. Sadly, Suppy dropped Mafia down, where Team Liquid’s Sheth later sent the former poker player packing with a 2-0 score. Rossi had a similar fate, losing 2-1 in the round prior.

mOOnGlaDe had a much better run; his performances in the online qualifiers saw him automatically seeded to the 5th round of the upper bracket, avoiding many of the shenanigans the rest of the Australians went through. Unfortunately, that meant the Queenslander was also drawn up against MC, who has won almost US$350,000 in StarCraft 2 since its launch two years ago. So naturally, the “Prince of Zerg” just casually dropped MC down to the loser’s bracket. And then did the same to Huk from Evil Geniuses, the first player in the United States to receive a six-figure contract for a PC game (with the exception of Fatal1ty).

Our Australian Zerg fought his way through groups and ended up dropping down to the fourth round of the Championship lower bracket. Only one foreigner made it further – Naniwa from Sweden, who has been living in Korea and playing in Code S for several months now — although a couple of Americans, Suppy and Insur, made it to the same round as mOOnGlaDe.

Unfortunately, the Queenslander was one round from making the money — but Team Immunity’s Halo division, competing in the Halo 4 pre-release tournament, got past the bubble quite comfortably. After showing off their skills in a showmatch on the first day, things got down to business with a 256-team double elimination bracket. They made it as far as the third round before losing 2-1 to Status Quo, who would end up finishing third.

Then, not satisfied, they went and tore the living hell out of the lower bracket. The Australians won the next four matches without dropping a set, including a 2-0 thumping of Virtue, who defeated European powerhouse Fnatic by the same score. Immunity ended up finishing 9th after losing 2-0 (2-3 in the final set) to Reality Check, which isn’t a bad result considering the incredible number of sign-ups from around the world. By my count, at least 220 teams showed up, meaning that almost 900 players attended MLG to play in the Halo 4 tournament alone.

It’s an astonishing effort that deserves praise, and hopefully it’ll be followed up next weekend in Shanghai, where Mafia and mOOnGlaDe will take part in the Battle.net Starcraft 2 World Championship Series. A strong run could change the boys’ lives permanently, giving them the reputation and support necessary to move to Europe or South Korea (Pender has already indicated his desire to do so next year).

I’ll cover the WCS finals in-depth next week. But the strong performances of Australians over in Dallas will not be forgotten. We’re no longer in an age where people were sitting at home, glued to HLTV, praying for a favourable bracket draw so that we might make it past the first stage.

That time has passed.

Moonglade pics thanks to Team Liquid Coverage!

Some people foolishly think that playing a game is a simple affair. You look at a screen, click the mouse a few times, press a few buttons on a controller at the right time and that’s it. And while there’s some truth in that the core mechanics of playing a video game are executed through precisely those methods, it conveys a great deal of ignorance about the mental fortitude required.

It’s not overly difficult to get your mechanics to a competitive state, although there are certain limitations such as reaction times that are much more difficult to improve than say, not missing a supply depot. Decision making is really the difference at the top level, and often it’s only possible to improve through exposure to the world’s biggest events – or by being born with a prodigious level of talent.

But making the correct choices becomes demonstrably more difficult when you get thrown in front of rabid fans, bright lights, cameras and have to deal with, quite literally, what feels like a cavern of sound and eyeballs aimed at you.

So to that end, we’re going to walk a little bit back on time and go over some of the lessons Australians have learned when it comes to global competition.

Stick to the plan

If you were a Counter-Strike fan down under, there was this ritual every six months or so where you’d sit back, load up the game and jump into one of the many HLTV servers to watch Australia’s best and brightest strut their stuff on the global stage. But there was a period where, for a couple of years, being a fan was akin to torture.

It’d go something like this. You’d ignore the pistol round; if they won, hey, great start, but it wasn’t a big deal if they lost. You’d watch the first gun round, see what kind of strategy they whipped out. Most teams weren’t experienced with Australians and vice versa, so there was a lot of feeling out going on.

A couple of players might start to hit some good shots; one might choke. Not a big deal, still plenty of rounds. But as the match progressed, you’d increasingly tear your hair out at the way the Aussies would play, largely because it was so unrecognisable from how they won the flights to Germany/France/where-ever in the first place.

The phrase “if they played like that at home, they wouldn’t be going overseas in the first place” stuck for quite a few years.

Obviously, there are cases when you have to throw out the playbook. But the truth for any competitor is that the best card in your deck is always going to be the one you’re most familiar with: and that’s especially true for the StarCraft 2 boys competing this weekend.

Otis Duncan, one of the most consistent players in Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source, told me that he forms a siege-like mentality that keeps him on the edge. “I always just wanted to prove that the Aussies could take it with the best of them, which kept me level-headed and knowing that it could be your only chance means you have to make the most of it,” he said.

Don’t be afraid to lose

Nobody likes losing, of course, but it’s equally important to not be concerned about it. There’s a simple reason why: if you’re constantly fretting about making the wrong decision, you’ll be unable to consistently take the risks and knife-edge choices that are necessary to do well in a major tournament.

It’s a common refrain whenever people watch replays from a major tournament. MarineKingPrime attracts this kind of attention a lot. “I could never do that,” x player says. “That’s way too risky: if I tried that on ladder I’d just die.”

And that’s probably correct. If you take the kind of risks a player of that calibre does in a setting as even and as tumultuous as the ladder, chances are you’re going to have a bad time.

But live tournaments are fundamentally different. You can physically see your opponent. You might have even had the pleasure of watching his previous match – or the misfortune of having him watch yours. Perhaps you can see there’s something in particular that he’s struggling with, or maybe learn which builds to avoid.

Risk-taking doesn’t have to be reckless. Competitions is as much about information as it is execution and preparation. That doesn’t mean rolling the dice is the path to victory – sometimes playing safe will get you out of a lot of trouble – but not taking any chances at all is a sure-fire way to hamstring yourself.

Don’t show all your cards

While Australia’s not the completely unknown quantity in gaming that it used to be, our geography means that we’re still pretty isolated from a lot of the top professionals, particularly those in Europe. Now that’s not a big problem for them, provided that the Aussies don’t show any talent. But Australians have been using the “I’ll show ‘em” mentality as a psychological crutch for years to help their performances overseas – and that can lead to problems.

It manifests before the tournament, when players and teams get together for some friendly practice. Everyone gets a chance to warm up, familiarise themselves with the area (even if it’s at a local netcafe) and just relax a little.

But don’t kid yourself by thinking that the practices are friendly matches.

A few years ago, a group of Australians went on a little tour of Europe to play in some Counter-Strike: Source tournaments. Being a fresh face on the block, the Australians had their pick of the litter and played some games against some of the best Europeans to see where they stood.

It wasn’t even close: the Australians went to town with brutal scores in the range of 16-2 and 16-3. Word quickly spread among the top teams that the new kids weren’t mucking around, and the Europeans changed their tactics ASAP.

But when the Australians got savaged in the first round by a team from Italy, one of the teams they’d summarily executed in practice, something seemed amiss. How were the Europeans suddenly able to respond so effectively?

A reporter for the European eSports website Cadred said at the time that it was the worst counter-stratting he’d even seen – and he was right. After the match, the Australians were given the answer: some of the teams they’d thrashed in practice had gone around to their rivals and sold the demos of their practice games against the Australians.

It’s certainly not ethical behaviour, here or anywhere else, but bleating about it won’t change reality. The only way to combat it is to prepare beforehand, by using a set of strategies and builds that aren’t necessarily your trump card, but ones that are good enough that the practice can be worth your time without giving up the store.

Don’t lose heart

The last thing to remember is that no matter what the result, all the fans back home are immensely proud of you, provided you don’t give up. There’s nothing worse than getting disheartened and packing it in, because not only does that kill your chances of winning, but it also ruins your support back home.

Whether there’ll be any Australians left in the various tournaments at MLG and ESWC this weekend by the time you read this article is unknown. That’s not important though. What’s essential is that you give our boys their support. It makes a difference and it’s worth remembering: the better they do, the more chances they open up for Aussies back home.

A divide has always existed within gaming, a historical canyon that has made it difficult to connect the medium with mainstream culture. That divide has since narrowed over the last few years, thanks to the growth of consoles, mobile gaming and a general shift in attitudes over time.

But the gap between casual and even hardcore gamers to the competitive community is still as large as ever, even with the popularity of games like DOTA 2 and League of Legends. One movement that has helped bring fans out of the woodwork, however, has been the BarCraft movement around the world.

Peter Du is a member of the Australian Pro League, which hosts BarCraft and MOBAR events in Sydney. I sat down with him to chat about how it all got started, what makes them so popular and how the growth of Barcraft/MOBAR has affected the image of gaming not only with gamers but with the wider community.

What was the original inspiration for the Australian Pro League to begin the event and who was involved in getting things off the ground?

Everyone at the Australian Pro League experienced the same feeling that I’m sure many eSports fans have; the feeling of “I wish I could be there”. Seeing all these large international events and their respective BarCraft events being advertised, we all had the desire to attend these awesome events, but being in Australia, that wasn’t that feasible. So we essentially became the solution to the problem many people faced: we wanted to bring those events to Australia and thus brought about our Sydney BarCraft chain of events and subsequently, Sydney MOBAR. There were two people responsible for getting Sydney BarCraft running; our CEO, Eugene Mak and the founder of Sydney BarCraft, Brian Ng. Without them, we wouldn’t have such awesome events in Australia.

Is there any fundamental difference between the crowds that attend a BarCraft and a MOBAR? How has the reception for MOBAR been, what were the initial numbers and what expectations do you have for future MOBARs?

Despite what most people may believe, there are very little differences between a BarCraft crowd and a MOBAR crowd. Whilst the crowd themselves may be different people, they both have the same level of energy and both love their game just as much as the other. Our first Sydney MOBAR was a huge success, attracting approximately 350 patrons, similar to the numbers we see for our Sydney BarCraft events. Going into the future, we will definitely keep working to improve our MOBAR chain of events and we expect to see bigger and better things moving forward.

Do the crowds at a MOBAR and BarCraft tend to mix or do they remain separate (fans of Barcraft don’t attend MOBAR events and vice-versa) ?

For the most part, there is a large portion of the crowd that attend both MOBAR and BarCraft events, but of course there will always be a group of people who just aren’t interested in the other title, which is perfectly valid. You may see them trial the other event once or twice to get a feel for it, and while you may get some people getting hooked, others will chose to stick to their one title.

How has your relationship with the Paragon Hotel management developed since you began running the BarCraft events? What was their initial expectations and concerns with bringing gaming into the venue, and how do they look at them now?

When we initially approached the Paragon Hotel with the concept of hosting a BarCraft, as you’d expect, they were a bit sceptical, but nevertheless their General Manager, Craig Wesker was more than willing to trial the idea. With the success of Sydney BarCraft #1, any remaining scepticism was put to rest for not only the Paragon Hotel, but also for us. Since then, our relationship with the Paragon Hotel and its chain has been a highly positive one; they have always been very accommodating to us and it’s always a pleasure to work with them. We have also found that the Paragon Hotel and its staff have come to embrace the games as well, as they become immersed in the event’s atmosphere.

How many people, and how much time, are required to help make the event a success? What kind of preparation happens on the Paragon Hotel’s end? Are extra staff rostered on specifically for a BarCraft?

The Australian Pro League staff is comprised of 8 members and in order for an event to be successful, all 8 of us have our own respective jobs to do. While planning the event itself may only take a day or two at most, we’re constantly working on trying to improve the event as a whole. In regards to the Paragon Hotel, if we expect a big turnout, generally they will almost double their staff numbers to help with the large number of customers. Apart from that, we work closely with the Paragon leading up to the event to ensure that all the technical equipment is in order and that seating arrangements are the most optimal that they can be.

How important are the quality of the games at the BarCraft itself towards making it a great event?

We can do everything in our power to make the event as amazing as we can, but at the end of the day, the games being shown is what everyone is there for. As we’ve seen in the past, if the games aren’t exciting enough, people will lose interest quite quickly which puts a dampener on the atmosphere. So all we can do is hope that each set of matches are amazing, and so far, they have been.

What kind of events work best in the downtime between matches? Do traditional pub events such as trivia and live music work well in a BarCraft?

Due to the intermissions being quite short for most tournaments, we typically find ourselves only having enough time to do a quiet prize give-away between each match. But provided the intermission is long enough, there are a large number of different things that would work; a trivia event tailored to the game would be one such example. Your creativity would be the only real restriction other than time.

What kind of response have the Sydney BarCraft events had internationally? Do you get much support from major sponsors?

As a chain of events as a whole, we aren’t all that internationally recognised, despite being the second largest BarCraft in the world. This simply comes down to the fact that the exceeding majority of BarCraft events are held in North America and Europe, which typical don’t pay much attention to the Australian StarCraft scene to begin with. Our sponsors have played a huge part in making Sydney BarCraft what it is today; they’ve provided us with products to reward the people who come out and support our events and they’ve helped put our name out there.

Has the success of the BarCraft events at the Paragon Hotel led to other venues contacting you to organise similar events? Have you looked at broadening BarCraft beyond the Paragon?

Whilst we haven’t received any form of contact from other venues, we have received messages from other organisations/people to host events for different tournaments and titles. As far as broadening our events beyond the Paragon, we don’t see this happening in the near future. Not only because the Paragon was the first venue to believe in our eSports venture and we want to support them for supporting us, but because the Paragon has other bars in its chain (such as the Ship Inn and the Republic Hotel) which have also accommodated us in the past. Most other venues cannot offer us this form of “fallback” in case their venue is already booked out on the day of an event. Working with the Paragon Hotel has been nothing short of amazing and we want to be able to continue working with them into the future.

What effect, if any, do you think events like BarCraft have had on gaming?

Although BarCraft hasn’t had any large immediate impacts on gaming, it subtly helps target core problems for gamers. BarCraft is a way of showing the public that your typical gamer isn’t someone who dwells at home all day and is anti-society, but rather, show gamers love to come out to events like these and socialise with other people. It also serves as a demonstration to people saying “This is why we love what we love” and this effect is clear when you have members of the general public, who stumble into our event unknowingly, end up getting caught up in the hype and staying for the remainder of the event.

What advice would you give to anyone looking to take gaming to a more casual venue like a pub or an RSL?

My advice to them would be, go prepared and believe in your venture. If you don’t think it will be successful, they won’t be willing to jump on board with you either. Also, with all technology related events, make sure you know what you require the venue to have, it help cuts down on a lot of confusion later on. While some may perceive gaming to be a poor business choice for them, presented in the right way, it can become a very attractive pitch to them.

Finally, why run a Barcraft? What makes it worth all the time and effort for you?

Ultimately, it comes down to our passion for the game. We love the game, we love the community, we love everything about it. To be able to create something that brings together other people who share the same passion as us and gives us a chance to celebrate that passion together, it makes everything worth it in the end. No matter how much effort it takes to put together, to see and hear people enjoying the event and saying they want more, it just drives you to keep the ball rolling. And with the amount of feedback we receive event after event, you can definitely expect more events to be coming out from us!

With a wide variety of skill levels and the differing opinions of players from the three races, Blizzard has their work cut out for them in Heart of the Swarm. Any path they take is likely to draw ire and stir debate; buff a unit here, deal with a thousand forum posts a day later.

But it’s undeniable that there is plenty of room for improvement with the upcoming expansion, with individual units, entire match-ups and even the general design of Battle.net 2.0 all legitimately criticised at some point over the last two years. After a couple of months of intense patching, Heart of the Swarm is starting to take shape. So to find out how things have been received so far, I spoke with some of the country’s most well-known and talented StarCraft gamers.

Daniel “deth” Haynes

Member of Team Nv, a professional gaming team which is attending the Dallas leg of Major League Gaming’s tour circuit in November

I feel that Terran as a whole is missing something. The other races have gotten some really unique and fun tools and abilities to play around that complement their existing arsenal, whereas Terran has had one of its new toys removed (perhaps prematurely). What we have right now is a slightly gimmicky version of the spider mine from StarCraft: Brood War, and a healable/tanky Hellion.

The matchups seem to be pretty similar for Terran in HotS as in Wings of Liberty – army compositions are largely the same, but the mine and hellions have been seeing a lot of use versus Protoss especially (although I think pure mech is still pretty bad for top level).

I have been pretty happy with how Blizzard have gone about balancing the beta though. There is still a lot of time for improvement and tweaks, trying new things and possibly filling the void in the Terran army. What is most impressive is how engaged they have been in the community — in the private Pro Forums especially, but also reading and engaging in many well written and constructive threads on their forums (David Kim and Dustin Browder especially).

Although I was a little sad to see the warhound disappear without much effort to redesign or rethink the unit’s role, I am heartened to see Blizzard reactively responding to community opinions and comments from professionals – rather than trying to slam a square key into a circular lock.

I think HotS will be well received by the community at large, both casual and competitive if Blizzard continue in their current direction. They have promised a vast array of features we have been longing for since release – clan support, Global Play, resume from replay and watching replays with others. I will be extremely happy to use these features, and hope they all make it into release.

I would say though, if the game is to truly seek to be well received and absorbed by the competitive community it needs a better map-making team (or to engage far better with community maps). For the casuals I think it needs to have a broader free-to-play option (which they are investigating currently I believe), and some sort of progression/rewards system needs to be implemented outside of ladder wins/points – just look at why League of Legends and Call of Duty are so popular!

Ash “Champi” Stanton

Player with Carnage eSports and winner of the AVCon 2012 Starcraft 2 tournament

I love the new units, as most of them resemble old units from Brood War, such as the swarm host (lurker), viper (defiler), widow mine (spider mine), mothership core/oracle (arbiter) and the battle hellion (firebat). I don’t recall any significant changes to any Wings of Liberty units so far in the beta, with maybe the exception of sentries not needing to upgrade hallucination anymore (which is nice). But I’m interested to see if the infestor is going to be tweaked in the future, as I feel the unit is very powerful in WoL at the moment, and there is potential for it to become even stronger with the addition of new units and strategies for zerg.

I think many things are missing from Protoss (my race), although the including of the mothership core was something that was sorely needed in WoL. It allows Protoss to have a stable static defence against Terran drops without having to commit supply in the form of stalkers, zealots and a high templar at each base along with photon cannons. It also gives us the option to recall our army back if the opponent opts for a base race instead of engaging our army.

Given that the race, to me, felt very one-dimensional that revolved around having an indestructible deathball that bounced around the map, I feel the mothership core is perfect for keeping our base a little more protected against harassment that often ends up becoming a kidney shot to our production or economy when our army’s stuck in the middle of the map.

The unranked ladder appears to be one of the best new changes so far. It’s actually identical to the normal ladder but it cloaks your league and points. I can play a ranked ladder match and match up against someone who is playing an unranked game. If I win, I’ll receive an appropriate amount of points based off the hidden MMR system, while my opponent loses no points and vice versa; if my opponent wins, he wouldn’t receive any points, but I’d lose a certain amount of points.

I’ve been thinking about whether players might be able to abuse the system, but so far it seems Blizzard has designed a method that works very well for the most part.

As far as the individual match-ups are concerned, Protoss vs Protoss has improved drastically. I’m now able to open with 20 nexus builds thanks to the mothership core (fast expansions are typically unviable in top-level play for WoL). Pylons can no longer provide power to the high ground from below, so the four-gate all-in has been greatly nerfed, and the tempest bonus damage to massive units helps deter mass colossi wars in the late game.

Protoss vs Zerg has become more interesting, thanks in part to the awful new maps: it’s not always easy to forge-fast expand, so I’ve been playing with gateway openings that focus on small aggression while using the mothership core and zealots to secure my natural. I’ve been favouring stargate play during the mid game for now, using oracles for harassment and the tempest as an answer to the brood lord/infestor composition.  I think the match-up is headed in the right direction, since I don’t feel it’s necessary to all-in a zerg before they reach hive tech to win. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to late-game battles that don’t revolve around landing a perfect vortex, and the oracle’s entomb ability makes me feel more secure economically against zerg players that rush to get 80 drones.

Protoss vs Terran is a little difficult right now because of the spider mines’ ability to shut down scouting. Mech armies have also become a viable option for Terrans, instead of relying on biological units [marine/marauder/medivac-centric compositions]. This makes it fun for even the Protoss, since you get to experience a completely different style of gameplay and I think it offers a lot of potential in the future with players able to choose between aggressive bio-centric styles or a more macro-heavy, turtling style revolving around mech play.

Jared “PiG” Krensel

Full-time professional Zerg player currently staying with pro-gaming team Prime in South Korea

I’ve only played a few days before I had to go back to training on WoL and I found it to be completely unfinished and imbalanced. It’s a beta so that’s to be expected. I look forward to learning the game when it’s fully released. I think Blizzard will follow their pattern of releasing fantastic expansions that make the game vastly more complex and entertaining to watch.

–

With the community continuing to harangue Blizzard over the Battle.net forums and websites like Reddit and the developer constantly changing the look and feel of the game, there’s no doubt that Heart of the Swarm has many changes ahead.

One of the most difficult aspects of tournament play is holding your nerve, finding the strength to recover from a humiliating loss and making the best decisions under pressure. Most players often spend years learning the tricks of the trade, finding their own ways to cope and their own methods of squeezing out that extra 1% or 2% that could be the difference between winning and losing.

But it doesn’t have to be a hard slog in solitary confinement. One of the greatest advantages of the internet is being able to learn from others – and there’s no better person to ask than a gamer when it comes to dealing with tournaments. So I rounded up three hardened pros and asked them how they coped in the heat of battle.

Daniel “Fenner” Fenner

Member of Frenetic Array’s Starcraft 2 roster

Good preparation for a tournament starts in the long term. Having good health by eating healthy and exercising often is vital to performing well on the day. They aren’t things you can just do the week before but habits that need to be maintained. Having this healthy lifestyle allows you to have a clear head and lots of energy with the stamina to back it up and solid focus. Consistent practice over the long term is also vital otherwise it’s very hard to keep up with the competition.

Over the short term I find that sleep is the most important, getting enough sleep leading up to a tournament has massive benefits towards decision making and focus on the day. If it’s a tournament where you have an idea about your opponents beforehand its definitely smart to see what you can find out and analyse about their play to gain an edge in the strategy department. If I know my opponent in advance I’ll work with team-mates on thinking about and planning the best strategies. This kind of preparation can allow lesser players to defeat much more experienced and well known players by simply developing with strong counter-measures.

On the day of the tournament I find it’s good to cut out all distraction and just focus on the game, my train of thought can easily get interrupted by any distraction which could potentially cost me the game. If its an online tournament I’ll make sure that there is no social software that could distract me by either closing it or putting myself on a busy or silent status. If its and offline tournament I’ll just make sure I get as much time as the organisers will allow to get my head into the game, put good though into the strategies I’m going to use and achieve. High level of focus.

Stefan “Shadowloo Stef” Materazzo

Winner of the Marvel vs Capcom 3 tournament at this year’s EB Games Expo and the ButtonSmash tournament in Queensland

This might sound a little odd, but I prefer to stop playing a game a week out before a big event and only pick it up again on the day of the tournament.

Next, I like to scout the bracket I am in to see who I might potentially face and think up strategies that I think will work against certain players that I have seen play or have played before.

Before any big games on stage I like to hype myself by doing things like jumping up and down, screaming, getting the crowd on my side. Because once I have the crowd on my side, the cheering drives me to play at my best so I don’t let them down and hopefully puts my opponent under pressure.

In between games, I like to take mini breaks. If I lose, I like to take time to think about what I did wrong and correct it. If I won, I like to think about what I did right and keep at it until my opponent adapts and forces me to change it up.

As for comebacks, it’s all about the reward! Once you make a miraculous comeback, people will remember it for a very long time, the crowd will go off and you make the highlight reels! That’s what drives me in a comeback situation.

Mack “Petraeus” Smith

3rd place finisher at the Asia e-Sports Cup 2012 [Starcraft 2] and the New Zealand leg of Blizzard’s World Championship Series

In terms of preparation for a tournament, I’ll only play a couple of games before just to warm up my fingers and get myself focused. When I’m just practicing, it will take me around 2 hours to start playing properly.

In tournaments I find the pressure alone is enough to make me play my best most games. I’ll always get really nervous when playing in tournaments and I don’t think this is likely to change. Although this used to affect my play, recently I feel it has helped it; the nerves help hone my focus on the game and not on anything else.

A fortnight ago I sat down and laid out my thoughts for where eSports was going in Australia. The ideal direction would be up, although it was certain that competitive gaming would not disappear at any rate given the projected growth and reach of gaming.

But problems such as the growth of mobiles, converting casual gamers and working out the best business models for tournaments and teams are more of a medium to long-term issue. What’s critical is to try and sort out the nagging odds and ends that we can deal with now – and there’s a fair lot of them that simply seem to get glossed over.

Respect my authoritah

In his interview with me last week, Derek “Dox” Reball — one of Australia’s top tournament organisers — noted that eSports isn’t a profitable venture locally. Most costs have to be covered out of the pocket of the organisers, whether it’s a major event like a Australian Cyber League nationals or something small like a self-sponsored online tournament. Derek himself has poured thousands of dollars of his own money into making tournaments happen, for no return.

That puts enough pressure on the people running the show, but what contributes to the mess is the attitude of the players in being punctual – or rather, their indifference towards it.

Reball’s tactic is to tell players to arrive an hour before a tournament is scheduled to begin; that way, most players will have arrived by the time you expect the competition to start. It’s a sound procedure and to my knowledge hasn’t failed.

But the problem is that you’re committing to wasting an hour of the day before you begin – and quite often you’ll end up losing a second almost immediately after. This isn’t just annoying for the admin – especially if it’s a LAN and the venue hire is fixed to a specific time – but it also makes for an unpleasant experience for people who show up, only get to play a couple of games but waste three or four hours doing so.

It’s been proven in the past that LAN tournaments can run according to schedule without allowing for a “grace” period, as such. Unfortunately, doing so requires a very hardline approach and a similarly thick skin. Players don’t show up on time? Enjoy the forfeit or a suitable penalty (such as starting the match without a team member).

You won’t make any friends with this approach, but in my experience I always found that people were much happier at the end of the day when they realised it was possible that you could go to a LAN and have time to do something else in the day. Far too often that’s not the case: whether you come first or last, people are resigned to giving up much more time than is really necessary.

Whether a suitable taskmaster still exists is unlikely, but abandoning the pursuit of efficiency just to keep everybody on side isn’t a great alternative either. Tournaments can and should run smoother. It just requires a firm hand, and one that’s strong enough to backhand a few players into submission if they fall out of line.

Networking

Networking, physically and literally, is probably the most crucial aspect of eSports – but the amount of wise talent out there is far less than it should be, and there aren’t quite as many locally-produced resources that people can turn to as there should be.

This isn’t just about the nuts and bolts of getting a few consoles and PCs hooked up to the internet. It’s about getting people to talk and to share their wisdom with each other. The amount of times I’ve been to events where the same basic errors keep happening beggars belief.

There are people in the scene who have spent the better part of a decade or more making mistakes, learning the workarounds and just accumulating experience that everybody should be able to call on.

It’d make a great deal of difference, for example, the admins that organised the stream for the World Championship Series and the ACL events maybe did a short livestream one night or wrote some tips down in a small article and just talked about some of the finer technical points. Or perhaps the old SOGC or SGL admins could give some advice regarding networking and some simple tips on, say, getting internet to a venue without a fixed-line connection and setting it up to only allow for Steam to authenticate.

These things don’t necessarily bring in the big eSports dollars, but they do bring everybody a bit closer together. And the major point is that they make it a hell of a lot easier for other people to get involved, particularly when you consider that a lot of the technical wizards behind major events get very little face-time and are rarely mentioned.

You see the MC and shoutcasters – you know where they are if you want to talk to them. But getting some advice from the people behind the scenes is just as important, and Australia could do itself a favour by making these people a little more accessible to the public – which should also allow the community the chance to really give them the credit they deserve.

Thinking outside the box

Another issue that needs addressing is a way of regularly engaging spectators. The truth is that spectators are more important than players to some degree; you can have tournaments with a miniscule amount of competitors if the audience is large enough.

International events are fortunate enough to call on a pool of spectators who won’t and will never participate in the tournament itself. Australia isn’t that lucky. Whatever show we’re putting on needs to be fun to watch and play in, and that means the old formats could do with a refresh.

An idea that’s been floating around the fighting game community for a long time but yet to take hold elsewhere is the concept of a-cho.

Named after the a-cho arcade, the format is a great alternative for team matches that uses the entire roster while keeping the entertainment of a best-of-x format.

The basic principle is that the two teams will send out their players in a specific order. If a player loses, he drops out of the match altogether, but if he wins he returns to the end of the line; in other words, after the whole team has played a match, the first person to win will step up for a second game.

The match continues in this fashion until one team wins a set amount of matches. It doesn’t eliminate the whitewash as a possibility, but games that would have previously been run in the winner’s format (which uses a pre-determined order for each player) become infinitely more interesting as one or two players are inevitably left to pick up the slack.

One other way of thinking about different formats is changing the tournaments altogether. The local Brood War scene underwent a revival after one admin decided to run a State of Origin series. Rush competitions proved to be highly popular for Counter-Strike (1 minute round time, 15 second bomb timer, $16000 start money and so on).

Running a competition with more lax rules might not be the best for a player’s skill, but it does a great deal for their motivation by engaging them and breaking up the monotony. It’s also exciting for spectators whose usual fare is suddenly replaced by a hypnotising curve-ball, which also has the effect of making them want to play a little bit more.

In a scene as small as Australia’s, that’s a crucial step. We can’t afford to lose the players and fans we have and the odd bit of content or slightly bizarre tournament here and there goes a long way to keep the players happy – which, at the end of the day, is the reason we all play in the first place.

My first taste of running tournaments was seven years ago. It wasn’t a choice I wanted to make – it was simply the reality that if my friend and I didn’t learn how to run things on our own, there wouldn’t be any more competitions in Sydney to play in.

There wasn’t much enjoyment to be had and I was happy to pass the mantle on a few years later when the opportunity arose. But one of the things it did give me was a strong appreciation for those who have been in the business for longer, people who understand the pitfalls and pleasures better and those individuals who actually enjoy it.

Until recently, Derek “Dox” Reball was one of those. It took a new career to deprive him of the time necessary to stop becoming the cornerstone for Starcraft 2 competitions in Australia and his expertise will surely be missed. But before his career deprives the community of his experience altogether, I sat down with the man to learn a thing or two.

GON: You originally started running tournaments for Warcraft 3, a scene that was dedicated but much smaller compared to other games such as Counter-Strike and the fighting game communities. Was there a lot of resources or other admins that you could learn from when you started out?

Derek: I just kinda jumped on board the whole eSports movement while it was still establishing itself locally in 1999. The phrase “eSports” didn’t even exist back then; we just called it competitive gaming. I watched some Brood War tournaments – no prizes, just bragging rights – at The Bunker and took mental notes. From there, it lead to running the Brood War side of the World Cyber Games for a few years, and everything since then has been a snowballing series of lessons. Back then, it was an educational experience for everyone. Players didn’t understand the concept of a bracket, and terms like “Double Elimination” and “Round Robin” meant nothing to them. All they cared about was playing the game. More often than not, players would disregard the bracket and spontaneously start playing their own King of the Hill style matches instead. Between 1999 and 2002 we saw an enormous cultural shift in Australia where people just started to “get it.”

Everyone saw this shining beacon of opportunity where they could play games and be recognised as the best. There wasn’t a lot of prizes going around at the time, and money was almost nonexistent. It was just simply about being the best at something they loved. There was a serious lack of people willing to run the events, unless they saw an opportunity for profit. There wasn’t really anyone I could learn from back then, it was just this kind of clunky road where I’d stumble through an event without a clue what I was doing, and by the end of it, one of the players would approach me with a good idea to implement for next time.

GON: Time management is always a factor that seems to plague events all over the world. How do you cope, what can you do to minimise delays and what tricks or strategies do you have for making up for lost time?

Derek: Funnily enough, most time delays are completely out of my hands. I mean, over the years I’ve developed a solid routine where I can practically run an event in my sleep. (Seriously, I’ve had people tell me I’ve been talking in my sleep about brackets and maps and all sorts of stuff.) So ultimately, once you have that routine down, you know what to expect and you can prepare a lot of it in advance. A few things I’ve learned over the years:

• If you want the event to start at 11:00AM, tell the players it starts at 10:00AM. Gamers generally have very poor time management skills, so more often than not, you’ll have a few stragglers running late.
• Save yourself time in advance by preparing all of the resources you need the night before. If you require the participants to fill out a registration form, create one in Excel or Google Docs and allow them to enter their own details. Provide them with examples so they know exactly what is expected of them. Make the bracket page early, and include as much info on it as possible, so all you need to do is enter the names the next day.
• When gathering details of participants, be sure to grab their phone number. People often wander away during events because, although you might have a very specific schedule in mind, they might decide to go and grab a snack or take a cigarette break between matches – leaving you stressed and stranded whilst inevitably causing delays.
• Send reminders prior to the event. If you just let them sign up on a forum or a registration page, chances are, they’re going to forget. I personally only allow players to register for an event via email, which allows me to communicate directly with them 1 week, 1 day and 1 hour before the event goes live. It also makes life easy if any changes occur to the format/schedule.
• Always do a test run the night before. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve announced the commencement of an event and left out something really important, like the maps or who is being seeded. Just create a dummy bracket, enter in the registrations and play it through from start to finish with some predicted results. No-one needs to see it, but it’s always fun to go back and take a look at the bracket the next day and see how close your predictions were to the end result.
• You need to find a way to be firm but polite with the players. In a close-knit community like ours, everyone is a friend and sometimes you feel like a jerk when you tell them to stop socialising and start their match. It’s worse when you tell a guy who is devastated about losing a match to pack up his gear and vacate the computer so the next player can get ready. If you let players stand around mingling and occupying computers to their own leisure, events will never, ever finish on time.
• Never be afraid to admit your mistakes. It’s how you remedy them that really matters.

GON: What was the first big lesson or mistake you made as an administrator?

Derek: There was an Australian qualifier for the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational back in 2004. Due to time restrictions, we only had 1 day to run the entire event, with players scheduled to fly back out at 7:00PM. So I made a decision to run groups, followed by a best-of-one single elimination bracket. Andrew “mOOnGLaDe” Pender went 6-0 in his group, whilst the rest of the people who made it to the next stage of the tournament went 4-2 or 3-3 at best.

In the first round of the Single Elimination Bracket, GLaDe got really unlucky against Bryan “SiZeMaTTeRs” Murphy – losing his entire army and hero in a bad creep jack. Because of this, an unknown player by the name of “SouLJaH” ended up taking out the tournament, and it left a really bad taste in the collective mouth of the community for a long time.

Funnily enough,SouLJaH went on to eliminate Wizard – one of the reigning champions from North America in the first round of the global finals before he was eventually knocked out of the tournament. But that was the day that I learned a very valuable lesson – never compromise the integrity of the event in order to meet a deadline.

GON: Many tournament organisers often have to put their hand in their own pocket to make balance budgets at the end of the day. How frequently have you had to spend your own dollars to cover costs, and what are the best ways to make an event as budget-neutral as possible?

Derek: Well, eSports – at least locally – has always been about volunteers and charity. Whether its flights, accommodation or venue hire, it always comes from the pocket of the volunteer who has agreed to run the show. The only exceptions in nearly 13 years are last years Battle.net Invitational in Sydney and WCS Australia/Oceania, where Blizzard covered my flights and accommodation.

Every other event to date has been an acceptable loss for me, with the biggest one being my own online event last year – Dox Cup #2 – where I put $2,000 of my own money into the prize pool. The best and only way, without the aid of sponsors, to recover those costs are entry fees. People may complain (because most competitive gamers are poor uni students, after all!), but it’s a necessary compromise in order to keep these events afloat.

Even then, I know that events like ACL are far from turning a profit. The entry fees barely cover the prize pool, let alone the venue hire, equipment hire and various other associated costs. It’s a sad fact of life that I often choose to ignore. When you really look deep within the scene and realise how many peoples’ wallets are bleeding, it kinda takes some of the magic out of it.

When it comes to events hosted at internet cafes, it’s another story entirely. There is this misconception that internet cafes lose money because the entry fee is often less than what they would make if their computers were occupied by regular paying customers. But truthfully, many people who are eliminated early in the tournament don’t spend the rest of the day at the venue. They’ll pack up and leave, vacating that computer for someone else to use. (Not to mention there’s no guarantee that an internet cafe will be completely full for an entire 8 hour block anyway.) And the real kicker is drinks. These venues purchase snacks and drinks at a wholesale price, and when a tournament is running, most people don’t have time to leave the venue and grab some food. So they’ll regularly turn over up to $4 per drink throughout the day. Rest assured, tournaments are very lucrative for internet cafes, especially when they offer products from sponsors as prizes instead of cash. So if you’re looking to break even or even profit from a tournament – internet cafes are your best bet. In my experience with venues like Elysium in Brisbane and iBisQ in Melbourne, they’re always happy to offer a significantly discounted rate when it comes to venue hire.

GON: A lot of gamers come to an event and they’ll see the games and complain or praise about the setup but they never really experience the exhaustion and time that goes into making it all happen. How much effort and manpower does it take to get a major venue, such as the Roundhouse at the University of New South Wales or the Moonee Valley Racecourse, ready for an event?

Derek: Back in 2004, when I was running the Innovative Home Show WarCraft 3 event for Pantheon eSports, we had to fly 8 people down to Melbourne 3 days in advance so that we could lay all the carpet, construct the stage, prepare the network, transport the equipment, test the audio/video, and configure the PC’s/peripherals. And here’s the kicker – this was before the era of streaming. We didn’t even have to worry about internet connections, stream quality, or any of the other associated nightmares.

When I look back at those days, and then look at the efficiency of the ACL/LanSmash team, it leaves me in awe. These guys rock up to the venue 1 day before the event with a team as small as 5 people and make pure magic happen. The combination of sheer technical excellence and manual labour endured by these guys is truly admirable. Competitors will never truly appreciate the amount of effort that goes into the setup until they’ve been a part of the process.

More often than not, these guys are working until midnight (or later), with only a few hours sleep before they need to wake up and kick the event off the next morning. And of course, that’s when some of the technical difficulties start creeping out … equipment which was working 12 hours ago is no longer co-operating. Internet is dropping out. Computers are losing power. Screens are refusing to turn on. Microphones have gone missing. But the ability to quickly and efficiently resolve these issues and keep the show running is a true talent. In the WCS Australia/Oceania documentary by The Filming Archon, you can see the crew constructing the booths, stage and rigging 2 days before the event went live. And these people are gamers man, they’re not paid professionals. They’re just passionate volunteers who do it because they love eSports. It’s beautiful.

GON: Let’s talk about the World Championship Series, one of the largest events ever hosted in Australia. What was it like from your side of the stage – how many hours did you have to put in setting everything up, what was the daily schedule like, what problems arose that nobody saw and so on.

Derek: For me the hours went into managing qualifiers, promoting events, sharing information across gaming networks, social media and so on. To make everyone’s life easier, the ACL crew set up some structured discussion boards online, with a long list of tasks which needed to be completed, who was assigned to each task and its current progress.

This was everything from purchasing/configuring/testing equipment, constructing and designing the booths, to arranging flights, communicating with subcontractors, accommodating and transporting players, contracting photographers and putting the stream up on the Team Liquid calendar. The vast majority of this work was completed by Nick Vanzetti and the rest of the crew in the Aus Gaming House, along with JB Hewitt and his LanSmash guys.

On game day, I played one of many director roles, whereby I would plan out the event structure from start to finish, budget for time and decide which matches would be on the stage, who would commentate them, and which matches would need to be postponed or played backstage. Then it was a matter of communicating this information to the rest of the team so that the guys managing the overlays could have them prepared in time, along with having the dynamic brackets updated on the ACL site.

One of the issues we encountered in real-time was that the caching for the directory containing the brackets images was borked, so viewers couldn’t see the updated results no matter how many times they refreshed. So i needed to host the files on my FTP and re-route the files ASAP. On top of this, every single match result was broadcasted across Twitter, SC2SEA and TeamLiquid, with upcoming matches being announced in advance. Each replay was retrieved at the end of each day and archived, where I would later sort through them and categorise into a list to be handed over to Blizzard post-event. There was a lot of coordination between myself and Linc, Josh, Nicolas and Ash whereby we would ensure that players were notified of when they were expected to move to the stage, have them in position and ready to rotate, assisted them with setting up their equipment and verifying the noise cancelling, sorting out map vetoes, providing refreshments to the players/commentators and resolving technical difficulties with the PC’s.

Some of the biggest problems that arose were organic ones that you simply can’t really resolve. You get one player out of the booth, and the next player in within 5 minutes, but then the guy running the stream needs to quickly run to the bathroom. So we do some giveaways on the stage to kill time. In the meantime, the commentators went outside for a cigarette. The venue security didn’t like people smoking near that door, so they locked them out and directed them to the other side of the venue. We lose sight of the commentators and we start arranging replacements. I run off to find the other commentators, and tell everyone what the new plan is via walkie-talkie. They update the stream overlays to tell the viewers who is going to be commentating the next series.

But then I bump into the original commentators and they’re back from their cigarette break, ready to go. But now one of the players is missing because he decided to take a bathroom break. And while all of this is happening, we have 10 frantic people all talking in my headset asking the same question: “What’s going on?” It’s hectic, but unfortunately these things happen. I can guarantee you they happen at every event. All you can do is try to keep the issues at a minimum and prevent them from snowballing into a nightmare.

One of the scariest parts of the whole event was actually Saturday night – the WCS Australia Grand Final between mOOnGLaDe and PiG. We were running so far beyond schedule that we were at risk of having the venue switch off the power in the middle of the match. We had until midnight to wrap it up and get everyone out of the venue. It was 11:45PM, and game 2 was just about to start. No-one wanted to live with the responsibility of shutting down the event and postponing the finals until the next morning – not with two days of built anticipation and tension. So of all people, they asked me to make a decision. I said, “To hell with it, let’s play the match and hope GLaDe loses in 10 minutes”. It was heartbreaking to actually say, because this harks back to that cultural shift I was talking about earlier, when the players aren’t the focal point anymore. The production is priority numero uno.

As coordinators of the event, we didn’t care about the games anymore. We just wanted it to be over so we could dodge a bullet. Thankfully, PiG took the next map with 3 minutes to spare, so Leigh ‘Maynarde’ Mandolov (MC for the event) got up on stage, blurted out the quickest, dirtiest congratulations he could, and promptly ushered everyone out. You wouldn’t believe the collective sigh of relief from Blizzard and ACL at that point. Fortunately for us, by day 3 we’d dealt with enough issues and endured enough fatigue that we became bulletproof. We knocked it out of the park, fueled by the enthusiasm of the crowd, and it will forever remain a keystone of Australian eSports in my memory.

Derek won’t be leaving the scene entirely. As the founder of Nv, he’ll be flying to Dallas later this year with his team to participate in the Major League Gaming event. You can follow his Twitter at @NvDox and he’s a regular contributor to discussions on the SC2SEA website.

I was recently given the opportunity to record a radio segment talking about eSports, which I enjoyed thoroughly considering how nervous I was leading up to it. I spent the days beforehand frantically research a whole load of facts and figures, making sure I was on top of all the community sites, how the scene worked and so on.

But that’s not the direction the discussion took. It was more general and more prophetic, talking about the basics of eSports and where the scene was going. I didn’t get to make this point as emphatically as I would have liked, but my research led me to believe that eSports would only get bigger. But I also realised some problems along the way that demand our attention, lest they become insurmountable.

The last month has been nothing but a hive of activity at home and abroad, but for a nice change of pace, Australians have been right in the thick of it.

While the World Championship Series was a great weekend for many Australians – and the handful of New Zealanders who made the flight up – it was only the start of proceedings for Jared “PiG” Krensel and Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender, who caught a flight the next day to fly to Gamescom in Germany.

Krensel, who won the Australian part of the local WCS double-header (but only made it as far as 6th the following day) had qualified with Pender to participate in the Intel Extreme Masters tour stop. Pender’s an old hand – IEM traditionally brings out the best in the Queenslander – while Krensel was able to call on the experience of having played in Guangzhou last year for another leg of the event.

Despite starting the week a few thousand dollars richer, the wind was taken out of both boys’ sails early on. Krensel got hit the hardest with a difficult draw, being asked to overcome three of the world’s most feared Koreans (Violet, MVP and Nestea) and one of the more reliable foreigners (Kas). His 1-10 score looked bad, but understandable given the circumstances.

Pender’s ride, for his standards, was much more achievable but it didn’t work out all the same. Despite a comfortable 2-0 put down of Choi “Bomber” Ji Sung, who qualified from the group stages first, the Queenslander surprisingly away games against the Protoss and Zerg opponents, and his 2-3 score wasn’t enough to get him out of the group stage.

One Australian outfit that did get past groups recently was Absolute Legends (pictured at top), which had the honour of being the sole representative for Oceania at the recent DOTA 2 International.

With the laconic Toby “TobiWanKenobi” Dawson overseeing the action along with a team of casters, aL found themselves in a group with LGD Gaming and DK, two Chinese teams that were (rightly) hyped up by the casters and feared by many. LGD and DK would end up taking out 3rd and 4th for the entire tournament, with the former not dropping a single game until the winner bracket finals of the play-off stage.

The Australians were paired off against Darer from Ukraine in an elimination match, which saw them finishing 12th-16th for the tournament. It’s always disappointing to never make it past the first round, but to be even playing at a tournament featuring all the best players in the world is always something special.

Sadly, the magic didn’t last for very long with news breaking in the past week that the European organisation had dropped its DOTA 2 squad. It’s not sure what the cause behind the breakup of a relationship that had been running since the start of the year, where the Australians burst onto the scene as one of the most promising teams in the world.

Someone who’s managed to breach the limitations of Australia’s geography was Dawson, who started from the humble beginnings as a Call of Duty fan to become one of the most well-known commentators in professional gaming. He now lives in Berlin spending most of his time shoutcasting, but was able to spend a couple of hours sharing a side of eSports that most people don’t often see.

Dawson admits that he doesn’t have a lot of love for League of Legends, but that wasn’t the case last night at The Republic Hotel in Sydney, which hosted the first BarCraft-esque event for the free-to-play MOBA.

Given that most people are still recovering from last night’s shenanigans, photos aren’t immediately available, but I’ve heard that the event was a success, which should provide a little bit of competition to the Paragon in Sydney for local BarCraft events.

People looking for a bit of social gaming outside of the city centre, with a small event being held next weekend at the Ryde Eastwood Leagues Club for the Australian qualifiers for the International eSports Federation World Finals. The event’s looking like it’ll be much smaller than the traditional fare at the Paragon – around 50 people have committed to going so far. That sounds like a disadvantage, but on the other hand it’ll be nice to actually be able to hear the person next to you.

Australia has always been praised for its small, tight-knit, dedicated community. Over the last month or so, I think we can safely say we’ve upheld that reputation quite nicely. Except for the small part.