IPTL Premier - MVP look to be favorites, but will they meet their potential?

MVP Clan came to life in October 2010, but December 2010 was the month when Korea StarCraft 2 Association finally recognized them as a professional team; however, it was May 2011 that put them on the Korean map for good when they took second place during GSTL 2011 May finals losing to SlayerS after very close games and five months later when they won GSTL Season 1 defeating Prime.

Yet, it is 2012 that brought them vast number of titles both for the players and the team as a whole; more GSTL medals,  third place at IPL Team Arena Challenge 1, KSL Opening Ceremonies and Asia StarCraft II Invitational Tournament. Now it’s time for the IPTL Season 1 and they are more than ready to become the ultimate champions of another team league again.

Normally this paragraph would be the beginning of “bad picks” chapter, but in case of MVP it cannot be done, since there is no bad player on the team at the moment. Even if some of them haven’t qualified for the GSL Season 4 they still have a strong or at least decent presence on the international or Korean scene. Great examples are Noblesse and finale; they haven’t won anything big in 2012 yet, but are consistently on top and in a tournament full of foreigners like IPTL Season 1 we might see them crushing bones and eating flesh of their enemies. You cannot underestimate Korean players.

Team captain and one of the best Starcraft 2 zergs in the world is DongRaeGu. Despite being a part of the scene since 2010, he made a name for himself in the second half of 2011 after winning LG Cinema 3D Special League over sC, 2011 DreamHack Valencia Invitational over ThorZaIN and taking second place during Arena of Legends 1 after losing to MarineKingPrime.

Just like any other player DRG had his slump during spring 2012 when he stopped performing as well as he used to, but currently he’s back on track. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that out of every GSTL player it is Park Soo Ho who constantly outperforms his colleagues. He almost single-handedly carried MVP in the 2011 GSTL May event and even outperformed his own track record during 2011 GSTL Season 1 with a 13-2 record. There is no other player who came close to DRG’s score.

Besides GSL and IEM championship titles there is also MLG, which was the curse of MVP’s captain until June 2012 when he finally won his first Major League Gaming title during 2012 MLG Spring Championship after crushing Alicia 3:1. Back in 2011 he won MLG Spring Arena 1, but it was a much smaller event, hence we count his latest gold medal as the first big one. Still, many other players have won MLG events before him, but it is DRG who currently has 2 of each medals in MLG events.

Another huge name for MVP is KeeN who just recently placed third in TeamLiquid StarLeague 4 taking out Sting in a very one-sided match. At the moment, together with Vampire and finale KeeN represents MVP in GSL Code A.

Sniper as a Code S player cannot be overlooked. He always gives his best and is visible on the international scene participating in number of online qualifiers.There is also Monster who proved his worth all-killing Evil Geniuses during IPL Team Arena Challenge 3 three months ago and winning GIGABYTE ESPORTS LAN Invitational.

MVP doesn't have an all-star line-up, but every single one of their players is more than capable of taking down the best in the world. Their strength lies in cooperation during team events and steadily growing skill of every member on the current roster. In IPTL Season 1 they should advance to the playoffs.

Source : ign[dot]com

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm Beta is Live

The closed beta test for the second installment of StarCraft II, called Heart of the Swarm, is now underway. Blizzard has sent out invites to a limited pool of testers, and in the coming months will be sending out more.

For now the test includes the multiplayer portion of Heart of the Swarm where testers will get a chance to try out the new units and abilities planned for the beta. Blizzard does not have a definite end point for the beta, so no word yet on a possible release window for the game.

If you’re interested and would like to help test out Heart of the Swarm, you can opt in through your battle.net account. Opting in does not mean you will definitely get access. Here’s what Blizzard said about how it selects who gets in through the opt-in pool:

“Beta testers are chosen according to their system specifications and other factors, including recent StarCraft II activity (and an element of luck), when selecting individuals during each round of invitations. Our goal is to have a wide variety of players and system types.”

For more on Heart of the Swarm, check out IGN’s recent interview with Blizzard’s designers.

Source : ign[dot]com

Why eSports Are Like Dubstep and Pro Gaming Isn't For Gamers

There’s something in the air at the World Championship Series StarCraft II Oceania Finals at the Australian Technology Park. It is, in fact, the roof of the Australian Technology Park. Or was, rather. 100km/h winds had blown a section of it off the converted locomotive workshop earlier.

But there’s definitely a buzz down here, and it’s not just the iron sheets above us vibrating as they cling to the roof while the gale outside tries to peel them off like a stubborn nether-hair from a bar of soap. People seem excited. Excited about StarCraft II. They’re sitting in clusters fixated on the big screen while a man brings around platters of tiny chicken schnitzels on tiny pieces of toast. The crowd is small today, but it’s a Friday. The show isn’t open to the public until tomorrow, when we’re assured things will get a lot more boisterous. All 600 tickets for the event were snapped up inside of 11 minutes. Tomorrow the crowd of people cheering on a man in a small glass booth playing a video game against another man in a different glass booth will be a lot larger and louder.

Larger. Louder.

There’s very little about this experience that would seem real to your everyday everyman. It barely makes sense to me. I’m watching two people I don’t know battling against one another on a video game I’ve never played. The commentators aren’t called commentators, I can’t quite figure out why everyone is cheering and I don’t actually understand what anybody is talking about.

This must be how my wife feels when I play video games at home. Or perhaps a more potent example would be what my sister feels like when she watches cricket. She doesn’t understand the game and she doesn’t understand the rules.

Two of the expert StarCraft II shoutcasters brought in to provide commentary for the event, Nick ‘Tasteless’ Plott and Dan ‘Artosis’ Stemkoski, laugh when I confirm with them they don’t know anything about cricket.

“No, we don’t!” says Plott. “Basically our jobs are to try and make that as accessible as possible to a viewer like you, for instance. We’re just trying to translate, ‘Okay what’s this guy trying to do? What’s this guy’s dilemma? What’s the other guy’s advantage? We’re there to navigate the viewer through the experience so they can enjoy it.”

Thus far I’m still working on volume. When the commentators start shouting I figure something exciting is happening. Plott and Stemkoski are the commentators I’d know all about if I knew anything about StarCraft. The pair are currently based in South Korea.

“

[In South Korea] if I say I’m a StarCraft commentator that doesn’t require an explanation.

“Out there,” says Plott, “if I say I’m a StarCraft commentator that doesn’t require an explanation. If I say I’m a pro-gamer that doesn’t require an explanation. They did a poll a few years ago where they asked young Korean boys, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and the number one response was professional gamer.”

“We live in this world where it one of the most watched things on TV, completely culturally accepted. It’s not a taboo, it’s not weird and there’s an ecosystem there that supports it.”

Peter Neate is 31. He’s from Brisbane. For three years, however, Peter Neate lived in South Korea and everyone called him Legionnaire.

After qualifying for the first World Cyber Games main event in 2001 Neate found himself in South Korea.

“I went overseas to Seoul in Korea and I was the only Australian to win a match,” says Neate. “They set up a show match afterwards and I was the only one to win versus a Korean pro-gamer. They offered me [a chance] to stay, just out of the blue. I really did not expect it and I didn’t really understand just how big professional gaming was in Korea at the time, so I turned it down.”

“I did a bit of research after that; I started playing a lot more. The next year, WCG came around again, I qualified, I went to Korea, I extended my Visa out for the full three months and I just went around trying to play as much as I could. We got very fortunate, I was there with another Australian... we got picked up by a sponsor a couple of days before our Visas were to expire.

“We were sponsored for three months and we played non-stop. At the end of the three months there was a big tournament – 512 players I believe – in Korea and I went through to the top eight where I got noticed by one of the professional teams. I became friends with them and they asked me to join so I leaped at the opportunity. From that time on I spent three years playing professionally in Korea.”

Neate out of retirement for another crack.

Neate illustrates just how hardcore South Koreans are about eSports.

“Back then they had an event down in Busan, the second largest city in Korea,” he says. “They did a custom built stadium, on the beach; they brought the players in on rafts, up onto the beach.”

“There were 90,000 spectators. So if you think about that, it’s like an AFL Grand Final. That many people were turning up just to watch a computer game.

That’s Australian Rules football, for non-antipodeans.

“It’s amazing,” Neate continues. “It’s really hard for people who haven’t seen anything like it to understand how big it is. In Korea, it is considered a sport; it’s a real sport, it’s the fourth biggest sport in Korea after soccer, baseball and basketball I believe.”

Neate retired after three years, conceding many players stay in the scene for longer.

“It’s a full-time job over there, so a lot of Koreans stick with it for a lot longer,” he says. “For me it was long enough. I’d done everything I’d wanted, my brother was getting married and I’d never actually met his fiancé because I’d been over there for so long. I’d had a lot fun, I’d travelled around everywhere and I just felt it was time to move on and get back to normal life.”

Normal is probably not a term you’d apply to the life of fellow finalist Andrew Pender. Pender has a nickname for his nickname, but that’s not what makes his life so fascinating. No, it’s because Andrew ‘mOOnGLaDe’ Pender, or GLaDe, quit his job to play StarCraft II eight to 12 hours a day in the lead up to this tournament.

Pender’s first real-time strategy game was the original StarCraft.

“As that went on Brood War came out and I continued to play during high school and I stumbled across pro gaming on the Internet, and I thought that was an amazing thing at the time,” he says. “That was the thing I wanted to be as a kid. Pro-gaming; it sounded so amazing.”

Dream job(?)

“From there after StarCraft I jumped into WarCraft III as fast as I could and started competitive playing there in the hopes that one day I could be a pro gamer, but at the time it was only a hobby. For six years I was competitive playing WarCraft III and I managed to travel around the world for it and do rather well, nothing too amazing, and then StarCraft II was on the horizon so I quit WarCraft III, worked for a couple of years until StarCraft II came out and then pretty much put all my time into StarCraft II and tried my best to go pro gamer with it.

“Basically from there I started to do very well and I joined a pretty good team and I managed to travel around the world with a salary and make some money and some fame and do pretty well. For the last two years I’ve just been travelling around the world for StarCraft II.”

The prospect of being paid to play games might be a tempting one for many. It sounds like the perfect job for someone who loves games. However, one of the more interesting things is how few games pro gamers actually play.

“If you’re a pro gamer you’re probably only playing StarCraft,” says Plott.

Stemkoski agrees; he spends his free gaming time playing StarCraft too.

“Yeah, it’s definitely mostly StarCraft,” he says. “I find that I’m so involved in StarCraft, I enjoy it so much that I find if I have some free time I don’t necessarily want to pick up a PlayStation controller. I want to go and play some more StarCraft. There’s a reason why this is the biggest eSport; it’s because it’s the best game.”

Pender tends to avoid other games too.

“

I used to play many, many games before I became a professional gamer. Once you become a professional gamer it’s a lot harder to just jump on another game.

“I used to be a gamer, he says. “I used to play a lot more other games; I used to play many, many games before I became a professional gamer. Once you become a professional gamer it’s a lot harder to just jump on another game.”

“In the back of your mind you’re worried that it’s going to affect your StarCraft, or your mouse movements or whatever. But that’s not really the main reason I don’t play many other games. Currently I don’t have time for it, and when I do have time for it I kinda don’t want to be in front of the computer, more than anything. I like to do physical things. Anything but be on a computer.

“I do love exercising. I do a lot of boxing; not so much the getting hit in the head, but the training for it I really enjoy.”

There are other misconceptions about pro gaming.

Though probably not ones shared by these rabid fans.

“I think that the biggest misconception about pro gamers and especially about this industry as a whole is that it’s a bunch of geeks or nerds or something like that,” says Stemkoski. “We have such a diverse line-up of humans that play this game and complete professionally at it.”

“We had people that worked at McDonalds, we had people that were bodybuilders, we had people that play basketball, just every type of person. There are dog catchers that turned into professional video game players. This is not something like some of these other sports where, ‘Well, you have to be born this tall to do this’. No, anyone can do it.”

So where to now for eSport? Speaking to GamesIndustry International at Gamescom Riot Games co-founder Brandon Beck believes that the popularity of eSports could grow to the point where video games are actually played at the Olympics.

“We don't have our sights set on replacing soccer right now, but we definitely think that eSports has a place as a large, important, mainstream competitive activity,” he said. “I fundamentally believe that eSports will be an Olympic event in my lifetime.”

Plott and Stemkoski stop a few miles short of anything as monstrously optimistic as this, but both agree eSports are on the rise.

First, you win the StarCraft. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.

“It’s gonna take some more time,” says Stemkoski. “Some places are starting to catch up, like China and Germany, and to a lesser extent Sweden. These places are starting to get more and more there. You need to get the word out, you need a lot of tournaments, and the more that you have the more people will see it and the more it’ll be in the news.”

Plott picks up from Stemkoski.

“The way I would look at it is, are you familiar with dubstep?” he asks. “So like, dubstep started out in the UK and it’s actually been around for a long period of time now. Imagine the UK is to dubstep what South Korea is to eSports.”

“

Imagine the UK is to dubstep what South Korea is to eSports.

“They had the right club scene, they had the right attitude; progressive, electronic music was taking over there. Nowadays everybody knows what dubstep is right, but it just took time for it to catch on. If you imagine video games as music, I feel like eventually there’s just gonna be a point in time where this is kinda a genre of gaming that’s just gonna take over everywhere.

“I mean, two years ago this was so niche outside of South Korea it was mind-boggling how long it took me to explain to anybody how big my job was. Now I’ve ping-ponged all over the globe, we’re going to Germany right after this, and I would say I don’t know whether it’s going to be two years, five years or 10 years, it’s gonna be a genre of gaming. “

Looking at just how heavily the likes of Black Ops II are becoming geared towards the competitive player, I’m inclined to agree. It’s not going to matter if you or I are interested or not. Enough people are.

I leave to find the foul weather has knocked over a tree just outside the building. If a tree falls in the park and everyone is inside watching two men play StarCraft II, does it make a sound?

Apparently not.

While veteran Peter Neate’s tournament was ended early, Andrew Pender came in as runner-up in the Australian National championship and was the overall winner of the Oceania Finals the following day. He and his fellow finalist will advance to the StarCraft II World Championship Series Global Final at the Battle.net World Championship in Shanghai, China in November.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and other stuff on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

Source : ign[dot]com

StarCraft II: Preparing for Heart of the Swarm

Sometime soon beta invites will start to go out for Heart of the Swarm, the second game in a planned three-part arc that makes up the complete StarCraft II experience. Along with an all new single-player campaign, Blizzard will also dramatically alter the multiplayer game by adding in new units to the Protoss, Zerg and Terran armies, as well as tweak existing units. The result, according to game designer David Kim, will be a more complex, challenging experience.

He gave an example of what some Zerg players had been doing in internal testing. Against an enemy army, players would set up Swarm Hosts, a new Zerg unit that can burrow and periodically and automatically birth offensive units on the battlefield that roll towards enemies from long range. Players would then move in Vipers to back up the Swarm Hosts, which are flying units that can set down a Blinding Cloud to dramatically reduce the sight range of affected biological units like Marines. They then immobilized part of the enemy army with Fungal Growths from Infestors, forcing the enemy to fight off the Hosts’ units while blinded, and used the Viper’s Abduct ability to yank any mechanical units like Siege Tanks away from the enemy pack in order to focus fire them into oblivion.

“That kind of micro is pretty crazy, right?” said Kim. “But at the same time, we don’t think it’s a requirement to have to be able to use all those things. We foresee players will stick to what they’re good at more so than trying to follow pro players as much as people are trying to do now. For the pro players, the bar is definitely higher. We definitely think a better pro player will be at the top, as compared to someone who just follows other peoples’ strategies. Originality, strategy, mechanics will definitely matter, because the game is harder to play. All those factors will contribute a little more than they did in Wings of Liberty.”

So because it’s going to be such a different experience, what will happen to your Wings of Liberty online rankings? “The current plan is to just wipe everything,” said Kim. “Even the MMR [matchmaking ranking]. Another option is we might be able to bring over your MMR from the beta, because the beta and the actual game are very similar. Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm are pretty different. A diamond player in Wings of Liberty might actually be a masters player, and vice-versa. We’re going to reset that and people will just have to rank up again.”

Heart of the Swarm will also bring in unranked matchmaking, giving you a way to compete without having to worry about hurting your overall ranking. “It is less stressful for most players. And those players who do opt to play in the ranked modes will have an even more competitive experience.” If you do decide to play in leagues and ladders, you’ll also find it’ll require more skill to move up in the ranks. “If you’re fifth place in diamond and I’m fifth place in diamond, I could be way better. You could be way better than me. Because there are different tiers within diamond league. We’re going to flatten that out so that each rank actually matters. The flip side of that is, if you are not a top five percent diamond player, you’d never get there, whereas right now you could.”

Your Wings of Liberty ranking won’t disappear if you pick up Heart of the Swarm when it’s ready, though. “You could choose to play two different ladders. In your Wings of Liberty ladder, you’ll have your MMR still, so if you were masters last season, even after HotS comes out, you play one game and you’re back into masters.”

As Blizzard continues to spread out beta invites, it doesn’t have a set timeline on how long testing will run. “We’re going to spend as much time as we need to, especially on the multiplayer side, really making that right,“ said producer Kaeo Milker. “Wings of Liberty has been so great for multiplayer, the esports scene has been so great, we’re going to very cautiously going to make improvements to that for Heart of the Swarm. The beta is our real proving ground for that.”

Reaching that state of readiness isn’t a scientific process, because during the beta, which will initially offer 1v1 online play, anything could change. Any number of variables, from unit damage to armor to research times for upgrades, could be tweaked, and units could even be cut or completely new ones added in. So when will Blizzard know when to stop tinkering and ship the product? “We don’t really know one-hundred percent. It’s kind of the same as how we develop the game. We constantly change units, we add in new units, we polish a lot. I think if you keep doing it, you kind of get a sense of ‘yeah, it is so much better than before.’ The time it takes to improve further from this point on is just way too long, so that’s when we decide. It’s not one hundred percent perfect, but it’s close. I think that is the point where we say, it is done.”

After that, patches take care of what beta testing didn’t catch. Following the launch of Heart of the Swarm, Blizzard will continue to monitor both it and Wings of Liberty, but Heart of the Swarm will be the focus of the team’s attention. “If there are balance problems in Wings of Liberty we will definitely address it. But probably not to the degree that we will focus on HotS because Wings has been getting two years of attention already, so naturally it’s not going to have as many problems as Heart of the Swarm.”

If the testing period for Heart of the Swarm winds up being similar to Wings of Liberty, chances are it’ll last at least a few months, meaning Wings of Liberty isn’t going to necessarily fall out of favor for a while. Kim seems happy with the current state of the game, which Blizzard recently reassessed after analyzing new data. “The global [win/loss] level [for Wings of Liberty] was looking good for a long time now, it’s fifty percent in every matchup. Every map is very good, especially in the ladder maps. So we did a more focused study on just the pro level games . We took almost fifteen thousand professional games at the highest level tournaments only in the past two years. The graph looks like a constant decrease toward fifty percent, which means we have been on the correct direction. That’s also why we feel confident if any problem arises in Heart of the Swarm because we have that track record.”

Following launch, is there any chance Blizzard might add in another unit through a patch? “We don’t want to confuse players,” said Kim, “by changing the role of a unit completely. Or adding new units or removing units with a patch. That’s only for expansion. When the game goes live, we will not patch in new units, or change up abilities, or change the role of a unit.”

Blizzard says the team is putting the finishing touches on the campaign now, so assuming a beta testing period of four or so months, it seems likely Heart of the Swarm could launch in early 2013…maybe?

Source : ign[dot]com