Intro to eSports: MLG Raliegh

[sofa king]

Hi everyone. for those of you still unaware of it, competitive computer gaming is at an all-time high worldwide and your sports bar nearby is likely to succumb to the pressure.

Why? Because eSports spectators show up in packs with lots of money and drink lots of beer.

This weekend is the Major League Gaming event in Raliegh, NC, and for the moment it looks as if they're just on the edge of the hurricane and may continue operations through the weekend. If you're rained in but still have a data connection, this might be just the ticket for you this weekend:

http://pro.majorleaguegaming.com/

Their streams have improved somewhat, but are still sketchy. You need to change your global settings in Flash (with a right-click on the video screen) to allow them to save information (their evil LSO cookies) on your computer (and then you'll want to kill them off later with Spybot and CCleaner), but Adblock Plus seems to work pretty well in Firefox--many users, including me, experience problems with never-ending commercials, unrequested audio feed channels, and three-minute promos every time they switch streams, so until they fix that, I block 'em.

There are four tournaments running simultaneously: Halo:Reach, Call of Duty:Black Ops, League of Legends, and my favorite of favorites, Starcraft II. I wrote a brief introduction to SCII here:

http://www.gonemagazine.net/?p=341
http://www.gonemagazine.net/?p=346
http://www.gonemagazine.net/?p=350

The tournament structure alone is interesting enough to keep a lot of you busy. The short version is that nobody has to walk away after losing a match (which is a best-of-3,5,or 7 games). Instead, losers are cast into the up-or-down loser's bracket, where a loss is final. In the IGN Pro League this month, a Polish dude who goes by the name Nerchio lost his first match and survived every single round of the losers bracket to play in the finals, so it can happen. There is also an open bracket where anyone could enter, and they will desperately fight one another for a few slots in the final tiers on Sunday.

Don't even try to take in the full complexity of the game, which is many orders of magnitude faster and more complicated than chess. Whereas chess moves are made every two to three minutes, SCII players issue hundreds of commands every minute. You'll learn quickly and soon you'll know roughly what's going on and even be able to anticipate what's about to happen.

And the battles, well, it's definitely a blood sport. Fortunately, it's not real blood.

I'll warn you right off the top, this is an addictive sport. Sociologists have already identified one vector of appeal, which is that nobody, not the players, not the announcers, not the spectators, has complete information about what's going on (I think this is also one of the attractions of actual war to certain people). But oftentimes, spectators have more information than either of the players, and soon you'll find yourself shouting at the monitor, "don't do it!"

What I like about Starcraft II is that it's a war game, just like soccer, football, or rugby (and don't forget the Rugby World Cup is also coming soon). But because it works at a speed and level of complexity so far beyond field sports, actual principles of warfare routinely apply. The very best players are little Alexanders and Napoleons executing flanking maneuvers, turning movements, raids and positional warfare.

And as far as how good are the players themselves at what they do, consider this: Starcraft II is competitively played every day by at least 2 million people around the world, and all of them are in theoretical contention to enter this tournament. That's a talent pool directly comparable to the player base of other professional sports.

Starcraft II is the national sport of South Korea, with whole television channels devoted to it (like the NFL Network), paid players who practice around 12 hours a day, and there are at least a dozen Koreans in Raliegh who are good enough to take the whole thing. That means the final games played tomorrow will be of the highest caliber. A number of "foreigners" (all non-Koreans, even when the event is here in North Carolina) have been practicing in Korea and seem to have finally brought Korean-level skill to their games. Two Americans, IdrA and Sheth, have an outside chance of reaching the higher final brackets. But I'll be surprised if two Koreans aren't playing in the finals--and Bomber is dominating this weekend so far, so you'd be wise to keep an eye on him.

So check it out. I know some of you are going to toss up your hands and say "you can't play effing sports from an office chair!" But others of you are going to watch this and see a dozen Kasparovs duking it out in some of the most frenetic game play imaginable.

And, if you ask me, it beats the hell out of pre-games. Have a nice day.

[sofa king]

1. Wow!

Hero just pitched a "perfect game," in which he defeated his opponent without losing a single unit. While this statistic is not tracked, it's so unusual as to be virtually unseen in tournament play. Highly improbable, and yet there it is.

I still think Bomber is on course for the finals, and Puma, who won the NASL this summer, has torn through the open bracket (a much harder thing to do) and gets to rest for much of the day. It's possible that Puma and Bomber may actually play each other twice under the extended-series rule, with is an interesting way to weight previous play, but which gives an automatic 1-2 game advantage to the winner of the previous match, heavily weighting the odds of the final in favor of that player. If you're putting money on it, the winner of the first meeting has a good chance of taking the whole thing.

On the other hand, Puma has to get through CoCa first. CoCa has not lost a single game this weekend. Not one. He could be pitching a different kind of "perfect game" that could be hard to duplicate, ever.

Less reported, young Spanishiwa won seven matches in a row to hang on in the Losers' Bracket until finally falling to his teammate DeMusliM, who recently returned from drinking-and-fighting related injuries incurred in Rotterdam. Spanishiwa's promise is high, but we hopefully won't see as much of him as he's off to college now and will hopefully focus on being the rocket scientist he clearly is.

Also unexpected is the performance of player/announcer PainUser, who officially hung up his pro career this summer to announce full-time for IGN. Nevertheless, he entered MLG and did very well until he ran up against the aforementioned Hero yesterday morning. He recovered from that reverse and advanced two tiers in the championship bracket before finally going down. On the opposite side of that coin, player/announcer InControl, who left his casting job at NASL to focus on his pro career, lost every game of pool play until he took out fan-favorite Drewbie, and as usual his run ended by having to face his arch-nemesis Machine, whom I do not think InControl has ever beaten in tournament play.

One of the players, TLO, accidentally forfeited his first match because he was sucked into watching some of his future opponents play, suggesting that watching Starcraft may well be almost as fun as playing it.

Edit: One has to be careful reviewing this page, as fans are routinely editing the results to more accurately reflect their wishes, rather than actual results. But it's a great way to see how things are going to go tonight:

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2011_MLG_Pro_Circuit/Raleigh#Results

[sofa king]

2. Trimaster!

http://pro.majorleaguegaming.com/live/sc2_blue

From out of nowhere, some guy nobody has heard of is somehow still alive, defeating Huk just now. Trimaster has to win three more games in a row against HuK to advance... but he won the first one, which is the only way to start.