One of the many nice things about Heart of the Swarm has been how it’s made the Zerg a much more flexible and interesting faction to watch. That really hit home for me yesterday watching the first group of the WCS America round of 16, where Norwegian Zerg Jens “Snute" Aasgaard showed off the variety of play with Heart of the Swarm Zerg, and his own resilience as a player.
You can watch last night’s play over on Twitch: his series against NesTea starts at 9:30, and his series against Alicia (highly recommended) starts at 2:15:30. The MLG-operated WCS America continues tonight (and every night this week save Friday) at 11 PM UK / 6PM Eastern. Tonight, however, the WCS America broadcast is preceded by the first-ever SHOUTcraft America Grand Finals, between Sam “Kane" Morrissette and Ryan “State" Visbeck. It starts at 8 PM UK / 3 PM Eastern and streams via TotalBiscuit’s Twitch channel.
Papa John’s are offering eSports fans 50% off if they order using the promo code “PIZZAGG", and major eSports organizations like Evil Geniuses, Team Liquid, Onemoregame.tv, and ROOT Gaming are all participating in the chain’s eSports initiative. It’s clearly a significant moment for eSports, since Papa John’s is a massive pizza chain and exactly the kind of mainstream brand that many eSports stakeholders want to attract. Over on TeamLiquid, a statement from EG, Liquid, and ROOT suggests, “If you feel like eating a pizza (or two or three or ten) this week, please consider using Papa John’s and help us show them what we can do!"
The reaction from other members of the eSports community, however, has not been quite as universally enthusiastic. What’s interesting is that the objections aren’t about “selling out" or the highly debatable quality of Papa John’s pizza, but about values. It’s a debate that may have ramifications for how eSports culture differs from that of traditional mass-entertainment.
Blizzard tend to spend weeks in consultation with the StarCraft 2 community over even the smallest alteration to the curvature of an alien butterfly’s wings, mindful of the earthquakes it could cause internationally - especially as the StarCraft World Championship Series 2013 gets underway.
Emboldened by a week’s worth of testing, examining ladder stats, watching tournament matches and gathering feedback from pros, however, the dev team is now ready to tweak a single number in the game’s exquisite battle equation. Spore Crawler damage has been increased from 15 + 15 when fighting biological enemies to 15 + 30.
French Zerg master Ilyes 'Stephano' Satouri will end his career as a StarCraft 2 progamer on August 15 to resume the academic career he halted two years ago. He is the second member of Evil Geniuses to announce their retirement in the past week.
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Gosh, that’s a mouthful. The StarCraft 2 World Championship Series, Blizzard’s first ever hash at a unified annual tournament, has been ticking over for about a month and a half now. Victories have been hard-won, dreams crushed, and it's about time for the regional finals. They begin next week.
Following his dismissal from the StarCraft 2 team Evil Geniuses Greg ‘IdrA’ Fields has decided to retire from competitive play.
Speaking with JP “itmeJP" McDaniel in a new episode of Real Talk, Greg Fields told the host that “I am not going to continue as a competitive player" because “it’s just got to the point where competition isn’t enjoyable for me anymore."
StarCraft 2 pro-gamer and divisive community figure Greg ‘IdrA’ Fields has been relieved of his position in top team Evil Geniuses after insulting fans in a forum discussion earlier this week.
What are eSports tournaments for? If you’re a fan, you’re looking for drama, suspense, and passion. Tournaments have to be more than just demonstrations of skill.
Two examples: over the weekend at Dreamhack, Sweden’s mercurial Protoss, NaNiwa, faced off against Brood War legend Jaedong in front of a delirious home crowd. The combination of star power, a close series, and the crowd’s fever-pitch excitement made it an unforgettable series.
Meanwhile, the League of Legends Championship Series is about narrative; about the long game. The story of this weekend wasn’t the prize pool, or the possibility of relegation. It was the astonishing twists and upsets that came from young teams that have finally come into their own.
The success of both Dreamhack and the LCS stand in sharp contrast to the stumbles of Blizzard’s Starcraft 2 World Championship Series.
ESEA have now issued a formal apology and explanation, claiming that “an employee acting on his own and without authorization to access our community through our company’s resources" is responsible for activating beta code that the company never intended on using.
The ESEA server client, commonly used as an anti-cheating measure in games of Counter-Strike, StarCraft 2 and Team Fortress 2, has been discovered to carry malware that uses unsuspecting players’ graphics cards to mine Bitcoins.
Users of the client have reported that their GPUs have overheated and been disabled by the bitcoin mining process.
Poor DreamHack, we all cried. Left out of the StarCraft 2 World Championship Series, shunned from the cool kids’ table where Blizzard and its new pals MLG, ESL, and OGN / GOMTV were planning to revolutionize StarCraft 2.
Now, after weeks of confusing mixed-signals, a troubled North American qualifying tournament, and some problematic tournament rules that may quash the kind of vibrant regional play the WCS was supposed to encourage, DreamHack is looking like a pretty great alternative. While Blizzard and its partners put the WCS back on the rails, StarCraft fans can spend this weekend enjoying the start of the 2013 DreamHack open series in Stockholm. Play starts at 10 AM UK / 5 AM Eastern on the DreamHack Twitch stream.
Dota 2 veterans No Tidehunter and StarCraft 2 independent Johan ‘NaNiwa’ Lucchesi have been spliced together to form a new eSports team: the Alliance. The new organisation has been pulled together beneath the banner of gaming hardware specialists Razer, will focus its efforts on both Dota and SC2, and is actively looking to expand its StarCraft roster in the coming months.
Blizzard are ploughing ahead with preparations for their recently-announced World Championship Series. In lieu of a previous season from which to pull qualifying players, the Irvine monolith have cherry-picked 24 likely suspects each from America, Europe, and Korea to take part in the upcoming Premier League.
Even as Blizzard announced a unified tying-together of StarCraft 2’s international leagues last week, the wheels of 2013’s Championship Series were already turning. WCS Korea is happening as we speak, and the WCS America and WCS Europe leagues are nearly upon us.
As such, the Craft’s men and women in Irvine have seen fit to detail plans for this year’s Series, and to release a list of competition dates - which run from last Thursday to the end of May.
Blizzard have bought up IGN Pro League tech and assets from its former owners, and hired former IPL staff to form the core of a new San Francisco team focused on producing "high-quality web and mobile content" in support of existing Blizzard games.
CaptainTrips commented on Five lessons from MLG's Heart of the Swarm Winter Championship