Time for a Yiska blog. I've been busy lately and after that weekend I felt I really needed a break from writing for a while since I worked the whole weekend. So much is going to change in my life and for Eurospective that I'm excited, yet afraid. I'll be trusting my gut over my brain this time around and it could end up royally ****ting all over my future. One thing is certain, I wasn't happy 6 months ago and I'm not entirely happy now even though it's way better. Great opportunities have opened for me and I will have to make sacrifices.

I tell you this because one of the changes might be that I'm going to join a new project with Eurospective and if it turns out like I think it will, I will start mirroring and after some time delayed mirroring my articles from the new project on Gameriot. Yes, this means Eurospective might get a new home. I'm slightly pissed that no one from Gameriot has responded to my PMs as they owe me 650$ and I have writers to pay. I still have my doubts if it's the right move though since Ming promoted me and helped me out quite a bit. The new website has huge potential as I will be working with Syeren who seems to be a very dedicated worker with very useful knowledge. You will hear from this soon(tm).




Get Yiska'd: Divine Inflame



It was long overdue, you all knew it was coming. When you write a European-centered WoW arena blog, you simply can't dodge this guy and quite frankly; you don't want to. He's the best warlock in the world after all. Meet the Divine:



Divine Inflame, I as the Kazekage of the European WoW community want to thank you for your duty in Anaheim. I believe you can be proud of yourself as you brought European pride back home. Let’s jump into business. I was a little concerned when you lost to EG. Do you have an explanation for the bad Saturday morning performance?

I hadn't eaten whole day and me and Another were really tired. I'm surprised we even still won some matches but we got ****** over. It was 3-1.

Also Europe is only good because of me, I carried Europe in 08 and I will carry Europe in 2009/2010.

 

 

Sad that Another isn't allowed to attend Blizzard tournaments...

He would have won Blizzcon 08. They were the best RMP by far.

 

 

 

Good enough to beat your team Nihilum Plasma?

 

Yes, they were the only RMP that knew how to beat WLD.

 

 

 

Sad that 3.0 came so early. Oh well he caused Celex to nerd rage, I guess that's something. As most people know you came second in the tournament even though you were close to not qualifying for the final four. Are you satisfied with your results in Anaheim?

 

Yes of course. Americans got trashed like the scrubs they are.

 

 

 

So you aren't sad for not making 1st? The final games were intense and many people were impressed by Button Bashers performance. Did you lose to the best RMP in the world?

 

Possibly, but I mean they deserve to win for being consistent throughout the entire tournament and they practised 6 hours per day so they should be winning and it was still close. My team barely practices because Enigmz can't play that much. If I could make two copies of myself I would win every tournament.

 

 

So they are better than Godmode (Hydra's RMP)?

No. Godmode would win them in a mirror.

 

 

 

Interesting. What do you take home from Anaheim as far as strategy, team synergy, experience and maybe even behaviour goes?

 

Stop talking **** when there is a mic in my face.

 

 

 

Do you think Check Six's 3^rd place is justified and on a related note, do you still stand to your statement that the American competition is bad?

 

Yes they deserve 3rd place for playing beastcleave but all Americans are ******* bad.

 

 

 

Paperkat claims that he gave you guys some tips before the loser bracket finals in which you beat Check Six 3-0. He was even talking about Healing Touch. Moreover he says he’s the reason you smiled from time to time while you were just idling at the PCs. Typical Luis brain farting or actually true?

 

Haha, he's bull****ting of course. But yeah, he made me smile sometimes and he was trying to give me tips on how to fear.

Like press the button?

 

Yeah and that I should use portal.

????

 

 

 

Paperkat is flawless at     theorycraft apparently.

Haha.

 

 

 

Did you get a chance to talk to Kalgan to express your opinion about the current state of the game?

 

No, I didn't really see him that much and I didn't have the time.

 

 

 

What would you have told him?

 

"This game is ******* ****, fix it"

Like RNG and too strong comps?

 

Everything.

 

 

 

What did I forget?

 

Mages.

 

 

 

Scouts reported you had a little beef with Private Enigmz. Considering you are half German and he is French, I hope you dominated him properly and he surrendered like a baguette should? Who would win in a fist fight? Would the 4star General even allow such behaviour or would he go all Spiderman on your ass? And now seriously, what was that all about?

 

Yeah he came over to me and told me to buff improved Fire Shield in the starting area, so I said "Shut the **** up you retard. It's useless". Then he was trying to explain to me why it's good and walked back his seat but I was forced to buff it after because he said he won't heal if I don't.

 

 

Was it all fine later at the hotel?

 

Yes but our team is emotionally unstable. This stuff happens on vent every time we play I don't know what it is.

 

 

 

So is it serious or are you guys just goofing around since you're used to **** talking each other?

 

Nah, it's serious. We don't **** talk each other for fun.

 

 

What’s next on your list? Will SK send you to Dreamhack Winter? From what I’ve heard about the teams attending that should be rather easy money for you if of course GODMODE doesn’t attend.  

 

We're not sure if we're going to Dreamhack yet. It depends on the amount of prize money there will be, I guess. It's not announced yet even though it's only 2 weeks left. But yeah, we all want to go and we would win it.

 

 

 

Some quick questions and you try to answer as simple as possible:

 

Nicest person you met at MLG Anaheim.

 

Enigmz.

 

 

 

Bodi is …?

Black.

 

 

 

Best American player at the tournament?

 

Me.

 

 

 

LOL, nice. Worst player and worst team at the tournament?

 

Azael/EG.

 

 

 

Zilea is a … paladin.

World champion.

 

 

ESL Global Finals Champion this season?

 

Me.

 

 

 

Best Warlock in the world?

 

I’m the best player in the world.

 

 

 

How can you not love this guy?

 

 

 

 

Ensidia - The sponsor you don't want to have

 

 

I'm sure you wondered who this Godmode team is that I talked about with the Divine. Here is the story about it:

 

If you're a bit into the pro scene, you most certainly heard about the jokes that are WoW contracts compared to let's say CS or RTS clan contracts. Many sponsors take a certain percentage of the tournament winnings (somewhere around 0 - 35%, depending on travel cost) even from tournaments where they organisation doesn't even have to pay for the travel cost such as Regionals and Blizzcon. Yes, you read that right; You pay money to promote them by wearing the clan t-shirt. It is an outrage, but recently a sponsor reached an all time low:

 

Ensidia - the organisation around the recently not so much best PvE guild in the world - pulled a ridiculous move at their former arena squad. As most people have realized, Ensidia was in and out of MLG Anaheim a couple of times for a reason that they disguised as being busy with university as they didn't want to make their sponsor look bad. In reality, Lord Hydra and Caliph Kalimist tried to contact their manager and he didn't even respond. He didn't explain himself saying that they don't have sufficient funding, which would be a lie anyway.

 

The players were of course upset as there was still a small possibility for them to go to the MLG Finals. SK.EU took the slot and now we can understand why they were at this tournament despite my effort. Yet the team that brought home the 1st spot at GamesCom and promoted their sponsor in their very first tournament that way was not just ignored, no. They were kicked from Ensidia before they could leave.

 

My advice goes out to all possible new arena squads that might approach or be approached by Ensidia: don't do it. Other sponsors aren't exactly fair, but Ensidia stooped to an all time low. Keep in mind, there are players in WoW who receive salary even though it's just a small one. To the wealthy investor that keeps signing paychecks to Kungen and the other officers: You just lost the best RMP in Europe and there simply is no better or equal team despite SK.EU in Europe. Your organisation just committed WoW arena community suicide. We are talking about travel expenses probably not exceeding the monthly salary of one of your guild officers and the benefit is infinitely greater. You don't ditch a Lord without consequences. 

 

 

World Cyber Games - nicely done

 

The only thing that you can moan about regarding the WCG coverage is that you don't hear as much about it, at least not in our community. I'm about to change that.

 

The World Cyber Games, the Olympia of e-sports, kicked off on Wednesday in Chengdu. While the IEM Global Challenge was also pretty well done when they resided there, WCG does extremely well in my opinion. The stream is extremely high quality for a free stream (You can check it out here) and the whole process feels very professional. Rarely do you see a shout caster lost between cuts and at least the English speaking guys do a great job.

 

The stream was in fact so nice, that I watched one hour of possibly the worst competitive FPS game ever. It goes by the name of Crossfire. The rule-set is ridiculous and I don't even know where to begin with this. Only Chinese people seemed to play it anyway.

 

The highlight on those streams are of course CS, WC3 & SC and there have been quite some sick games on stream already. If you have missed those it's not a big deal as they are extremely quick with their VoDs which you can check out here: *click*

 

Basically every major e-sports is about to go into the last matches of the tournament and it's not too late to catch the hottest action. I will surely cheer for the last German playing in one of the major games: Yaws. He managed to beat famous human player Sky in a mirror and finished first in his group. Sky is widely considered as one of the best if not the best Human player in the world.

 

Even if we Germans suck, I still have Europe to fall back on. Fnatic & mTw.dk going strong. Go Europe!

 

Yiska out.

 

EDIT: The user V33 just made me aware that there are in fact polls to vote WoW into the WCG for 2010. I will definitely touch on this topic soon again. We have to get the hype going!

http://www.wcg.com/6th/poll/poll_PTT.asp

^Vote for WoW!