Reactions After Germany, Photos & Meeting the Players

Hi, my name is Fabian "Zilea" Siffredi, and I will be, hopefully, blogging a lot more in the future for WoM (unless of course I get my house bombed by all of the people that hate me on WoM) and will hopefully entertain the readers for a long time. I'm going to spend my first article talking about my experience in Cologne, Germany last week.

Reactions after Germany; meeting the players/memorable stories

Germany was, to say the least, really fun and I'm sure all of the Euros can attest to how nice the city of Cologne is. Nice grassy scenery, a lot of nice people, etc. However, a few things I came away with after being in Cologne for a week was that: A) Tons of people smoke and B) everybody rides bikes. I saw countless amounts of people in suits riding their bikes but after seeing the way the streets are in Cologne, it is no shocker that everyone rides bikes: the streets are ridiculously narrow! Moreover, traffic in Cologne was pretty light and it looks like bikes are the way to go.

The first few days in Germany were really awkward for me, especially when all of the players introduced each other. I know that I was pretty shy the first day or so because I had just met a lot of the players, whereas a lot of those players had already met each other before at past events. After the first day or so though I started to loosen up.

It really is a strange experience meeting people you used to hate and trash talk all the time (this was the case for me with Team EG and Holyplay) but then as soon as you meet them and start to get to know them, the tension drops. I even recall violent threats being exchanged between myself and Zyz/Azazael weeks prior to the US Regionals, however things were very different once the first handshakes were made. I can easily see how a lot of the top teams become close friends after meeting at events because after meeting players face-to-face, you really start to think differently about them. I can honestly say that trash talking is going to be near impossible because just about everyone there was down-to-earth, normal and cool (this is a note to all of the trolls on WoM that love to trash talk players for their performance, their looks, etc). I especially enjoyed meeting/hanging out with Realz, Azazael, Twix, Payce, Venruki, Kint, Roguemonkey, Niero and Shinaniganz as I found them to be nice guys (if you're not on this list don't take offense).

I will at this time talk about the very interesting encounter I had with Team CompLexity. Early on in the week in Cologne Kint was telling me how the CompLexity players were really pissed at me for ripping into them months ago after they went 0-5 at one of the events. Anyway, after hearing this, I went ahead and went towards the CompLexity players and decided I would apologize so that there would be no hard feelings after our match. After apologizing to Sodah and Venruki, things seemed cool, but things got very spicy when I approached HappyMinty. I remember going up the stairs to the gameroom and I was talking to HappyMinti as we walked and I was telling him that I was sorry for talking trash about his team in the past and that I had no hard feelings for him or his team. I will admit his response caught me by surprise when he told me, in an agitated voice that it wasn't cool what I did in the past and that I knew what I was doing when I said the things I said. He promptly continued walking up the stairs and left me in the dust as I started to slow down as I walked. I felt like a complete jackass for being shut down and I think HappyMinty also felt kinda bad for responding the way he did. A little bit later when we were getting photos taken he approached me and told me he appreciated what I said and that there were no hard feelings, which I found as very gracious.  Things between me and HappyMinty really cooled off after that and we began to talk a lot more. Ultimately I came out of Germany feeling that HappyMinty was a really nice guy who was just upset about what was sad about him in the past, which is completely understandable. Hopefully he sticks with his team so I can see him again at future events.

Oh, and I also met Kalgan, who gave some pretty interesting information, albeit was very careful not to spill any secret information. I found out from him that rated BGs were planned and that we would hear much more about it at Blizzcon, but I did get to find out that Blizzard intends to make rated BGs a lower "echelon" (or "tier") than arena and would be an alternative way to get gear. The way I took it from Kalgan, Blizzard intends to allow individual players to pug queue rated BGs and every player would have their own PR.

And being the paladin that I am, I asked a bunch of other questions regarding the paladin class, like why auras were still on the GCD. To which he replied saying that he didn't want players having macros to constantly swap between auras.

He also told me that mounts being on the GCD is a bug and should be fixed "soon".

I also found out Blizzard is intending on finally allowing the arena frames to be movable (finally!) and should hopefully be in the game soon but did not promise to have it in for patch 3.2.

And, questioning him on the basis for the resilience change, Kalgan commented about how the game had become too fast-paced and bursty and even commented that the resilience change was designed to slightly nerf RMP.

On a final note, Kalgan has a really hot girlfriend and if someone has a picture they should go ahead and post it because I was like "holy crap" when I saw her.

Are EU people shy compared to the US players?

It was really strange to me after meeting the players how different the personalities were. The Euros, for the most part, seemed to be much more timid when it came to the social scene. While the US players were always together, the EU players seemed to be more distant and less inclined to talk to others. I met a few cool guys like Orly and Alex, but for the most part the general vibe I got was that the EU players were much more nervous to meet people. A bunch of the US players were commenting on how the EU players were never anywhere to be found and some of us figured they were just sitting in their hotel rooms by themselves.

WC3 player out of his league?

The first day we got let into the venue to get access to PCs was the day I realized that WC3 players in the US are generally pretty awful. Valrath, the DK on my team, played a game of WC3 against the 8th seed of the US WC3 Regionals just for fun. However, this match, which was supposed to be a warmup for the WC3 player (I believe his name was "Deuce."), turned out to be the begginning of the end. Valrath, who had stopped playing WC3 for pretty much over a year, literally stomped the garbage out of him without losing a single footman, which led the WC3 player to rage and say he could not play with the German keyboard (despite the fact that Valrath was using the exact same keyboard). What happened to Deuce. in the WC3 US regionals was predictable after watching him lose to Valrath; he lost every match and was quickly eliminated from the tournament.

More memorable stories & the karaoke bar

I learned that Kint is the #1 Michael Jackson fanboy and was listening to the Michael Jackson hits on his ipod while the WoW matches were going on on stage.

Interesting factoid about Cologne: the sun went down at 10:15 pm every night and came up at around 5:15 am every morning. It was really strange to say the least to still see it light out at 10 pm.

Another thing I found interesting in Germany was how Americanized parts of the city were. When you see a Pizza Hut and a Subway in Cologne, you know America's got its grubby corporate hands in the cookie jar.

And the big memorable event of being in Germany was when Kint and Zyz were singing Backstreet Boys songs in a karaoke bar on the last night in Cologne. Unfortunately for me, I had bounced early as it was the last night and I was really tired. Here is the video for your viewing pleasure (I am trying to get an HD version which apparently aNNa has):


Sharp version, courtesy of aNNa:

http://www.sk-gaming.com/video/136628-Zyz_and_Kintt_karaoke_BSB__I_want_it_that_way

(Still trying to find out how to embed it)

Payce's obsession with WoM

Believe it or not, everytime I saw Yiska say how bad Payce was at paladin, I burst out laughing because all Payce did was talk about what people were saying about him on WoM the entire week we were in Germany, which led to numerous calls for him to shut up. There is nothing funnier than a group of 10 of us walking to have dinner only to hear Payce mutter about how people were saying he was bad and asking us to tell him what he did wrong.

The photos

I have close to 100 photos but unfortunately posting them all here would probably bug a lot of people, so I'll just post some of the good ones.




The left is Valrath, the guy sitting is Payce. This pic was taken in the player's lounge.


Photo inside the cathedral in Cologne.




Day 2 of a bunch of us at this local restaurant. Wingman (Kint) was trying to use chopsticks and failing miserably.



I'm out of the shot, Kint is next to me, followed by Beastlol, Valrath. On the right is Twix and Payce.



Holding the souvenir check




The best group shot that was taken during the event. Note the very flamboyant nature of Payce, who is seen here wearing socks with sandals on (??).


Here is the gigantic lake-thing outside of the hotel.


There were swans in the lake, and they were pretty big. Believe it or not, this thing growled at me as it was passing by me and it scared the crap out of me.


Apparently this sign means if you walk on the ice you will fall through and freeze during the winter.


Photos at this Brazilian bar. The 2 guys in between Roguemonkey and Euneek are WC3 players, who I do not have the names for.

Last series vs EG/SK

Despite what others could say about the cleave vs RLS matchup, we felt very confident going into the first series against EG. We have played literally every top RLS that we could think of on the TR before Germany and we were stomping all of them with relative ease (we always avoided EG so that they could not learn anything from us). So, to that extent, a lot of praise needs to be given to Team EG, as I feel they are without a doubt the best RLS I've ever played against. Beating my team 3-2 in one series and losing in a very close 2-3 in the second series against pally/war/dk? That really shows you how good they are and they deserved to get top 2 as much as both my team and SK-Gaming.

After all the practice we had vs RMP, we thought we had the series vs SK in the bag before the gates opened. Believe it or not, (and I know we probably looked really bad against SK in the stream) but we were not making critical errors in our strategy. The way our comp plays vs RMP is to charge in and get on the priest as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the power of SK-Gaming really showed as they locked us down incredibly hard and made the games brutal for us, leaving both Valrath and Veex doing around 5000 dmg each per round. They got first place and deserved it, they are exceptional players.


Hopefully everyone enjoyed my first article so that I can write more in the future.

On a final note, anyone know any good acne medication?