TL;DR Preface: This will be a recap of my experience at ACL Sydney 2014. If you watched the event or know the results, the only thing you're going to learn is my mentality
going into the games / coming out of the games and what I did before / after them. You're not going to find crazy drama here, sorry. That's saved for Mates of Starcraft.
For me, the event started on the Friday (day before the event) as I had to get into the apartment to check in for the team (as it was booked in my name). I got in around
2pm with my bags to check it out and it was amazing; we stayed at a place called Oaks, located on Castlereagh street, right near central station. I ended up just relaxing
at the apartment for an hour until an old friend from the Starcraft community, TAMiles, messaged me and asked me to meet him at central to hang out. Sure.
Wandered over to Central station, met Miles to the lovely background noise of a crazy lady in a park screaming at birds and went to get myself Subway for lunch, as well as
a few cookies, because subway cookies are freaking amazing. After grabbing lunch, we walked around for a bit to locate The Nerd Cave. If you don't know what The Nerd Cave
is, it's a nice little.. well, nerd cave. Has a few PCs set up for use, board games, console games, etc.. sadly, didn't end up going in at any time during the weekend
(bloody busy weekend) but nice to know where it is.
After exploring for 30 minutes (I might be from Sydney, but I sure as hell don't know where I'm going in the city..) I got a message from Zahe saying he was on his way.
Sweet, first teammate arriving, finally get to meet him in person. Miles and I walked to Central station and waited for a bit until he arrived upon which we went back to
the Apartment to relax for another hour before joining Infeza and what ended up being a nice little crew of people.
Once Infeza gave us the a-ok to come over, we made our way to the Mercure hotel through the bloody freezing wind in Sydney and met him and his entourage to explore Sydney
with all the tourists. Infeza, Arnor, Miles, KingKong, Blysk, Revenant, Zahe and myself all set out on a trek to the Opera House, even though none of us really knew where
it was exactly. Infeza was filming shots for his short Starcraft movie Mates of Starcraft and we all decided we'd keep him company.
After ~20 minutes of walking in almost the wrong way, we ended up at the Opera House and settled in while Infeza got the shots he needed. Thanks to the Starcraft boys
always being inviting, Zahe was welcomed into the group of friends even though he (and I) are now known as "dirty LoL players". Once the tourists and Infeza had gotten
their desired shots of the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and anything else they could point a freaking camera at, we made a group decision to take a train to town hall and
then find somewhere for dinner to avoid freezing ourselves on the way back.
A train ride away, we get off at town hall and head for the only Korean BBQ place that actually matters, Seoul Ria. Much to our dismay, once we get there, the place is
packed. I mean, every seat is taken, waiting room only packed. We were bloody hungry and unwilling to wait 30 minutes, so we set off for another walk to find -- you guessed
it, yet another KBBQ placed to settle in at. Once we settled in at the new place (after a ~10 minute wait for a table.. god Sydney is busy on friday nights) we were joined
by Ninja who had been trying to find us as we avoided him for the last 20-odd minutes.
Given it was Zahe's first time at a KBBQ place, we eagerly rushed him into eating KimChi without explaining what it was or how it tasted, as you do to anyone new to KBBQ.
Once we'd enjoyed his reaction, we set in to a nice relaxing dinner (with some of us drinking soju), KingKong setting half the meat on fire as his limited Chef training
kicked in and myself gorging every bit of KimChi that anyone else didn't touch.
Finishing up at KBBQ after eating more than my fair share because god damn I was hungry.. we started our journey back to the Mercure, but not before stopping to get froyo.
I don't care how cold people thought it was, it's never too cold for froyo. Simple as that.
Then, the disaster happened..
I tripped (sort of) and dropped like, half my froyo. Worst thing ever. Luckily, it wasn't captured on camera. Whew. We then ran into a group of other SC2 players who were
looking for a netcafe to play a few games at, but it was closed down, so they did the next bext thing -- came back with us to the Mercure hotel for more drinks.
After relaxing with the boys for an hour or so (and getting to see Maynarde!) I took my journey back to Oaks (Zahe had left as we got back to the Mercure) while groggy as
all hell. Got into the hotel, gave Miles his laptop and things back and sent him on his way and then tried to get to sleep. I think the others got in and I may have said hi
- I don't really remember. I didn't sleep, but I wasn't really awake, it was all just 9 hours of complete groggyness.
Waking up on Saturday was tough. It was made even worse by Zahe coming in to where I was sleeping, shaking my legs and saying "tgun wake up, it's 8;30, we're late!". I
reached over to my phone, looked at it, saw 8:00 and said "bloody Adelaide locals can't even tell time".. although he was right, we were meant to be up at 8, so at least we
were woken up on time.
After doing all of our morning routines (meditation, stretching, one person attempting a backflip -- you know, the usual) we headed out to grab some breakfast and to ACL.
We got there bright and early at 9;30am as ACL staff had asked us to be there early for a "briefing" of some sort. Well, I didn't really hear or know what that was about,
so we just ended up setting up for our first game (vs YSSC) on the main stage and talking strategy. However, we didn't even get to start -- they called everyone into the
main auditorium / hall / room / whatever you want to call it -- the place where SC2 was held and did the standard introduction. Lots of shoutouts were given -- well
deserved shoutouts, without the sponsors everyone so proudly represents we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing -- we were sent back to start our games.
Our first game vs YSSC was on the main stage, but wasn't put up on the projector or broadcast on twitch due to various tech issues - none of our concern, and we didn't even
ask why. We just focused on the game.
Picks in the first game vs YSSC:
We were surprised by the Lucian pick, as we didn't expect anyone to play him so close to the recent rework. Denian however, the ever versatile player (and also the person who favoured lucian pre-nerfs) locked it quite quickly. Going into this game, we didn't ban Swain or Lucian as we didn't see them as threats - we removed other priority things and built our composition around a yasuo setup. However, this lead to Yasuo vs Swain which is a ridiculously poor matchup for the Yasuo. He fell behind early, as expected, and the other lanes (myself and uber at bot, jksmithy at top and zahe jungling) weren't able to pull our weight enough to right the scales after a failed dragon fight when Swain had a Zhonyas and we didn't have Lulu ult and we were dispatched in a fairly short game.
After the game, we gathered ourselves. Going into it, we were confident but respectful of YSSC - they were our greatest scrim partner and we held a positive win ratio VS. them over a reasonable sample size of games so we expected to beat them. Getting slapped down in such dominating fashion was a good wake up call.
A short while later, we took five minutes to ourselves and worked on our pick/ban strategy vs Immunity. Without making any excuses -- the better team won, that's for sure, we went into the game knowing that if we lost, it wasn't a big loss. We weren't going to come out of the group in first seed after our loss to YSSC, so we decided to experiment and try to settle ourselves on a new comp. This game was streamed (if I recall correctly) as well, so if you'd like to, I believe you can find the VOD in the twitch.tv/aclpro VODs, although we had a solid 30 minutes of pause time due to horrendous net issues.
Picks in the second game vs IM:
We got ourselves strong picks: myself on thresh, Zahe on evelynn, Claire on Orianna, JKSmithy on Irelia -- all of those picks are champions we are all happy and confident on. One thing I do want to point out is that while, quite obviously, happiness isn't something we take into account when we pick, it does create a (slightly) better environment in a game, and it showed. We put in some good work vs Immunity, lead for a decent amount of the game and were competetive unti lit all fell apart. We pulled a very cheesy invade off and got both of Rayderes summoner spells down before minions spawned, until they laneswapped and caught us off guard. We were still well in the game however, playing very competetively until their split-push tryndamere pulled us all over the map, getting us to drop objective after objective until we were simply too far gone and dispatched us. Still, a strong showing, proving to people we weren't to be taken lightly.
After the Immunity game we had a large break until our game vs AKG, so we all relaxed and walked around, watching other games. I myself walked over to the SC2 area and said hi to a lot of old friends -- sorry if I didn't get to you ^^.
Once we were called for our games vs. AKG, we went over picks and bans and decided that if we were going to win this game, the easiest thing to do would be to ban out NADA's Morgana, as he's notoriously strong on Morgana. Other than that, the bans were fairly standard, and we moved into the game.
Picks in the third game vs AKG:
Hold on a second..
NADA was playing ADC. Whoops. Oh well..
We dispatched them in a very clean 30 minute game with very few errors from us -- it started out reasonably even, going kill for kill, until we built a lead and played a very objective based game to force them into a loss. At least we ended groups on a good note, 1-2 -- not fancy, not flashy, but it got the job done and seeded us into a nice spot in the brackets by pure luck. We were playing on, what I would call, the weaker side of the bracket.
Brackets were as follows (From memory, I couldn't find a link T_T)
AKG vs Legacy
Ex D vs NV
--------------
iM vs YSSC
BLJ vs UTS
So we dodged both Immunity and YSSC, two teams which we had lost to earlier. We were confident vs NV and knew we could beat Legacy, so we were pretty happy with how things turned out.
Our final game of the night, the first game of the brackets was played vs NV off stream, was a phenomenal game. Mostly because I was Blitzcrank. Well... all because I was Blitzcrank.
Picks in the first game (brackets) vs NV:
If you can find the game timeline on oce.op.gg, you'll see a gold lead change that tells a story in itself. We were dominating the game, dictating every fight and taking objectives until we made a huge mistake. Taking the 2nd tier mid tower, we grouped up a little too hard and got hit by a 4-man ori ult into a 4-man riven combo, giving up our lead and giving them a free baron + momentum. After that fight, everything was out of sync. We felt behind, even though we were ahead in gold and felt like we had to conceed small things, like wards and dragons when we realistically shouldn't have given them up.
Then it got worse.
We had a horrible engage at baron, losing both Zahe and Niwa, leaving only myself, Claire and Ubergiantsbro up. With ~60 second death timers, we knew the game was going to be over before they could revive. Then the call came through -- "We can backdoor". A huge wave of minions had piled up at their bottom inhib tower. NV took baron and headed towards our base -- and our two open inhibitors, whilst Uber ran to the bottom inhib tower and Claire TF ported with him. A base race ensued, where NV only sent Orianna to deal with our combo. That was the first, big mistake that we wouldn't let go unpunished. Once the orianna was killed, our inhibitors had been dealt with but they had no minion wave to push our nexus. Josker started teleporting back and I knew I couldn't cancel it.. but he teleported to a tower which would die before his channel finished. One tower and the nexus to go, all of NV trying to recall. I ran around like a madman headbutting my keyboard to interrupt the recalls while Uber and Claire did the hard work, and we won a game we had absolutely no business in doing so. Our mood went from, before the game, pretty down on ourselves to incredibly hyped up. Kind of sad it was the last game of the night and not on stream.. but we won, and that's what matters the most.
After this, we knew we'd be up against Legacy. AKG had a very, very, very long shot at beating them that we didn't even think about. So, at dinner that night, after we'd calmed down from all the excitement, we had a group meeting on how we'd deal with them, as we knew it would be Legacy with Rusty as their mid, instead of ChuChuz, we decided that we wouldn't focus on banning mid at all. We knew Rusty's champ pool was vast and his playstyle was primarily passive over the aggression ChuChuz packs on, so we focused ourselves on shutting down Cardrid. But, before all that, we needed to get some much needed sleep.
I slept much better on the Saturday night. I think I got roughly 4 hours? It was more than enough, considering events have me running on pure adrenaline anyway. We woke up and did everything much the same we did the previous morning, but we knew getting into ACL this morning, we had a new goal. We got to watch Legacy vs AKG and get a handle on what they were doing and why they were doing it -- sort of scouting them. It was pretty much what we expected, with Cardrid getting a lot of focus and farm to carry them through. Standard Legacy play: Carbon on a jungler with good dueling potential, Minky on a safe top laner and I believe Rusty was on a safe midlaner.
Picks in the second game vs Legacy:
The game clearly didn't go as planned. Giving up Kassadin was completely planned as we placed more priority (of banning) above him in this matchup. Even though the score says different, the Kassadin wasn't really the problem in the game. He came out of lane down CS and reasonably weak, but we did nothing to their bot lane and put a lot of our focus (jungle wise) on top lane. This created a huge problem. Given our game plan going into this was to shut down Carbon, we didn't exactly have a strong lane comp down bot to do this without pressure from somewhere else. Thresh is a great champion all-around, but he shines most when he can bring someone in with a lantern to force an engage. Legacy kept up a great pink setup (one in tribrush, one in river) to lock out Zahe and we didn't use thresh's lantern enough to counter-act this.
Meanwhile, we were getting kills up top on Minky, but as he was on Dr. Mundo, those kills are essentially nothing. Obviously, a less-farmed Mundo is going to be easier to kill, but he wasn't the problem. We have lucian, a champion able to kite Mundo forever (theoretically) on our side, versus Corki on theirs getting very farmed. We took a dragon fight when the money was (roughly) even and pretty much lost there and then. We had Riven dive for their Corki, as was our only hope, but Legacy played the fights almost perfectly. Riven would get near corki? He's either kicked out or exhausted. Irelia? Exact same treatment. They would simply peel Corki as he shredded us while up ~1.5k-2k gold on our Lucian. Then, anyone trying to escape would get the "piss off, I'm Kassadin" treatment and be struck down.
Well, at the very least, there is a lot to be learnt in losing. We re-affirmed our previous thoughts on how Legacy would play (very focused on Cardrid) and knew that if we fought back to get another shot, we'd be able to take them. Our next game was against AKG again, and we needed a game like this: without sounding too arrogant or disrespectful to AKG, in our minds, we needed to play a game against a weaker opponent to get our confidence back - and we did just that.
Picks in the third game vs AKG:
Even with me on a very uncomfortable champion (Nami), we were able to completely dominate the game. Everyone else was on comfortable champions: Claire on his notorious (that weekend) Orianna, JKSmithy on Vladimir, Zahe on LeeSin, UberGiants on Kogmaw.. it was heaven for our picks/bans phase. Our plan going into it was to protect Kogmaw as a team whilst Vladimir forced them to focus him during fights. Everything went well, we pushed objectives as a team in a very calm and controlled manner and took the game out. Exactly what we needed to prepare ourselves mentally for YSSC.
Going into the game against YSSC, I was completely calm. Surprising, given the match -- a bo1, was worth $1k. Winner of it got a guaranteed $1k, loser gets 4th place. It was such a shit position, for the lack of a better term, to be in. YSSC are our major scrim partner, and ontop of that, one of the few teams I am actually friends with in the LoL scene. However, I had to put this aside; I couldn't go in thinking I was playing against friends, and I knew they sure as hell would do the same. We took some time to compose ourselves and had a discussion about picks and bans.
Here's where it got interesting: I was adamant about banning Swain. We had an incredible record vs them when they didn't have swain, and the only game I could remember us losing recently was when QtCheese (tempname507) went beastmode on Swain against Claires Yasuo -- an admittedly bad matchup, but it was still a fresh wound in my mind. However, the rest of the team was confident against Swain so I told them to ban around it. We decided that leaving Braum open would be fine even if we ban Morgana (my previous, and current sentiment being that if one is banned (braum/morg) you must first pick the other) because I was very confident playing as Braum or against him. What ensued was one of the cleanest games I've played on what I would consider an "off-champ" for me. I say "off-champ" because the style is quite different to how I normally play support.
Karma is centered around poking, prodding and more importantly, helping peel for your ADC. That's not how I play, I play engage champions - Leona, Thresh, Blitzcrank, Alistar.. they all center around making big plays for your team. Putting me on a champion that's more focused around helping and supporting my team is a very big shift in playstyle. Obviously, I was confident that I could play it, but it's still something to be noted.
Picks in the fourth game vs YSSC:
In the end, all the picks went reasonably close to how we expected it to go. They took braum and swain, as well as Jarvan for Guo. All of these were picks we expected and planned around, so we were happy with how the draft went. They got a strong, comfortable team, but as we were able to predict a good portion of their team, we were able to prepare. Our comp was built heavily around Claire - a good Orianna ult meant an easy win of a team fight.. a bad Orianna ult meant running for our lives. Luckily, we could do both. With Ubergiantsbro on Lucian, leaving him to fend for himself in fights, whilst not optimal, was a possible solution.
Then everything clicked. Every lane played superb and we swapped into a very objective, push focused team that we're comfortable being. JKSmithy's malphite ults were superb, I think Claire missed maybe 1 Orianna ult in a 30 minute game, which is a phenomenal feat in itself. We took fights in a very methodical manner and one big mistake for them meant it was all over. They had Guo engage on us in mid with an admittedly good Jarvan ult, but they had made one major error. They had mistimed their Shyvana's teleport cooldown, which meant we were able to sweep the fight and then snowball to win the game. A bittersweet victory, knocking out our friends, but one we wouldn't let go to waste. We just beat one of the two teams who had taken games off us earlier, so going into the losers finals we were re-invigorated with energy and ready to keep our bulldozer moving.
Again, thinking about Legacy basically came down to "Rustys passive playstyle isn't something we can ban out". That was the general sentiment on our team - he has a vast, safe champion pool, so we might as well focus on getting Cardrid shut down and a safe comp for ourselves. Pick/ban phase actually went the best it had all tournament for us, and that's a big mention, as I feel our expectations of what people would draft was spot on more often than not.
Picks in the fifth game vs Legacy:
One thing I want to make a huge note of here: I got Leona vs Nami. I've always held a very strong sentiment that blind picking Nami is the worst thing you can do, because of one champion. Leona. Your kit (as Leona) is enough to completely shut down Nami, and if we are able to shut down one of the two champs in a duo lane, the lane is as good as done. My memory of this game is foggy -- I know that we played it EXTREMELY safe. Enough that the casters poked fun at me after the game, although they definitely understood why we played it that way. One play stands out in my mind, clear as day, though.
In the bottom lane, we had backed off after a (small) skirmish and I retreated into a bush unscouted. Ubergiants backed off, but they hadn't seen me sneak into the bush. So here I am, Leona, practically touching Nami and she doesn't know it. I call for the engage and we obliterate Nami, giving us a good confidence boost (and to those in the audience, a 3 minute warning that someone was about to explode). The one way to explain this game, again, is extremely safe. We took practically no risks. No towerdives, no contested objectives, nothing. If Orianna's ult was down, we would run. We just slowly took objective after objective until the game was over - a clean, deliberate dissection of Legacy, placing us into the finals. The first thing I said, when we had won the game, was "what do we do vs IM?". The team rightfully put me in my place and told me to just chill out for a few minutes and let us soak the victory in.
A big victory for us. Legacy could have had Chuchuz that game and it wouldn't have mattered, so anyone even thinking of saying "oh it's because Rusty was there" is talking out of their ass. We were going into the Immunity game down 0-1 in a bo3 (weighted brackets, completely the right thing) but knew that we could pull it off if we played perfectly. In the group stage when we played them, we had a lead for the first ~15 minutes of the game.. until Swip3rR's tryndamere pulled us all over the map, costing us objective after objective upon which we lost the game. We knew going into the game, that even though Swip3rR's tryndamere is increidble, it's not ban worthy. We simply had to play properly (against it) and not get pulled all over the map. We were also very concious of them lane swapping against us, as they had done so before.
However, we made a huge error (in my opinion) in picks/bans phase..
Picks in the sixth (and final) game vs Immunity:
In picks/bans, our plan was to get a good Yasuo comp going. Now if you block out everything but the Orianna pick, it all makes sense. Knockups from 3 of our 4 champs and a strong jungler to help mid if he needs it. However, we swapped at the last second to Orianna as our last pick, because Claire had been doing so darn well on it. Honestly, if the picks had swapped around, we probably still would have lost - iM were playing damn well and weren't giving up anything. However, I feel that making a split second decision to change our whole comp was a big mistake in drafting -- our first drafting mistake of the whole tournament.
Going into the game, we were doing well at the beginning. We got first blood early against the formidable Raydere+Rosey combo and felt good. Then we flubbed a dragon fight quite poorly. We focused down Zac instead of twitch and/or Irelia, thus removing simply a tank and no damage. We didn't even finish off Zac (in his passive form.. he hates it when that happens) before they cleaned up the fight. After this, they slowly snowballed a victory to the point they were able to ace us at a tier-2 tower dive. We almost /ff'd then, but decided to at least put up a fight for the crowd, both there and online. After all, at the end of the day we are there not only to win, but to put on a show. We fought for another ~15 minutes before iM were able to finally shut the door and take their position as the victors.
With the games over, everyone could finally relax. We knew that we'd be going over this game later, but we also knew that we should simply take the rest of the night and enjoy it -- fretting over the games and results at the time was a pointless thing to do. So, everyone went off to relax in their seperate groups: obviously, I ran off to watch a bit of SC2 and CoD -- the CoD semi's drew a huge crowd, full of hype as Immunity were knocked out in 3rd place, for the first time at an ACL event.. I believe ever? I'm not too certain about that.
After a while, all of the boys from my team headed off to get dinner and I hung around with my girlfriend until we were accosted by a group of nice people (Pastry, Benji, Asgard et al -- I know i'm not listing a bunch of you, it's not out of malice..) to go to KBBQ for the 2nd time that weekend for myself. Sure! We saw Immunity and NV there at Seoul Ria, had a wonderful night of events that I won't be re-telling in this blog -- some things stay offline, and closed out the event in wonderful fashion.
So.. that's it. That's ACL weekend for me, but what blog wouldn't be compelte without a completely random list of shoutouts? So, here's mine:
Steelseries, for providing me gear that is more durable than Alistar. Holy crap do I put my gear through some stress and it still works as if it was brand new..
ACL staff -- everyone there is always wonderful. Setting up, taking it all down, running the event.. gets better every time.
AKG - These guys are awesome and deserve a mention.
My girlfriend - Proofread this + brought lollies on day 2 to poison our enemies.
Nah, it's pretty sick to see you continuing to wreck nerds no matter what the game is. Always continuing to cheer for you. I came and watched a bit of the finals just 'cause I saw you were playing.
___________________________________
The Transformer Zerg, Jadron Burgerman @Soundwave
tfw tgun relentlessly feeding in every game ehhhehehe
___________________________________ www.twitch.tv/switchaus @andrewthomasrrr
"The hardest part about playing Protoss is not choking on your dad's d--k" - Kreamy 2013
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