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GESC & ACL overview :3
 

Hi friends. This blog is just gonna be an overview of my GESC/ACL weekend and some Immunity stuff. Excuse the bad quality photos...they're from my tiny little Nikon camera that hates indoor lighting.


GESC was held in Monash university. The setup was good - we had 3 rooms. Two of them were for the players and one was the streaming room. The tournament was super stacked with our 16 qualified players being more or less our usual suspects.


Despite some issues with brackets, the games were really intense. My only regret was that our stream was a no-go so you missed out on some sick plays :< . The reason for this was that the stream was all fine and good when we tested it, but after the SC2 event discovered that although we were supposedly using uncapped uni internet, the routers had load sharing which would restrict your connection to stop you from doing what you were doing if it detected too much outgoing/incoming (not sure which...excuse my fail networking knowledge) traffic after about half an hour.
During the time in which we were streaming we didn't know what was going on with our connection. We tried switching from own3d to twitch, restarting the streaming computer, closing additional programs etc. and this caused us to forget our nameplate updates, our vs screen that had the players' pictures come up before each match...it was a shame. Next time I'm sure we'll have a much better run. For every LAN there are always unforeseen problems and we just copped it really hard!



I'm not sure what we're doing about VODS and replays or if/when they'll be released. I sincerely hope we can sort something out though, because there were some really awesome games. Particularly from our overall winner, MF.Targa who took home the big $2500 prize. Second went to Nv.mOOnGLaDe , $500 and third to GoSu.tgun $250 (instead of motherboard according to his preference).

Aside from those silly stream problems, the event was run really well by our main man Tony (aka Sent1nel, iM manager). It was a player focused event rather than spectator focused, which kept us on a good time schedule once we got started and ended up working out with our stream problems. Every player was catered to from borrowing headsets to fixing any kind of computer issue that arose. Pizza and red bull was even provided to ensure a healthy level of nerd energy ^.^


Huge thanks to everyone involved including our awesome volunteers and sponsors, and especially Team Immunity for running it all (:





After an tiring day and some late night pizza, we got a decent nights sleep for some ACL action the next day. I have to say, I was very impressed by the venue this time. A nice big room packed with nerds, caffeinated drinks, computers and consoles with an awesome stage. I was also pleased to see that the event was running more or less on time considering how difficult it is to coordinate that many people without going insane. Big ups to the ACL guys for getting it all to run smoothly.

I don't have all that much to say about ACL apart from that it was really fun and cool to finally meet a lot more of you. Particularly the people that I've known online for a little while but never had the chance to meet until then! I enjoyed casting a couple of games with the wonderful Maynarde and was glad to see that there was no shortage of people - players and casters alike - trying their hand a commentating a few games during the event. It's always interesting to hear from different people ^.^




One last thing!
A huge congrats to the Immunity boys for their performances at ACL (: Top 3 at one of the first LANs since joining the team is pretty damn good. Also Sunder made a really great effort making it into groups and showing that he has a lot of promise as a player.




One of the coolest things of being part of Immunity so far is the feeling of being together as a team and getting to know each other on a more personal level. At ACL one of Immunity's Halo players and one of their FIFA players just came up and introduced themselves and had a chat with us. I thought that was really nice because oftentimes teams cater for a lot of different games but the players don't seem to mingle, so it's as if they weren't associated at all.

As for us SC2 folks, we haven't been together for long but things have been great thus far. Tony has been awesome and spoils us every chance he gets . The accommodation he got us for our stay in Melbourne included multiple bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms for the 6 of us. Real nice place. He ferried us around in his car when time permitted to events, the airport and even on late night food searches in the middle of nowhere. The amount of opportunities we've been given as part of Immunity already is amazing. It's something I never thought I'd be lucky enough to experience. I'm definitely looking forward to the future as our players get even better and our casting experience grows. We've got some awesome stuff coming!



I think that wraps up my overview of things (: .

Thanks for reading all ^.^