SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

Hey everyone!

As some of you may know, I have been recently involved in many SEA Lan tournaments/events within the last fortnight (16-09 -> 25-09), such as the Blizzcon Invitationals in Sydney, the Gigabyte E-Sports at the Respawn Lan in Melbourne, and the WCG Brisbane Qualifiers. During this time, I got to meet some truly amazing people, and am really stocked I can now call these people my friends. I had quite some ups and downs in terms of StarCraft, but came away at the end of the fortnight with a lot of positive energy and motivation to continue the pursuit of excellence. I really wanted to share with you guys this experience so I've decided to begin this blog, it may be a long read, but I hope you guys would be able to enjoy it and feel abit of the amazing experience I've went through. Me and Benji recorded quite abit of footage (including some awesome AZKziek moments), and we'll get to uploading them as soon as we can.

This is Part II of the fortnightly experience.


Part II - Contentions & Preparations for Melbourne & Brisbane

Prior to my trip to Melbourne and Brisbane, there were many contentions that arose, and it took a serious effort by one man and a crazy idea by the same man that allowed me the opportunity to be at both the Melbourne event and WCG Brisbane.

As we all know, the announcement for the event for Gigabyte E-Sports at Melbourne came at such a short notice that it was extremely hard for interstate players to book flights and accomodation at a reasonable rate, especially when the Blizzcon Invitationals was happening right after the announcement. *I am not making a judgement on how the event was marketed, this has been discussed enough in the original thread*. Also happening on the same weekend as Gigabyte E-Sports event was WCG Brisbane, which Xeria (Benji) already booked me tickets for.

However, the prizes for Gigabyte E-Sports was so large that I was far more attracted to it than the prizeless WCG Brisbane qualifier (which also featured many potential PvPs). As I am quite financially motivated at the point (being unemployed sucks), being really unreasonable and determined, I told the team I would rather go to Melbourne than Brisbane. However due to the short notice, the cost of sending one player to Melbourne was going to be north of 400$ and if they have sent me, then I would have had to abandon the Brisbane flights altogether. (Which costed around 250$ altogether, including changing fees because SCII at WCG Brisbane changed from Saturday to Sunday (which worked out for me in hindsight). Iaguz couldn't go because of family commitments, whilst Mafia definitely wanted to go. (Poor Iaguz, thankfully Glade gave him his IEM Guangzhou spot that has rejuvenated his spirits!)

It was completely unreasonble for me to want to go to Melbourne when the team already bought my tickets to Brisbane, but I was determined because I didn't want to miss out on something big like this (Reading about WCG Melbourne was so painful for me and Rossi). So Benji came up witht he idea that since Respawn LAN was going to happen on Saturday and WCG Brisbane on Sunday, I could try to fly from Melbourne to Brisbane between Saturday night and Sunday morning whilst still using my return ticket from Brisbane to get back to Sydney. The only issue was that the team was not going to pay for that Melbourne to Brisbane ticket and the cheapest flight at that point was 340$. Not feeling too confident that I was going to finish in the money and not knowing whether Tgun and/or Glade was going, I had a pretty big decision of whether I wanted to fork out that money or to just ignore Melbourne altogether. Knowing that it was Monday night and SEA usually updates patches on Tuesday morning and the patch was coming around, I decided whether I go or not was going to depend if the patch came the next day.

I open my Starcraft II the next day and... UPDATING *YEAH!!!!* The long wait was finally over. I was so excited about the patch, it gave me so much confidence and positivity even though I haven't played a single game on it (I couldn't because the Relocalizer Program was stuffing the updating up). Also on the same day I found out that both Tgun and Glade was not going because of insanely expensive flight costs, which made me more determined that I was going to Melbourne. Only trouble now was that the tickets from Sydney to Melbourne itself was north of 250$ by this point and the Team really wanted to not try to throw money around like paper, so Benji came up with this money-saving but extremely-insane idea -> That himself, myself, and Mafia was going to rent a car to DRIVE down to Melbourne($100 each, for car rental + petrol). Little did he know Mafia did not have a license and I've been sitting on my Ls for the last 5 years cause I live in the City.

Anyway so the plan was pretty much, we drive down on Friday, get to Melbourne at night, stay at a Hostel, play at Respawn LAN on Saturday, then I would catch a 7am flight to Brisbane on Sunday to play at the WCG qualifiers, then fly back to Sydney on a 7am flight on Monday morning, whist Mafia and Benji drove back to Sydney on Sunday morning. I was pretty weary about making it to Elysium net cafe at Brisbane on time for the qualifiers, but after having heard Superman Dox was going to hold the line until I get there, the slighest ounce of doubt I had just evaporated. The plan was pretty epic (from my perspective), but because everything looked like it was gonna work out, I hardly cared for how tired myself or Benji was going to be. With adrenaline in motion, we were ready for the road trip, and ready for Benji to realise he was going to be the only driver for the entire back and forth.

Finally fixed my SCII on Wednesday night and was able to the only few games I could of 1.4 before Saturday (busy all week job searching T_T). I didn't care that I had no practice on 1.4 or that the patch won't affect my performance that much because I would have no experience on it, the patch gave me confidence, of a Protoss Rebirth. & I was going after this, regardless of how I well I was going to do. Also prior to the patch I thought up of alot of builds/strats that I wanted to try out for patch 1.4, I didn't get to try them out but I sure as hell put them on first time display at both Melbourne and Brisbane later on!

Friday Morning, we were supposed to leave at 10am from Benji's so we can get to Melbourne by like 7. With 2 4packs of V's ready, bags of sugar lollies and 10 hours of driving motivation ready, we were ready to go! But ofcourse... somebody slept in.......... T_T. Guess who!? We departed at around 12:30, then run into a traffic block on the Hume Hwy because of an oilrig Truck that blew up, caught on fire on Hume Hwy near Cambeltown (Black smoke was filling the air). Thankfully the car we rented was really nice and sitting in it wasn't too bad. Tick tock, 1.5 hour passes and we've only moved few spaces (vacated by the cars that said "*** this" and drove on to the highway on the other side). It was already 2pm and we weren't even in cambeltown, with Benji's rock music playing in the car, and Mafia constant protests of the type of music, how did we manage to cope!? Did we keep waiting? Or did we turn around and quit like the quitters did? What did we do!?


Find out in Part III - Gigabyte E-Sports Event - Zerg player solidifies his place as one of the best in SEA.

One thing I can tell you we did do... we whipped out the Video Recorder, expect video updates very soon!

Quick shoutouts to our Sponsors - Kingston Technology, for being so awesome and allowing us to be our team that we want to be. To V Energy drinks, which will always be available to team Xeria for that extra energy boost we need at LAN events. And to City Hunter Internet Cafe, a cafe we can call home.


Signing out,

Rayray 'Light'
Xeria Gaming