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Today was the first ever Singapore LAN and it was held at Mystery Box Gaming, organized by Frogmite! (and HDPhoenix)


Disclaimer: This blog post has no pictures so if just words aren't the kinda thing for you, you can stop reading.

(If you went for the event and you're wondering who I was, I was wearing the black shirt with the big Zerg insignia on the front)

Prelude
I was pretty apprehensive about going for this event, as it would be the first time I'm meeting online friends/personas face to face! I even had dreams about it the night before >< Also, I didn't know how receptive the people would be, whether there would be much interaction, etc.
And also, how the heck do you introduce yourself in these kinda things? Lolol. It feels weird to say 'hi, I am Crazerk' instead of my real name.


Three Random Thoughts From The Event
1) People have cliques
It was odd being there as I had virtually no friends/cliques. I had one RL friend there but he was with his Eve clanmates, and then there was the 'top GM clique', basically the top players like Rev, Han, ice (can't recognize the rest) who know each other from playing together so much and from the many tournaments. There were also little congregations, like Drake and Proann from their iRL clan.

Thus I was just drifting around like a vagrant, spending the bulk of my standing-up time behind Revenant watching him play. He's always been my favourite SG player, just because he's very well-mannered, humble and he's Zerg!
It was also a cool experience to have people standing behind ME watching me play, and you can hear them mutter-narrate stuff that's happening and you feel amazing when you do good stuff


2) Offline Events Are Real Tough
I brought my own mouse and headphones just for the fun of it, not like I expected to beat those GMs in the tourney and hence need optimal performance or anything.

The first thing I realized was how difficult it was to get used to the new setup - the new scroll speed/sensitivity (have to basically go configure and unless you are a seasoned offline veteran who has memorized your settings, you're going to have to adapt to something slightly different) the bigger screen, the different keyboard.

THE KEYBOARD. It really makes a huge difference, maybe more so than the mouse! Why? Because mouse(s) don't really differ THAT much apart from those that have different ergonomic designs. (Ok I'm probably horribly wrong but who cares)
But the major differences between keyboards is - the Ctrl key and number keys seems to be at different places on different keyboards.
Thus I was having alot of trouble hotkeying stuff and kept messing up hotkeys because the keyboard was slightly different.

This experience made me realize that it is possible that players play like 10% worse at LAN events if they don't bring their own keyboard/mouse!
Well, of course there are those that practice on poorer platforms (e.g. ProAnn who told me he practised on laptop, so he played better there instead) so somehow perform better, but assuming someone who has a decent rig at home, spends hours practising and being so familiar with his own setup - he is likely to perform poorer in an entirely new environment.


3) Frogmite is a pretty big fella
Ok I couldn't think of a 3rd point so this is it. He's big! At one point he grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me for fun and I swore he could have lifted me and spun me on his finger as well.

My Games
My first opponent was aLtHan, woopey doo. I obviously didn't expect to win and just was playing for the experience.
I still remember our conversation before the game:

crAzerk: "Hey ready for our game?"
aLtHan: 'Hang on, let me warm up '
crAzerk : "You can use our game as a warmup!"

In Game 1 I opened 15 hatch and he went 14/14, and I defended his early lings terribly and lost a few Drones. He expanded off that and after some trading of ling/banes he was magically 20 drones ahead or something like how GMs always are and then does a Roach timing.
I defended it with spines and my own Roaches which popped, but he had a superior upgrade + economy advantage, so he just played around with me (for his warmup I guess) for awhile before killing me eventually.

In Game 2 I opened 15 hatch again and held off his early push much better. He went for 21 hatch with banes I believe, and after being a retard and running all my lings up his ramp for some unknown reason and losing them all to a baneling, he counterattacks and kills me.


In the loser's bracket, I faced Warfest, a Masters League Protoss. I tried out ling-infestor and with my amazing micro I more or less killed nothing when he pushed out finally after turtling on 3 bases with a +3 zealot heavy / archon / stalker/ sentry army. Forcefields + Zealot/archon = Zergling Bloodbath.
I silently cursed Protoss under my breath for being an A-move race as he marched on and I pitifully rallied some units to poke away at his Protoss ball and finally surrendered when I had let him kill enough buildings.
(On watching the replay my macro was terrible and inferior to his too so even if I had decent micro it wouldn't have made a difference)
(loser's brackets were Bo1)

Final Thoughts
It was pretty fun seeing faces that I've only seen in photos, and putting a face to some names. Got to see ProAnn (who gave me some tips and played a game with me in which he crushed me with Mothership) , derpy (who more or less ignored me because he had his friends ;( ), Frogmite (who warmly shook my hand when he realized who I was when I introduced myself)
Revenant probably looked at me several times but had no idea who I was so,

Kudos to Frogmite for running this event!