i quit. since im so NOOB.

good luck all. (:

lol

who thinks that we should play PMS, raise your hands pleaseeeeee


line up, TBC.

For those who don't know,

www.teamzenith.net

Our new website! Also the location where I'll be blogging there for the duration that team Zenith is in Europe for. Until the 5th, and possibly for the long haul.

bring in the party poppers!

alevel's over! :D:D:D:D:D

Since its been such a hotly debated topic undercover, i guess its best to openly lay out what is REALLY going on. in tune with zenith absorbing some of Micronology's players,

asterisk* girls are set to combine forces with dNgirls for an upcoming competition to form a mixed-team team.

as for what a mixed team is, i lifted a portion of dawnsheep's email out for your viewing pleasure.
*Mixed team: what it means to us-
A mixed team is when members from different teams collaborate to form a team for a particular tournament, with no long-term plans involved.
For example, Tammy and Me getting Ice, Ant and Musica to play together in a tournament.

Zilch said it was okay to field the mixed team for GXL, but as of latest, there are NO PLANS for the dNgirls to join X3M or vice versa.
With the number of girls that we have, we are likely to form 2 teams.

for the final teamings, please stay tuned as the second part of the drama unfolds.

^^ Cool T-shirt, for girls about guys. (See, we really love you all!)

Keep your hands off their balls, boys!

The way I see it…

The whole point of supporting a team, is if you actually admire/like them enough to want to do it. And if you actually like them enough to want to do it, you will have to put up with their quirks and preferences.

Like not replying to you when they don’t feel like it. Like not posting because they don’t want to. Like me posting in pink because I like pink. ^^

While it is entirely human to expect reciprocation, it is not logical to expect it with regards to the current situation. It’s very simple. Zenith guys and Asterisk* girls don’t really know you taggers. (And if we do know you personally, you can just drop us a PM.)

Thus, the relationship is one-way. In other words we are not obliged in any given terms to respond.

This is not to say that we will not provide updates. But updates will be given when the time is right (or when everything is certain/stabilised). Not on a demand-respond basis. So while it may greatly inconvenience you not to know what's going on, it can't be helped. GLHF! =Þ

firstly, i dont see why any normal team has to answer to their supporters. they don't earn a living from gaming, its an interest to them as much as it is to you. maybe if they go seriously pro, then yes, you "loyal fans" out there have a right to request for inside info updates. as it is, i dont see why they cant choose to keep quiet about some things, should they want to.

secondly, so what if their attitude sucks? they aren't teachers or parents or anyone set to mould the future generation of singapore. like i said, they're just gamers, mostly immature still and waiting to grow up. havent heard of the word "humans" or "mere mortals"?

i tire of the modern mindsets of kids nowadays and yearn for the time when policemen still wore shorts.

and we have limited blogging because most of the authorised bloggers prefer not to have their thoughts splashed on a high traffic site to become the next juicy piece of gossip. or they dont deem it worth their while, unless they're seriously bm-ed or misunderstood.

As much as I feel the need to put up some unglam (ewww what kind of word is 'unglam') picture of MusiCa, our article's star, I fear it wouldn't be good for his self-proclaimed image as "TEH GLORIOUS EYE-CANDY OF WIN". In my own words of course.

Taken from a Zion.Net tournament last year in Malaysia. Picture chosen because I'm being strategically covered in it. Musica is very prominent in this picture! Unfortunately, not because he's the guy in the front, but because he's the only guy that isn't wearing a black jacket. As a side note, I kinda like my shoes in this picture.

The origins of Musica's name are shrouded in mystery. Apparently it's a reference to some anime character. Or it's to indicate his preferred choice of personal entertainment. Regardless of how his nick might have all kinds of dumb reasons for being chosen, it does have a nice ring to it. Plus, he has stuck to the same nick for as long as I've known him, which is always a good thing. Somehow people who stick to the same nick tend to have a better impression T_T. For me anyways.

Musica's recruitment into Zenith, on hindsight, seems to be almost too lucky. It just so happened that a few of us just so happened to be with people who talked about him, or played a good game with him once, and poof, there you have Musica in Zenith. Of course, him becoming a key player in Zenith is hardly based on luck.

Musica has one of the best distance judging in lane that I know of. He is one of the few people who could beat Tofu consistently in 1v1 in a lane when Tofu wasn't blowing. While his last-hit timing might not be as precise, Musica is simply fearsome to lane against. It isn't common to see someone like Musica who can abuse his seemingly heightened judgement on distance in a lane to gain a substantial advantage in harrassment.

Moreover, Musica can be insanely aggressive, which is usually a good thing in a lane. He is able to and will regularly completely dominate his lane. In lane, he is often able to catch competent opponents off-guard by forcing a fight when they least expect it.

This of course leads to Musica being someone overly aggressive at times. He takes horrendous risks when catching, and often is left very very dead from picking a fight that goes horribly wrong. This manifests itself most in the mid-game portions, but occasionally happens when Musica is in lane as well. For an example, one might look to his THD in a THD Pudge lane with Tofu in the first match of WGT against Gamers Inc. This makes Musica a rather frightening teammate since he will often place himself at a position just milliseconds away from losing you the game, but fortunately doesn't actually throw the game away that often.

Musica also seems to have his... forms. At different times of the year, he can go from being very damn good to being pubby-like. However, one should give credit to him for generally displaying exceptionally amazing play very often, in a variety of farmers and AoE heroes. The moments that show Musica as an outstanding player aren't actually that few and far in between.

That being said, there are some heroes and roles that Musica simply is far from adept at. Supporting is simply not his style. Then again, we don't need Musica to play support, so I'm simply trying to find flaws here T_T.

Musica has been very dedicated to the team. It was very easy to settle any team issues with him while he still was in Singapore, made easier by the fact that I lived opposite him. There are many things to commend him about, but perhaps it would be enough to say that he made the choice of flying down to Singapore during his school term to play WCG and WGT for us.

Overall, Musica is polite, reasonably cheerful and considerate enough (for his team members at least). He might be rather shady at times though... but he never fails to exclaim to the rest of the world, and very often too, that he is some sort of God on Earth. My own words.

the problems of an extended team.

- who plays and who doesn't

solution : people who are willing to sit out, forcibly benching weaker players, or just conveniently failing to inform certain people that there is a match/compie.

which leads to

-team politics

solution : no solution. just yell it out.

there's always this stigma of being in the "second" team. second connotes "weaker".
fixed team of 5 vs 9 rotating players, probably with up to 3 core players?

no idea.
save me from my sleepless disjointedness.

We seem to have had a sudden increase in the number of maphack accusations in draft matches lately, which results in a nice BM war between the accusee and the accuser which we're only happy to indulge in.

While we're much complimented by your accusations, apparently the new metagame involving heavy warding seems to have made people forget about map awareness and prediction. Oh well. I seem to recall writing an article back in the early days of the blog about this.

The future looks ready for... MORE EXPANSION OF THE TEAM!! As more and more people take long-term leave from Zenith (my turn comes soon), you're going to see the team lineup on the right column grow and grow. Now, when all those people return from their long absences... well, that's an issue for far too long in the future for me to think about.

Today's writeup will be short, about our new, and sadly less idiosyncratic member, ZX, which makes for a less spicy article. I write ice's name with a small 'i', because that's what he writes it as. Unfortunately I'm not doing the same with ZX even though he writes both letters in lower case, because having a two-letter nick makes a lowercase 'zx' far too insignificant amidst a bunch of text.


The history of ZX's relations with Zenith members actually goes way back into 5.84c in the days when Tofu, LuX, and GPS (and Shoury and Lu.cK) were still known as DsD. Known then as custommapplaya (and thus being called 'papaya' by all of us until just recently), he was LuX's senior in TP and was busy serving his NS. He was originally intended to be a stand-in for DsD but unfortunately had NS commitments.

Fast-forward to two years later, after IGC. Dk-Mag3 was originally slated to join Zenith to replace the NS-going LuX after IGC, but had chosen to stay with Micronology, then suddenly decided to join Zenith (for what was only going to be a week or so), bringing ZX along (i.e. ZX was originally merely "part of the package"). Unfortunately, the week that Dk-Mag3 joined was fraught with inactivity due to many members of Zenith being too busy with MYM, and he chose to return to Micronology since he probably didn't want to leave hyhy and Bouncy behind.

ZX however, chose to stay in Zenith, and well, that's the story.

The origin of ZX's nick is a no-brainer for someone called Zhen Xiang. Anyone wants to hazard a guess? We did get a nice comment from some European in IHCS though (DotA inhouses in Quakenet). Since ZX's GGC account is "mynameiszx", he was asked "is your name really zx?" to which of course he confirmed. "Wow. That's wicked".

Initial opinions about ZX were mixed. He came in around the same time as NutZ, and we went into CAPL with the lineup of GPS, ZX, NutZ, Tofu, ice, and I. Constantly playing a pure support role in Micronology, we were unsure about his skills, but his performance in that CAPL was really beyond expectations, at least not something that I expected.

ZX's weaknesses are actually rather trivial. His most major one would probably be his ability to sometimes simply NOT USE a skill or an item that would save his life, as if he has simply forgotten that it exists.

ZX also sometimes, usually when playing a late gamer, gets caught at the worst time, but this doesn't happen in competitions at all, so it's a minor fault at most. He also can be crazy to a fault, often charging right into death, and unfortunately sometimes having his teammates leap in with him.

ZX used to be one of those flash-engagers too, where all of a sudden, he would cast a spell to start an engagement without any warning whatsoever, surprising his enemies. Unfortunately, his teammates, who would probably be busy retreating, would be even more surprised. However, he has since gotten over not notifying his teammates of his sudden movements.

ZX also used to engage pretty badly with certain heroes. His Sandking used to NEVER epi-blink into battles, even when that was clearly the best option. His Enigma used to be almost unspeakably horrible. However, he has since improved tremendously in this aspect, which is a testament to his good attitude towards improvement. He still however, stays a little too quiet in game, a little like NutZ (^_^), speaking only when it's too late.

Finally, ZX, being brought up around all his Micronology customs and traditions, is BM. Now now guys, it's perfectly fine to whine and smash anyone you like in teamchat, but when you type in allchat, do keep some things reasonably politically correct!

Even though they may be true.

On to the good part...

First and foremost, ZX is always early.

HOLY SHIT!! Ant is NO LONGER THE ONLY ONE THAT ARRIVES BY THE REPORTING TIME.

ZX is a dedicated admin, and responsibly informs the team whenever he is going temporarily inactive or when he might not be able to make it for a game. To me, this is PURE GOLD in a teammate. He has no qualms (okay, he whines a bit, but he still usually makes the trip!) about taking a 100 minute journey from his home to Katong to meet with us too, and he's a busy SIM student with a social life etc. etc.

ZX can play almost every single hero in the game better than most people, and be useful to the team! Where Tofu also shares this trait, ZX fairs better in that while Tofu individually will do well with a hero, he often won't help the team as much as ZX does.

In terms of skill there is really nothing bad to be said about ZX. He has established himself among the team as pretty much one of the most trusted members no matter what hero he plays, except SP (hah). While he might not have that constant "flair" that other team members have, he is consistently the reason why the rest of his team is doing well.

ZX is pretty good at about everything, but what he is particularly exceptional in is in assisting farmers. It's really quite hard to describe it, but suffice to say that he has often made farming for his teammates very much quicker and easier.

Still with all this, ZX is constantly improving, and has been showing better and better performances ever since he has joined team Zenith (of course, before that, I wasn't watching him so I wouldn't know). Moreover, he won't be taken away any time soon (he has already finished NS) so he looks to be a very promising player in the team.

Since he was mentioned so much in my previous post, I have decided for this post to be a testimonial to our one and only beloved Tofuboi.
Here he is in all his glory (facing us). Pictures will mostly be taken from those I have from the recent Malaysian tournament since I'm too lazy to take pictures from anywhere else.

To explain the origins of his nick, one must look back into a time where his nick was Steaky, of non-existent DoDa fame. Obviously, this was to express his love for Steak. As he puts it, his mother one day cooked tofu for dinner and he found it so delicious that henceforth he was known as Tofuboi. His seemingly healthy switch away from meat though seems to have done nothing to stop his rapidly ballooning physical build, swelling to soon be comparable to his already inflated ego.

Tofu's involvement in the team goes as far back as when GPS & friends decided to form a DotA team for RGN Season 1, and Tofu teamed up with his brother. Since then, Tofu has more or less stayed through, from KODO to DsD to mVp to Zenith.

A citation of Tofu should not be given without talking about the sheer advantage in skill he had in the early days of DotA. Back in the days of 5.84c and for the early days of version 6 (of course, in version 6 he was augmented by the rest of his team quite obviously, but in version 5 the difference in skill was quite obvious), Tofu was virtually unchallenged. I remember his Morphling in 5.84c fending off a push 1v5 (yes, Morphling was overpowered, but it's still 1v5), his Clinks dominating lanes game after game, etc. Back when many people still didn't have a firm grasp of competitive DotA, Tofu was one of the few giants in Singapore (although physically he seems to be twice as large now).

Tofu called most of the strategic shots for most of version 5 and the early months of version 6 (it took something like 1 and a half years of me pitching strategies to him before he finally listened to anything I said). Much of DsD/mVp/Zenith's dominance in the early stages of competitive DotA can be credited to him.

The virtues of Tofu as a DotA player are rather well known around the community. When focused, once given the chance, Tofu will farm insanely quickly. In fact, Tofu seems to be able to farm quickly no matter what role he plays with whatever hero he gets.

While no one will ever admit to it, Tofu is simply good at playing DotA. He CAN play a lot more heroes than late gamers, most of the time better than almost everyone else in the scene.

Tofu has also a rather good attitude towards improvement. He has improved tremendously in his two weaknesses, which are being suicidal in the early game, as well as being completely deaf to the rest of his teammates. Tofu is also much less suicidal in the later stages of the game, though not as cautious as some of his teammates would like him to be. Instead of being absolutely clueless to his teammate's shouts, Tofu now merely has a few seconds of lag between receiving information and comprehending it. Deadly enough for us, but at least he has enough time to retreat when the entire enemy team moves from one lane to another to hunt him down.

Tofu has actually shown rather good commitment to the team, perhaps partially due to his relationship with GPS (meaning that they are relatives, no innuendo here). Aside from a few hiccups here and there, Tofu has remained dedicated to the team, informing the team of any arrangements in advance, and giving team events quite a high piority. He has been a dedicated teacher to NutZ and has shown that he is willing to sacrifice time to help teammates improve in whatever he can help in. He has shown almost full commitment in sponsorship events and whatsnot, attending most with a positive attitude.

Now that we've settled that, let's move on to the more exciting part.

Firstly, Tofu will take risks that are so insane that against many competent players, he will often die, and he will die often, which greatly impedes his fast farming capabilities. Often due to sheer cockiness or simply carelessness or just plain stupidity, Tofu will die deaths that could have easily been avoided.

Which leads to the next point. Tofu can lose the game for you. Tofu has been known to be cocky enough to turn sure win games into losses (or games that are too close for comfort), even for games as high stakes as the quarter-finals in a single elimination tournament OVERSEAS. Tofu makes the dumbest game-costing mistakes ever, getting caught at crucial moments which result in the opponent's push having no way of being repelled, or simply not looking at his screen for an extended period of time after he has been nether-swapped in the middle of the opponent's heroes. To his credit, part of the reason why Tofu can lose the game for you so often is because he gets himself in the position to win the game. Thankfully, he doesn't do it so often anymore in competitions.

Tofu will do tremendously stupid and selfish things in practice games, but at least he doesn't do so in competitions. In fact, Tofu will often be happy to blatantly cause you to LOSE a practice game to satisfy his own sadistic cravings, not really caring at all that perhaps his teammates might have wanted to win.

Then again, his performance in competition hasn't been too bad as of late, so I guess he can be forgiven.

Going on about cockiness, Tofu has a habit of refusing to cooperate against teams he doesn't find very good (unfortunately, far too many for comfort) unless we give him a hero that he knows he shouldn't be playing. It isn't very comforting that most of the justifications for his choice of hero, when it differs from the team's general opinion, is somewhere along the lines of "nvm, chill, we will win, got me". He will also make major draft decisions sometimes without consulting the team, though fortunately this has not happened in competitions for a long time.

Tofu, to say the least, is at least rather entertaining as a person. He has many interesting life experiences to share, and will have no qualms about shamelessly sharing them with you. His rather verbal nature however can get rather unpleasant for the public.

Tofu will shout, very loudly, for absolutely no reason, possibly to satisfy his craving for more attention, which unfortunately can cause great public annoyance and some form of uncomfortability for those around him (partially due to the shock and the absolute unbearableness of someone screaming something high-pitched rather loudly right next to you).

Tofu is uncontrollably vulgar. He uses the word "fuck" in about every possible way you can imagine, for reasons that will elude most, and he uses it very loudly too. This would be fine in most places you hang out with, but when you're eating at Aston's right next to a Father and his about 9-years-old kid, and the word "fuck" comes out of him so loudly that half the restaurant can hear him, one starts to question his self-control.

And of course there's the whole part about Tofu's very warped sense of humour, including acting like a fag, setting channel topics for fun, interrupting serious conversations with irritating meaningless spam, massive irrelavant noticing and spamming etc... which I don't have the right to elaborate on since I'm not a judge of character nor a humour dictator. The many IRC bans and whatsnot as a result of trying to change his warped sense of humour have been fruitless, so in this aspect, Tofu is incorrigible.

Finally, Tofu seems to be a little lacking in moral character. Not that I have any authority over moral judgement, but... well... here's a little story I've told, with a few embellishments here and there.

There is an overhead bridge linking to Parkway in Katong, in the middle of the route from Gamers Inc to Gaming Giant, a route which we often take. It runs over some rather quick-moving traffic.

So if one day NutZ jumps off the overhead bridge, the road is going to be like a trampoline, and NutZ will get run over by a car, then bounce up, and up, and up...

Then if Tofu jumps down, since he brings with him a lot of mass, he will jump down, hit the road, and keep going down...

and down...

and down...

and down...

and down...

You get the point. He's not an evil person, but he can do very very wrong things if it results in personal gain, but then again that's just my opinion. I'm no judge of moral character. As for any examples, I won't be giving them since it won't be very good for his health when a dozen people turn up at his doorstep with Molotovs and any other form of makeshift weaponry.

All that being said, Tofu is by no means an evil person, merely rather undesirable to be with at times, and when all the lobbying has been done, he's ultimately smart enough to not hurt anyone or ruin anyone's future (including his own), and not to mention that he's been reasonably dedicated to the team and is a rather good player, which I guess is good for a teammate.

Right. How could I forget GPS.

GPS is currently our beloved team Zenith manager. He actually has been in that status for quite some time, but as always you might see him playing from time to time (he last popped in for CAPL in June, as well a many other times before). He is still invaluable in handling most external non-gameplay matters (which, believe me, is quite massive) and best of all, he keeps Tofuboi in check, which makes our life not so much a living hell.

And now that we've settled that...

As much as I would love to impose my will on others, people are all entitled to their own opinion, though they should phrase it as such if they don't have the space to provide any elaborations.

What I can do though is write a little testimonial! Since I have no obligation to get anyone to rely on this to enter University or anysuchhow, it's going to include the bad parts too. And hey, instead of tagging, any additional points or responses can be posted in the comments section so it can be saved!

A player is often assessed from many viewpoints. Often many watch a player either as a spectator, as an opponent, or as a teammate. Not surprisingly, these views will differ, but what is surprising is how much they do differ by.

The following, as well as the next series of posts, all are opinions of one teammate.

Let us open this with a nice testimonial of our very own WARNUTZ. Now bask in the image of NutZ in all his glory.

The origins of his nick are wrapped in mystery. Apparent it's because he thinks he's crazy or something. Hurhur. Hurhur.

Background? Lessee... from what I know, NutZ started off in Etny playing standard for quite some time, played some stuff in Etny DotA with Jovi (TruE) and company (whom I don't know! EEK). He was introduced when ice decided to form a fun team with Tammy and me for MYM, roping Jovi in (from their common ROC & TFT background), and Jovi roped NutZ in, and then NutZ suddenly appeared in Zenith for reasons that aren't actually that clear to me.

Let's start with the bad points shall we? Since they seem to be more prominent to everyone else =.=...

NutZ can do very stupid shit at a rather frequent rate. This more or less translates to "sometimes, NutZ will feed. Badly, and seemingly unneccessarily". He doesn't however, make game-costing mistakes, although this is mostly because he either isn't in a position to make or break the game, or that his mistakes are in the early and mid game.

Also, NutZ doesn't have the best laning prowess in the world. That pretty much explains itself. It's not that we don't trust him to take a lane himself, but he might not do as well as say, Tofuboi. He also is a little too quiet for his own good, which isn't very beneficial for communication with the team.

On to the good stuff. I know! How about a haiku? How about two haikus!

NutZ is never late.
Except when we are meeting
Right next to his house.

NutZ is very free.
He has no school and no work.
He can play all day!

Ah... the joy of having someone you never have to worry about when it comes to attendance. Sometimes though, NutZ does this Superman thing where he suddenly, for no given reason, becomes uncontactable, presumably busy saving a cat from a tree halfway around the world.

NutZ can be a completely sacrificial supporter pretty well. In a team with so many people who want to farm, this is actually a good thing. It's harder than it seems, and takes discipline and self-control, which many people (AHEM) don't have. And this ties in well with his next plus point...

NutZ can engage and follow up pretty well. When you have no items, as long as you get your spells off perfectly, your job is done. As much as he might screw up the smaller matters, he does well in those large clashes. This was mostly the unique characteristic which got him in the team (for me at least).

The best thing though, is that NutZ has actually improved!

YA RLY!!

Actually that's secondary. NutZ has probably the most positive attitude towards improvement in the team. Aside from the random Emoing in nonconsequential games (which everyone does, but NutZ does it at a much lower frequency, even with all the FEEDER calls he gets) he responds pretty damn well to constant criticism, even though sometimes it isn't phrased very nicely (AHEM). He's also nice enough to not respond to a personal attack with another personal attack, which is respectable.

The willingness to constantly improve, evidence of actual concrete improvement, and the means to improve (hurhur) means NutZ has a lot of potential!

Am I missing anything out or would you like to add any additional elaborations? Post a comment!

since ant has made things on his side nice and clear
i guess its time for me to do the same. i've never really believed in shying away from facts.

dawnsheep and i are pretty much stable in the team, we're getting a little pwned by work, but still hanging in there nonetheless.
maria is looking forward to becoming a sub once shan gets back, but as of now, she's as committed as she can be to the team and trainings.
shan is mia because of her a'levels, which i think end on the 16th nov. after which she may be taking part in a mixed team for a while.
cass is currently on probation after certain events which i wont elaborate on. but official status is quit team.
alt)alien also known as meiying, wendy and eliza are new candidates for the last couple of places in our team. or who knows... we might just plan something else.

gxl is coming up, registration ends on the 21st, so we do need to figure out what to do soon!

and in true (gay) ant style,
love u guys!

The state of the nation again!

This time in much clearer terms.

Musica has gone back to Australia. He's still active, but he's... well... in Australia. You probably won't be seeing that much of him in local compes anymore, but meanwhile let's hope he has fun gallavanting around with Kangaroos with Team Immunity... whenever they actually get a team together. I have no idea when he's slated for permanent return to Zenith, but I'll guess around the end of next year.

Tofu has O levels coming up... but that doesn't seem to stop him from doing whatever he wants... which fortunately also includes studying. He seems pretty much set to play in Zenith for a long time without any breaks in activity (I mean, if O levels won't stop him, I'm not sure what will in the future).

ZX seems to be cruising pretty fairly. Aside from his down periods, and god knows when his major exams will ever come, he seems set to stay play for Zenith for a long time without breaks.

NutZ is well... awaiting NS. Up till then he's too damn free and probably will play for Zenith, unless he finally gets cheesed by everyone calling him a feeder (which begs the question why else make a name that is a homonym of walnuts?).

Ant is busy supposedly studying for his IBDP exams. As much as he would like to not do so, his parents unfortunately have him a little more pwned and both parties agree that anything less than 42 points would be rather disastrous... not that he thinks the additional mugging would help. Following that he would probably get enlisted into the army early in 2008, although he might want to just sit out to make room for the new team lineup and also because he is a feeder.

LuX is busy with NS. As skilled as he is, the current team would prefer to have members that can train regularly and are contactable more often. Heck, that's going to happen to me in a few months too... so for now he's not in the stable main lineup.

As much as ice sucks at playing Enigma, ice's current situation puts his status as such.

HY and Dk-MaG3, fresh new recruits, are hopefully planning to stay for the long haul, and don't seem to have anything in their way short of next year's final examinations which are a bit far away.

As huge as this player base seems, at most 6 people at one go will actually be active, so it seems pretty fine. Well, 7, if you count Ant, but he's willing to part with helping to feed in the team.

And if we're lucky, NutZ' enlistment into NS will be slated to coincide with Musica's return to Singapore.

I'll leave it to the Micro side to explain their own details. For our side, we knew we needed to find a last very soon in order to maintain a stable lineup, with Ant entering NS and busy with exams and whatsnot. I mean, if we flew Musica all the way from Australia to play (eventually he played WGT, which we didn't plan to take part in, but whatever) just to ensure a stable lineup, it's pretty much a statement of how much we needed a last T_T.

Mizencrononith was an idea conceived quite long ago, as many players had to retire temporarily for exams. It was originally conceived as a short term solution. In the end, what happened was that Mizencrononith became more of an online team, where a larger player lineup was not only allowed but reccomended given our situation, but Micro and Zenith stood as separate teams in LAN competitions.

A little known fact that is related yet doesn't exactly say much about the current events is that in the initial recruitment of ZX, he didn't come alone from Micro. Dk-MaG3 and ZX originally were transferred over, but after a short period of time Dk-MaG3 went back to Micro. Probably since we were too busy in that period with MYM and TT_TT and made him feel lonely :(. But we love you all!

i really wanted to sleep once i got home, but i just couldnt without coming here to say this.

don't take me for granted just cos i'm always neutral and not blowing up and chu-ing stuns.

***

k i know we've been through this many times, lets just do it one last time.

1) training starts at 1030 sharp on mondays and thursdays. sharp meaning a match is found and hosted, and the countdown starts at 1030. NOT come online at 1035. and if you have a game with someone else before training, either quit it when you're supposed to or start it earlier. online trainings are just 4 hours a week. this gives you 164hrs for you to do other things each week.

2) alternate fridays, or at least 2 fridays a month, lan session at GG katong. starts at 830 thanks. not reach there at 9. exception : asta.

***

i'm not going to issue any threats, other than this: i'm not going to contact anyone anymore if they are absent from training/not online at appointed time. i will find a match and get it hosted by 1025 as i normally do, and i will get it started with or without the team members in.
and when i get too frustrated with starting training matches without team members in i will just forget that there is team training at all.

First order of the day: http://www.dotasg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1586

If you haven't voted, do vote, and since most of the stuff said is pro-XL, it'll be good to have some valid comments about pro-AP if you vote against the current majority, otherwise it's pretty easy to dismiss any errant votes.

GG-Client ADC is coming up. TGL's massive online single-elim tourney is also coming up soon, but no news yet on that.

Now that we're done with those, lets get on to WGT. I thought the replay pack would save me from having to feel a need to do any reporting on matches but the replay pack seems to be short of lots of replays, including a Zenith vs XqR replay that is... anything but what it professes to be.

To start, player lineup. Some background. A couple of weeks back we get invited (again) to the same tournament in The Phillipines that has been trying to go off for a while, except this time they seem pretty certain that it actually is going to happen. Well, it clashes with WGT, but it's so much more fun to fly over and play overseas!

The lineup for going to The Phillipines was proposed to be: NutZ, Tofu, zx, me, and one more from somewhere else. I wasn't even confirmed since it was smack right after my prelims. More bummer, since WGT was going on it was kind of hard to get anyone we knew to sacrifice WGT for their team and fly over with us. GPS was kind of busy studying anyway (which Tofu and I should have rightfully been doing...), we couldn't confirm anything with LuX, and ice was out of question. The solution? Fly Musica over from Australia!

The best benefit of this was that it left us with a lineup that could actually train together. After our exams at least. We almost always had 3 or 4 online for at least one game each day the week before WGT and we made sure we were at least moderately prepared to fly down to The Phillipines.

The week before we were supposed to fly over though, we STILL hadn't confirmed anything about the trip with the organisers on the other side. Seeing as how we had to book air tickets for Musica, we needed to make a decision quick about whether to fly him over or not. In the end, we decided that in the event that we didn't fly over to The Phillipines, at least Musica could play WGT, so we signed up for WGT as a backup tournament.

Lo and behold, as Musica flies over, we get word from The Phillipines side that it would best for us NOT to fly over (which is all fine... if Musica wasn't already on a plane and after we had made arrangements already for the week). Oh boy, looks like we would actually have to play WGT =.=

So up comes our first match against Gamers Inc. Tofu insists on playing Pudge. By insists I mean he threatens to throw the game or emo if we don't draft Pudge for him. I get thrown into playing SF and NutZ gets thrown into playing PotM. Role reversal eh? Tofu plays Pudge, and Musica plays THD, and together in top lane they do a mighty fine job of first blooding, as expected, the lane against Viper and Bristleback. After which, they continue doing a mighty fine job of feeding the Bristleback to no end. I believe it's something like 6 kills for the BB in the span of 10 minutes or something like that.

Well, to summarise, the game ends with NutZ being 12-0 and my SF getting 16-0, so Pudge and THD's feeding is offset a little.

The next game sees us up against x3m.osiris with Tofu INSISTING on playing Slayer, which thankfully only blows for the first 15 minutes or so of the game. It's Musica and ZX this time who, aided by a few arrows from the opponent, feed the PotM down at bottom lane. PotM continues to rack up kills with very well placed arrows, but lacks a lot in the farming department, which leads to a rather even hero score in the mid game, but a serious farming advantage on our side.

The next day has us up against GG[U] first thing in the morning and I can't even remember what happened. I vaguely recall a relatively one-sided game with Musica actually, amazingly, not blowing at QoP, getting hex up very quickly - without dying!!!!!(!!!!!!!oneone111)!!! and me pushing alone not really being needed much by the team at all as PotM.

Up next was Knightmare who had just finished DNA-SK. I think the replay is available and full, so shouldn't be a problem for anyone who is curious to find out what happened. About the draft choice, SP was a pick simply because we knew where the draft was going and we simply wanted to screw up Knightmare's draft to see what they would do without SP. Fortunately, they didn't do anything much.

Sunday's game against xqR was a rather good game. Musica's QoP went up against BB in the bottom lane, my Silencer went up against SF in the mid-lane which was quite unexpected because we had as of then not yet seen xqR's SF solo mid. Tofu and ZX with PotM NA went up against a Slayer RK that surprisingly fended them off very well. Their beastmaster roamed around, and NutZ, playing Viper for the first time I've actually seen him use it competitively, ran around as well.

Tofu fed with PotM. Sort of. He farmed pretty damn slowly, being taken down repeatedly by Slayer Beastmaster and RK. Still, I think Musica and I are slightly thankful to Tofu for feeding so much since it made our job a lot easier with less heroes after our skin. Musica went on a practically unhindered farming spree and got hex up in 23 minutes (he would love for me to add that he had the money for hex long before he bought it, but only actually got the stick of hexxage at 23 minutes or so).

Skirmishes went rather evenly for a while, but always left Musica's QoP and my Silencer alive, resulting in the QoP and Silencer being insane sources of damage which xqR, surprisingly underfarmed, were unable to stop. Tofu, being Tofu, still managed to up his cookie-cutter Skadi + Mjolnir in a pretty short time and when that was done, the 2-hex 3-ranged focus fire with Musica's Stygian Desolator was cutting through their heroes... LIKE BUTTER!

Might not be the best report, but with replays up, a rather blurry memory from lack of sleep the past few days, I guess it's a sufficient summary.

Then there was Micro. The replay is up there, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Maybe they weren't quite prepared as much for us this time, seeing as how we pretty much didn't even plan to play through WGT until the day of our first match.

Just for the heck of it, someone should try organising a series of funmode tournaments. With some elements of strategy and teamwork of course. Think of how many modes are being neglected in DotA.

I mean I doubt that there would be problems with participation provided that there is a sufficient prize pool. It's practically no-pressure and the one-off ness of it makes it such that, in all likelihood, every team will have a completely different hero lineup.

I'm talking something like -om, -sh with potm, -rvai or -rvas, or just mix some together. Of course, rulesets can be altered. Ban a few heroes here, allow sharing control, heck, maybe allow pooling. Do everything to make it as fresh and unconventional as possible. Set double elimination just for the heck of it.

Pulling in sponsors might be quite hard though, to create that attractive enough prize pool to serve as incentive to participate, not to mention that no one is going to be willing to take the risk in organising it if an old-fashioned DotA competition works just as well.

I mean think of all the funky modes one could have... and of course we should make everything -om (only mid) and allow sharing of chicken.
-sh with potm or meepo or maybe PUDGE. Bristleback -sh would be funny. Viper would be really messy. QoP would be messier.
- aa, as, ai. (All agility, all strength, all intel). Add in -xl for the sake of removing those obviously imba choices.
- Pool the intel hero. This one is kind of complex but could work. Every team picks 4 heroes and the other team chooses one intel hero for them. Pooling will be allowed, but none of the 4 chosen heroes can carry an item worth more than 600 gold. In other words so you'll see truly 4 support and one uber phat hero. Of course, techies should be banned.
- Chicken run. Pooling allowed of course. Win by having a chicken die to the opponent's fountain with the chicken starting out from your fountain (to avoid obvious abuses).

Anyone?

As was said in the last post, our dear D4wn is leaving Asterisk*. Would appreciate if the anonymous detractors would make this easier for her without taking every opportunity to criticise.

D4wn, I certainly will miss you, and I hope you'll come back to play with us again someday. Team and Dota aside, we never socialised that much, a mistake on my part - hopefully we'll get the chance to work on that in future! Take care girl. All the best.

Goodbye to Asterisk*[X3M].

Thanks for everything.


Good luck girls! =)

All good things come to an end.


d4wn

Speaking of humorous...

I had to post this cause it's just damn cute. <3 http://icanhascheezburger.wordpress.com/

If the point was missed in the start of the previous post, I'll just re-orate the announcement made. In all likelihood, we'll be playing in the Open Category of CAPL Winter by virtue of simply not playing CAPL Elites in Autumn.

We do have enough players to stay in Elites for Autumn, but the lineup will be shaky at best, and a player might have to register purely for the sake of keeping the team in Elites and not actually playing. I mean... 2 players from the original Zenith with 3 others... isn't the best team to field in the world.

It isn't my style to have a post simply to make some minor announcement that affects no one, so here's a little discussion about...

Why Damage Reduction is Imba.

And no, I don't throw the word "imba" around randomly. I'm just using it loosely here as something that is "very good", but not to the point of utter imbalance where a team will is forced to use it or almost immediately loses.

For starters, let us just throw out some heroes. Bristleback Visage Viper Void Anti-Mage Spectre.

Except for Anti-Mage, these heroes have at some point or other been used as gay late gamers in normal drafts.

Back to the late-gamer theory, late gamers usually fare well in the late game due to an offensive skill that greatly boosts their damage. Clinks with Strafe. Sven/Arnold/GPS with God's Strength, et cetera. However, we see that popular late-gamers are drafted now due to their ability to be so damn difficult to take down, not so much their ability to dish out damage.

Just look at QoP and PotM now. Both rose to popularity as late gamers simply because their escaping skills allowed them to avoid a large amount of damage.

But that isn't so much the discussion today. Back to damage reduction.

Generally, any hero with damage reduction is going to be a pain in the ass to take down. Check the above. We see heroes with many forms of damage avoidance. However, windwalk is limited at best in avoiding damage since you can't deal damage at the same time as you are avoiding it, mirror image or illusion skills are rather short term and serve more as offensiverather than defensive measures. Reincarnation is easily stopped, and the best bet would be Sunder, something I would classify as damage avoidance since it makes it seem as if the damage simply wasn't done, but even Sunder can be prevented with the proper counter-measures.

Passive damage avoidance however, as in the above heroes, are not preventable. There is absolutely nothing stopping the Spectre from Dispersing or the Void from Backtracking. Like it or not, these heroes are so damn difficult to take down because there is absolutely nothing stopping them from reducing the damage you do to them.

Mathematically there seems to be nothing impressive about a simple 25% Backtrack or even a 40% reduction in damage doesn't seem so bad. A Platemail or so, or maybe a bit more HP, could at certain times increase your survivability by much more than these damage avoidance spells seem to do.

The key here is that damage avoidance skills (Backtrack, Disperse, or even spell resistance from Viper or Anti-Mage) stack multiplicatively with every other damage reduction thingy you have. A reduction of 40% damage is not much except that it stacks multiplicatively with all your armor and spell resistance. As one would know, the damage reduction offered by armor grows significantly lower with each point of armor. Armor gives the same absolute bonus (6% of hp) with each point but does not stack multiplicatively. Damage reduction skills however, will stack with every damn thing you have.

Add that to the fact that you can't increase your spell resistance by adding armor, and heroes that can reduce spell damage will have a much greater survival advantage over heroes without.

The second thing is that element of the unexpected. Low HP heroes with damage reduction skills have deceiving amount of survivability. No one expects the Spectre to Disperse Laguna Blade, or the Anti-Mage to take no damage from your nuke, which greatly throws off how people calculate engagements or fights will go.

But my lesson is over and I gotta leave the complab, so I shall just leave this post in its rather unsatisfactory condition (too lazy to edit and add at home).

Assuming I'm not already serving NS, I'll most likely be looking forward to playing CAPL Open in the Winter Season.

Well, we never expected so many major tournaments to come up during the 3 months of exam period right after WCG. WGT, CAPL, Batu Pahat Resurgence v2, is about a potential 7K worth of prizes we're missing out on. We hopefully can send an incomplete team for WGT though.

Our trivial writeup for today has me discussing what everyone already knows yet again. Prompted by gross inactivity though, I feel tempted to write something.

Today's topic is about our friendly late game heroes.

Generally a late game hero is simply... a hero that has an advantage over other heroes in the late game mostly because it can deal more damage to opponents using physical attacks before getting taken down. Duh. Now lets go on to less trivial stuff.

As with everything else, your late gamers run from high-risk to low-risk late gamers. Risk is basically the chance of your late-gamer being useless in the game. There are usually 4 factors involved in this. How fast the hero can farm, how difficult it is to take down the hero, how well the hero can lane control, and how useful the hero is without items.

Generally the faster a hero can clear creeps the faster it can farm. Heroes with AoE spells can generally farm much faster because they can farm quickly and run away with less risk of being backstabbed, and when all else fails they can neutral very quickly. A difficult to kill hero farms more by simply not dying... with the added benefit of the opponent not backstabbing him much since he's so damn hard to kill.

Lane control is a no-brainer. You can't be farming free lanes all the time. A late gamer that is useful without actually needing to farm is practically a risk-free late gamer as the late-gamer farming is merely a benefit. Without being farmed, the late gamer still has a high utility. A prime example would be Silencer, who actually is pretty damn useful without any items because he has awesome utility simply pressing one button the entire game.

On the other side we have late-gamer effectiveness. Basically this measures how much a late gamer needs to farm in order to be effective. Warlock as a late gamer, for example (for whoever uses it) needs to farm... MKB Treads Guinsoo... or something like that, to be able to match up to a Faceless Void with one Butterfly. For the most part, risk is proportionate to effectiveness. A hero that is more risky as a late gamer usually also is much more awesome given the same amount of farming.

Which is why we don't see much of Naix. Naix is the epitome of high-risk late gamers. He has no lane control, no fast farming, absolutely no damn use without items (a living observer ward is not a valid use) and perhaps the only silver of hope left is that he isn't that easy to take down with Rage. Then again, he's an extremely effective hero when farmed. A single Heart increases his effectiveness in battle by a hundredfold.

Let's then take a look at our favourite Queen Of Pain and Bristleback. QoP is superbly low-risk. She pretty much fulfills all 4 low-risk criteria. Her AoE skills make farming a breeze, she has good lane control, is one of the hardest damn heroes to take down with Blink, and is actually pretty damn effective in the event that she actually can't farm anything. Blink (arguably the best spell in the game) also makes her so notoriously difficult to kill that her damage output as a late gamer grows higher simply by her staying alive and shooting enemies for so damn long. Thus, her effectiveness level is also quite high.

Bristleback is yet another low-risk hero. Superb lane control, AoE skill for farming, is insanely difficult to take down, the only drawback being that the Bristleback isn't very useful without items... but he's so damn good at the other 3 areas that him not farming is a travesty. BB is surprisingly good with few items. His absolute tankage makes him effective with a simple Heart Radiance even very late into the game, not to mention that he's probably going to farm a lot more.

In fact, most heroes you see are low-risk with moderate effectiveness. They can farm early game but given the same amount of farming as other late gamers they wouldn't be effective. This makes perfect sense since few teams would like to take the risk of their late gamers being completely useless.

Naix is an extreme, on the other end of the spectrum, an extreme-high risk. Occasionally we do see rather high-risk heroes being used however, because they have extreme item efficiency, being really effective with few items. An example would be Phantom Lancer. Quite honestly he doesn't need many items to be rather insanely powerful, but he has almost no lane control but at least isn't too bad because he can save himself with Dopplewalk.

Shadow Fiend is probably the extreme for the low-risk spectrum. A Shadow Fiend more or less relies only on items in the late game. Generally a high-effectiveness late gamer will have a skill to boost its damage output or survivability. QoP has blink, Viper has Frenzy, Sven has God's Strength. SF has none of those, and is a late gamer simply by virtue of his insane farming rate and lane control. Okay, maybe +60 damage and -5 armor helps a little... but not as much as Critical Strike or most other late gamer skills.

High-risk but high effectiveness farmers usually cause a lot of pressure from both teams. One team will usually do all it can to protect the farmer, the other will do all it can to keep it from farming (because it is so easy to do so). The best counter to high-risk farmers is simply to... not let it farm.

Low-risk farmers often have low item efficiency. Often it is possible to counter those simply by having a farmer with higher item efficiency farm at the same rate, to be more effective in the late game. Usually this is mixed with some form of attempting to at least slow down the low-risk farmer's effeciency.

Then when you meet a low-risk farmer with quite high item efficiency, you just have to try to enact some form of super controlling on it and waste about half your heroes trying to take it down before it farms. Which is why Bristleback is so damn imbalanced.

The State Of The Nation!! Err... Team...

Our workforce is at an all-time low. We are faced with an ageing population. Our workforce will have to work much harder in order to support the elderly. Following the large exodus of foreign talent, as well as being forced to dedicate more resources to support our war efforts, our domestic workforce ability has seriously dwindled. We are expecting some foreign talent to return shortly though, and perhaps some of our ageing population can be called back to work. Re-training the elderly to have the relevant skills however, will not be done until much later. The current recession however, is not expected to continue for long unless our workforce decides to continue to laze around.

With regards to trade, foreign countries have reduced some of their protectionist measures slightly, possibly a result of a change in government. Our merchants are also becoming much more skilled at dealing with traders from the far reaches of the World. Nevertheless, it is still undesirable that we still have little control over trade with other countries. It merely seems as a means to export goods when our domestic market is already saturated.

Our research and development has been doing better than we expected, except with the dwindling workforce, it seems that all the new technology will have no consumers to use them.

Competition with neighbouring countries is stiff. In fact, a recent security breach and a bout of carelessness, has left our neighbour with a much better deal than we have. Does make everything more fun though don't it ^^.

The Ministers are soon finishing their term. However, they are still shaky as to the next batch of leaders appointed. We are entering a transition period where we will now be led by a mix of old and new Ministers, while the older Ministers try to do as much as they can while not being routinely owned by Very Senior Ministers (Parents) or Senior Ministeresses (not to be confused with Mistresses, of which we hope none of our Ministers have).

1) hi gals, pls let me know who wants to go work for this. i think asta, sheep and i cant commit because we're working.

Regarding our upcoming events – Games Convention Asia 2007, AsiaSoft is going to push our new game title- Darkness and Light (www.darknessandlightsea.com) we need to hire promoters ( we call it DAL angels) who know how to play strategy games. I hope that you can help me to check with your girls team who want to work for this event, pay will be $7 per hour. And before the event AsiaSoft will conduct a training session for DAL angels.

Events detail:
Date: 6-9 Sep
Venue: Suntec Convention Hall 601-603
Event Title: Games Convention Asia 2007
Working hour: 10am -8pm (10 hrs)

2) friday meet at 8pm at GG katong. i will be a little late cos i end work at 8. asta has church til 10, so she'll be down after that.

3) saturday shopping! who wants to go where? and meet what time? i need to alter some clothes at far east plaza, and have dinner at vivo with some uni friends.

One week from WCG seems enough time to look back and talk about it.

This WCG was probably the most well organised tournament I have ever seen, and I think the result of this was that player welfare was... well... shitty. It seems to be a fair tradeoff.

For such a long drawn and tiring massive tournament though, the marshalls for the most part maintained a surprising amount of friendliness. Problems were resolved directly, and they always helped as much as they could while rushing the schedule.

Some people should know though, that it really, sincerely, truthfully, DOES take more than 15 seconds to draft a hero.

I'm pretty sure gamesync and gg-game.com did more than enough coverage for our matches for me to do anything here.

On a final note though, to anyone ELSE who is going to ask "Why didn't Ant play for WCG..."

I DID! JUST NOT THE FINALS.

And no it probably would have made no difference, but I like living with the feeling that perhaps I could have.

ok there goes the age old argument about RGN sucking and marshalls sucking and all that. in the end, i've always taken bryan's stand. rules are there for a reason, for everyone to read. if you cant read, you can get someone to read it to you, so there's no real excuse you can give when you are penalised for a stated rule.
anyway, back to bryan. bryan btw, used to work with RGN, but he has since moved on to another job.bryan always stood by the rules, rules are black and white, and they give you no room for dispute. so, even if some idiot picks up a teammate's voidstone for fun then puts it down a second later, that a DQ. of course, ant will think otherwise. but i feel, that giving players the benefit of a doubt means that you will be taken advantage of. if you want to argue about it more, such a dumb act is simply against sportsmanship. like... why are you fooling around in a competition? are you not taking it and its rules seriously? if so, then you definitely deserve to be DQed!

i've been on the otherside of the registration table before, and players can a great pain. its really up to the marshalls to keep everyone in check, especially since most of them are little boys who have some kind of attp and expect the world to kneel at their name.
being a player myself, it does exasperate me greatly that marshalls can be so unyielding too. i remember capl a few seasons ago... our team didnt get to play many many matches til the last one by virtue of the other teams not being present. so these auto walk overs meant that we were totally un warmed up. e2max was freezing, and we were all sleepy, having been there since about 10. so we requested for coms about half an hour before we were due to play... at 4 i think, and we were rejected, for no real good reason. those coms were arguably, rightfully ours to use, since we were supposed to have been playing since 10, and the bulk of the matches were already over.
then when the match came, we needed to warm up a while, but the marshall (JS was the marshall of this match!!) kept hurrying us to join the game because they have a schedule to stick to, they rented the place for a certain time frame only, if overshoot the time, then gotta pay more and all that. i grumpily snapped back, "i need to warm up, my creeps havent even reached each other how do i try my last hit? you all dun want us to warm up earlier then too bad u gotta wait now."
both sides unhappy, both sides can't really help it.

so with that anecdote.. i hope both sides start understanding each other better. in the end who loses? the players stand lose more because they are the ones who want to play, and to win. whereas the all-powerful marshalls have the last say, remember?

No words needed.

im damn tired after 3 days of marshalling.. but i just felt like blogging this down.

ACG today didnt went off quite well. in fact, there were incidents where other countries (actually only china), who threatened rapture that they will bring the issue up to wcg organisation. its not exactly what happened that bothers me. its the attitude.

so as many have heard, there was a 3-way tie for AOE3 between australia, china and hongkong and base on the rules, the win was given to australia, for having the highest total score. china was unhappy and demanded for an explanation. 3 people were sent to explain. first, the AOE3 in charge, then the chief marshal, then the rapture management. the guy who was in charge of the china players was SO RUDE. he started shouting very loudly that its unfair and that singapore management sucks and all that, despite the 3 people telling him very nicely that they are doing things according to rules, and that now that they are in singapore, they should follow the rules of singapore. furthermore, before they even started any games, marshals already brief them on what is going to happen if there is a tie. buy hey, we all understand that they flew all the way from china and if im the guy, i wouldnt want to give in so easily. airtickets aren't cheap. but the way the guy shouted.. its just bad. furthermore, he started PUSHING people. thats just, argh. doesnt reflect well on their country la.

on top of the bad attitude, the players werent very mannered. they came down early yesterday, the last day of singapore finals. took photos with the ACG scoreboard. and guess what they did! they were pointing middle fingers to other countries as they took pictures. like, hello? =.= that's just plain rude la. and they just bang into the competition area like its their home, demanding that they should be allowed to use the coms as and when they like. and you might have already heard that there was a dispute when micronology played against china's team. micronology typed "gg". and they assumed that micronology conceded and thats it, end of game, they win. then they kicked a fuss when they realised that "oh no, its not the end of the game!" they raised their voice at the marshal on duty, demanding for the rules of dota. first of all, its already hard to communicate with them in chinese. like how do you translate FROZEN THRONE in chinese? yah, just nice i walk past and heard what happened so i tried my very best to tell them in chinese that the only way a game is considered ended is when the throne or tree is down. thank god they understood me. and guess what, they glared and rolled their eyes at me after hearing me said that.

so my point is! basic manners should be observed when you're overseas. doesnt reflect well on the country. at end of the day, dont blame everyone for condemning your countries just because of that few black sheeps.

Asterisk has been featured in today's issue of TODAY. (I hate how weird that sounds when you say it. ._.

Will scan and post up the picture soon. Meanwhile, here's a picture taken during our interview.

From left: cass*, Astatine*, d4wn*, furryfish*, =pinksheep*, flawed* who was marshalling but joined us right on time to appear :D

Hime wasn't there yet so unfortunately she didn't get to be in the picture.

Was an exhilarating experience, at least for me, a complete noob to the competitive scene. I would have to say we played really badly, even by our own standards! Was not one of our better days. Girls please fill in the blanks, my memory fails me!

First game: Asterisk*(Scourge) vs m2f (Sents)

Lineup: SF(Cass), Veno(Asta), Zeus(D4wn), Beastmaster(Tammy), Warlock(Dawnsheep)

versus

Bristleback, Tinker, Qop, Lina, Sandking

We were pretty devastated when the opponents picked the bristleback which we had intended to take. Ended up losing pretty badly with me being blicked half the time just before or just after I pull off a poison nova. After the first game we were rather frustrated - A problem with our brackets meant we'd have to win both games, or we weren't advancing.

2nd game: Asterisk*(Scourge) vs AxG(Sents)

Lineup: Viper(Cass), VS(Asta), Sandking(D4wn), Bristleback(Dawnsheep), QoP(Tammy)

versus

Warlock, NA, Veno, Zeus, Tinker

In this game we had a good draft - Ice, Ant and Wan were advising us on the sidelines, while Shan was there with us discussing the drafts. The last draft was a fight between silencer and VS, both my heroes, and it ended up with VS. Needless to say I was pretty worried as my VS is still in need of lots of training. Me and D4wn ended up farming horribly - So much of my gold was spent on wards that kept getting destroyed, and eventually I just fed. Dawnsheep had to farm and farm and wasn't able to be part of our engagements, D4wn didn't get her blink dagger up so there wasn't a single epic due to it being cancelled, or just not being cast. My chasing timing was wrong so I didn't help kill much and I was running around too often to gain any significant exp, and Cass was farming well as usual, but was somewhat distanced when it came to the engagements.

With that failure on our hands, we wandered aimlessly around before D4 went off, then we went to eat. Later we went training and just playing lan pubs together, after drawing up a list of heroes to use.

There is no 'i' in team. We definitely need to forget about what we like to do, what we feel like doing or don't feel like doing, if we intend to ever make progress. Ie. It's not enough for me to say something like, "I can't farm so I won't play a farmer." All of us need to get sufficiently versatile, both in heroes and roles. And if we continue to be just focussing on what we like doing, we won't succeed.

WCG 2007 starts tomorrow, and right now we're still feeling... grossly unprepared. I take it the guys aren't too peachy either judging by the number of times I've seen Ice tell them, "I am psing you now, byebye!" or something to that extent.

For all of us in Asterisk*, it will be our first time getting something to wear from our sponsors, and for some (well okay, me) a maiden voyage in competitive gaming. Besides dreading and longing for tomorrow all at once, I have been mentally playing out Dota games in my head while going through files at work. I'm starting to feel regrets already at being only able to competitively play a limited number of heroes, and wishing I had been able to train more over the past couple of months. Work pwns us, and I miss those days when my life was pretty much made up of gaming and boyfriend. Now it's a chore to fit in a single game a day, let alone more.

After hearing Tammy declare, "We have too much of a life!" and hearing my boyfriend tell me that real competitive players eat, sleep and breathe gaming, the jitters start coming in and the scary thoughts, "I'M NOT READY!!"

On a great note, dear Hime, who's been gamely training with us over the past couple of months, has agreed to join us, at least for WCG, which entitles her to a new garment too! HOW WE LOVE BEING SPONSORED! <3

So to Tammy, Dawnsheep, Cass, D4wn and maybe now Hime, if tomorrow doesn't work out, I hope we still continue to stay together as a team and keep playing, at least for a long, long while. <3 and emoness.

Blogger ate my previous post. Bugger.

This CAPL was probably the most tiring and frustrating one ever. So coupled with the usual happiness from winning was a feeling of relief. Gamesync did surprisingly quick and good coverage of it, but I'll do a bit more from my side of the story, which covers more in detail the hiccups that we went through.

Well, at 1010, I get word that we have to start the game by 1015 or risk being DQed. Unfortunately, ice has yet to show up, rather predictably. He says he'll be down in about 10 minutes and that Lux is with him. Oh well, I guess delaying for 5 minutes isn't too bad. We're facing the prospect of DQ here since we can't present 5 players at 1015, but luckily we get away with having to start draft at 1015 and waiting for them.

More delaying. I spend a large portion of my very limited handphone usage with ice on the phone, drafting. Can't really delay much though, since the marshalls are REALLY PUSHING US. We finish drafting at 1030 and begin to set up, at which point ice and Lux are still not showing up, and apparently will show up in 15 minutes.

Fortunately, GPS is around. After delaying as much as we could, with all the drama and whatsnot, we start our first match at 1050, 4v5, with ZX, NutZ, GPS, and me (Tofu is in school, Lux is waiting for ice and they are travelling together). We leave our last computer empty. In other words, we enter the game 4v5, and leave a computer empty in hopes that ice will quickly come and take over.

Around 10 minutes into the game, ice finally comes, and takes his spot as a LEVEL ONE Enigma. Hero assignments have been rather screwed up though. Ideally, it would be ice playing Spectre, but NutZ takes this role instead, and lanes are completely changed to accomodate the fact that we have to play 4v5 for god knows how long before ice comes (thankfully he comes only at 10 minutes... I mean one gets rather distrustful about another's time estimations when they tell you they'll be there in 10 minutes, and 20 minutes later tell you they'll be there in 15 minutes, and come in 50).

The game lasts for 2 hours, in part due to many of our roles being screwed up, and ice feeding madly as Enigma. Oh well, but the drama doesn't end there.

See, as it turns out, revealled after the drafting is done in our next match, we are only allowed to register 6 men in the team, and GPS having already played the first match has to be in our team (it was meant to be Tofu, Lux, ice, ZX, NutZ, and me, with Tofu sitting out the first match as he was in school). AFTER the drafting is done, we are forced to essentially have either Tofu or Lux sit out for the entire tournament.

Oh dear. Hero assignments are screwed up yet again. Lux has to play this draft due to the essential make-or-break role he plays, and so for the first time ever, Zenith plays CAPL without Tofuboi.

Which leaves NutZ playing Tofu's hero. Fortunately, he has Tofu by his side being very annoying and helping him. Phew. Cue another really long game.

We aren't allowed to eat lunch either, since they're rushing us for being behind schedule and whatsnot. However, we get Tofu to buy a few burgers for us and chomp them down.

The semi-finals against Micronology had us pretty much on our toes since we were playing them, for the first time ever, without Tofu. It was a pretty good draft in our favour, so I guess that made for a pretty easy game.

Everyone was pretty tired by the finals. Quite honestly we didn't even do a proper draft. Then again, we didn't actually do much of a proper draft in the previous games either, except against Micronology. With Tofu missing, and some of us feeling tired, and me still feeling like we were fated to lose CAPL because of things out of my hand, we did pretty touchy-feely drafts with no plan in mind as to how to play them. The draft in the finals though, pretty much had us mostly playing heroes that we had never played before in competitions.

I'm still quite surprised we won.

Without Tofu too.

With ice feeding for 2 out of 4 games, and one of those games having him not really doing so hot either. Yes, feeding even worse then NutZ.

Actually NutZ didn't even feed a single game. Not too badly at least. Compared to ice. Bleh.

Then again, I guess I should be happy that ice and Lux even came down. Who knows what would happen if we used GPS for the other 3 matches. Although he did play a rather good KOTL against rev0.

As many are aware, we made a nice almost unplanned trip to Malaysia last week. The organisers made a decision to open it up to other countries and in the span of 30 minutes, about 10 different Malaysians went into our IRC channel and invited us over to participate.

Well, the first thing we thought was "ZOMG THIS IS DURING SCHOOL TERM". Well, a weekend, but still going overseas in the weekend during a school term. Fortunately, Batu Pahat is in Johor which is right across the causeway. About 90 minutes only from the causeway as a matter of fact. So hey, no more 8 hour long bus rides like the last time we went to Malaysia.

The most common question I've been asked is... "WHERE THE HELL ARE LUX, ICE, AND MUSICA?"

I DON'T KNOW!!

Actually I do.

For the uninformed, Musica went to Australia (for good... or at least for the majority of this year and possibly the next) on New Year's day this year. Naturally since he is disproportionately far from Malaysia as we are, he didn't take part.

LuX is serving NS. Now, maybe he books out on weekends but when you gotta book in on Sunday night you really don't want to start making a 2 hour trip back from Malaysia. Well, better not to fool around with the army.

Ice always pwns. Unfortunately, he pwned himself and was being pwned by various pwners in the duration of this pwnage competition. Thus he couldn't go to Malaysia to pwn with us.

Thus the 5 players that went over to Malaysia were: Tofuboi, ZX, NutZ, GPS, and me.

Interestingly enough, this team has never ever played a single match in a competition together. One player sits out in competitions. Either GPS (by virtue of having a limited set of heroes available for him to play), me (by virtue of feeling not up to it), or NutZ (by virtue of simply being NutZ). We never really got to play much together either... we gathered the team less than a week before going down to Malaysia... a week that entailed me sleeping for less than 2 hours for a few days doing homework (ah... the problem with procrastination...).

Despite not playing much, we did have a lot of discussion on strats to use prior to the competition. Many of those were not used, mainly because of those strats being too risky or dishonourable (often a mixture of both).

But let's go on!

Batu Pahat, being in Johor, is near enough for us to go there via our own private modes of transport. GPS' father offered enthusiastically to drive us over, and I roped in my Uncle so we could have another car. The two cars left separately but somehow, very unexpectedly, reached the hotel within about 5 minutes of each other. We checked in at Crystal Inn in Batu Pahat around 7pm, after a 3 to 4 hour journey (changing money, wrong turns, and causeway jam contributing to all of that).

And here we are unpacking. It's your regular 2-bed hotel room, inclusive of TV (which we never touched), kettle (unfortunately without bottled water, but we did boil lots of water) and lots of space to accomodate an entire team for strat discussions (and communal late night snacking).

We had dinner with our 3 nice adults (GPS' father, my uncle, my mother) at a nice Chinese Restaurant, that cost around 7 SGD per person. Very worth it, seeing as how a meal like this would cost more than double or even triple that amount in Singapore. Good food. We wanted to eat there after the entire tournament was over, but alas... it ended too late.

In fact we had many plans to do extra shopping etc. after the tournament was over but it just ended too late... :(

But meanwhile here's our nice room!


Picture taken, I believe, when we checked in. NutZ, ZX, and me shared one room, while GPS, Tofu, and their father (who stayed for the first night) took the other.

Before retiring to sleep though, we went to check out GLOW Cybercafe. Played a few games, and one practice game with mKvL, a rather messy game too. GLOW is a rather spacious place, with only 28 comps fitted into a rather large space. Good thing is that you have lots of elbow room. Bad thing is that only 2 matches can go on at once. I'll have a picture of this place later...

Before we know it, it's already past 1AM and we're back in our rooms. Strat discussion brings it to 2AM or so, and after much miscellaneous stuff, I sleep at 3AM, to wake up at 7AM the next day.

Breakfast isn't too shabby. Toast, Cereal, Orange Juice, Congee, Rice, some meat. Standard but more than sufficient variety and of rather good standard too. Enough food to satisfy even Tofuboi.

And here's an elusive picture of NutZ... EATING!!! I mean looking at him, who knew he ever ate?
Oh right. Pictures courtesy of GPS who brought his camera along.

The organisers were nice enough to give us a short 5 minute car ride (which, with the roads and the speed there, is around a 1 hour walk) to GLOW cybercafe. We played our first match at 1030AM. Nothing notable. Replays are available somewhere if you look hard enough. The scoreboard ratio at the end was around 5:1 in our favour.

FYI, most M'sian tourneys do seeding. In other words, each match is meant to get more and more difficult as you progress through the tournament.

Now here is the dull part. Due to the fact that there are around 32 teams to play in this cybercafe (the tournament is held in 2 separate cybercafes, they only put the teams together at the semi-finals and finals), that means we have to wait a whopping 6 hours or so for our next match. What follows is a lot of hanging out at a nearby Carrefoure, some watching, some strat discussion, more shopping at Carrefoure, and of course, attempting to usurp control of the cybercafe's exclusive couch to get some rest.

Here we have our star, NutZ, getting some sleep. GPS and him practically slept every moment that we weren't playing or eating. Notice the turtle sneakily making its presence by his side.
Here we have the inside of the Cybercafe... rather spacious, and only participants and marshalls and some other special people are allowed in...
Here is the counter, outside the playing area, where participants watch through 3 monitors through an observer's view. It... isn't as spacious...

And some strat discussions near the CyberCafe where we just wanted to sit down somewhere cool and have a drink.

And then we sat down for our next match... there won't be battle reports here to extend an already long report. I would say though that it was a rather tough match, the lineup being RK Viper Bristleback Slayer POTM (them), against Visage Void Bane Sandking Tormented (us). Other than my Visage having rather suicidal tendencies (the amount of times I bought out almost reaches two digits), it was a game that we felt was very damn close, one that at one point had me thinking "damn... I'm not going back to Singapore after only two rounds..." The replay is up somewhere, and it's long but rather action packed.
The next game was some time after dinner. That's the picture of us sitting. Before it starts. Once it starts though, it becomes something like this...
Well, like I said, I won't be doing battle reports, but the 3rd game had my first ever serious match of RK. I had never ever played RK in any serious match before, let alone in a competitive game, but the draft forced me into using RK... as an alternative to having NutZ use RK (oh the tragedy).

Our infamous quarter-finals match was played quite late. Drafting I believe started between 10pm and 11pm. The match ended past midnight. If there is a replay you should watch for entertainment, watch this one, and watch as we go from an almost sure-lose situation, into a sure-win situation, and then suddenly plunge back into a situation where we are about to lose again.

Watch for the 1 hour and 7 minute mark. After pushing down one side and having Tofu farmed up to the brink of us being able to win engagements with him just attack moving, Tofu decides, in a heroic moment, to LEAP INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE ENEMY WITHOUT BACKUP AS THEY PUSH. Pandemonium ensues as Tofu gets instagibbed, and the team dies one by one as they try to salvage the situation. I'm still 30 seconds from revival at this point, and Tofu is actually laughing like mad throughout this. We lose two sets of raxes.

He tells me after the match "shit, I would kill myself if we went back to Singapore because of this". Or something along those lines. I'm thinking there would be a lot more people wanting to kill him first.

In the words of m4gi_7 to GPS, "your brother made this game very exciting". It is. Very exciting. It is also exceedingly stupid, but nevertheless an entertaining game to watch.

We get significantly more sleep this time. The next day, we head to a mall known as the Summit where we are to play our games. Here's the set-up

Every game from the semi-finals was played on stage. Unfortunately, the glare made the big projector screen very damn difficult to see, and the small monitors in front of the stage were just... too small. There was however, a lot of applause and whatsnot by the spectators at almost each engagement or catch.

Just for the heck of it, here's a picture of us watching the games by the stage, or stoning while waiting for the games to start... I'm not really sure.

We started our semi-finals match promptly on schedule against mKvL at 1pm. Unfortunately, ALL GAMES were played on that stage. In other words, we had to wait and watch while Ct` fought DNA-SK, then Ct` fought mKvL, before we could play our finals match, which ended around 10pm or so. Then we still gotta return to Singapore...

But anyway, more on our semi-finals match. It's quite a good game, and we all were rather pumped up and played rather well. Not too bad a replay. A major point in the game (if you're watching out for it in the replay) would be the first big engagement by our 2nd middle tower, where the ES echo slams and cleans off Tofu and NutZ from the realm of the living, and everything lands, and the entire crowd cheers. Then in comes epicentre hitting all 5 heroes (cheers start to die out), in rushes the overfarmed Doombringer, and in rushes Wrath to clear everything (crowd goes silent). After that, things just went up for us and we won rather easily (thanks to no more screwups! We learnt quite a lot from the previous day). For those who want to know, the matchup was Warlock Veno QoP Silencer ES (them) against POTM Doom Zeus Tormented Sandking (us).

Oh, and mKvL has like, the coolest jackets ever. Here's them playing at GLOW cybercafe.
Almost every team that takes part in M'sian DotA competitions has a lanshop sponsor which equips them with jackets and apparels, but THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE COOLEST JACKET I'VE SEEN. Really. It's also the texture, not just the logo and the font, but we don't have any other pictures of it. Maybe when the organisers finally release the pictures...

We play with DNA-SK in the finals. Now, there's a little background to give behind this rather screwed-up draft of hours. For those who need to know, it's Skeletonking, QoP, Bane, TS, Enigma (us) against BB, NA, Slayer, Zeus, SF. It's more or less instant loss for us by draft alone.

First, the tournament allows each team to alternately remove up to 3 heroes from the draft pool before drafting begins. They had the last remove. Having studied us well, DNA-SK proceeds to remove Sandking and POTM, essentially shutting down most of our strats from ever being used. We remove Tinker and Spectre as we have all games (for reasons which we can't even remember... we just removed them because we have removed them for all the previous games). At this point, we have 2 strats in mind. One which involves Void as the key hero, and another involving Omniknight. We remove void.

They remove Omniknight.

At this point we are basically fucked in strat. We have one strat left, which we refer to as our last resort. Unfortunately, halfway through, we realise that if we draft that, our hero assignments will be all over the place, leading to some of us feeding by virtue of using heroes we've never used before. Thus, the screwed up draft.

Oh, and I do realise that BB first pick would have more or less made the game much easier for us, but hey, hindsight is 20/20.

And after the 2nd and the 4th game, we really are rather grateful to have advanced that far. Heck, our semi-finals match wasn't exactly a breeze either.

We intended to do some shopping and whatsnot after the tournament, but seeing as how prize-giving and all ended around 1030pm, we had nothing to do but rush off back to Singapore via taxi.

We proceed then, to walk across the causeway close to an hour past midnight, carrying all our stuff. ZX, NutZ, and I share a nice supper, while GPS' father brings them home.
Yup. Above you can see us walking across the causeway past midnight, Tofu lugging our big trophy, all rather tired from walking round and round the customs (we never walked past immigration, so we walked round and round after walking the wrong places, not getting passports stamped, etc.)

A few more things to share about the trip. See, as a result of the integration of CS culture and DotA culture, SG DotA teams have learnt to shout "NICE!" and whatsnot after engagements or catches in their favour (some teams go further and go like "FUCK THEM!!" or "SCREW THEM!!" but we usually like to leave the competition area alive). Now, M'sian DotA teams it seems are slightly more reserved (for the first day at least. They got much more enthusiastic at shouting in the finals).

Our dear Tofuboi, with his ever over-enthusiastic spirit, high-pitched whiny voice, and lack of self-control, seems to overuse this word though. The entire CyberCafe hears his shouts of "NICE!!". Especially of course, where he claps and shouts "NICE!" everytime our Enigma blackholes air (or an opponent echo slams nothing), which actually, shockingly, happened quite a few times.

"NICE HOLE LA!!" *Claps 10 times and shouts wildly*.

And so, if you browse the lowyat.net forum thread after the closure of this tournament, you would see quite a few "NICE!"'s around.

Also, on the way back, we stuffed 5 passengers in one taxi. Then we had to pass a police checkpoint so one of us had to walk (since only 4 passengers are allowed). So, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a Malaysian expressway, I walked past a police checkpoint. It's quite scary because firstly, you have no way to get out if the taxi leaves you behind. There is no way to contact the people in the cab (only my handphone had roaming and still had battery), I was in the middle of the road close to midnight walking past a police checkpoint (they were staring at me... I just walked), and I had no sight of the cab at all (I just kept walking. Thankfully the cab was about 300 metres in front near an expressway exit.)

I would really love to go again. Lots of stuff I haven't said in this post, but it's already too long. Really, part of going for a compe overseas is ruined by the fact that you have school sandwiching the competition period... just wish there were some competitions during school holidays... but oh well, I think this is it for any Zenith overseas trips. Doubt Tofu will be allowed overseas anymore, but I think a mixed team wouldn't be too bad going over. Heck, it's a good experience, participating in competitions overseas.