clan dinner + photo taking session! lol...

(ripped off shan's blog.) hehheh.

photos that tammy approved. the rest are too.. :x

ok girls, nice outing we had just now! but seriously, im not done with all the shopping! 2hours and we only been to 2 shops. and we got so many things when the singapore sales have not even officially begin. more shopping trips yeah? im so tempted to paste some photos here, but then, under tammy's strict warning, im not allowed to. -pending for tammy's approval-

so we had fun, and we're back to serious work. since im having holiday, i'll take over the arranging of trainings/friendlys for the time being. it'll be good if you let me know your schedule, roughly roughly what time free, that kind of thing. tentatively, it will be 1 to 2 times a week, depending on schedules. if you need a reminder, wcg is 2 months away..

i demand more shopping!

^^ Yesterday, cass, d4wn and me had a nice game with furion and thacc. Draft was (sentinel) WL, Sandk, RK, Potm, Lina against (scourge) QOP, Zeus, VS, ES, Silencer.

cass was RK, d4wn was WL and I used Lina. (113 - 3 stunners at bot) Good coordination at bot meant we fbed, sbed and tbed their VS/ES. Then SK went off to hunt and killed Silencer at mid, while cass and I kept the pressure at bot. Very nice play from d4wn's WL too who went Deso, Dagger, Euls, Dagon and killed the running QOP with a nice blink chase through the forest. =D Even though potm was nerdlike without linken at level 17, we still managed to win. *eeeee*

GG!

hie...
yeah... super sorry about that night, i was like shackly lying on bed.
work pwns gaming.
and last night's game was lol fun. even though d4wn and kc dced... dawnsheep, zilly and i had a good game after! its fun to micro more than one hero... lol.

as for the ad... shan u put la! u are admin also wat. but will they REALLY pay us...

more traininggggggg
more dcing!
then i can multi hero... lol.

abit nostalgic to see dawn's post.. ahh.

anyhows, im having my holidays already! started early due to pre-u sem and because my school's the organiser this year. but still, its exams after the holiday so got to mug hard. then followed by prelims and then its Alvl already. -stress-

capl's starting this saturday. good luck to all teams, make sure you guys are on time for registration. see you there. (:

btw, judging the tagboard, this site's actually experience quite a high traffic flow. why not we put some advertorial in the blog and earn some money for lan?

Hi girls.

1. Should we take part in CAPL?
Things to consider:
- are we ready to take part in a competition
- what do we hope to gain from this experience
- what are our objectives
Thus far:
Tammy and me have said we are okay with anything. I will talk about this soon on MSN.

2. Trainings.
Be on time.
Try to be punctual (+-5mins). If you're going to be late, SMS someone. Don't wait for us to call.
Consistency.
Try to be consistent in your performance (only excusable reason - lag). If need be, do some warm-ups, private training.
Accountability.
The previous week we trained a lot. Last week we did not. So Cass took the initiative and arranged a training on Thursday night that most of us agreed to but did not turn up for.
>I did say I may not be able to make it because my movie is about 2hours20mins (started at 8.30), and asked the 4 of you to go ahead
>D4wn msged me to say she was going out and may not be able to make it at about 8ish (at least you informed everyone, but then don't agree in the first place -.-)
>Maria msged me at 10.40 and asked if there was still training (but I didn't manage to see this cos I was still in the movie - but assume that there is if we agreed from now on)
>Tammy told me she was very tired when I texted her at 11.10 (I don't know what's going on at this point)
>Poor Cass waited till 12+
Please. If you agreed to train at a certain time, please put it at the top of your priorities and go online at the designated time. Thanks! Unless it's something to do with work/school there shouldn't be other excuses.
And sometimes if someone is MIA, just grab an extra or two, sub and play. 3 or 4 are enough for a training, imo.

Okay rant complete.

At the last count, there's still 26 heroes left unplayed. I'm still pretty determined to leave Meepo for last, perhaps for another buff.

For now, the tagboard seems to be a good place to look for comic relief, better than the battle.net forums, and since DotaSG has a warning system (it was getting stale anyway), the tagboard is now my number one source of no-quality comedy.

In the spirit of delaying work, I shall actually update hero logs. Oh right, can our other members update too ^_^ thanks.

Oh and since I posted twice in one day, people who are checking for latest post might want to scroll one post down.

Let's start with the easiest of them all. The chronological order sort of gets mixed up now:


Hero Log #21: Bristleback

This is so easy because ever since when I actually first played Bristleback for the hero log, it has since evolved from the fun pwnage hero into the WTF IMBA hero that it is now. I actually tried a lot of different builds for BB, and all of them are quite fun, but none really work for competitive play.

I started out with the normal mass farm Heart Radiance stuff, and of course, as expected, it was rather capable of tanking everything and still having room to pwn things. I put a Midas in a build and it wasn't too bad, but it wasn't exactly very fun either since Midas doesn't add much excitement to your life. So far the build I'm most proud of involves getting Helm of Dominator and having 2 Centaurs stomp around and hit your enemies while you slow them with goo. Seriously, add a Kobold in and it's rather good backstabbing since about the only way to escape from a full mana BB is to TP away, but OH WAIT, HERE COMES THE STOMPER.

One thing I don't really like about BB is that it takes far too long to really start owning with him. I mean, his massive ability to not die is good and all, but unless you have good teammates to help it's really difficult to get any proper pwning done against decent players until past 30 minutes.

Ye. BB is imba still. Counters are available, but not widely or very cheaply either.


Hero Log #22: Silencer

I'll keep this short since I have a lot of ground to cover. This is one of the heroes I somehow can micro well with, much like Lich. There seems to be a heightened sense of last hitting with him. Or maybe it's just because glaives do imba damage. Either way, Silencer is kinda fun, but not that fun. I mean, for one there's the whole survival thing going on with Global Silence, but GS is usually not to be wasted like that. Then there's the massive damage output from glaives and orb-walking. The best part though, is that everyone lets the Silencer farm, which is nice.

Unfortunately, seeing as how the Silencer has no defensive moves apart from Global Silence, it usually means he gets ganked heavily, and dies. Still not a bad hero, one I don't suck at.


Hero Log #23: Queen of Pain

Everyone's favourite QoP is unfortunately not one of my best heroes. See, as much as Blink is probably my favourite spell in the game, there are some things that a QoP needs to do which I'm... not that good at doing.

Before I start on that though, there ARE still some things I love about QoP. One would be the sheer survivalbility caused by that spell known as Blink which serves as the spell that probably pisses your opponent off the most. Then there's also the nice AoE combo that insta-gibs low HP heroes.

Then there are some things QoP is meant to do which I can't. For one, there's the whole issue of Wave and Scream of Pain as really strong AoE spells. Like most AoE spells though, I miss a hell lot of them. The strange thing is that I don't actually miss them in team battles, but miss both spells a lot in 1v1s.

Then QoP players are expected to farm at godlike speeds, which I can't do. I have a consistent EoS timing of around 35 minutes, which is REALLY REALLY SLOW. QoP farming fast usually involves a lot of lane hopping around and risky blinks into situations to launch AoE at heroes. I'm unfortunately too humji to do that. Oh and somehow or other my early game micro really fails with QoP. Can't last hit for nuts.


Hero Log #24: Earthshaker

This one is easy because I suck at it. Not that badly, I do play a few good games of ES once in a while but for the most part I don't like it much. It can't farm, can't creep, can't really lane control, and is basically an EXCELLENT AoE hero, but that's pretty much it. I did play a good game of ES once, but it doesn't come often. What a simple log, ES simply isn't my kind of hero.

Well, if there's one plus point, it's the fact that ES probably has the best annoyance factor in a lane since Fissure is the longest spammable undodgable spell ever (that stuns!!!) and it feels good in a way to land a nice Echo Slam. Splat, all there fresh for your teammates to KS.


Hero Log #25: Goblin Alchemist

Ah yes. The Goblin Alchemist. I think my inter-school report more or less covered this rather thoroughly. It was an imba farmer, almost impossible to kill, good at lane control, purely irritating, and also could neutral really really well. It does have two drawbacks though. First, it is melee and has no natural movement speed increase, meaning it's easily micro-able in battle, or slows or disables can easily make him much less useful in battle.

The second and most important drawback is that the Goblin Alchemist has recently been WHACKED BY THE NERFSTICK SO HARD HE FLEW TO KANSAS. I haven't tried new Alchemist yet, and once I do I'll probably do an update of this (yeah right). Until then, I think my inter-school report pretty much covers everything else about Alchemist, as it was back then, pre-nerf at least.


Now the backlog is SA, NA, LR, Veno, Doom, LoA, Treant, Bane, Rhasta, Zeus, Prophet, THD, TS, Slardar, KOTL, Tiny, Troll Warlord, Anti-Mage, Bloodseeker and Nerubian Weaver. 46 Heroes. Whoo!

Before I begin, I would like to add that TT_TT is not Zenith. In fact TT_TT not being Zenith is part of the reason why I joined it in the first place. It does show how quick people are to love to smash us though. In all honesty, it actually says more good things than bad ^_^.

MYM tourney left me with rather mixed feelings. Where shall I begin?

First, scheduling international matches is hell. We could only play on weekends and in the morning or at night. I mean the Asian qualifiers were okay, easy to schedule and lagless. Then came group stages. I believe it was a weekday night, we went down to GG at Katong to meet up to play against n!, and they don't show (no official arrangement, just agreement I think). By night I mean something like 10 - 12pm. Weekend, I try to squeeze one match with Verge in the morning, but GG lateness means Verge says it's too late to play and goes off. We stone at GG for 6 hours since our next match against n! is at 7pm. Cue more delays, and we end up starting 2 hours behind time (but wow, I've never met a team that's later than us!). DN is nice enough to wait for us and we start their game at midnight, and end at 3am. Verge wants to play one game, but it's 3am, I've been awake for 20 hours, and I'm also sick. We postpone till Tuesday.

SkaP is to be played on labour day. Lo and behold, they can't take the neutral host, and their rehost leaves us running at 0.5 frames per second (I kid you not, when you can literally count the seconds between frames) though it probably wasn't their fault since GGC goes offline. We argue for a while, and SkaP leaves for another league. So we stay up till midnight plus at GG, and we don't get a game. Bummer.

Verge was 2 games, played from home (i.e. no coordination, a little more lag cause somehow GG has a rather godlike connection when you play GGC, yet its rather lacklustre in lancraft matches), supposed to start at 9pm. Lo and behold, we somehow pull some absurd irresponsibility and start the first game at 1030pm. This basically means, starting so late, I didn't get to play the second game.

At this point, we can reach a tie-breaker with n! if Verge wins n! 2-0. Verge is already winning 1-0, but n! is apparently trying to gain a tie so they auto-advance into the next round. Verge adamantly refuses to give n! a walkover win, giving us a chance to play a tie-breaker with n!. How's that for sportsmanship ^_^. Since it benefits us anyway ^_^. But there's a lot of thanks to be given to them for doing this.

Lo and behold, we have 1 Wednesday to schedule a tie-breaker match with n!. I basically stay online the entire day, waiting for n! to come online, and we go down to GG at 10pm, with nothing but the hope that n! will be online. Luckily, they do come online around midnight. I reach home at 2am, on a school day (FYI I wake up at 6am for school, and I'm saving a lot of preperation time by eating breakfast while travelling).

Then comes the playoffs. The brackets are released while I'm still sleeping, and as such I only receive the message from Pandemic when I reach home from school. I basically stay online until 3am just to wait for Pandemic members to come online, only to find that either they don't do any scheduling, or they're going on vacation, and Fachh doesn't come online anytime then, even though he has PMed me about a possible 11pm match (which I told him I'll rather not play, but I stayed online anyway in case he was coming on and teammates were still online if he said it was the only time they could play). An admin says that there's hope for Pandemic to make it tomorrow at 11am, which is a Saturday for us. I wake up at 9am, hoping to find Fachh online, no hope. I decide to just go to GG anywa. Fachh comes on at around 1pm while I'm on my way to GG, and tells me he can't field 5 players until... Monday. The deadline for the next round is in about 12 hours (I mean the NEXT round, not the round we're playing. The round we're playing ended long ago). We're actually pretty fine about this, but we're not sure about how the admins will take such a late match, so I run it through with the admins. The admins try to contact Fachh to see what's happening and tell me to wait around for a decision BUT FACHH IS GONE, and basically I'm trying my best to play Pandemic before the deadline, so my team and me basically stay on-call the entire time. So we wait until 11pm before we get a def-win, and basically went 12 hours without a game in hope that the other team could perhaps show up and we could play something.

We go home (no co-ordination, more lag, et cetera) and play TeG, finishing the match at 5am. Yeah.

If I joined every single international tournament, I would be forced to take DotA up as a career simply because of the absurdity if juggling school and international matches when your opponents are living at a timezone difference of many hours away and you receive notice of your next match, which you only have one day to play, when you're already sleeping. If anyone is going to tell me to sacrifice more of my life on this, you had better be reasonable. I for one am lucky enough to have parents who won't insta-pwn me for staying till 2am on a school day to play games.

Ideally we would be playing on American hosts against European opponents, and European hosts against American opponents (although for this case, even an American host would work fine) since that would be fairest. Unfortunately, it appears that Asians, Americans, and Europeans, are rarely awake at the same time (or at least good hosts aren't). We try for the best host, and it usually works out quite well, but admittedly there are problems getting split-second last hitting done when your opponent's host is right next to them and you are far away. American hosts are still better, though Soth has proven to be a rather imba host by European standards. It's still not possible to last-hit lockdown a good opponent in that kind of delay though (minimal, it doesn't affect engagements much but it does affect last hitting and harrassing).

But overall, I think we've had the best hosting in this MYM then we ever had in previous international games, or maybe it's just a good connection from GG.

Well the above was... the bad part.

The good part was that most of the matches were rather worth staying up late for. In fact we probably would have won a lot more of them if we met up at GG to play, except not all my teammates are as lucky as me to not be insta-pwned by parents for staying up till like 4am to play, especially not on exam week. For the record, we only lost one game, played against n!, when we were at GG, for... a myriad of very annoying reasons. The rest of the games, even those played from home with shitty coordination and communication, were actually really close (except those we won that weren't close). If anything, a team of 6 SG players who have never played together in their lives can actually do very damn well against an international team with delay against them and absolutely no communication.

I'll be looking forward to MYM #6 where hopefully it's version 6.43, hopefully they don't give us one-day match notices, hopefully my team can meet up for every game, and hopefully we can get like a pwnage Asian host. I hear that Korean hosts are rather imba, and I WILL SOMEHOW GET MYM|MOON TO HOST FOR US. TIS A DREAM I SHALL FULFILL. And then I'll somehow pwn on his no-lag host. Hopefully.

TTTT = not zenith, TTTT = fun team. Astons = Ftw.

The latest punishment in hell gave a new meaning to 'lighting up'.


The small print says:
STEFAN SIGMOND, 29, from Cluj in Translyvania, set a record in Bucharest on 31 January, when he smoked 800 filter-tipped western cigarettes in less than six minutes through a special wheel-like device, breaking his 1995 record of 750. Last year he ate 29 boiled eggs in four minutes and - seperately - jumped into a lake from a 135ft (41m)-high platform. He will not, however, appear in the Guiness Book of Records, which now discourages gluttony and foolhardiness. (AP:R) 2 Feb 1996.