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.