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.