By ESFI World on October 28th, 2012 at 10:00 am.
Our e-sports correspondent is Jeb Boone.
A dearth of tournaments outside of Asia has left western e-sports of every stripe wallowing in controversy. The StarCraft 2 community continues to cannibalize itself with vitriol and a player shake up has League of Legends fans up in arms. A few glimmers of hope have steered StarCraft fans in a more positive direction and, with any luck, an OSL finals will remind many of the reasons why a hobby became an infatuation that just wouldn’t quit.
Continuing last week’s “death of StarCraft” drama, Destiny faced off against inControl, IdrA and djWheat in the most venomous episode of Inside the Game to date. While PainUser labored backstage in a futile attempt to give a moderate voice, djWheat, inControl and IdrA.
After a few verbal jabs and a Skype rage quit by Destiny, djWheat popped an IRL bloodlust and released a furious NSFW harangue:
“That was such a pussy ass bitch cop-out! I can’t even fucking… yeah that’s right, I’m wearing fucking pajama pants because I had to stand up for how fucking lame that actually was! How fucking, fucking lame that shit was!”
With words like those, the chances of something positive happening in response were sparse. But hope rose up for StarCraft and it took a Brood War Legend to do it. While so many of his peers are becoming a part of the League of Legends professional scene in South Korea – Bisu renewed his contract with SKT T1.
The Revolutionist, perhaps Brood War’s greatest Protoss players is practicing non-stop at the SKT T1 house. The know that a player that saw the glory of Brood War chose to remain as a StarCraft 2 player instilled a great deal of hope in the faithful.
“Thank fucking god,” said one commenter on Reddit.
“Long live Starcraft! En Taro Bisu!” said another, referencing the Brood War Protoss campaign. Another relic of Brood War returned is the Ongamenet Starleague.
Pitting former Brood War player SKT T1 Rain against a heavy StarCraft 2 favorite and Champion DongRaeGue, the first ever StarCraft 2 OSL proved that former Brood War pros can compete with the best of the GSL.
Perhaps the best in the world, Rain dominated DRG is a stunning 4-1 series. In spite of what many claim to be an imbalance in Protoss vs. Zerg in the late game, Rain proved consistency for Protoss in the latter stages of the game against Zerg.
Those screaming for a Zerg nerf may have to wait a bit longer.
League of Legends
Earlier this month, Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani created an “Ask me anything” thread on Reddit while revealing new information about the roster of CLG Prime. Most notably, Voyboy made known the recent acquisition of former StarTale AD Carry, Locodoco, as well as a number of position changes within the team including his move to the bench.
A few hours later, Counter Logic Gaming confirmed Locodoco as the newest member of CLG Prime as well as the new team roles Voyboy mentioned in his post.
Source: Team Dignitas
However instead of being benched, Counter Logic Gaming announced that Voyboy has been released from the team.
In a response to one of the questions in his ‘AMA’ after the press release Voyboy mentioned how he is looking to return as the hyper aggressive top-laner he was originally known for.
“Yes. I most certainly will be looking forward to returning to my old roots, hopefully with a new team that can embrace it,” said Voyboy.
Continuing reading at ESFI – the official news portal of the e-sports armies of righteousness – for more of the best coverage in e-sports.
28/10/2012 at 10:45 Ny24 says:
wtf?
28/10/2012 at 11:10 Calneon says:
Something wrong?
28/10/2012 at 12:35 Ny24 says:
It’s just that I read this site everyday, but I just can’t make any sense out of this post. Maybe it’s my English. Is it a review of things that happended on an event?
28/10/2012 at 13:17 Captchist says:
Sentences such as:
“While PainUser labored backstage in a futile attempt to give a moderate voice, djWheat, inControl and IdrA.”
28/10/2012 at 19:49 slerbal says:
It read like total gibberish to me and I worked in the games industry until just over a year ago. Very strange article that continues the tradition of representing e-sports as opaquely as possible.
Definitely not for me, though I hope it made sense to someone. It was so incoherent that if it had ended with “Feck, Arse, Gerls!” I would not have been surprised. :)
28/10/2012 at 15:57 field_studies says:
I suspected, until about half-way through, that this article was a parody of e-sports writing. I guess not?
28/10/2012 at 16:12 DrazharLn says:
Me too. Bizarre article, not worthy of RPS.
29/10/2012 at 14:55 Groove says:
Yeah, I don’t want to be a dick but that article was a mess.
Also, the entire article is about drama, is that really the most interesting thing happening in eSports? It might be nessecary to report drama to fill an entire site with eSports news, but it’s not the point of it, is it?
29/10/2012 at 08:56 Chalky says:
I second this, what the hell is going on here? I follow esports but this article reads like something that fell out of a spambot.
28/10/2012 at 11:06 Joseph-Sulphur says:
I think its important to note that BoxeR, aka The Emperor, the most famous Starcraft player of all time, is coaching both Rain and Bisu at the SKT1 house. What with that and DRG’s lackluster recent performance I think Rain was the favourite, not DRG.
28/10/2012 at 12:33 SuPerNoVi says:
I love posts about SC2 and I love SC2 :D
28/10/2012 at 13:48 Tom Davidson says:
In the future, please make sure that your e-sports correspondent produces articles that a) manage to provide some actual context; and b) are actually reviewed by someone with a fair grasp of English grammar and syntax.
28/10/2012 at 13:55 SuPerNoVi says:
And who the F are you? Jeez.
28/10/2012 at 14:06 jrodman says:
Some dude pointing out real flaws in this article? In other words, content > title.
28/10/2012 at 14:48 SuPerNoVi says:
He’s not pointing out he’s talking like he’s the almighty and everyone should do as he asks!
28/10/2012 at 14:57 Stijn says:
Hey, there’s a “please” in there, you’re being a bit melodramatic about this. The article *is* kind of hard to read at times, with paragraphs stopping mid-sentence and all.
28/10/2012 at 21:25 Stochastic says:
It seems like some sensible advice to me. I used to follow SC2 fairly closely so I was actually able to parse this article to some extent, but to an eSports outsider this acronym-filled post would be utterly incomprehensible. I’m okay with RPS reporting on eSports, but it needs to be done in a way that is tailored for the average RPS reader, who may know very little about the SC2 community.
28/10/2012 at 15:11 Sparkasaurusmex says:
Yes articles like this will bring down the overall quality at RPS. E-sports might be an interesting thing to report on, but not in this manner.
28/10/2012 at 18:59 SuPerNoVi says:
Fair point it was the way the guy worded it, needs to get off his high horse.
29/10/2012 at 08:08 smoochie says:
He’s not the only one.
29/10/2012 at 16:02 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Oh come on.. it’s fun to ride a horse that high!
28/10/2012 at 14:05 jrodman says:
Who are the images of?
Why is one picture sourced team dignitas who is not mentioned in the article?
Why does the article end abruptly with a “continue reading at..” link that doesn’t link to any articles at all, but the front page of a fairly impenetrable site?
28/10/2012 at 17:34 gjrud says:
The picture from Team Dignitas is about Voyboy, mentioned at the of the article. I don’t see any “continue reading at..” in the article, I even tried to search for it in case I missed it.
28/10/2012 at 17:47 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
Of course you didn’t, because it says “continuing reading”.
28/10/2012 at 14:20 eightbitrobot says:
I hope this all turns around and everyone in Korea starts BW again, never liked to watch high level SC2 – it’s boring.
28/10/2012 at 14:50 SuPerNoVi says:
I enjoy it a lot more than BW, different strokes for different blokes and all that!
28/10/2012 at 16:12 The Army of None says:
This article was strangely incoherent. Not like the normal E-Sports writeups here at all.
28/10/2012 at 17:19 Vexing Vision says:
I’m working in this industry for 14.8 years now, including on LoL Europe back when there was a LoL Europe, and I still have no idea what I just read.
Bemusing, most bemusing.
Something about pants though. This sounds fascinating.
28/10/2012 at 17:22 elevown says:
This article while of some interest, was disjointed and hard to follow. Quite a few errors seems like it wasnt proof read.
28/10/2012 at 17:50 Rudel says:
I guess I’m too old to understand this article or is this some sort of irony? Strange things happen…
28/10/2012 at 18:35 SkittleDiddler says:
Despite having a little bit of interest in e-sports, this bizarre article just highlighted my total ignorance on the subject. I think I’ll be staying away from future write-ups.
28/10/2012 at 18:54 DK says:
I still love how every Esports article is about Drama in Starcraft 2 and then equates that with “all of western e-sports”.
Thanks for the token inclusion of the most played e-sport in the world, but roster changes on one LoL team is not wallowing in controversy.
28/10/2012 at 19:33 Zyrxil says:
Not only was this article incoherent- having actually followed the drama it covers, the explanations don’t actually represent the full story of what happened or any of the context that actually caused the drama to happen.
28/10/2012 at 20:09 dE says:
I’d like to chime in here, I have no bloody idea what that post was about. Could you please include some rudimentary explanations what’s going on, for those outside of the loop? All I took away from that post is the info that some dude ragequitted and another had a hissy fit. Why? What was their motivation? What’s the actual background behind that?
28/10/2012 at 20:18 Antsy says:
It’s like reading a random page out of a user manual for a machine I’ve never heard of; written in Urdu.
28/10/2012 at 21:50 captain lust says:
Please just change the style instead of abandoning reporting on esports. I’m an avid RPS reader and huge esports fan but this article really lacked coherence and substance. Not to mention the opinions given were poorly judged at best. Infact the whole “incident” that went down wasn’t explained properly at all.
In reality Destiny had been called mid-show to discuss a reddit post he had made about the state of competitive starcraft 2. After a mostly civil, albeit unconstructive, conversation Destiny just made a stupid immature comment and then quit the call. After which, djWheat was left fairly enraged and justifiably so. He’s someone who takes esports very seriously and puts a lot of care into producing this show; having Destiny come on and basically act like a 10 year old is embarrassing for him and for gaming generally. Aside from that, the opinions Destiny gave and the manner in which he conducted himself during the discussion (before the “ragequit”) were far from commendable.
None of the above was highlighted in the above post. I’d prefer to go into more detail about the characters involved to give a clearer depiction of events but needless to say, I found the above version of events to be wholly inadequate.
28/10/2012 at 21:57 dE says:
Thank you for the actual background on it. Much appreciated.
28/10/2012 at 22:14 Xizor says:
As far as I remember.. Idra told Destiny to “Go back to LoL”, Incontrol went over to Idra and high-fived him on the stream.. Which djWheat didn’t even mention. Afterwards Destiny made the remark and THEN djWheat went full retard.
In my opinion it wasn’t even remotely close to being justifiable.
For those interested you can go watch it here (basically only 2-3 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MUWCFYjx5I jump to: 1:27:15 – the context is accessibilty and Blizzard being very slow at implementing things the community want.
28/10/2012 at 22:33 Zyrxil says:
You saw a different stream than everyone else, apparently. Everyone else is up in arms about how huge douchebags Idra and Incontrol were being, while DJWheat did nothing to moderate the show, and that Destiny’s quitting was completely justified. Besides that, Destiny made a strong argument about Blizzard mismanaging SC2, leading to declining viewership, leading to questions about SC2′s future as an esport. Granted as a non-SC2 player I have no context besides Destiny’s reddit post and the reddit community post slamming Idra/Incontrol/DJWheat, but going by DJWheat’s style of hitting on a team manager live on stream in front of 8 million people, I’m gonna say it wasn’t a random outburst, and he’s probably a fulltime douchebag and anyone he defends is probably also a fulltime douchebag.
29/10/2012 at 11:06 captain lust says:
By “everyone else”, do you mean reddit? I watched the video without having any prior expectations or reading anyone else’s opinion on the subject and that was the conclusion I reached.
Honestly, Destiny’s reddit post was an absolute mess and as InControl rightly pointed out, it hasn’t achieved and won’t achieve anything constructive. Saying “make or break” for anything is idiotic because 1) It makes it look like something is on the verge of breaking (which in my opinion it isn’t) and 2) If whatever is achieved or “made” doesn’t change much, it seems as if there is *no* solution to a problem, real or otherwise (HINT: Otherwise, in this case). Infact the best outcome to a “make or break” scenario like this is for it to fail and then for people to see that it didn’t make anything worse particularly. At which point the person who came up with the dumb idea of calling a “make or break” gets completely discredited. When he came onto Inside The Game, his tone of voice alone made him come across as an absolute moron. He sounded totally extremist and as Wheat said, dodged every counter argument made against him before just quitting the show.
29/10/2012 at 16:06 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Indeed. I do like reading esports news.. but this one was a bit of a mess to be honest.
28/10/2012 at 23:42 Web Cole says:
I would describe myself as a casual follower of Esports (I watched the OSL this weekend for instance) and I found this article a little difficult to get my head around. It does not do a good job of establishing context, and lacks coherence.
29/10/2012 at 08:53 Ny24 says:
Buying there is like having orgasms 24/7.
29/10/2012 at 14:48 Groove says:
That sounds so tiring, I’m not sure if I can afford to buy there just now.