A quick statment to keep in mind when reading this: This is not a direct attempt to promote my team whatsoever, but more of an attempt to defend the up and coming players in the North/South American WC3 Scene, who I feel don't get the respect they deserve. Unfortunately, I don't know the other American players as well as the players on my own team, so it's hard to really give specific examples of anyone outside of my own team, but I'm sure my reasoning with my players is pretty consistant of the other up and coming players from the North/South American Scene. Anyway, with that in mind, to the blog we go!
Recently, the North/South American Warcraft III scene has seemed to become more and more competitive, with additional players (other than the typical shortround and wizard, who have both already achieved great things at international LANs) being able to compete among the worlds finest ( Axslav, Hunter, Virus, lnclnerator, Nilknarf, PaTo, and Levin to name a few ), with results which would seem suprising to most people. While it may seem somewhat unbelievable that these not-as-qualified players are showing results of progamers in europe/korea, I think it's disgusting that 75 percent of the comments towards these players are made to discredit their hard-fought win. The excuses include, "oh the korean had 200+ ping vs a 30ping american", "the korean wasn't trying", or "he was obviously having fun with a new strategy in an incup game". Hopefully, I can shed some light into why I feel that these Americans are not getting the respect they deserve.
While the lag excuse is probably the most legitimate excuse among them all, but still not even close to a good enough reason to discredit a win taken in a league such as WC3L or a weekly tournament such as incup. First off, Koreans do not get 200+ ping on a good USWest host, It's actually a significant amount less than 200, around 150 or so. I know of this because of two reasons, my own uswest players on my own team (u5) have told me they get 150 or less ping on Kalimidor, such as Sabre and Nilknarf. Both Korea and the United States have pretty good internet for the most part ( Korea's internet might even be slightly better, but for this blog I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume they are only equal to each other ), so the ping to one another should be equivalent. It bothers me when people discredit wins that some of these players get, due to "lag", when I look at my players's smurf accounts on asia (For example, Sabrex = u5.Sabre, and HumanDynasty = u5.NilknarfLP*) I see them do very well against players from some of the best clans asia has to offer, such as, WE, lof, TmG (When it used to exist), and NiP, just to name a few. So keep in mind, that these Americans have approx 150 or so ping to asia, while the koreans have 15 ping or less to their own server. If the Koreans we just that much dominant, wouldn't they win everytime, since they even have the ping advantage now? While a win of a ladder game is much less important than a league result, I think this is still sufficient to say that the lag difference between asia and uswest is big enough to discredit a win, just because the host was from USWest. Another example, is something from a recent match from WCR Racewars, of lnclnerator vs insomnia, where some people were commenting that insomnia was at a lag disadvantage. This statement is completely incorrect, considering the host was actually from europe (Myth) and it was on GGClient, so I don't think it really matters where the host is from, since it will only be like a 5-10 ping difference anyways.
The rest of these excuses such as " He obviously wasn't trying " and " He was trying a new strategy in incup ". A player not playing serious in a tournament with a cash prize is completely rediculous. While it might not all be about winning, and having fun, any professional/competitve gamer's primary goal is to win. All of these "not trying" excuses are completely nonsense and I don't think I even need to go into detail to further explain this.
In conclusion, I really dislike the negativity coming from comments on fansites, with a lot of it even coming from our own home countries. As some wise man has once said " If you have nothing nice to say, then don't say anything at all. " If you do feel that there was some injustice that was in a certain match, at least back it up with a legitimate reason, with sufficient proof, not with the excuses that I listed in this blog. There is an explanation for this increase in the quality of American gamers, but it's 4:30AM and I really need to get some sleep, however, it may be the topic of my next blog. Well done to all of the North/South American players who have been doing well lately, and I hope we will continue to grow as a community and hopefully some day be able to fully compete against the the asia and european continents hand-in-hand.
Cheyne Seleski
u5.Newbiee
*All of the games played on HumanDynasty was indeed not all of Nilknarf's doing, but I can say that he did play all of them up until around lvl 31, with about a 70% win ratio in solo, with many wins against the best korea gamers of today