Fun in games

We all come from gaming industry and the first thing we were looking for as children was the fun we could extract from the games we were about to play. Now with esports comes a new phenomenon, I think Fun, meaning the pleasure you have while playing, almost disappeared, at least in the old sense meaning in WC3 and CS.
Let me explain my thoughts, there are many signs showing every regular player takes no pleasure in launching a ladder. Typical examples are bad manner issues, which come from two categories I think, the medium level one, and the high level one. I belong to the medium one (at least I think so :p)and I must say I'm sometimes really bad manner, especially in ladder, against guys I don't even know. Why? Because I put so much time in WC3 and i'm standing at the same level, so I'm pissed off when I lose. And I can say I really have no fun in playing. I go for some ladders, get a win, so I'm happy but fearing a loss in the next ladder, and if I lose, I'll get angry, and play more and more ladders until I finally win. Result of this to me : most probably a special feeling, mixing anger and disappointment, and no fun at all.
Maybe it's even more the case for very high level players, but this anger isn't reflected in ladder games (or rarely with few examples), but in tournaments. They all have this tension which forces them to play perfectly and this can be compared to a technic, a job someone does day after day, not thinking to what he does. It's now a real competition with winners and losers.
I don't blame the games, it's not the fact they're boring, imbalanced or whatever, it looks like in esports competition kills fun. This can be discussed of course but if you take other examples like in football, I doubt any football player will say "I'm bored of playing" because they do like their game, they have some real fun. Look at ronaldinho, he's so skilled and he's smiling all the time.
This shows maybe a point we underestimated, the physical activity allows you to lay oneself out (No, I didn't know that word until I looked for the translation of a French word in the dictionnary :p). I mean in sports, there's a beginning and an end, the end is noticed when you're so tired you cannot play more. In esports there is no end, so there's no sensation of accomplishment, or not fully satisifed accomplishment.
What keeps high skilled players playing can be sum up in 2 things to me:
First thing is the amount of cash you can make nowadays thanks to competitions. CPL, ESWC, WCG, WEG and some more tournaments can now provide a decent progamer life for more than one player. And it's not even the value of those earnings which matters, it's more the credibility you have regarding outside esports people. You can be proud of the rewarded activity you're involved in.
Second thing, prolly the most important one is the community. Many examples show how important it is to meet your teammates in LANs/tournaments. It's there players have their best memories. I know everyone's having real fun at ESWC/WCG/WEG/WC3L finals. Best example for that is ToD saying how much he liked to be in Singapore and taking some vacation in Korea with his friends there. And this is also where I set the difference between W3 and CS, between solo gaming and teamplay gaming. By the way, it's the social side which is more emphasized in team playing. You can't make a tournament alone. In WC3, you get to know people and have fun with them in offline competitions. Same for other games, this is where I see what I call fun now.



MCL Background 6

Final part today, so I won't flood SK Hot blogs anymore, so I'll talk about something we did but nobody understood.
It began at the end of the MCL 2 regular season. As I'm also a newser, I saw that ClanBase merged with Global Gaming League, involving CB to receive 50,000$ from the Americans. First, I didn't think of MCL but another admin, Fanspastic, who had already worked with CB in past spoke to me about that.
He gave the idea of joining CB. Let me explain you why I've been interested in following his idea. We had no real sponsor during season 1. Season 2, we got Steelpad but seriously it wasn't enough for players to get simple mousepads they can have thanks to their sponsors or whatever. So teaming up with CB could give us the opportunity to get a serious reward, cash prize.
Actually, it wasn't the main fact. We knew they wanted to launch an eurocup, team battle at war3. This would have meant a new competitor, plus coming from a company like CB, I thought MCL would die because every team would join CB Eurocup instead of playing an unrewarded competition. To be honest, I wouldn't have decided to go to ClanBase if CB didn't have opened a rewarded w3 team battle competition.
I knew their organisation staff is pretty reduced, especially in RTS games, this type of game they always more or less ignored. Those reasons are the CB merge explanations. It was definitely not a mistake, we just should have negotiated more, on CB page of course. A ClanBase sponsor could have been a better solution, I mean, keeping our old MCL website, and put some CB banners everywhere :p
Hardlife was involved in MCL organisation thanks to his website and I wanted to contact him about CB but he was in vacation so I wasn't able to get in touch with him though his point of view would have change my mind I think. I must say he also promised to upgrade MCL site by adding new features, such as community system, and brackets etc, he never did it unfortunately. So I thought he wouldn't do anything more for MCL, though he already had done many things^^ I've not been confident enough to continue MCL and not caring about other competitions. This is what I regret because finally I guess everything could have run fine without CB.
Well now, we can discuss if CB caused MCL's fall or not... I don't know, what I can say is that CB website, which is really really not good to admin in the best conditions gave me at least 3 times more work than before. For example, before, every replay was easily uploaded on hardlife's ftp via a simple script. You find the replay you want to upload, you click on upload, it's uploaded. The replay gets a unique ID, you only have to link that ID in the news refering to the match. With CB, .w3g files (replays) can't be uploaded in CB FTP, it only accepts .rar. That's a real joke. So as it would have taken too many time, I decided not to zip every replay but to upload them directly on my own provider ftp. That was long since I had to link them all in the main page, with full URLs. Not many differences with the previous website apparently....? Not really, only supervisor and co-supervisor can edit every news (edit to update with replays/scores). And cup admins can only edit their news. So, let's say tomorrow is 4K vs SK. If I and the co-sup can't be there for the match, nobody can update the news. Those things are really annoying and bother everyone in the staff. You can't work properly with such stupid features...
This can explain delays concerning real time updates during matches... And I don't even consider CB server lag, which is horrible.
I tried to contact them during the season to upgrade CB website, thinking it wouldn't be a problem because it's just some easy coding things to do. I only got non adapted answers.
So season 3 wasn't as good as season 2, even worse because some teams forfeited... oTp, Ownage "due to a lack of motivation" with zubie or zerter, don't remember, learning ownage left MCL in SK news lol -_-. The end was pretty funny too. Elakeduck who was still T64 had to sign his contract with SK at WC3L finals, not even one week after MCL semi finals. We set deadline for scheduling I think, one week after WC3L finals. But triMble was really angry because he wanted the final to be played before, otherwise he would lose his best player. SK wanted to play later of course... They could never agree on time. And as we knew T64 would disband, we asked SK if Duck could play for T64 a last time, they didn't want because of contracts/wc3l rule... Then T64 switched to fnatic, but many more players were in that team, and winner didn't join, so it was a different team. I knew trimble wanted to play the final with fnatic too so he didn't schedule in time and everything went crazy. With 64amd.ownitsch wanting T64 to play the final (don't know with which players since everyone left, only crimson was still there and inactive^^). And I didn't want fnatic to play so we finally gave mTw the opportunity to play the final and we gave fnatic the third place. SaSe was angry too because he said fnatic deserved second place money. I told him it was trimble's fault, who waited to create fnatic...
Well a bad ending, I just hope CB paid teams ^^ I think so because no one complained but how hard it was... I'm just wondering where CB spends its money on... Giving ennemy territory 1000 euros etc instead of paying for a new website really stuns me. I don't get it. Last things to say just before MCL's end were WC3L new announcments. I remember 2 weeks before I stopped, every day a new announcement lol :| 1) Register for qualifications 2) New format 4 1v1 1 2v2 3) WC3L to collaborate with Blizzard 4) Selected teams for qualifications 5) Brackets... Well every day i was more and more pissed off but I have already planned two or three months ago that I would stop after season 3. No offense to my MCL 3 staff but I think they weren't as motivated as previous staffs. (Yes, many things affect a staff league, such as social life xD or WoW and so on... all the time looking for new admins)
Now you know everything I know ^^ I'll just wish good luck to WC3L & WPL staff, because it's just so hard to run a league.



MCL Background 5

Wow, I finally decide to write this fifth part today, so in a few lines, you'll know all I know concerning the MCL and you'll be able to trashtalk me and the league as much as you want!
So I stopped at the end of the season 1. Just a reminder, the aim of the league was to gather the well known teams and the future great teams. But we lost many of the great teams during the first season. I've to explain why I wanted a season 2 to start because as I said previously, the very first goal to reach was to finish the season 1 and maybe stop there.
When you come to a project end, you're always glad and proud of what you accomplished, even if it wasn't perfect. I had some free time and was ready to begin a new season, like my whole staff. Something I definitely succeed in was the staff cohesion. Everyone was, I think, really happy to work together for the MCL. So there was a real will from everyone to continue together and lead this league to another level. We decided to put much effort in this new project, MCL 2. First step, opening registrations for the next MCL. Our question was easy : would we get back the great teams ? I already knew for a long time 4K wouldn't take part in the next season since they were in Korea, it's what Khaldor said to me, though I think they just didn't want to "waste" time to play MCL. This was particularly funny to point out because they still played WC3L. But I didn't care much about 4K, some teams were very important to my eyes, such as prestigious teams, SK, MYM of course.
I must say I think season 2 was MCL's apogee. SK, 3wD applied, MYM was missing, I didn't consider this as a failure and they left MCL with kind of agressivity towards MCL so this wasn't a big surprise.
So we began qualifications with 24 teams, from low level (Magic for example) to high level (SK). First disappointment : SK set up the worst line up ever for the first match against Boomtown. I was afk when my admins posted it out, what a "nice" surprise -_- 2v2 : HeMaN & bds, DominatoR and NuKe @1v1. Great great great, great credibility for the league. I didn't know what to think, "SK Must lose because they make fun of us" or "SK must win in order to have this great team in". At the end, after a very close clanwar, SK managed to win 3-2 but how hard it was. So I expected them to prepare something better for the next clanwars.
I don't remember many other things from the qualifications of that season except 3wD. Honestly, skedar and especially gh0st really bothered me because they were never able to get serious matches, well scheduled, decent line up etc... Concerning other teams, we picked up an unknown Israeli team. They looked good and at that time we didn't know how talentuous the players were there! An entertainting example : 3wD.eNvious 0-2 Daw.Cat. Okay that one isn't really famous, tell me if I'm wrong but I think he was the Israeli qualified player for WCG and wasn't ridiculous in SF. Another one, 3wD.eNvious 0-2 Daw.HoT. Haha, eNvious was so much angry that he never wanted to play MCL again. In fact, losing to HoT shouldn't have make him ashamed since HoT is the player we all know, SK.HoT. As league admin, the other staff people and I wanted great surprises, not only low level teams beating high level teams, but low level players beating high level players. For example, when I see SK 3-2 BTo, it's not good because BT didn't perform particularly well, they just won "noob" players (sry nuke and bds -_-). What could have been nice should look like BT.Revael 2-0 SK.HeMaN and I don't know, BT.Geeko 2-0 SK.MaDFroG ^^
It happened sometimes, but everyone explaining those facts with one and only reason : they don't care about MCL. Pretty sad to get statements like that. But I had one thing in my mind at that time tho : the league was rising in everyone's thoughts. More and more coverage, (even if we never got regular waaaghtv covered games in season 2), more and more interest and first rewards signs : I could say as examples interviewed players speaking of MCL or random warcraft 3 players refering to MCL while speaking of other matches. It didn't mean obligatorily they cared much about MCL or followed it, it just meant they KNEW it. It was the first step.
Coming to MCL 2 regular season's end... I've nothing special to say concerning the season itself. It ran perfectly, just some unavoidable delays but at least, no one forfeited and took more or less seriously the league. Moreover, MCL helped discovering new talentuous teams, es4x and DkH are most probably the best examples. KidArctica came to SK.w3's head during the season and she managed to get her clanwars played in the best conditions, players on time, good line ups, manner.
For the final, we were afraid to try again our innovative system with 2 mini clanwars so we didn't take any risk and scheduled everything on the same day. 64AMD won but before, we were already discussing with ClanBase about a merge.
/Tired now. Looks like I'm going to write a sixth part later ^^ Sorry :p



MCL Background 4

I'm back! Sorry for every reader who doesn't care about MCL and/or league stuff. Don't read, or don't comment =)
So aAa replaces SoL in group B while SK decided to leave. Big disappointment because losing a team for reasons like that always hurt since most likely they won't come back for next season.
2 weeks later, for playday 3 I guess, I-eS was facing off dp (darkpraetors) which used to be a very small clan, mostly composed by Swedish guys, from northern division. (They had one of the best 2v2 in Europe at that time ! Figuren & xzidez !). The clanwar was more close than predicted because it ended at 2-2 and the last solo, delicato vs. neonik was postponed. Scheduling it caused I-eS departure from the competition. Once, both admins told me the game was scheduled. DeliCato didn't show up on time. Dp said "ok np, we reschedule it" so did they. But this time, it's neonik who didn't show up. But DeliCato wanted defwin, of course I refused, it was pretty unfair. After long discussions with I-eS admins and Delicato himself, I-eS decided to leave, letting us with already 2 forfeits and one replaced team. This was a pretext of course, they just didn't want to play MCL at all.
Once I went out (yeah this is rare enough to be noticed xD), moving to see some family and just before I took the train, I received a stunning SMS from Toof (he helped out much to reborn MCL and is now Guardians admin), saying "mTw leaves". I knew more or less for SK/I-eS, it was predictable, but mTw leaving was totally unexpected, especially since they have scheduled, played and managed to win their matches. And they had a normal roster, I must say I was very angry because the forfeited teams counter displayed 3 now, and all of them were very high level teams. And without those teams, nobody would cover up MCL.
I really wanted to stop MCL there, wondering if it was worthy to spend hours and hours to get only a lack of respect from the players. I'd say players and maybe people in general don't see how esports are mainly running benevolently. They don't pay anything to play and never realized how many unpaid guys worked for their (players) own pleasure.
Surprisingly, among high level teams, one didn't cause much trouble. I'm talking about 4K. Khaldor, I think, was quite interested by the competition for two reasons. First, MCL meant a new title for 4K, though there was no reward. And second, he was and he still is a headadmin from gamesports.de, and the German coverage page wanted to get exclusiveness for MCL. I just remember one chaotic clanwar, 4K vs. GG. As we (Toof and I) wanted to get in touch with the players, we decided to go to Akyrion, goodgame former cybercafe. Moreover, it would prevent gg from cheating as they were all playing from the same place. We got unlucky ^^ Khaldor wasn't even there to give me his line up. And lol... his friend Baschi queried me on IRC to give 4K line up. And of course, a sucky one. Grubby wasn't in the list. He only began to play MCL from playday 5. Myth was there and lost against ChobO, but Myth wasn't a solo 1,5 year ago. FuRy was in the line up but he didn't show up, I talked with him after that and he said he wasn't not aware of any clanwar. Zeus won against Wolf, 2-1.
Let's talk about MYM. QuiSh tried to get MCL clanwars played by his team until playday 6. Then he said he wanted to forfeit but it would have been really TOO sucky to announce a new forfeit one playday before the regular season ending. So we just gave a freewin to DkH instead of reseting every MYM points. Yes this may not look fair but if you were in the same situation, you would have probably do the same.
Well this first regular season ended up around mid july. Quarter finals were held easily, we would just have wanted a Bracket on the website but hardlife was busy and couldn't work on it. Mouz won over IT, DkH team who wasn't well known, won over DSky, a-L won GG, in a very close match. Last match made no suspence since 4K's opponent was tuRs.
Semi finals were won by Mouz, over a-L, and 4K, over DkH. For the final we wanted something big, between Mouz and 4K. As there was no loser bracket, a special format was the best we could think of (Thanks Jayce though it didn't work well^^). Two parts, with 2 1v1 and 1 2v2 each. Players who took part in the first part can't play the second one, so it's all about match up. If there's a tie at the end, both teams choose one player and a "super duel" in best of 5 gives the win. 4K won the first part while they were in Korea, in October, with some impressive score 3-0 6-0. ToD 2-0 Shortround, FoV 2-0 Panic, Grubby & FuRy 2-0 HasuObs & Pun1sher. But ... we were never able to schedule the last part. Korean tv leagues and all stuff made it quite impossible though i harrassed Khaldor (who moved to Mouz) since he knew every player.
So we had no winner ^^ Khaldor finally chose to let the win to 4K. That's the end of the first season which was really tough for admins, and team admins, handling with motivation problems. MCL admins were both happy to see this season going to its end but also disappointed concerning the amount of problems. I'll finish this mcl background in the fifth part.



MCL Background 3

Time to write another part of the great saga "MCL" now xD.
Okay so, we were about to start what I call the true beginning of MCL 1. This starts on April 2004, with the new page made by hardlife. We decided to change the rules, and especially the tournament structure. It was supposed to work like that : 8 groups with 4 teams (that's the stage we were in trouble with), then the two best teams of each group get qualification for another pool stage, composed by 4 groups of 4 teams. Finally the two best teams of those new groups make it to a bracket, starting as quarter finals.
We had to change those plans because so many things didn't stick to the idea I had from a valuable league. The main issue was the groups. Groups are not the best way for sure. When you have 4 teams in the same group, if a team loses its two first matches, there is a very high probability that this team will leave the competition, and so forfeit its last match. This involves that the team's last opponent will get 5 points without playing. It gives some wrong rankings and everything makes no sense. That's why I (when I say "I", it doesn't mean I'm alone taking those decisions, it refers to other important admins) thought dividing our 16 qualified teams into two groups of 8 would decrease the risk of forfeit teams, at least by loss streak of a single team.
I didn't want to have a too long season. We were already very late (omg something like 5 months to come to first group stage's end xD) and adding 7 playdays (7 weeks) to the final single bracket would lead us to nearly 3 months. Keep in mind that at that time, we were still not sure to continue after season 1, so an as fast as possible season was our main priority. My wish was quite a simple thought, finish what you started.
I have to add a last important thing : I knew our biggest problem was the following one: We were afraid to see teams running away when their managers would know that the promised cash prize (600$) had vanished with NarKotiK. But even without cashprize, we wanted the league to go to its first season end.
To avoid any unwanted forfeit, we asked EACH team, and I really insist on this fact, if they still wished to continue playing the league. To us, it was easier to replace a team before the launching, and to be sure to start on solid basis. I must say we didn't say anything about the cashprize and no one could consider it bad since every team (maybe except one, I don't remember) never asked us if there was any kind of prize, prolly supposing there would be nothing. It didn't matter at all.
All of them said "yes, we want to continue playing the MCL". We didn't expect that from every team but that was a nice news, at least we thought it.
The participating teams were the following ones : 4K, SK, mTw, DSky, DkH, dp, Mouz, plan-B, sTar, eXe, I-eS, tuRs, MYM, SoL, a-L and IT.
We were pretty excited before the first match serie and made some heavy advertisement on the most important esports pages.
We set the dates to schedule/finish the first clanwars, expecting surprises to make the interest for the league bigger. And from that side, we weren't disappointed... SK vs. I-eS showed the first signs... Very hard to schedule even though NuKe, who is French and supported more or less MCL, helped a bit. So on the match day, I was disappointed because some SK players weren't there, and that match was really important for MCL since it was definitely the match of the week. Seaweed, Insomnia and ZeeRax didn't come. Other games ended like that :
SK.FaTC 1-2 I-eS.DeliCato
SK.HeMaN 1-2 I-eS.SjoW
SK.SuRviVoR & SK.DominatoR 1-2 I-eS.DeliCato & I-eS.SjoW
You can ask me the replays if you want ^^ They're still on hardlife's ftp. (Don't know which patch it was, maybe 1.14 or 1.15...?)
Other games were unfortunately postponed. Anyways, that 0-3 score was unexpected and it didn't help out to schedule the last games. A few days ago, we got confirmation about what we had no doubt on : SK left the season.
Must be a week later when we are forced to replace SoL, totally inactive team since udlol's inactivity. Buchta and the others weren't available to play. As we already got one forfeit team, and as it was only the second playday, we invited aAa to replace the Italian team. They seemed to have the same level and they didn't care about rankings, their manager, BaDGui, told me it could be an interesting European training. So they started with two losses 0-5 because there was not enough time to schedule & play both previous clanwars. But this was just a beginning and I'll speak about what remains in the next days.




MCL Background 2

Here comes the most chaotic part of MCL. As I said, we were just a couple of admins (motivated), ready to give our best to do something. But many questions didn't have answers. It must be something like 11 pm, in the end of January 2004 I guess, NarKotiK left our private channel, and #league.leader (key beta :p), the team admins private channel.
Should we continue running the league ?
If yes, how could we proceed since we don't have a website anymore ?
Are the teams motivated enough to finish this season ?
Must we finish the first season and call it last ?
It was pretty funny at that time since the website of NarKotiK (http://www.gamers-arena.com/) went down and as he didn't want to speak with us, we couldn't have every results. This means we had no backup of the matches, and even the pools. I just remember ChecK made an html website, very ugly of course, made in 2 hours. We just tried to gather the last results, to ask the teams. Our first wish was accomplished : we wanted a dedicated MCL website. This made the difference compared to gamers-arena, which was also a french warcraft 3 news page. That was the first step. Meanwhile, we managed to get some clanwars closed. Many times we thought of closing the league, because it used to be the most chaotic league ever. I remember some games where the players asked "what league am i playing for?". What a reward!
Now that it's over I can explain how lucky we got concerning a clanwar in group 1: SK, pG, IT and TeG were the teams fighting for the two qualifying slots. SK got qualified really easily, as expected. But the last three teams were quite far from SK level. pG was the clear favourite but no one should have underestimated IT and TeG. IT already had one of their future key player, Creolophus. Anyways during pG vs. IT, RaGe (yes the great lamer we all know) who was pG's leader aswell was trashtalking all the time and pissing me off, same for IT members. It was more than funny teasing so I warned him : "stop trashtalking now or pG will get a default loss on that bo3". Of course he continued and finally I had to make my threat taking effect. With this loss, pG lost the clanwar, and the slot for the next stage. IT got qualified and it was a real surprise for that unknown Norwegian clan (at that time!).
I developped that part because you've to know that MCL new website (yes, the best one, used for season 1 and 2) hadn't been made by any MCL admin. I would say... 1 week later, I got a query from hardlife (IT's manager) proposing me an interesting offer. To sum up, it was something like that "Hey, I'd like to help MCL." My answer made no doubt : "yeah sure, about what?". "I can work on a new MCL website". I was a bit astonished, feeling "yeah some good news". Hardlife continued "I take 100$ per hour". Haha, "OK" he wanted us to pay, better forget that, that's what I thought. So I had to tell the truth "We got no money for the teams, so no money to pay a webmaster". Keep your eyes open, he said "I'll do it for free since I want to see MCL bigger".
2 days after his proposal, he queried me again and showed me the website design. It was very innovative and much more better than our old html site. Those new features were really corresponding to a team league website. Classic pages with teams, rules and so on, and some details which were appreciable. For example, the micro gif, able to be linked to a shoutcast ip. Well, that was really amazing. Moreover, he also hosted it on his own server. If you're nostalgic, the same design is now used for the Norwegian Clan League (http://ncl.demofreak.com). I have to give more details about the pG match / the site. I have no idea if it was directly linked or not but I must say I don't have any regret concerning my decision, pG, because of their manager's stupid attitude deserved this penalty.
Now that we had the main thing to run a league, the website, we tried to improve some specific points. This knowledge is important, and I'm sure Baschi and the whole WC3L staff understood it very early. I could give coverage as an example : no one spoke of MCL, didn't even know it, or was talking shit about it. We decided to contact some websites to get special coverages. The idea was to get some advertisement, with two goals in my point of view. First one was to keep MCL staff motivated, it's not so easy sometimes. Second one was to give better impressions from the MCL in the community so the players would respect it more and would care more. You can comment if it worked or not, we could say it failed since MCL doesn't exist anymore but I wouldn't say it because there are many more factors to analyze.
There are still many points to add, but I'll continue later.



MCL Background 1

Hey, to try this new SK feature, I'm going to present my own organisation experience in wc3 competitions. I don't know how long it will last, maybe i'll divide it in several parts, no idea yet.
I feel like writing some lines about the MCL. Yes I was the headadmin of the Master Clan League, that team league many teams denied, and so did the gamers.
First of all, let's talk about how it started. It must have begun somewhere in November 2003. I read a news on gamers-arena.com speaking of a newly built league, called MCL, run by a well known French organisator, NarKotiK. He had already created a community website and many people were playing his tournaments. For the old guys still standing up, it was LiN clan related.
Anyway, let's continue with this stuff. The news I read announced every top team playing that league. I once thought about joining WC3L staff, but it looked like it was a bit closed and the selection was pretty tough, at least it stood for what I had in my mind, like in most unknown warcraft 3 player. The so called news invited Warcraft 3 gamers, French ones, to admin that league. I took up my chance and said "ok, gogo, I'll be able to obs the best gamers in Europe/USA". This was my main goal. During that time, I was considering myself as a player trying to get better by every mean. Then, after some kind of stupid tests (English testing by French dudes who didn't even know how to say "lu" in English :p), I was "selected" if we can say it was a real selection to admin the league, without knowing what it really involved. We can say I was a bit disappointed by the messy ambiance of the irc channel and the lack of preparation concerning the upcoming first season. Actually, not even the league website was online and ready to work. The project looked too ambitious for only one man, NarKotiK.
He was the guy who seeked for sponsors, helped by WaRiO. He was the guy who coded the website. He was the guy who got in touch with the teams. To sum up, the league was going to run 100% thanks to him. I must say that wasn't what I expected but it was better than nothing and for the first time he gave some responsibilites to his new admins. I had to take care of group 5, composed by 4 teams. You must know at least two of them, Destination Skyline and a-Losers(.MSI lol Nifler/Mars). The last ones were rising Legends and Net in Game. As you notice, only one is still alive, a-L. More or less ironic, maybe one warcraft 3 gamer out of four should remind the MCL^^.
The beginning of the job consisted in getting in touch with the team leaders to schedule the clanwars. If my memory works well, I guess it was Blue/Bluft for DSky, Nifler/Alex for a-L, Kymkid for NG, but I don't remember rL admin... Blah, no one cares. Hmm it's a blog, so nevermind. I soon realized I got the toughest pool to run for some reasons. For example, NG was about to die and the manager didn't care much about his team anymore. What should happen happened. (Translation from French, don't know if it can be translated ^^ Well who cares, my English is far from being perfect) NG died some days after the MCL launching. As far as I remember, I'm not even sure they played a single match. That's not the point. Concerning a-L, it was more or less hard to schedule because they felt to be one of the greatest team in Europe, though they were declining for some months already. So they didn't help much in the first weeks. DSky was a growing up team, many talented players (eNvious, Chemi, Satiini, AbuserElf...). I'm not sure if DIDI8/Demon already teamed up with DSky at the end of 2003. Anyway, they didn't care about MCL, at least, not enough. But I managed to get my pool over within a decent delay.
Meanwhile, other admins (Jayce, Chris C etc...) did the same and we were more or less lucky thanks to the dead teams. Yeah, everything is going faster when a team dies in a pool of 4. It means 3 matches vanish and it's always a good news when you have a reduced staff (don't think there were more than ten active people in the "first" MCL) to take care of 8 pools, 32 teams from all over Europe.
Everything wasn't over yet, but we were all feeling that NarKotiK was more and more pissed off by the MCL, and considering how he put so much effort in running the league, I couldn't agree more. He admined many matches, sometimes alone and admining alone when you don't have a proper website also means you won't be able to provide a full replays page. I would say I was very motivated to make something big with the MCL. There was some contrast between him being more and more unmotivated, and me becoming more and more implicated.
One day, he gave up. He threatened the staff several times, announcing he would leave if he wasn't helped more. I can't precisely evaluate if he was actually needing more help or if it was just some whine. Anyways, he left the private channel, then, every MCL related channel, leaving us alone in front of a league which didn't even reach its second pool stage. So what to do? I'm a bit tired, so I'll answer to that question later.

http://www.sk-gaming.com/rss/blog/wanzerg

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