Hello!

Before you read the wall of text below I figured I'd let you know that I will add pictures later when I get home today, so if you'd rather have it easier for your eyes, just give it a few hours before going through it.

Here's the blog some people requested following the trip to Kuala Lumpur for Asia E-Sports Cup 2012 Malaysia. I will add a few pictures later today when I get home from work, since that was also requested by someone in the comments. I arrived in Kuala Lumpur after layovers in Frankfurt and Bangkok with over 20 hours of travel time, on Friday evening. I met up with the team, we had dinner and hung out for a little bit before going to sleep a little before 2am. Check-in closed at 11am, so our goal was to arrive just before that.


Petronas Twin Towers

Saturday morning we drove over to Invasion Cyber Zone where the tournament was held. We quickly found out about the new tournament format which was changed due to a lower team turn out (11 teams) and because the organizers wanted to finish the tournament in one day to save money on renting the entire upstairs area of the LAN center. Normally when you read about teams attending an event with a stand-in, it means they probably have anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks of solid online practice or even a bootcamp. However, not only had my team not practiced in months, but obviously I had never played with any of them, so not being able to play together definitely hurt us. Besides, I only had three days of CS after four months off so I was hoping to get in as many hours and matches as possible, but unfortunately that didn't work out.

It was a bummer that opposed to what the CyAC.jp site originally said, the tournament wasn't going to have two group stages and a best-of-three single elimination bracket for the top four as planned, but instead just a best-of-one double elimination bracket which was finished in one day. The map selection system also seemed questionable to me, as they used a veto system where the winner of coin flip (which was not me a 100% of the time) got to remove a total of 4 maps from the now standard pool of seven. In my opinion that is far too much power from something that's literally based on luck, especially with knife round still determining the first half sides. Luckily the system changed for our second match ups against Lucky5 and Hybrid (although I didn't think it necessarily made sense for the reasoning they did it, it was still a good change) as we could no longer play de_dust2 against either so the coin flip winner's power diminished to three maps.


View from Marina Bay Sands Skypark towards the Singapore Strait

We started off with a 16-1 win over Rebel on de_dust2 (14-1 as CT, 2-0 as T) where we didn't set up Mumble or any other voice com and I can only say, it truly felt like playing public. Next up was The Lucky 5 which featured my buddy Prasad "StrykerX" Paramajothi from TitaNs. We started off going down 0-6 and lost CT side of de_dust2 5-10, but played solid as terrorists and secured a win with a 11-1 score in the second half. Next up was the upper bracket final, once again on the map I despise the most in the game, de_dust2. We started similarly against Hybrid, losing 3-12 as CT but unfortunately losing a save round after winning pistol eliminated all chances of a comeback and we lost 5-16. After a few hours of waiting which saw the Hybrid guys say I looked dead from being so tired, we beat Lucky5 once again, this time on de_train, despite of losing yet another save round - this time against glocks. Grand final was fairly uneventful as we only managed three rounds as terrorists on de_train after losing yet another save round from a promising 3-2 lead (after losing pistol and going down 0-2) - had we won (I know, coulda, woulda, shoulda) I think we would have been lock to get 6-7 rounds. As CTs we fell short, losing 8-16.

On Sunday I went sightseeing around Kuala Lumpur and saw the Petronas Twin Towers (although I wasn't able to go up as tickets had already sold out for the day, sad face) and went to both KL Tower and Low Yat. It was really cool and I definitely wish I had more time there, so that will probably call for another visit later on. Monday morning I flew to Singapore where I mostly hung out around Marina Bay. Especially going up the Marina Bay Sands Skypark was amazing and it really surprised me just how western both these cities were, even more so than Shanghai. In my standard touristy fashion I spent multiple hours just walking around the city as well, trying to see how everything is - and being the architecture nerd that I am, there were so many simply mind blowing buildings in the city, even completely hidden within the city, outside of the financial district and the port. In the evening I met up with StrykerX who is local to the area and we went out for some drinks to finish up my trip before flying back home next morning.


Marina Bay Sands

After arriving home from the ~30 hour trip starting in Singapore, my teammate and fellow HLTV.org employee Maxim "mitz0r" Maximov was going through some of the demos for the tournament, and I heard the most disappointing fact about the entire tournament - I have my rates set in my userconfig as always, but I have a bad habit of not shutting down CS at all at tournaments, instead opting to alt tab out of the game when not playing. He told me that apart from the opening match against Rebel, I played the entire rest of the tournament (four matches) with rate 7500. Normally I think that would be something anyone would pick up normally as feeling off, but I suppose not having played for four months and switching from my 100Hz BenQ monitor to a standard 75Hz LCD made it hard to tell a difference. Obviously that is no excuse and it is fully my fault (assuming it was some glitch and someone didn't change my rates), but thinking back it is for sure annoying, knowing it probably messed up my game a little bit.

Playing competitive Counter-Strike is definitely fun and it's saddening seeing all these news about CS 1.6 tournaments disappearing one at a time. We're still trying to attend FireCore 4 in Manchester on 4-5th August but so far have no possible sponsors - if you're interested in helping us attend, you can reach me at paistit@gmail.com. I'd also thank SteelSeries for the new gear they sent my way this week; a SteelSeries SiberiaV2 Frost Blue, a new KinzuV1 and V2 as well as new NP+ mousepads for both me and my brother.


Downtown Singapore skyline as seen from Marina Bay Sands Skypark

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Cheers,
Tomi