Recollections

Due to a lack of owning a digicam, I am sad that this BlizzCon blog would not have been as cool as all the other ones. So as a result, I’m going to sneak some pics from our BlizzCon camera man. Thanks in advance Plexa.

Day 0: Oct 16th
The BlizzCon trip started when I arrived at SFO (San Francisco International) at around 8 PM. Last Romantic was already at the airport for 30 minutes. Since he was busy finishing up an econ assignment, we just hung out around the luggage pick up area. Chill arrived from Calgary at around 9:30. intrigue was supposed to arrive at 10 but his gosu flight ended up delayed for an hour for god knows what reason. intrigue landed at 11 and the 4 of us got picked by thedeadhaji in his revving Lexus SUV. The five of us drove back to Los Altos to pick up SpiritoftheTuna from a dimly lit parking lot. Amusing thing was Tuna's parents weren't exactly happy with him skipping classes (high school student yo) for a gaming convention. I'm positive that his mom probably didn't think too highly of his son's (online) friends picking him up from some deserted parking lot at 11 PM.

With our group assembled, we headed to the best burgers in the west coast, the pride of Cali: In n' Out. intrigue, having visited haji before, enjoyed the great burgers at In n' Out before. We hyped up the food to our visiting Canadian. Luckily, Chill found the burgers were pretty good and fairly priced. Hype did not fail, win!

Our next stop was SafeWay for munchies for the road. Last stop of the night was haji's house. We ended up grabbing a few electronic equipment for the trip. Chill had GGPO installed on his laptop, which is essentially an emulator which he plays 3S on. haji made a stop at his house so we could pick up his arcade sticks, a PS2 controller and a gaming USB converter. With the proper equipment, we prepared for a glorious 5 hour drive down to Anahiem, with a stop at Six Flags for the afternoon.

Our seating arrangement was haji as driver, LR in shotgun navigating. Center row was Chill, me and intrigue. I held Chill's laptop on my lap while the three of us in the middle took turns playing 3S for what seemed like 3 hours straight. intrigue, a first-timer at 3s, just had to pick Chun. Fear the Fierce! So much priority. Oh and Tuna, poor guy had to take the bitch seat in the back with all the luggage. Alas, the pain of being picked up last.

We made a few pit stops during the night, once for gas, another time to stop by Denny's for a quick bite. We arrived at Six Flags Magic Mountain around 11 in the morning. The rides were fairly good but some of us were fatigued from the lack of sleep and probably slightly dehydrated as well. haji, LR, Tuna and I "bitched out" at 2 (how Chill put it lovingly on Liquid PodCast Ep. 2) and drove the last hour to Anaheim. What should have been a trip that lasted under an hour ended up being a 2+ hour drive. God damn LA traffic. I only found out later that semioldguy knew a "long cut" route that avoided all the traffic and took the other guys who stayed at Six Flags, to Anahiem in an hour.

We met up with a few other TL.netters later that night to pick up our goodie bags and entry passes for the next two days. zatic and Plexa have a wicked cool accents but that's probably because my ears are too used to American English.

I conclude Day 0 with 4 words: StarCraftII Beta Key, hi.

Day 1: Oct 17th
Anaheim Convention Center is a beastly building. Visiting for a second time does not take was from the feeling of how immense the convention center is. The center of the building (where all the action was at!) was divided into three areas. We entered at the right most area which was the WoW stage but also areas for StarCraft II and the Fan Tournament area. The center area was the RTS stage. Most of us ran between the right area and the center area, for SCII games and to watch the Korean progamers. The center area also has a section roped off for the progamers, a practice area. ToT)Cloud( sported a pretty nice ToT shirt while all the Koreans wore their team uniforms. All of the Koreans were rather short, save sAviOr and NaDa.

I started out Day 1 with 10-15 TL.netters standing in this long winding line that stretched a good 100 yards (or more, I'm bad at visually measuring distance). Some of us had a little bit of fun at the expense of the WoW players, in regard to their waistlines. In line was also where I overheard Day[9] talking to his mother which lead to the glorious thread of a progaming mom posting on TL.net.

Tuna playing a few of ZvT games immediately upon entering the convention center. 3-0'ed Tuna ez but the third game took too long as we missed out on IdrA v YellOw on stage. There was actually a lot of talk while we were waiting in line about IdrA's chances against YellOw. If IdrA could pull a win against the Koreans, a rusty YellOw would be his best bet. Chill lamented about the lack of results IdrA failed to yield while in Korea ("he played one of the best TvZ for a foreigner in game 1 in GOM but proceeded to play like a East newbie for games 2 and 3", I paraphrase ^^) and LR started to make bets on YellOw.

ForGG, my prediction for who would take it all this BlizzCon, choked utterly and failed to even show his face on stage. JangBi v NaDa was a killer match but JangBi was simply too in the zone for NaDa and NaDa was knocked down into the loser's bracket. Kudos LosingID8 for leading the TL section in the han-na dool set chants!

The rest of the day was just StarCraft II galore. I probably played about 40-50 games that day. The ironic thing was that in terms of line length, SCII multi-player was the shortest, single player was slight longer. Diablo II yielded a longer line than both SCII lines combined while WoW took the throne for longest line.

Our dinner plans was to meet up at the BJ's at Huntington Beach. haji's GPS was an instrument of epic fail and we ended up parking at some dead end street due to road construction and had to walk four or five extra blocks to the restaurant. The TL dinner had an impressive showing, much like last year's. Saw DJEtterStyle and omgbnetsux again, they were at BlizzCon last year too, always nice to see those two again. Quite a fucking pair of characters and I mean that in a great way. Too bad they don't post as much anymore.
Despite not introducing himself formally at the dinner, Zileas, of SC:BW beta fame, and a friend of his from Blizzard did show up for the dinner as well. But sadly they left before we took pictures at the end of dinner. haji is a hilarious drunk but he'd be even better the next night.

Day 2: Oct 18th
The highlight of the final day (besides another 50 games of SCII) was the epic sAviOr v NaDa Finals. sAviOr came out of nowhere to claim the winner’s bracket as his. Since falling to JangBi the day before, NaDa clawed his way back up from the loser’s bracket. I’m sure everyone knows the results, Ma Jae Yoon took it home in a decisive 2-0 manner. Apparently before the Finals, NaDa was asking how much the prize difference between 1st and 2nd was. When he heard it was $15K, he was like “oh shit, I better go practice then!” Not verbatim, but something similar with a joking connotation. All the TL.netters and probably the entire RTS area (I couldn’t hear over our own cheer) erupted with MJY’s “Hi, I Will Destroy Everyone In 2009.” The remainder of the day was filled with SCII.

Chill brought home a sick Kerrigan v Zeratul SCII poster the day before, so pretty much everyone went to the Fan Tournament area to win their own SCII poster. In the Fan Tournament area, you waited in a partially longer line than the regular Multiplayer area. When it was your turn, you sat down to play up to three games. If you won a game, you continued playing. If you lost, you got up. Win three games in a row, you’d score a nice SCII poster or a WoW poster of Arthas the Lich King, each poster $15 at the Blizzard Store!

At around 8, we were all pretty exhausted. In Chill’s words he was “all SCII’ed out and it would be too soon if he saw SCII again in another two months.” The group of us left Anaheim Convention Center two hours before BlizzCon officially closed. We returned to our Motel 6 to recuperate for an hour then we went to a nice 24 hour Korean BBQ restaurant, on the recommendation of LID8 and Brian, semioldguy’s friend. After we all ate our fill, we took our final pictures together and dispersed.

To a fabulous weekend: BlizzCon 2008, you were great.

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Photos


intrigue


Our gosu Men in Red, zatic and Plexa


LR and his progamer signed SCII poster


Standing up (l to r): LR, me, zatic, intrigue, Tuna. Sitting at the front of the table: CharlieMurphy. Sitting in front of LR: Pano!


semioldguy and thedeadhaji


LOL!


yo~


Chill


Final BlizzCon Pic

Units
Zealot: Still the staple ground unit for the Protoss army. I must say that they have a pretty ridiculous stance. Zealots now have one solid hit, as opposed to the quick double hit from SC1. Leg upgrade from SC1 is no replaced with Charge. With Charge upgrade, Zeals feel slightly faster in mobility (than without the upgrade), but not as fast as Zeals from SC1. The obvious bonus is that zeals now dash into combat when they engage enemy units. Not much has changed here though.

Stalkers:
The new dragoons for SC2, they even share the same dragoon death sound, sans the blue soup that we will all miss. No range upgrade present anymore, but instead they are given Blink. With Blink, stalkers are able to teleport a short distance away, granted that you have sight of the area (another words, you can blink to anywhere where there is no fog of war). I have great hopes for this unit and its ability. While pathing in SC2 has greatly improved, stalkers are still bulky units. However with Blink, they can teleport up to high ground to do a few raids, then run away. Observers with stalkers are a must. Stalkers have a Blink radius that is slightly larger than its line of sight, so take advantage of this with an observer. Not to mention blinking onto a cliff is not possible without an observer or a prior unit/building already up there.

An in-game experience I want to mention: against another TL.netter team I was playing, the other Protoss FE’ed. The natural was located on high ground right next to the choke, accessible by ramp. The Protoss FE’ed and cannoned on the high ground, making it suicidal to approach his base via choke. So I opt to build stalkers and an observer asap and managed to Blink up next to his expansion nexus, take it out, and blink out before his horde of slow zealots could take out the stalkers. Blink enables Protoss to conduct successful attacks on greedy FE players that build defense at a small choke only.

Stasis Orb: Not much to say about this unit, comes from Gateway and requires Cyber Core to build. It’s a flying unit that slows a single unit’s attack and movement speed. They are probably most ideal to slow units such at tanks or colossi that have high damage output with high cooldown between attacks.

Immortals: Protoss’s new anti-heavy artillery unit. I only built this unit twice and didn’t have much unit interaction with it. In the big screen SC2 demo that played continuously at BlizzCon, 4 Immortals took shells for 3 Siege tanks and all of the Immortals were still green by the end of the battle. It is still difficult to discern how much damage is required to activate the Hardened Shields. The obvious big units like Tanks and Colossi can be countered by Immortals though. In the same demo, 15 Reapers were able to down those 4 Immortals with minimal losses for the Terran. Immortals require the Twilight Council to be able to be produced from the Gateway. If these units were in SC1, they would definitely lead the charge for Protoss against a Terran siege, they are able to shrug off tank shells like nothing.

High Templars: Ahh, the elite Templars are back. Like the Zealots, I feel not much has changed for them. Again, they are built from Gateways and require the Templar Archives. HTs retain their Psionic Storm albeit with what seems to be a much smaller Area of Effect. Like WC3, AoE spells now appear as a circle so you know exactly what area will be stormed.

Playing testing the HTs really made me realize how much of an improvement Blizzard has done in coding SC2. Units are so very fluid. Both having used storm and have storm used against me at BlizzCon, units react very fast. If the player is aware and ready, it’s rather easy to dodge storms because of how well the units react. My best experience with HTs is to bring 2-3 HTs along in my army when I attack another player’s base. When Zeals engage in battle, I run the HTs around to the other player’s mining area and storm the workers. With a reduced AoE radius and what seems to be faster unit reaction time, storming workers seems to be the most efficient usage of storm at the moment. Granted workers have the same fluid mobility as I said other units have, but at 40 hp, workers definitely can’t stay under storm as long as say a Zealot. The most effective use of HTs at BlizzCon was doing worker raids.

Dark Templars: And what would the Templar caste be without its dark side? DTs make a return and like all the other units, they have a sweet design upgrade. Cloaked units are now clear and see-through. They are very, very transparent, as oppose to DTs in SC1 who were just translucent. Not much else to say here for DTs, they are built from the Gateways but require a different tech building in SC2: the Dark Obelisk. I guess Blizzard wants Protoss players to have to commit to one type of Templar early on before teching to the other.

Twilight Archon: Fuzzballs are back. Twilight archons are the new SC1 archons. Movement is smooth as ever and I believe they still levitate (though I didn’t test it against a Reaper mine). Their attack visual is a range bolt of energy, not as big as the SC1 archon’s shockwave but with longer range. Attack is still does a small area of splash.

The biggest modification done to Archons in SC2 is that they require any two types of templars: HT/HT, HT/DT, DT/DT. This certainly allow for greater flexibility mid-battle, especially with that one odd manaless HT that’s just waiting to be picked off. In a gas-heavy environment, if you plan on teching straight to Archons for whatever reason, it’s probably wise to go the Dark Obelisk route. Not only are DTs 25 gas cheaper than HTs, at least you’ll have an attacking unit around before merging into the Archon. It’s said that Archons have a built in Feedback in their attack; I wasn’t able to test this.

Phase Prism: A shuttle and portable pylon in one! It carries 8 matrices worth of units like SC1 and can be built straight out of the Robo Facility. I imagine these units are key in making Warp Gates effective in battle. Acting as a transport, free pylon for cannons, and warp spawn location for Warp Gates: I imagine it’s hard to find a late game situation where having at least one of these units not beneficial.

Observers: Same as SC1, though their new design reminds me a lot of Sentinels from The Matrix, tendrils and all. Has only one upgrade, sight only, iirc.

Colossus: The largest ground unit for Protoss. Very expensive and takes six psi, I had a hard time finding its niche in the Protoss army. From experience and in the SC2 demo video at BlizzCon, one of these behemoths took down a number of marines, no problem. But in another video demo, they were trounced so easily be zerglings and banelings. Countering one race’s tier 1 unit then being owned by another race’s tier 1 makes it hard to say what the Colossus is good for.

PHOENIX: Jesus Christ… if you somehow haven’t read the blogs of other BlizzCon goers, phoenix are a tier 9 unit, without a doubt. They cost 100 gas, which is pretty damn cheap compared to other flying units and require nothing else except the Stargate. To put things into perspective, Phoenix hit and run better than SC1 Mutalisks, have an attack range on par with SC1 Battlecruisers, and has better damage output than any tier 1 flying unit in SC1. With such stats, it’s no wonder that Liquid`Meat raped the 2v2 Blizzard Summit tourney with Mani. These units have no equal so far in the game.

A number of our 2v2 TL.netter teams revolved around building these POS and we gave a number of serious attempts to find a counter to Phoenix but we couldn’t find any. I found that Archons can stand head-to-head against them but the Phoenix’s mobility advantage is utterly disgusting. A pack of 6 Phoenix was enough to block any attempts to expand by the other team, if they didn’t have one already. 4 Phoenix was enough to take out a probe in one volley, factor in strafing and you’ve crippled another Protoss’s econ 8 minutes into the game.

The build that Hot_Bid and I utilized was Forge first, 2 cannons, Gateway, Core, 2 Stargates. If you don’t anticipate Phoenix coming and don’t have 2 cannons in your mineral line by they fly over, it’s practically GG. Hot_Bid/yubee team abused Phoenix even more by both doing defensive builds by covering their ramp, yubee would attempt to FE while funneling his gas to Hot_Bid to solidify air superiority and map control. Hot_Bid would then deny any expansion attempts by the other team while yubee took another base and continue to build something ridiculous like 30 Vikings. Their one loss came from CharlieMurphy/X_woof_X, who did a strong double 2 Gate rush and incapacitated yubee early on and then played defensively against Hot_Bid.

Phoenix have an ability, Power Overload, that does a small AoE damage to nearby enemy air units. Hot_Bid said the ability was unimpressive but a small fleet of Phoenix all Overloading was enough to take out all the interceptors in an opposing Carrier fleet.

Warp Ray: A new unit, but again, hard to describe their niche. Demo video showed 4 Warp Rays taking down 3 Battlecruisers with the 4 Rays in yellow and red condition at the end of the battle. They seemed to do more damage over time if they focused on just one unit, killing it, then moving to the next.

Carrier: Overall, same as SC1’s carrier. There is very little to say beyond that. Interceptors are somehow smaller in SC2 than SC1, I find that manually focus firing them would be nearly impossible for their size and speed. Good thing there’s hold position.

Mothership: At a whopping 500 gas, Motherships are the most gas-hungry unit at BlizzCon. They are no longer limited at one per game and I had the amusement of massing 6 of these in my first Protoss game. At first glance, there seems to be very little use for something as gas heavy as the mothership, but then again, didn’t everyone used to say that about Arbiters in SC1? The Mothership has 3 abilities: a stationary cloaking field, a large radius force field, and a high damage beam that damages anything right under the mothership. The black hole ability from previous SC2 trailers has definitely been removed.

Buildings

Thanks to Mani for taking the picture and uploading

Nexus: Same as SC1, probes are now hotkeyed as “e” instead of “p”. Etter praises God for this one.

Forge: Same three upgrades, weapons, shields, armor. No changes here

Phase Cannon: Photon cannons with a new mobility upgrade. Phase cannons have the ability to makeshift into a ball of energy and redeploy anywhere there is pylon power, this includes pylon power made by the Phase Prism. They cannot jump between the blue pylon power, the moving Phase Cannon must remain in pylon power.

Gateway: Ground unit production facility, can morph into a Warp Gate for a 5 second duration. While in Warp Gate mode, it can warp spawn any unit to anywhere where pylon power is present. After Warp Gate has been activated and warp deployed, it reverts back into a Gateway and there is a 20 second cooldown before that Gateway can be used again.

Cybernetics Core: Building for Air Weapons and Armor upgrade, as well as place to tech Warp Gate upgrade.

Twilight Council: The new and improved Citadel of Adun. Allows for Charge upgrade for Zealots, Blink upgrade for Stalkers, and Hardened Shields for Immortals.

Templar Archives: Allows for psi storm upgrade and additional mana reserves for HTs.

Dark Obelisk: No upgrades here, purely for opening tech tree.

Robotic Facility: Produces Phase Prism, Observers, and Colossi

Null Circuit: The new and improved Observatory. Allows for increased sight range for Observers and increased speed movement for Phase Prisms

Robotics Support Bay: Allows Colossi to be built at Robo Facility. Not sure of any tech upgrades here.

Stargate: Aerial unit production facility, same as before.

Fleet Beacon: Allows Overload tech for Phoenix and some other things I fail to remember.

Personal Commentary
If there is one aspect of the game Blizzard improved the most on from SC1 to SC2, it would most definitely be pathing and unit control. Remember how in VODs, we could see Korean progamers do crazy dances with their scouting probe? Yeah, you can do that with just about any ground you in SC2 now. Units respond to every click and order impeccably. I feel virtually no lag response each time I tell a Zealot to move from point A to point B or to take a turn whenever, wherever. Units not only move and react promptly they also succumb a lot less to bad AI pathing. Out of 25+ games, only once was there a pathing issue: that was when I place a phase cannon next to the wall and there was a small crevice where units could fit into but not pass through. A number of queued High Templars got stuck in there while Zealots were smart enough to walk around. I ended up killing the cannon and rebuilding it a matrix down and pathing solved.

I anticipate SC2 to retain the high micro feeling from SC1. The SC2 engine now utilizes the alt HP bar that is implemented in WC3. I found it very beneficial to find which enemy Zealot to blink towards and focus fire with my Stalkers. I definitely don’t find the alt key to be dumbing down any aspect of the game. If anything, it allows for greater combat precision.

Hotkeys have been updated as well. You can still bind to keys 1 to 0, a limit of 24 units per hotkey.

Thanks Hot_Bid for the screenshot

However, there seem to be an additional 5 tabs within the same hotkey where you can bind additional units beyond the first 24, to the same hotkey. I am definitely not a fan of that. 24 units per hotkey are definitely more than enough.

The main thing I would like to see changed is the macro aspect of the game. I echo the opinion of all the other BlizzCon goers: Macro is far too easy at this stage of the game. The ability to bind 20 gates under one hotkey and mass produce at a press of a key is just unnatural. My suggestion to restore some of the old macro sense from SC1 is to allow buildings to bind together simply for rallying purposes, but not for production. I find it ok to select all your gateways and have them all arrive at one key location or to have newly produced probes to all go your new expansion to mine. But macro does not feel like macro without 5z6z7z8s9s0s. Keep the mass hotkey rally, remove the mass hotkey production and I think some aspects of macro are restored.

Lastly, I want to share why I wholeheartedly believe Blizzard is looking out for their gamers and doing what is best for us. I am colorblind red/green. On jungle terrain maps, it is somewhat demanding for me to stare at the minimap since I can’t just glance at it. I literally have to focus on the minimap with the green background on. As a result, I have been accustomed to turning the minimap to black background since vanilla StarCraft. When playing SC2, I tried to shift+tab, it did nothing. Not deterred, I just moved over and manually clicked to change the minimap background to black. About 2 minutes into the game when I started to scout, I started to notice the minimap was different: instead of the solid black background like SC1, the new minimap I could differentiate between where I have scouted and where I haven’t. The areas on the map where I have visited had different transparencies of black; I could clearly distinguish the areas on the minimap. Such improvements are not something I thought of nor would I have asked for, but the fact that Blizzard pays such attention to detail and always looking for ways to improve the game sincerely impresses me.
I tip my hat off to you, Blizzard, you have one dedicated gamer who has been with you for over a decade and perhaps another decade to come.

Mmm, definitely an experience to remember and the highlight of my summer. BlizzCon 2007 would mark the first TL.net gathering I went to and the second time I met people from the site (the first time being meeting thedeadhaji face to face two years ago.)

I picked up Hot_Bid from SFO airport at 2 AM, t-minus two days before BlizzCon. He turned out to be quite a character; his online persona was definitely a mirror of what he’s like in real life. Confident and constantly scheming is how I’d describe him, haha. The day of his flight, he went ahead and posted a thread requesting TeamLiquid to design cheerfuls. Our goal was to at the very least have one for sAviOr and Nal_rA, if we got more, the better. Luckily, our calls were answered in less than 24 hours and we managed to get a cheerful designed for each of the Korean progamers.

The next morning, we went out for all-you-can-eat sushi and began our task of finding a place to print out the cheerfuls in color and have them laminated. The entire cheerful process made me realize how meticulous Hot_Bid is. It is no wonder the guy was able to churn out LiquiScoops monthly and heads the Final Edits project now. We definitely did not cut corners to get these cheerfuls done. Going to OfficeMax twice to redo XellOs’s cheerful wasn’t even a problem, we were going for perfection here, representing TeamLiquid. At the end of the day, we had six crisp, clean cheerful for the progamers. Along with a brand new whiteboard and a Staples Easy button, we were good to go.

Day 0
The drive from Davis to Anaheim is 443 miles, took us about six and a half hours, from 2 AM to 8:30 in the morning. We had good three hours before we could check into our EconoLodge room. A quick stop at Taco Bell for lunch and we were off to the Anaheim Convention Center. If we didn’t already have pictures on the site, it would be difficult to describe how friggin’ huge this facility was. 3 stories tall, 2 gigantic main halls on the first floor and various rooms on the second and third stories. Hot_Bid quickly whipped his camcorder and we began our quick run through of all the rooms.

We checked into the our room and crashed for a few hours. yubee phoned us around 2 in the afternoon and we swung by John Wayne Airport to pick his ass up too. When we got back, we saw Manifesto7 in the parking lot, apparently coming back from the Blizzard Summit meeting. The rest of Day 0 was waiting for other TL.netters to arrive. At night, Hot_Bid, yubee, Mani, Dknight, DJEtterStyle, omgbnetsux, Liquid`Meat, PanoRaMa, CharlieMurphy, PTC Hurricane, and I all hung out in Manifesto’s room and just chilled. We had a heads-up LAN setup where we took turns playing one vs one. Highlight match of the day was between yubee and Mani, with yubee taking it down 3-1 and spewing out shit talking galore. Good stuff.

Day 1
Eager to get there early, Hot_Bid, yubee, and Dknight left bright and early. I arrived at the convention center mid-morning and missed a few things early on. Upon walking into the main lobby, I must say the place was pretty damn packed. A Blizzard official who was handing out the passes the day before said that they sold roughly 8000 tickets for this event. Not bad… First thing I went to was the SC2 line. Played twice, one with Protoss and another with Terran, walked away fairly impressed with the game and have a lot of hope that SC2 will be more than capable to take over as the best RTS on the market. I found a crowd of TL.netters around the Pro Gamers Area where the Koreans were already underway in their games. My first impression of them was, “wow, they’re a lot taller on VODs, haha.” Height aside, they seemed like your typical Asian: quiet and reserved. In comparison however, the KTF guys definitely seemed more approachable than the CJ players.

Being a former WC3 player, I was able to follow along the Moon vs Grubby game before it got delayed because of a technical issue. But all in all, I have to say the game is not very entertaining for your average gaming spectator. 4:30 pm rolled around and a large group of TL.netters gathered on the ground smack in front of the center stage. TeamLiquid does not fail, equipped with a whiteboard and group cheers prepared, I am positive we made a scene during the first StarCraft broadcast. Props to Hot_Bid and his “Autocast is for Noobs”, “Real Men Macro”, and “MANI I STOOD FOR U.” Granted the last one was an inside joke, the crowd laughed with us whenever we put up a new sign. IriS v Yellow was a face trounce ez, but no surprise there. Storm Zerg’s muta micro could not match up with the Berserker’s macro and control.

After a few more hours of SC2 and the last game of the Winner’s Bracket, we all left the convention center around 10 and drove out to BJ’s for the TeamLiquid dinner. I sat with Hot_Bid, yubee, and the others and didn’t really have an opportunity to talk with the others but there was a good 40 of us at dinner at least. Thanks to mnm for setting it all up and a happy birthday to you. Hot_Bid and Etter did not fail in humor that night, “Hello, I am tawt incontrol” says it all. I’d also like to say sup to XG3 who sat to my right, we chitchatted a little and left me with a good impression. And CyRiC, it’s a pity I didn’t have a chance to talk to you.

Day 2
Face trounced. Curb stomped. Raped. Newbie bash. Call it what you want, but TL.net certain wrecked house on Day 2. After having a taste of SC2 from the day before, we were determined to pack as much SC2 into today as possible. We ran three teams: Hot_Bid/yubee, DJEtterStyle/omgbnetsux, and PanoRaMa/Neo. The six of us ran through every other non-TL team with ease, TL.net would be proud. We ended up playing at least 15 games each, I played Protoss in all of the games. Phoenix strongggggg. I’ll get into that later.

The progames were good, better than the day before. IriS definitely impressed me; he is now one of the few non-SKT Terrans that I would gladly cheer for in the future. His series against Nal_rA was good, though not spectacular. sAviOr vs rA on the other hand just showed why sAviOr is so feared. I’m glad rA went reaver/sair on Blitz X. I have no doubt in my mind that if I had to choose one Korean to display reaver/sair to the general public, it’d be rA and he surely did not disappoint. But even with great micro and control, the Maestro was not to be overcome. Game 2 was somewhat disappointing but simply solidifies the fact that it is exceptionally difficult to cheese sAviOr. We ended the final 4-5 hours of BlizzCon with more SC2. Definitely not a bad way to conclude the two day event.

Last Words and Shoutouts
I have been a TeamLiquid member for over five years and an experience such as this has made me glad I have been a part of this community for all this time. As an average gamer, I suppose I’d be as excited about the announcement of StarCraft 2, Blizzard titles have not failed me yet. But as a TL.netter, BlizzCon is that is memorable to me.

To those who came along-
Hot_Bid: Probably one of the most spontaneous people I know but at the same time, so very meticulous and driven. It was great having you drive down to Anaheim with me. Was definitely a pleasure. Best of luck in law school.

yubee: Totally surprised me, he talks more shit in person than he has ever in the past six months online, haha. Guess online impressions doesn’t always say everything about a person. Look forward to PvZ’ing you some more.

dknight: lol, some water will do you well

DJEtterStyle: Past exchanges aside, you’re a stand up guy. Never did have any issues with you in the past, thought I’d like to make that clear. We shared a warm parting in the end, didn’t we man luvr?

omgbnetsux: I give you the best TL.netter introduction ever.

PanoRaMa: Sup partner, let’s actually run a 2v2 team when SC2 comes out for retail. Epic hair indeed.

CharlieMurphy: Definitely not the SpoR/BloodBath/CharlieMurphy I imagined you to be, but for the better. Your antics will be remembered.

Liquid`Meat: You were probably the happiest person there. Always with a smile, cordial and totally approachable. I’m glad I was able to meet a foreign TL.netter, you certainly stayed in the US in style.

Manifesto7: Happy birthday TL.net dad, it was a pleasure meeting you. You are as humble in real life as you are online, TL.net is a better place with you at the reins. Btw, nice desktop, she is utterly adorable.


Until the next BlizzCon or TL.net gathering.
We'll be owning teh intarweb until then.