Welcome to the second issue of the New Year!
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
Kau is mia this week apparently, so welcome to the magical cobblers land of PX.
Staff
Kau – Editor
ShoCkeyy – Editor
Bloodyc0bbler – The Stove/Editor
Nyovne – IRC Comments
NeverGG – Progamer Pics
Pholon – VOD of the Week
Grobyc – Ban of the Week
Vayesh – Academy of ESPORTS(retired ages ago)
LordWeird – Interview
meeple – Troll Booth/Shit Bus
Roffles – Troll Booth/Shit Bus
Fanatacist – Troll Booth/Shit Bus (banned)
DoctorHelvetica – Troll Booth/Shit Bus (resigned)
Thunk – Chalk talk
Table of Contents
Serious Business and Funsies ................ p1
The Stove .............................................. p2
Chalk Talk ............................................. p3
Semi-Funny IRC Comment of the Week ... p4
Progamer Photos ................................... p5
Random Image of the Week .................... p6
A Walk Down Memory Lane .................... p7
Troll Booth Willie .................................... p8
The Shit Bus .......................................... p8
Best of Blogs ......................................... p9
Ban of the Week .................................... p10
Vod of the Week .................................... p11
Academy of ESPORTS .......................... p12
Replays Time Forgot .............................. p13
Interview ................................................ p14
Who knew Economics was so hard
The other lethal side of disease, the medical side
Robot Sex FTW
A rallying cry for gamers everywhere....to smite a mom
Glider's art, deff a good watch
p1
Philly Burger
Ingredients
Provolone Cheese
Hot pepper
Roasted peppers
6 ounces of ground beef
Onions
Salt and pepper to taste
Directions
Turn the ground beef into a uniform patty, ¾ inch thick at most.
Preheat a grill or cast iron grill pan to high, and brush oil onto the patty, add salt and pepper, then grill till cooked to desired doneness.
Add cheese, peppers, and onions just before you finish.
p2
TvZ Lategame, explained by Ver
p3
p4
5
p6
p7
Flash in college?
Not exactly a troll.....but it scares me a bit
I can kill a squirrel with my fronthand loop
The Shit Bus
Teamliquid mods are generally known for their strict, no fucking around attitude around the forums. Everywhere you see a post in Red or Blue, you typically expect stellar posts, examples set for the rest of the community to follow. However, when machinehead arrives on the scene trying to hustle newb SC players for quick cash, the Red Army quickly mobilizes and all hell turns loose.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=109352¤tpage=2
In just 5 minutes, the Reds and Blues have completely shit on the thread in spectacular fashion, even giving spawn to a response thread opened by TL's own Chill.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=109357
Chill's Credentials? All-in'd vs JF when JF was 15 years old, discovering mobile photon cannons in dragoons, and beating Combat-Ex 3-1.
Later in the week, we saw a rise of Race ranking threads, led by the Ten Dragons Thread. Written in a rather professional form, the article questions whether or not Bisu should be even praised as a top Protoss Player. Hell breaks loose as Bisu fanboys and Roffles bashers come flocking to this 12 page shitfest.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=109569
This would soon lead to rather unoriginal threads made by random posters about their own rankings. However, those threads lacked the originality and legitimacy to make it in this section.
p8
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=109592
p9
Ganfei was just banned by SonuvBob.
That account was created on 2008-08-29 09:43:01 and had 1439 posts.
Reason: It takes a lot of dedication to be a total douchebag so consistently for nearly 4 years. I admire your tenacity sir.
That account was created on 2008-08-29 09:43:01 and had 1439 posts.
Reason: It takes a lot of dedication to be a total douchebag so consistently for nearly 4 years. I admire your tenacity sir.
p10
TSL Nony Vs Idra
This series is exceptionally done, best emphasis for games would be game 2 and 4
Vod of the week:
(P)GosI[Flying] vs (Z)EffOrt on New Heartbreak Ridge
+ Show Spoiler +
And check out the Day analysis Here
p11
Academy of ESPORTS
p12
p13
This issue of Pony express we bring you Kennigit. One of the various people responsible for bringing you the TSL. Welcome to the issue Kennigit, thanks for taking the time to do this.
Kennigit: My Pleasure!
+ Show Spoiler +
BC: With the TSL up and running now, I know it has created a lot of work for all those responsible with the endeavor. Could you describe what work is required to put together the TSL?
Kennigit: Everything we do or release publicly has had hours of discussion, tweaking, reworking, and iterating iterating iterating. Its ridiculously time consuming but at the end of the day we have a solid product that I think people appreciate
For example:
We spent 10 hours the day before the nony/idra cast fixing bugs, testing audio, and pulling our hair out with casting software that wouldn't cooperate.
This week is pretty nuts too with R3 and then Ro16 quickly approaching but we all get a big thrill out of the end result when we go live.
Theres basically two fronts this time around
The tournament side which includes all the rules, scheduling of refs/players/matches, keeping in contact with players, chasing them down when they don’t show up, figuring out where rules need to be implemented, drawing up brackets, discussing maps, tourney structure.... it goes on and on.
The side, which I’m more involved in, is the production side - all the graphics, posters, video, and streaming. That’s basically what I worry about - I was pretty stressed out during idra/nony. People don’t realize but while the observer is casting, we are in communication with him trying to correct issues as they arise. It's a bit crazy but a huge adrenaline rush.
The guys doing production are sick heroes so big props to r1ch, sigrun, and silversky
To give you an idea of how we iterate on production
+ Show Spoiler +
Final:
That’s just for 1 image during the announcement loll....
Hotbid has this phrase that we dread... "Hey, can you just change ____ to ____ just to see what it looks like?"
That’s the result hahah
BC: As you mentioned your part of the production side of things, how many people work on it with you, and who is basically the team lead? What role does said person take?
Kennigit: Well for art production, I’m the team lead - basically other staff come to me with things that need to get done for articles, broadcasts etc and I make sure that it gets done. It’s about 50/50 with doing it myself and delegating to one of the graphics guys depending on my workload. Usually hotbid and I go over it and tweak before it goes up. The stream/casting side is primarily handled by r1ch
But we all chip in a big. R1ch handles all the server stuff.... you’d be better to ask him about how it works - I know he has some scripts that load balance between our two video servers so neither gets too full.
We took a lot of feedback from the first broadcast - specifically people having issue on vista with WMP embed and in WMP itself. R1CH already has a solution so you can look forward to
That’s next weekend.
The other "official" team members are:
Sigrun - is doing all of the player portraits this time around. You've only seen idra/nony but the rest he's done look really sick! We've been doing some guessing work on what he should do next as we only have a week or two between when R3 finishes and ro16 begins.... trying to get as much done early as possible and finding work around
Silversky is my sous-chef I guess hahah. He does a lot of random banners and graphics that need to get done. If I don’t have time I can rely on him to get it done usually.
Then we have our regular graphics team who I grab now and again if it’s an emergency or our core group doesn't have time
BC: With all the work you guys have done, especially through the preliminaries, extra work was created for you guys via the abusers. We all know who they are, but when exactly did you become aware of the issue and how long were the discussions on how to deal with it?
Kennigit: We know immediately. I don't want to get too much into how we track people but when you have a wizard like r1ch on staff. We can see exactly who is doing what
So....
I was really pissed off and was demanding life bans for one in particular who has been abusing since 2002 and people don't realize it because he never fesses up...
We basically just bounced back and forth until we could all agree what punishments justified the crime and would help protect the integrity of our league.
BC: Excellent. I personally think they managed to get off a little easier than I wanted, but the punishment was a strict one even for a compromise. Now lets flash forward past the drama of all the eliminated players, and onto the standings. With the preliminaries over with, and the standings finalized for the qualifying round, what was your reaction to the player groups? Which did you think would be the most difficult group?
Kennigit: I guess group F or group L were the hardest imo. It’s disappointing that a few favorites got knocked out but that’s the nature of this beast. Thinking about it I’d love to have a few "wild cards" up top who some of my American friends may label as "terrible trash Europeans" haha.
To be honest I haven't even had time to go through all the replays yet to get a good feel for the games. The day they were played was a mad house because of idra/nony, and the next day getting set for day's cast. Overall though i'm pretty happy with the results.
BC: Yea, I can imagine. I remember checking facebook in between games of idra vs. nony only to be spoiled by inc's status.
Kennigit: yeah haha. I HATE getting spoiled but I didn't really have much of a choice haha.
I managed to keep the xiaozi r2 games unspoiled until day started to cast them so I enjoyed those
BC: Have you had the opportunity to watch the idra vs. nony games?
Kennigit: yeah I was watching them live spamming irc for changes intrigue needed to make on the camera and looking for things that were "wrong" haha. They were pretty great games though - I was really impressive at the level nony was playing at despite being inactive for so long and just getting back from a honeymoon
BC: I think we all were, the storms in game two were insanely well done.
Kennigit: yeah, kid thinks he's jangbi
BC: Speaking of Koreans, and I should say Korea in particular. Were there any complications getting a time set for idra and nony to play their series? Or complications during the series?
Kennigit: You'd have to ask hotbid - the first time I really had any involvement with the games themselves was when I was asking for the reps to be sent over so we could get the first match set up
BC: With the next leg of the tournament just a weekend away, are their any new things that are going to be implemented, or will it be a similar style to what we have currently seen?
Kennigit: R3 is going to be pretty similar except we'll have all 4 casters (Tasteless Day[9] Artosis and Chill) across two broadcasts. Video wise, it will be very similar.... Ro16 is the one to watch out for production wise. As these have just been qualifier rounds, they aren't "technically" TSL. We just threw this together because we thought it would be a good idea to
a) Let people watch these matches casted
And b) give ourselves some practice with more 'low key" games
BC: What all differently will you be doing in ro16, or is that going to be something you want to surprise us with?
Kennigit: hahah I you'll have to wait and see. It's going to be a good show though - tell your friends!
BC: most of my friends that are interested are already following the series haha
Since we know you’re a busy man, I would like to thank you for taking this brief amount of time away from TSL to answer just some of the questions that people would like asked. Is there anything else you would like to add to this issue?
Kennigit: My pleasure. The only thing I’d add is that I get PMs with some frequency asking how people can help with TSL without knowing what they should do specifically. Get the word out! Post on other message boards? LET THEM KNOW! Our prize pool DOUBLED from TSL1--->2.... anything is possible in the future if we can show that people are really interested. So yeah, start a thread, call your mom, tell your prof, etc… you know the drill
☺ Thanks for taking the time for this!
p14
Question of the Week
What new section would you like PX pick up next?
Also, for all sections missing pieces. If you have stuff to send me, pm it and I will edit it in.
Hope you enjoy the issue thus far everyone!