Monday, February 10, 2014

Progress

So, it has been a really long while since the last time I wrote a blog post. For a long time I delayed writing because I was waiting for my new mechanical keyboard to arrive. However, that got delayed by over a month and after that I kind of forgot about it. Anyway, here we are now.

Major things that have happened since the last post:

Team FN disbanded. It's a slightly sad story, however it has been a while now and I want to keep looking forward so I will summarize briefly what happened.
I felt that Chil's schedule did not allow us to train enough, and that combined with his attitude that can be quite negative during games we are not doing well in, was enough for me to decide to replace him. At first I wanted to simply try playing with a stand-in while Chil is not there to see whether we really could get more games in than usual, but Chil made it apparent he did not want a testing period and would rather have me just straight-up decide. So I decided to replace him. I cannot say whether it was a mistake or not, because, well, yeah we did disband shortly after that, but on the other hand I cannot say we were progressing all too much with him either. So in the end we played with the new roster for a while but it became apparent that the replacements despite having a better attitude were simply not on par in terms of skill. Love and I had a small argument that lead to him leaving the team, and, well, with only 2 original members remaining Andy and I decided it would be for the best to not play together for a while.

I tried many teams after that, some of them with great attitude, some of them with decent skill, potential in some areas, but none of them with every single required quality on every single member. It was no surprise, really. So, after a while, Andy, Love and I decided to give it another shot. This time we would have Martin who used to be our dedicated 6th and stand-in as part of the stable roster, on the support role alongside Andy. Our fifth player, the iconic carry that we had trouble finding before, turned out to be Ivan, or MinD_ControL. I played briefly with him in a previous Bulgarian team where he was playing support and I noticed his potential quite quickly. As it turned out he had been playing the 1 position for a couple of months so he fit perfectly. I must say we got a bit lucky because so far this roster has worked close to seamlessly and I can definitely see potential.

As for actual achievements in terms of tournament victories, unfortunately we do not yet have any. However, we have started playing versus solid teams and getting decently far in tournaments. Our first game versus a major team was our first game of the grid-phase of the Eizo cup, and it was versus Speed Gaming or as they are now known; Cloud9.

We lost, and it wasn't a close game, but the experience definitely payed off. I still think about that game occasionally, what we could've done differently, especially what I could've done differently to not get destroyed on mid in a match-up that should have given me the advantage... But at the end of the day nerves played a major role and I doubt many people could have performed much better if it were their first game versus an actual professional team in a tournament.

A few days later we played another game in the Netolic tournament versus Power Rangers, and lost that too. That game would have been a lot closer and even winnable had it not been for Love who had some mentality issues and got quite upset in the middle of the game as he had a bad start which he couldn't possibly recover from due to the attitude that followed.

Nevertheless, we are starting to get further and further in tournaments, playing versus good teams and getting our names out there. Soon are the Dreamhack qualifiers, and they are our shot at big exposure. If we win those and participate at Dreamhack, chances are we're looking at a TI qualifier invitation. If we win Dreamhack itself, which is quite unlikely but not impossible, then we may even be looking at a direct TI invite, just like what happened to then-NTH currently known as Alliance.

So, that's a summary of what has been going on with my roadtoTI4/5 recently, and I am happy that despite lack of solid results progress is definitely being made!