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Swedes Dominate Counter-Strike Championship
fluor2 writes "'Guys, somebody stepped on a switch. I'm not kidding; someone actually stepped on a switch and unplugged our network!'
These are not the words one would like to hear from one of the staff in the middle of Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) Extreme World Championships $100,000 Counter-Strike finals. But it happened. Finally, after the game was restarted, Team Eyeballers (Sweden) is the new CPL CS Champion over Schroet Kommando (also Sweden), winning (7-5;6-0)." Update: 08/02 01:06 GMT by S : There's a more detailed report over at Gotfrag.
The Koreans are unbeatable at Starcraft and to an extent Warcraft. Not surprising considering Starcraft is the national sport in Korea. Matches are shown on public TV, game replays of top players are recorded and sold as DVDs, some players have insured their fingers (the best korean player's fingers are insured for 80k$). Starcraft is as big in Korea as any other national sport.
Speaking of Swedes, they are known to be good at CS. They have LANs there with 1000+ PCs for CS only.
In counter-strike aim, anticipation, and teamwork are the most useful. Headshots are usually instant kills, so aim is very important. Anticipation is knowing the maps and position your characters accordingly. The person that knows where their enemy is coming from is going to get that split-second advantage that determines life and death. Teamwork is also critical. In CS you have objectives - plant the bomb, rescue the hostages, stop the other team, etc.; you can't complete the objective without teamwork.
www.gotfrag.com has full coverage of the event - download the MFAVP videos on the right(you need an account on the site, it's free, and gives you access to most of the event videos except those marked with a p). The videos cover the matches with a mix of ingame clips, interviews, and footage of players during the matches.
-tso duong
It wouldn't have mattered. Swedish CS teams has played vs the best Chinese and South Korean teams and won convincingly. The asians just has not got what it takes yet to play FPS games on the same level as Europe and USA.
They are actually behind in this respect...
While I've heard that from Slashdotters, most people I've talked to who actually live in Korea say that pro gaming is nowhere near as huge as it's made out to be. Games are shown at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and most regular folks would much rather play a game than watch one. Pro players are famous among avid amateurs, but the average person on the street couldn't name a single pro gamer.
I just got back from watching the finals at the CPL, and team EYE was ahead 2 to 0, and they were showing off with some cool jump-on-top-of-each-other-to-get-to-higher-places moves, and then all the computers simultaneously crashed, on live TV and radio, into a "Net Packet Error."
A loud mixture of booing and laughter erupted from the crowd, and several anxious looking guys ran up to the computers to figure out what happened.
About five minutes later, the founder of the CPL gets on the PA system and says that the round will be restarted, and the scores will be reset to zero-zero. There was more booing, and some team EYE member made snide comments about the CPL over team-chat.
The founder then gets back on and says "the press is no longer aloud on the stage. The reason for the earlier crash was that a cameraman stepped on a router and actually unplugged it."
I'd hate to be that cameraman. Fortunately, team EYE won anyway (although the other team [team SK] scored 3 times before team EYE got back into their game.)
I've played in competitive rtcw (including getting creamed in the first rtcw tourney at quakecon) and I've spec'd a few really great players in my day. Its a combination of practice, understanding and properly executing strategies, amazing eye-mouse coordination. Some of the best can spin around and know exactly when to stop to fire at someone's head, whereas other people see a blur. Reaction time does help in some situations, but thinking and executing a strat in many modern games is just as important. The great teams usually practice and scrim every night. They can spent 2 to 3 hrs a night scriming different teams to try new strats and prepare for upcoming matches. You have to have a lot of time to be in the top tier of players. The greats (especially in fps) know how to configure the client to better enable them to play. There is a real art in modifying a quake3/rtcw/rtcw-et/... config files to provide the most fov, lighting conditions and tweaking of their mouse settings. There are some settings that are outlawed, where as others are accepted in the community. Many of the competitive gaming leagues have published configs for the servers. Finally, the type of computer isn't that important (as long as its above the minimum requirements). The ping does, however, and many teams fight about which server they use to play their matches, hoping to give them an advantage in the game. There is definitely homefield advantage when your team has the best ping.
The Swedes also dominate in Quake (i.e. Quakeworld). I think their entire country is wired with high quality inexpensive broadband. Hence they all get round-the-clock LAN practice, which is great for training for competitions that are usually held on LANs.
Not true. I have friends (Swedish as it happens) who live in South Korea who says Star Craft is just as big as it is made out to be. They show games in the evenings and a lot of people watches of all ages. If you go out to bars etc, it's not unusual to have SC running with a lot of people watching.
As a a sidenote, Sweden is right up there in Star Craft and Warcraft too, though of course, after the Koreans.
That is true, but in CS and (moreso even) Day of Defeat SOUND is the most important thing. Get a surround sound system, or good headphones. Knowing where the enemy is is necessary. Also, the ability to count in one's head without being distracted is needed for DoD. The respawn timer is 15 seconds. If you can count 15 seconds from the time of the first killed enemy, then 15 from the first after the respawn, etc, you can know approxamately when you will encounter the enemy, and where. Very important. Also very difficult to master. Oh, and knowing how to airburst a grenade properly so the explosion is horizontal at head level (spherical explosion has the equator at head level) is very useful. If you have great grenades, you hardly need a rifle.
Not a sentence!
That hundred grand is split among 16 teams each with 5 players. The most money a player playing cs can make from this tournament is about 6,000 dollars.
I would think the free trips to all over the world including Japan, various places in Europe, and many places arond America would help even more. Not to mention the salaries some of the top players get paid by their team and/or sponsor.
Most of the top players don't sit around play CS on public servers all day, as some might think. Most teams having scheduled practices ranging from 2-4 hours each day. They probably devote less time to their game than most professional REALathletes.
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