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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.
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
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.)