Slashdot Mirror
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.
Well, athletic ability is not only restricted to your legs, arms and body. A person with fast reflexes, good hand-eye coordination, quick thinking and strong concentration can be considered as "athletic" too. There is as much sport in Cybergaming as there is in Football or any other conventional sport game.
Questions like this clearly prove that Americans of today can't differentiate between games and reality anymore.
Hear, hear. CS is *very* fun if you play it with down-to-earth folks, but the downright retarded comunity that has spawned arround it drove me away as well.
And "cyberathlete"... sheeze. I work at a cybercafe, and i hear people from 15 to 30 years old seriously considering "living off CS". It made me chuckle the first times. Now it's pathetic.
Yeah, $100,000. If you win, then it has to be splitted to all members of your team (no less than four). Once or twice a year, maybe. And i wonder how much of that is real cash as oppsed to sponsors' hardware.
Yes, obviously the government would recruit the Ghost Recon players since that's a game that forces you to not run around, to not hop around, and to use careful tactics. Note: The prior paragraph was written with tongue firmly in cheek. I know members of the SF community (and I don't mean sci-fi) and the whole idea of recruiting out of shape (or even in shape) computer gamers for the type of work various Special Operations units do is rather hilarious. They lack the discipline, training, probably basic physical and dispositional requirements, and they may not have the required social skills. And there is a heck of a difference between blowing up someeone else in a video game and having to hold your buddy's hand while he bleeds out from a mine strike or bullet wound. :(
The idea is silly enough to have been a Monty Python skit....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Hobby seems to fit more then an actual job; since only very few in the many thousands of players across the world actually sees any money from this stuff.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'm not surprised to see Swedes winning online gaming competitions. In the online gaming I've done, the Scandinavians are always among the elite players. They're clever, fun, and think things through.
I put it down to the fish they eat. Fish is high in omega 3 fats. These fats greatly enhance brain development. A person who consumes large amounts of omega 3 will think faster and concentrate better than a person who doesn't.
I know very well what binds are. In fact, I have to import my own cfg files each time I (unfortunately) have to reinstall, simply because otherwise it would take forever to change them all the way I like it.
No, I was too lazy to look up which commands the F1 and F2 are bound to by default, simply because I've got no beef with those binds.
Way to damn generalize everyone.
"He is a CS player! He must be a clueless n00b who has no friggin' clue about the cogs behind the shiny graphics!"
Dumbass.
Since nobody answering has bothered to respond factually to the question, I'll do:
Every male is drafted around age 18, after high school but before college. However, not all are selected to actually do military service - I think the numbers are down to about 30-35% at this point.
And I have to disagree strongly as to whether it teaches a "sense a weaponry". It doesn't. It does, however, teach how to think creatively in a group to solve an immediate problem.
(The American military, by comparison, considers its chain of command as holy. The Scandinavian militaries rely a lot more on the intelligence of the individual soldier.)
/ CrystalFalcon
(15 months of geeking around with military-grade radio hardware ain't that bad)
I wonder how much of this may be due to the Swedes (and other Europeans) having more leisure time. In Sweden, they get a mandated 32 days of vacation a year, as part of their Social Democratic welfare state. In the USA, there is NO mandated vacation. Often you are lucky to get your 2 weeks. For us techies, it may also be problematic whether we get to use it!