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Meet Korea's Gaming Rockstars
PC Gamer has up a short piece looking at some of the big names in Korean gaming. The piece describes an event, and discusses the training regimen these console contestants go through. "I visited the A-team house, which is in a residential street in northern Seoul. Fourteen pro gamers live here, together with their team coach. It's half frat house, half sweatshop. Upstairs are the dorms. The team's top two players, Ma Jae Yoon (handle sAviOr) and Seo Ji Hoon (handle XellOs) share a room that's not much bigger than two single beds. The others are crammed into bunks in two other rooms. Ma, aged 21, is currently South Korea's number one Starcraft player and, according to Sean Oh, a millionaire. You wouldn't be able to glean this from looking at his bedroom."
according to Sean Oh, a millionaire. You wouldn't be able to glean this from looking at his bedroom."
Most millionaires aren't flashy bastards though. I once had a boss who was a multi-millonaire. He looked like a hobo. In fact the only thing that gave away how rich he was was if you were allowed into his attic where he collected and framed $50 bills. Seriously, he collects and frames them. He has THOUSANDS of them.
I've always enjoyed watching the Korean players go head to head in competitive Starcraft, cause they are the best at it. Nothing is quite as insane as seeing Slayer_Boxer go absolutely apeshit on someone with a few dropships and siege tanks. Some of the tactics and strategies they implore are so far from anything anyone else probably thought of in an RTS. It really makes for entertaining viewing. Some games obviously don't, I think really it comes down to more fast paced RTS games and obviously FPS games that make for great virtual spectator sports.
Aw Frell this
"limited server side resources" is crap. GOOD crap, in the sense that battle.net is free and Blizzard hasn't had to spend more than pocket change to keep SC and Diablo running all these years, but crap from the POV of cheating. Apply the FPS server model, dedicate a beefy machine to every 30-60 players, and you can do all sorts of wondrous things. The client doesnt have to be dumb, it just shouldnt be sent things it doesnt need to know. As to latency, for the game to be competitive you need minimal lag anyways, and how far is a unit going to move in 1/10th of a second? Sure, you have to send a *LITTLE* more data than the client needs, such as positions of units and projectiles that are [lag time]*[movement speed] distance into the fog, and that would be visible to a map hacker, but it would be orders of magnitude less trouble than now. EverQuest had to solve the same problem when people were sniffing the data stream to find NPC positions miles away, they just stopped sending that data, problem solved.