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."

Comments

Just Doing Their Time

[Slider451]

1. Serve on a fishing ship, in the military or... as a professional gamer.
2. Endure austere conditions, long hours, harsh discipline.
3. There is no step 3
4. Profit!

Millionare eh?

[the computer guy nex]

http://coinmill.com/KRW_USD.html#KRW=1000000

Looks like a Millionare in Korea can barely afford a PS3.

Re:Millionare eh?

[Goldberg's Pants]

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.

Re:Millionare eh?

[everphilski]

You can make lots of money, but unless you are saving it, its hard to become a millionaire. For those of us who are just regular joes with 9-5 jobs, it isn't impossible to be a millionaire, you just need to lower your cost of living. It's kind of surprising how some former sports stars that were making millions a year have lost their money due to bad management and just spending it, where someone even just making 5 figures can still anticipate being worth several million before retirement.

Re:Millionare eh?

[Dogtanian]

I think people generally talk about dollars when they say "millionaire", even in foreign countries. Not in Britain, they don't. We'd generally assume that a British "millionaire" had a million pounds.

Howlin' Mad

[Dogtanian]

I visited the A-team house, which is in a residential street in northern Seoul. Are those guys *still* on the run from the U.S. government? I'd have thought getting B.A. Barracus onto a plane for South Korea would be a major PITA... and you just blew their cover again!

Re:hmm

[godscent]

I expect that it is the same as watching other people play sports. I don't get it either, but it seems to be fairly popular.

Back in 98-99 I was one of the top 5 gamers in SC

[CrazyJim1]

I got invitationals from South Korea, but I just thought it was spam. I'm kicking myself now. But at least Starcraft 2 will come out soon. SK has lots of gaming centers and this used to make for refined strategy over creative strategy. And one thing that Starcraft has is psychology. If you know exactly what your opponent is going to do, they have no chance. I think SC2 will have more advanced players from the get go than SC 1 did because SC1 was one of the first competitive online games with a ladder system. I was able to kick ass in Wacraft 3 as #1 1v1,2v2 and 3v3. So I think I'll be able to do well in SC2.

The only reason I quit Starcraft was because of the map hack. People stopped playing on Battlenet, but I had no where else to train so I was screwed. I hope they punish map hackers in Starcraft 2. There are a lot of ways to do it. One way would be a report map hacker button: and when someone gets to the top 10 of reported maphackers, people at Blizzard could review a replay. Another way is to open up a ton(1,000,000) of memory addresses that allow map vision, and none are legit. If someone changes one of these values, they'll be reported to Blizzard and their CDkey banned. Anyway there are lots of ways of doing it. I look forward to Starcraft 2 as being my game of choice.

Hurry and meet them...

[riskeetee]

Before they die of exhaustion from a marathon gaming session!

Starcraft

[Ka D'Argo]

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.

Re:Back in 98-99 I was one of the top 5 gamers in

[king-manic]

Or maybe the game could just be secure and not allow map hacking at all?

Go server side for everything and have the installed game be nothing more than a dumb client?

Map hacking occurs because the enemy player position exists within ram. By removing a fog layer or dummying enemy position graphics on top of the fog. The onyl way to truly avoid this is to prevent your opponents position from being distributed until they come into view. But the problem is network latency, limited server side resources, etc.. keep it from being very practical. The best you can do is a shifting array of ram checksums, obsfucation, banning, and statistics. Unless you make the entire load server side. Which is possible these days and network latency isn't as much of a concern but it's not an easy problem to solve.

Re:Back in 98-99 I was one of the top 5 gamers in

[Sparr0]

"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.

Re:For those of us that love Korean girls

[jma05]

Unfortunately for you, video game playing geeks are actually cool there.

"They shriek and cheer when the two teams walk on stage. In South Korea, pro gaming has attained the status of rock and roll."

backwards

[penguinbroker]

ftfa..

Korea's #1 Starcraft Player: I would like to have a good car and a fancy girlfriend.


um.... isn't it supposed to be the other way around?