If you are expecting a summary of what you saw on the stream, you should stop here. This is about the hydramist crew and especially my experience I had at the tournament so far, with some fun information you possibly didn’t catch on stream.

My nose is dribbling. My feet, hands and ears are freezing cold. I feel exhausted from standing about 10 hours today, be it in a train, in a bus or in the event hall. My brain – tilted. My feet – aching. My throat – as dry as the awful sparkling wine you had for new years. And let me honestly tell you, it was all totally worth it.

The event experience for me has been absolutely amazing so far. I apparently arrived at the tournament way too early, which was around 10am. I called Noonia to get some info when they will arrive at the „Jugendzentrum Cultra“. He said that they’d take some time but Team Dignitas just left the hotel. I hung up and two minutes after a cap with Team Dignitas were driving by. I waved but they didn’t stop and later it turned out that they went to have breakfast at the local McDonalds. Fine with me, I waited for 20 minutes, why not 5 or so more. Fortunately for me, H2K came shorty after with a car they rented. For those who don’t know, H2K consists of Selcuk, Sanchez, Instance and their manager.

We called Shawn and asked when he was going to arrive and he said that it could still take a while. I begged for shelter as they wanted to wait in the warm fuzzy car and H2K let me in. Thanks guys! We had a little chit chat about how they made it to the event, how they didn’t know that they were actually attending 4 days or so before the actual event. They are awesome guys and while Seluck was a bit shy, he turned out to be a pretty nice and also high skilled fella. As Sanchez spots movement in the hall we go to the entrance and it turns out we were the first people there for the entire event. The guy still let us stay inside the front hall and we took a seat.

About 5 minutes later, SK.EU plus I assume a manager appears at the front door. As they enter and say “hi” Inflame walks for a bit, looks into a random direction and goes „H2K, free win“. The guys from H2K just laughed it off but were still even more motivated to win against SK.EU now. Enigmz threw a shy look at us as if he was apologizing for Inflames behavior. The 2nd team of SK, SK.Sansibar, follows and even though they weren’t exactly the best friends with SK.EU before, they are still from the same organization and later Noonia told me that they even had dinner together. From what I could get from the conversation Inflame was proudly telling the Sansibar guys what he just did.

Next one coming in is Carmac, who at first let’s us wait for a bit but then invites us into the tournament hall. The setup was pretty OK as far as computer-positioning goes. It was basically in one big square with the admins in the middle. Carmac wants H2Kto set up directly next to the entrance as Team Dignitas walks in. From there on, nothing should separate me longer than a best of 5 of another team from the Dignitas guys. Don’t get me wrong, I still chit chatted here in there but sitting literally in the middle of Hydra and Kalimist while they play was not just only a very educative experience for me as a WoW player, but it was also hilarious in a good way. I mean sitting between Enigmz and Inflame would be hilarious as well, but in a very different way if you get what I mean.

The setup. That’s roughly half of the player area. Bottom left is Flyn.


When they were not playing (either actual counting matches or training games) they were also observing other peoples games to get an impression in which shape they are and what to do against them.

More and more WoW players joined in and I was actually surprised how many people knew my face. I mean, I’m not trying stroking my ego here but almost everybody was reading Eurospective (absolutely shameless advert!) which is a great honor for me and surely for my team as well. Sadly the internet was too weak to let me write myself with my laptop I brought, instead of only my cell. More on that later.

The funniest part about sitting between Hydra and Kalimist was probably them dueling and I was really surprised how many dirty tricks Hydra had up his sleeve, heh. (Mindvision party target much?, Attacking mobs with Shadowfiend to not get sapped). Stuff like that made me giggle all the time because their dialog were simply hilarious. Here is an example.


PS: Hydra ALWAYS lost.. just messing with him. No seriously always. Here is (healing)proof.

I watched x6 closely if they were setting up Prot warrior but I honestly think they faked setting up an Arms warrior and made the Prot stuff at home. These guys have tournaments down to an art. They came in like pros, highly concentrated, highly professional. Souler put on his gloves after every game for example. Talking in spanish was also a pretty huge advantage for them because even though teams playing eachother were separated, most teams were too vocal to not share valuable information with the enemy. For example CoolD was playing without a headset against plan-B because plan-B (a German speaking team) was loud enough to get very solid information such as switches, attempt CC and burn moments in advance. They still use mostly English spell names and so it’s easy to understand what they are about to do. Of course you have the disadvantage of not hearing in game sound such as kicks which are almost not visible at least for my awful eyes.

One thing that stood out for me was the amount of staff SK-Gaming had at the event. There were almost more people wearing SK-shirts than not. They were very supportive for their teams always cheering when they won which is amazing to see, but not all that unusual for the orgas at all. Everyone had a different style though. The H2K manager was standing behind the enemy team screaming victory cries when they won a game to intrigue the enemy team. Odee, the manager of Team Dignitas is an oldy (no offense Mr.Odee!) and he took the much calmer approach of telling his team to keep the communication up even after losses, drink some water (because you don’t to get deHYDRAted. God that was an awful joke…) which proved to be the better approach as Team Dignitas is now in the finals and qualfied for Cebit. Sorry H2K, you are great guys but it just wasn’t enough. Don’t be too hard on yourself, you barely had preparation time. Next time guys, see you at regionals.

SK-mile. Off da hizz’

The matches, oh the matches. They were almost always instense and especially having so many people I like at the event and seeing them fight it out was amazing. I talked a load to SK Sansibar who are currently the only team without a loss. I talked to Alec from plan-B and they sadly weren’t on top of their game. I talked a bit to Enigmz and he seemed to be a very nice guy. He got raged at again but mainly for having UI issues. I talked to iNNERFIRE a bit and they all are all awesome as well, especially Desis. I bet he’s getting kids drunk while celebrating his Cebit spot. You deserve it mate.

The only guys I haven’t talked to was x6 and just because I’m so hypnotized by the spanish language. When they play and call out shots, it’s like they are making love to the oxygen in the room. Look at this mousepad. You can easily tell that Siler is a man of love.

I also didn’t talk to Bloodx but only because I didn’t know him before. Fun story, Hydra had a present for Bloodx which he didn’t end up giving him. I don’t want to spoil as there is still a possibility we will see them later in the tournament.

Another not so fun thing I have to talk about is the latency. They set it up so the stream and the player base is separated traffic wise from eachother which really makes sense. They even had the option to only give internet to a certain set of PCs so only the two teams currently playing against eachother would have internet. Problem was, the traffic bandwidth was very random. At times it was perfectly possible to play while others were surfing but 5 minutes later they had lag spikes which lead to the death of Hydra in game one against SK.EU. I saw it, it was crazy delay and it is a fact that warping favors dot teams. When nobody can cast and dots are ticking, you get one shot when the lag spike is over. I’m sure it happened to a couple of more people but that was the only game I saw it in myself. For game one of the SK.EU vs Dignitas series, Shawn had to make a decision and he followed the rules which I obviously can’t blame him for. Rules are rules. The admin must obey, but it’s still pretty sad. On the other hand Vaneck, the European Community manager of Blizzard was observing every match as well and maybe he can finally make the developers understand that we need a LAN client for WoW.

I also picked up some conversations James „2gd“ Harding had and if you think he is jut that funny before the camera and is a douche nozzle in real life, you are so wrong. He talked to his old leader Odee for a bit and it was fairly hilarious listening to their bullshitting.

One thing I have to point out is how nice Dignitas has been to me and how supportive they are with Hydramist. They picked me up and drove me to McDonalds, invited me into their own little family at during and between games and it made it much more enjoyable for me. I talked a fair bit to Odee and he not only knows which tournaments any of his team is going to attend (and I tell you team-dignitas as loads of teams. Check it out on their webiste) but he also has immense knowledge about the entire e-sports scene.

One thing I want to talk about before my train arrives are interviews. No one really wants to do them or so it seemed but they all have to. Inflame had his first time interview on camera and immediately ignited as Carmac asked him again about what he said in the front hall. Dignitas handled it in a fair way and everyone had to do one interview which is not only nice because you get to see all players, but it’s also a very democratic thing to do. Some people were shivering, some were quite cool such as Souler who did interviews for years now and some… had birthday?

Happy Birthday Chris! You earned yourself a nice gift; a spot for Cebit where the Global Finals will take place. Odee told me that he’s not going to allow excessive alcohol abuse (which they probably wouldn’t do in the first place) because of the finals, but I still hope you are having a fun time chilling with the others on your hotel room.

And even though I’m waiting at this awful train station for 1 ½ hours while writing this (after walking an hour to the station), I still don’t regret coming here at all. I hope this wasn’t too random as I’m really wasted. There is my train, gotta go. Yiska out.