Saelis!

Bromance.

Well, it’s a Monday afternoon and I am taking half the day off. In between waiting for information for an upcoming article to be sent to me, I decided to write a post, since I’ve been severely neglecting this blog even to the point that I don’t reblog League-related photos and such.

Recently I have been feeling very… bromancey, with several friends of mine. I know it’s not really counted since I’m not actually a… bro… But well, I just got out of a conversation with Penthesilea, where he punctuated every nice thing he said with “BRO,” presumably so I didn’t think he was hitting on me or anything.

And I like this. I like the safety I’ve had with my groups of guy friends when I was younger. I like being comfortable, and I’m most comfortable feeling in the bro zone with buddies. I have the same thing with Kailing; I love him, in a completely non romantic way. When I see him, I want to hug him. I like talking to him. Yet I think the world would end before I ever brought myself to date him.

In other words, they’re all friendzoned but it’s okay since the feeling is mutual. Except for the hugging part maybe.

The people who make it worthwhile.

It’s been a rough week.

Sometimes, being a GM is kinda like being in an abusive relationship. You get beaten up all the time by the community(well in this case only figuratively). Heck, you beat yourself up for every decision you make, wondering whether this is good for the community or bad, whether you made the right choice in this or that - whatever you do, it’s gonna end up haunting you in some way or another because you’ll kick yourself, or get kicked by someone else who isn’t happy with you.

Your every move is scrutinised, every word analysed and picked apart to insinuate that you meant the worst. Try to be impartial and you get criticised for being robotic and uninterested in the players’ issues. Try to be more personal and you’re unprofessional.

Everything is your fault. If you’re the copywriter, it is still your fault that the servers aren’t up, that the matchmaking is bugged, that this one guy still isn’t banned, that world peace isn’t happening anytime soon and people are still starving in third world countries. You are the convenient scapegoat, you are the punching bag of the community. Anything you do is perceived as an ulterior motive - are you writing this because it’s your company, your job on the line?

People walk all over you all the time and make snide remarks in game or rub it in your face when you’re not playing well - for what, really? To feel powerful? To get a kick out of taking a stab at someone in authority? We have little authority or power; we probably get abused more than anyone else purely because of the GM tag. And oh, you can’t do anything about it because that would be an abuse of power.

You do the best you can, and you think you’re doing something good, but you can’t really remember the last time you were proud of yourself, or someone was proud of you, or you were happy with what you did. It’s all just, so what? So what if you do that? What about THIS? WHY HAVEN’T YOU DONE THIS?

So I guess I should say a big thank you. To the people who make being a community executive worth the emo and the jerks and the abuse. For those of you who have shared your experiences and your lives with me, and allowed me to share mine with you in turn. Perhaps it is just little touches and conversations to you, but to me it is an ineffable touch that makes everything worth it, that reminds me of why I am here in this job, why I take interest in the community, and why I haven’t broken my computer screen with my keyboard.

I’m serious when I say, it means a lot to me. ♥

Away with thee, evildoer!

I have a dilemma. As a GM and community executive, I’m something of a customer service… person, in this company. So what happens if I dislike a particular player?

And by dislike, I mean, ‘I can’t stand you, I don’t want to talk to you, don’t watch my livestream, don’t comment on my gameplay, just go away’ dislike. You see, back when I was a newbie, I was playing LoL with one of my friends and he invited one of HIS friends to the game. The first game went fine, the guy added me to friends, so I accepted.

So this guy was playing in the bot lane with me supporting him. At that time I was playing Soraka, and in one instance we got ganked, the guy got killed even though I tried to save him with everything I had which wasn’t on cooldown.

He proceeded to call me a noob, and when I explained that I already did all I could to save him, he ignored my reply. I remember him being more of an ass, but the exact details are lost to me except that I promptly deleted him from my buddy list after the game.

Do I hold a grudge? It’s not so much a grudge as a knowledge that this person is a jackass and I want to have nothing to do with him. Last night he came on IRC during my livestream and laughed because I was buying Mercury’s Treads on Morgana.

1. I was attempting to support with it.
2. Morgana needs to go deep into the fray to deal her damage. Obviously that makes her a less effective support since she wouldn’t be farmed enough, but I was already in that situation so I might as well get something to negate CC.
3. I have had decent players advise me to go for Mercs on Morgana EVEN when I was playing it as an AP mid.
4. I really don’t like that guy because he thinks he’s some sort of god.

So I answered him with probably the most childish, knee-jerk reply I could come up with.

“You are a noob so I’m not gonna listen to you.”

Yes. I know. I sound horrifically childish. But really, I don’t like this guy. I rarely ever call people noobs (or at least, not to their faces) but for him I will gladly make an exception. I don’t like him. I don’t like how he picks on me, I don’t like how he picked on me long ago, I don’t like how he’s arrogant and annoying and I don’t like how he just PM’ed me on Garena Messenger saying, “hi pro,” which made me start on this rant in the first place.

I think I’m allowed to dislike people, and I’m allowed to have my personality because I am a person, not a mindless gaming robot that is called a female because it occasionally wears a skirt. I have my pride, and I have my dignity too and I will not smile and wave and be all nice and sweet to someone who is a jackass to me just because I happen to be the face of the company. It isn’t fair to me.

I don’t ban quite a few people who are really nasty to me, and they know they canbe nasty to me while just stopping short of verbal abuse because it would be counted as me being oversensitive and an abuse of power if I take action. Awhile ago I put up a picture of a jerk that pushed me too far on my Facebook. Stuff like this happens fairly often in game; people just like to pick on GMs because they feel that they can. If we retaliate, OMG GM SCOLD PEOPLE, and if we ban them, OMG GM GOT PERSONAL VENDETTA. It’s annoying because you couldn’t imagine the amount of vitriol that I get from some people.

We’re people too, and there is a point where it’s unreasonable to expect us to get walked over by jerks. When it comes to that point, I’ll just tell them to shut up and leave me alone. >.<

Garena Premier League Afterthoughts.

So I watched the GPL Community Shield over the weekend. As Hammy pointed out during a meeting, the name Community Shield was kind of a misnomer since the proceeds weren’t donated to charity or anything like that. It was just more of an opening tournament.

So it was six teams; Team Singapore Sentinels, Kuala Lumpur Hunters, Saigon Jokers, The Bangkok Titans, The Manila Aguilas and finally, Taipei Assassins.

To be brutally honest, I pretty much knew what was gonna happen with first and second place; Taiwan’s TPA is a sick team. They are amazing and have made most of our GLSS matches look like a pub stomp. I expected them to be in the top place. Their map movement and control just has no comparison here in Asia - yet. So it was no surprise that they won.

Same goes for second place, really. TSS took it, which was expected by most people as well, since TSS is the dominant force in our server.

For third place, that I wasn’t sure. The Saigon Jokers are relative newcomers to the competitive scene. With their best player being SJ.Archie, I was still skeptical about their ability to perform next to the top Vietnamese players like NIXWATER and ZhaoJun. Formerly known as SBArchie, he impressed me a lot with his Morgana plays against Taiwan’s B team, which has Mistake playing AD and Colalin supporting, while the A team has Bebe playing AD with Mistake on Support.

And this is accounting for the fact that Archie is primarily an AD player. In ranked, he has scant few games as Morgana. I still think NIXWATER really is one of the best AP carries there is on the server, but Archie’s engagements were really well done. Another person who blew me away was SJ.Egg, who used to be BB.Egg. While he’s not very high on the solo queue ladder, he played a pretty beast Shyvana in that game. In the end, Taiwan’s gameplay won out and they took the game, but I do think SJ gave them a terrific fight.

Do I think they’re better than last year’s WCG winning team, SioL? I’m not sure. SioL has a few really good players. As I mentioned, NIXWATER is a really dominant force in the mid lane. ZhaoJun is really good too, in my opinion, and he plays pretty much everything. RookieSai, their support, was also in my opinion, really decent, despite his shaky performance in WCG last year, when they lacked any experience in competitive play.

If you asked me, I think a combination of the players would make a pretty amazing team, with SJ.Archie at bot lane with RookieSai, NIXWATER in the mid and well… ZhaoJun and Egg are both junglers so I have no idea LOL. Why would I put Archie at bot, after his performance? Simply because I think he trumps the other Vietnamese AD carry players. Then again there are our very own Ks Ocelote and Ks Candypanda, although I don’t even know what their mains are because they seem to play anything and everything.

Hopefully their showing in third place will negate some of the hate towards Vietnamese players; I know that that is wishful thinking, but it must be humbling for the people constantly harping on how Vietnamese players are bad, only to see them coming in third, especially with that pretty strong match against Taiwan.

The finals were TPA vs TSS, and I was really shocked when TSS actually managed to get a 5-0 kill lead on TPA. However, looking at the gold difference, there honestly wasn’t much; somehow even when they’re behind on kills, TPA still manages to dominate the flow of the game.

TSS ly4 pulled off some spectacular arrows - I’m surprised, because he isn’t really known for being an Ashe player, but his aim was pretty spot-on. d4rkness vs Toyz, I don’t really remember anybody getting dominated in mid. Toyz did pretty badly in the SJ game as Cassiopeia. I’m guessing it’s not his main, because there were a lot of bad ults there, but he held his own in the game against TSS.

Stanley… Stanley is a boss all day every day, but HarLeLuYaR pulled off some great ganks early game which stopped him from snowballing too quickly. Tofu is a great top laner and really strong in duelling, but he readily admits that he can’t really call the shots in engagements because he doesn’t play other roles enough to know their intricacies in an engagement. There’s also a lack of good top lane players here in SEA; in most ranked games, Tofu just snowballs by owning the top lane player and continues to carry from there, so it’s an entirely different ballgame if he can’t snowball.

I think one thing TPA really has in abundance which other teams don’t, is game sense. Rather than just having five good players, they are an actual unit, and it shows from how the entire team plays, over the entire map.

Also one thing I’ve noticed is that the teams with single-country servers tend to have a poor showing. Thailand and the Philippines didn’t do well, and some of the matches were pretty painful to watch. There is a serious lack of quality opponents, exposure and variety when playing in a server that isn’t as populated as the others. This is one reason why I’ve constantly stated that losing the Vietnamese players would be very bad for our standing. It would be worse for them, because they’d have an even smaller community, and their top players would most definitely suffer, but the impact hits us too.

The lingering argument I get from players is how they don’t care about the competitive scene or how things are at the top, but at 800 ELO or so, Vietnamese ruin all their games. I am sorry for being blunt, but if you’re at 800 ELO, everyone is bad, including you, and really, if you were unranked and I was unranked, why in the world would I listen to you when you’re probably just as bad as I am?

Speaking of which, I’ve dropped to 1.3k over the past couple of weeks, and for all the absolutely horrific players I’ve come across, I’ve still yet to meet a Vietnamese person who could not speak English and would not speak English. And I’ve played a fair few games with unranked people who had absolutely no knowledge of the meta. True, I’ve seen a few Vietnamese players who are real jerks, but I’ve seen just as many awful jerks who are Singaporean or Malaysian. If you are a baddie, admit to being a baddie. I had a Volibear go to bot lane with me last night, and he wasn’t intending on playing support so I just let him get any minion kills he could lay his hands on, which wasn’t much, and even with him screwing up my farming every once in awhile, I still managed to outfarm the opponent’s Ezreal.

There’ll be a lot of games with terribad noobs on your team, but there will also be many games with terribad opponents, making it a massive stomp for you. It all balances out eventually, statistically speaking. If I can somehow carry myself up to 1.4k when I main AD and Support, which are the two most team dependent roles in the entire game, then something must be wrong with a player who is at 800 ELO but thinks he deserves to be at Gold. I have exactly 221 wins and 221 losses in solo queue, and I think I’m incapable of carrying a team, so really, where are all these pros who are stuck in the unranked zone?

I have little respect for people like these. It’s not because I’m good - I’m not. It’s precisely because I’m a pretty mediocre player that I can say, it isn’t that hard, and if it is, then you (you being the whiner) needs to look at yourself and realise that the only constant factor in all your lost games is you.

Yes! Wall of text! This was meant to be two posts but somehow it converged into one :D