As some of you noticed, i stopped gaming and the whole internet thingie around it 11 days ago, wow its unbelievable how slow the time goes by if your not sitting in front of your pc 14-18 hours a day...
Anyways, i experienced a lot of good stuff very shorty after i got over the gigantic level of depression, that came with leaving all the work and friends and my favourite game behind, for 3 days straight i spend 80% of the time in bed reading and pitying myself, but believe it or not, some therapists really know what they are doing, and mine helped me to get on my feet and to start sorting my "shit" out, in only 11 days i managed to get myself a new flat, lose 2 kilos and go out 3 times (thats pretty much for me right there!), im going to a meeting of guys like me once a week and i see them one more time a week when we play beach volleyball together (and yeah, my permadiet pays off perfectly :D), right now the hardest thing for me about not being on the internet like i used to be is the people i talked to and i called my friends lately, that's much worse then missing the game itself, it makes you realize how far you pulled youself out of the social life around you, currently my friends counter in Berlin is somewhere between 0 and 0,5...., but anyways im sure that a little work and dedication will do wonders here.
My sister comes to visit me on wednesday and shes going to stay 2 weeks, 2!!! weeks and shes bringing my bike, so im excited like a little boy right now :D, this is going to be a w e s o m e !
I think the scariest thing of quitting the gaming and the stuff around it was the fear of the boredom, that will take its place, since i suddently have so much time and no clue what to do with it, but i came to see, that life holds plenty of stuff for you to fill and brighten up your day if you only give it a chance. So here goes a shoutout to everybody who thinks he might be a "gaming addict" and is afraid of quitting because he doesnt know what awaits him: Its tough as hell, its boring as hell and you will miss a few people like hell, but after 1 or 2 weeks you will start to see, that the world out there isnt so bad and i think in a couple of weeks i will not be healed, but be back at the place that life holds for me and be a happier and much more satisfied person.
Yeah, so im sitting here, its approximately 5000°C and im trying to keep a 20 month old child busy and entertained (she actually just fell asleep), this is my first summer in the awesome city Berlin, and i got the feeling that this year will be...special! Sports-wise this summer has already been a great one with the EuroCup, and the Olympic Games are still to come, apart from that the weather is flawless and Berlin is in full green, its dangerous to go outside, because you know you will end up in some park or at a lake/bath, even the nightlife is ownage, even though i only go out like once a month (money issues TT).
Overall it seems to me, like 2008 will be a great year, in and off the pc (DIABLO 3 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMG), and im looking forward to the next 5 months, may they be as good as the first 7!
Greetings Amock
p.s. i didnt forget about my blog series, just didnt feel like writing about some lameass comm atm^^
IHCS - Extraordinary
Created 26th June 2008 16:25
(Updated: 26th June 2008
16:27)
IHCS is a truly unique league in the circle of DotA community, no league is so small and so famous at the same time, and there's a reason for this, did you ever wonder where people like Maelk, Drayich, Vigoss and Loda play, when they are not fighting in tournaments or LANs? Well IHCS is the answer to that question, no other league has that many high class players and such a high average level of skill, the dimensions are astonishing, the forum has over 11 thousand registered accounts, yet only 500 people are vouched in IHCS2, even less are vouched in IHCS1, a really big part of the vouch requests gets denied because people are simply not ready to play in the environment of IHCS2/1 and are able to keep up with the elite of DotA.
Even though IHCS is still one of the younger leagues, the owner and creator of the league, Lego- has contributed more stuff to the competitive scene than any other admin, he was the first admin who took his league completely to GGC and IRC and he developed an outstanding bot-script, even the game mode -rd and the ap-draft is directly influenced and particularly invented by him.
I could go on telling you facts about IHCS and give you more information, but Lego- published an article 'On the Histoy of IHCS', which i would like to quote here:
The main idea of IHCS was and still is to provide a meeting place for the world's top DotA players. Unlike any other leagues, which often like to speculate about the quality of their playerbase, IHCS has no need for any special descriptions or recommendations here: the word 'top' here is used here in its most true meaning, the league consists of those very players that form the teams of the professional competitve scene.
IHCS started in June, 2006, on Northrend Battle.net server as "InHouse Clan-Scrim League Europe"; the original idea was to provide an environment for high-level inhouse games and scrim matches at the same time. As time passed, the league became focused mainly on inhouse games, and, even though one can easily find another team to practice with in our channels, clan games were never our main concern. The inhouse league was seen as the European version of the North-American IHL league, which was successfully running at that time.
Due to the high dedication and commintment of the original staff members, exposure to suggestions and innovations, and presence of its own game tracking and player ranking system, which was being constantly developed and improved, the league gained tremendous popularity and recognition within a short period of time. One notable thing here is that the league channel became the first and pretty much the only place where all the players that later contributed to the development of DotA as a competitive e-sport could meet and communicate with each other.
During summer-autumn 2006, the development of beta-version of GG-Client achieved the point where it was ready and relatively reliable for usage by the majority of players, offering significant latency reduction in games, allowing a possibility of major improvement in gaming skills and even hosting of trans-continental games, which were impossible on Battle.net. IHCS was the first community that reviewed and adopted GGC as an everyday platform for DotA games.
Even though many people considered GGC bugged and unreliable at that moment, time has shown that its developement eventually achieved success, and until now it has benn arguably the only viable platform choice for DotA games. As i personally see it, the adoption of GGC by IHCS was an important milestone for the competitive gaming as a whole, since it allowed the most active community members to evaluate the new platform and realise that it made big professional tournaments possible.
Also, in autumn 2006 the community chat channel was relocated from Northrend Battle.net to Quakenet IRC server. This is also considered one of the major league's advantages, as IRC is in all aspects better chat platform than Battle.net. As all games were already played on GG-Client, the community had no more need to use Battle.net at all, and the channel on Northrend was abandoned ever since.
In November-December 2006, the league introduced a second division, which offered a ladder for players that wanted to improve their skill and start playing competitively, but had no chance to get into the main division of IHCS. This gave the league another huge popularity and activity boost. Nowadays, even though many top players disregard the quality of the second division, it is still seen as the most skilled league in the world after IHCS main.
Around the same moment, GG-Client improved to the point where Americans could freely play with Europeans without latency problems, and many top American players joined the league in search of better gaming experience. A merge between IHCS and IHL was agreed on, since both leagues shared the same idea and there was no further need for their playerbases to be separated. Even though IHL head administrator, Ucross, went inactive and could not finish the work on the merge, all the competitive North-American players assimilated into IHCS community by the end of 2006, and IHL, despite the attempt to maintain gaming activity under a different administration, was shut down shortly afterwards. Thus, IHCS became a truly international league.
Another significant note is about the game mode development. At first, due to balance issues, allrandom/mirrormatch was mostly used for league games. Then, for a relatively short period of time, players switched to 'voterandom' mode, which is almost completely forgotten by now. Then, finally, a 'Draft' mode was introduced, where heroes are picked from a randomly generated pool. In IHCS, team captains do the picks themselves, in chat channel prior to game start, and the pool has the size of 16 heroes. This mode instantly became the main mode for IHCS games, and due to its success it was later implemented by DotA developers ingame. IHCS is the place for the competitive players to try out new heroes and new hero combinations, and consider their usage in competitive games. Statistics are gathered and passed to the game crew to aid balance development.
During 2007, DotA has seen a lot of big tournaments and became a full-scale e-sport. During this time, IHCS has seen significant activity; most competitive players meet each other in games here on a daily basis; they consider it as training grounds, where they can play games that are relaxing, but at the same time retain the highest quality. The chat channel is also buzzing with discussions and arguments concerning all aspects related to the game. Several teams that started as mixes of IHCS players, gained recognition and secured their place in the top.
For a long time, 'IHCS' was an appelative for personal skill in DotA. Being vouched into the main division is a measure of a player's recognition on the scene, mainly because it can hardly be achieved without serious success in large clan or national tournaments. The second division provides a unique opportunity for ordinary decently skilled inhouse players to meet a real professional ingame.
League staff is looking forward for both discoveries of talented players, and innovations that would assist the game development.
So, if you think you are ready to play at the top of your skill, and if you can prove that you are worthy being included into such a prestigious league and measure your skill with the top-notch players of the world, go visit us at the IHCS forums!
Almost every European DotA player will know what i speak of, when i say the name DCE; a clan once started by a bunch of friends who just wanted to have fun, the 'Drugs, Cash and Extacy' included some of the most famous DotA players in Europe and was one of the first competitive DotA clans, but the desire of this prestigious clan turned out to be something different, after some of the players left, the clan pretty much died out and fell apart, until it got reanimated by Shad0wknight82 as 'DotA Community Europe', who together with J3m and a few others build up a bot-based community, first open to everyone but with bans, if you broke a rule and a rapidly growing player base, the first chieftain of DCE was Shad0wknight82, who built up this great gaming community, then followed by ShangOo, Strontkop, Mark) and finally NeuerLaptop, always accompanied by dedicated staff members, who put a lot of time and effort in this famous battle.net channel, before the prestigious ihcs existed, DCE was the only place aside from scrims, where you could find decent games, so all the big names made their start there.
At its zenith, the DCE channel had thousands of safe listed players and new games going down every minute, but this great community had to suffer a little bit by the competitive completely relocating to GGC/Garena, so DCE stayed a place for people, that play to have fun and chill with their friends to play relaxed and friendly games.
Nowadays DCE is a very traditional and prestigious community, which manages to get along just fine with their bulletproof system and a lot of innovations to increase the quality of their games and their channel, i myself had the chance to work in the clan for a decent amount of time and got to know a lot of people very well, i can even call some of them my friends.
So, if you are looking for relaxed games, without the pressure of being the best and scoring the most points, in DCE you will find a place that will give you a home and probably a couple of good friends!
Hi there, this is my first blog ever! Even though I'm an internet kid, this famous feature somehow passed by me all these years!
So i thought about what subject to write on, and i had a brilliant idea! Lets talk about the nerds in the background.
So first of all, who are those people? Well, good thing you came to my blog to find out, because I'm one of them :).
The nerds in the background are people with a lot of dedication to games, but forced by the lack of skill or time, to not be able to reach higher goals in the games they love!
So now we know, what nerds are, lets bring in some diversity: there are useful nerds and useless nerds, while the useless nerds try to pursuit their goal of becoming a pro one day and keep trying sooo hard to reach something they will never achieve, the useful nerds see their place in a gaming community and start using their energy for something good!
Now, why does the gaming community need those nerds? It's rather simple, only a very small percentage of the gamers industry is getting paid (and most of them get paid for being goldfarmers in MMORPGs), so especially young games like DotA, live of people, that put their time and dedication in the game without expecting anything but a little fame and acknowledge, so are most of the tournaments and leagues and gaming communities ran by volunteers, which made a big amount of e-sport games able to reach a level of professionalism, which is amazing!
I want to my ability to blog, to bring these people to your attention, which helped DotA, a WC3 custom map to become a internationally respected e-sport and display, how much some people have put into a map, that started off as horribly imbalanced fun game!
In this series of blogs i will try to give you a closer inside view on:
DCE
IHCS
DotA-League
Garena
to accompany my inside view on these community projects, i will try to get interviews with:
Shad0wknight82
Lego-
Carnie
MaRs
I will try to update my blog once a weak if i stay motivated enough, stay tuned! :)
Germany, Berlin-Wedding
DotA
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Lego- has contributed more stuff to the competitive scene than any other admin, he was the first admin who took his league completely to GGC and IRC and he developed an outstanding bot-script, even the game mode -rd and the ap-draft is directly influenced and particularly invented by him.
Strontkop, 
