sup ppl. Seems like I’m the guy that’s chosen to update the blog regularly from now on

One of the first lan compy held in singapore for quite some time now, also with promising prizes surprisingly(it was a funfair tournament thing in a secondary school). 16 teams took part including zenith, imprezza, juju and some other teams like f@ze and dN*/t@x!s people, which was a surprising amount of local teams joining as we thought this would be more of a pub thrash playing against secondary school teams. I was pretty hyped up over this compy as it was the first lan compy we joined in like 5 months and we were all ready to deliver teh pwnage. Well let me get started on the games now.

1st game - We played against some secondary students mixed team(at least i think) and the game was pretty easy for us, nothing much to comment about it except for the fact that hy did some nice temeka razes and i did a few retarded impales(NOT MISS) with NA. Antimage with dagon pretty much sums up how easy the game was. [temeka->http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNFWB-zeGEQ]

2nd game - Pretty damn amazing. It was only the second round into the competition and we were to fight to imprezza, the only team in singapore that we thought had a chance of defeating us. We won the toin coss against imprezza and we had the choice of first pick. This point, me and my teaammates were discussing between first pick beastmaster or NA. I strongly voted for NA first pick, and we got into a serious long discussion onto whether picking which was better. It was like a old zenith draft vs old micro draft thing where the old zenith was up for the NA first pick and micro was up for BM first pick. As u know, 3 ex-micro, and 2 long-term zenith, resulted in the decision of picking beastmaster as the first pick. I guess I had to trust my teammates and just play the game and do my best to win it. For those interested in the draft, it was [Zenith, Sentinel-Bm, Qop, Zeus, Leshrac, Mag <against> Imprezza, Scourge-Na, Sf, Lina, Tiny, Thd] in order. The game commenced and we went to our respective lanes. TS MAG <vs> THD TINY top lane, QOP <vs> SF mid, ZEUS <vs> LINA NA btm, while beastmaster neutrals in forest. I was playing the TS and got the firstblood and died around 2+ minutes, but the opponents were complaining of lag and so we did a remake. To summarize the lanes, TS MAG won the top lane against the THD TINY(i got the firstblood again and didnt die XD) and QOP vs SF was pretty tough for hyhy as SF made use of the scourge neutrals to get extra dmg(Necromastery) and gold, and the creep spawn lured to his tower. Hyhy(qop) was losing in terms of lvls and farming i heard, but got back when he killed the sf twice alone at mid. ZEUS vs LINA NA was definitely bad, and of course, ant(zeus) lost the lane but at least managed not to die to those 2 heroes too much. Soon the mid game reached and it was all about gameplay - sticking, warding, downing towers, pressure, 4-1 etc.
Against NA, a hell lot of sentry wards were needed and it became a ward war between both sides. There was a point when all the supporters were not farming and just sticking together so as not to get caught by each other’s beastmaster or na. However, the difference was that only the SF on their side was gaining levels really fast and farming up items whereas our mag, qop, and my ts, were all farming as well. I guess we could say we won every engagement due to mike’s(mag) good polar and both mike and hy commands throughout the whole game. The combo was simply too lame for imprezza to fight against. Polar, Shockwave, Stun, Lightning, Nova, Wrath, Sonic Wave, Scream of Pain were the spells we could use on those who were polar’d. The engagements at first was more of 2 down for zenith and 3 or 4 down for imprezza but later as the game went on, the difference became bigger. Naturally, by winning engages, the gold comes in for the team through the kills and the downing of towers afterwards and the free time of farming when all their heroes are down. I know i got a double kill at bottom lane and i suddenly became 3k richer after that double kill and the downing of 1 tower + tp farm at another lane. Was pretty shocked myself. Now, i had a cyclone and a soul booster and was pretty much ready to own them. Qop and mag were quite farmed up as well, whereas beastmaster and zeus had decent items too. I guess imprezza realised they were losing and decided to make a push for our mid tower. This was where the game changed, or rather where the game ended. Big Mike the big mag jumped into imprezza’s heroes and sucked 3(plus a sf from the fog at max range) which sums it up to 4 heroes. That polarity made a round circle which spelled OWNED all over it and i shouted my ass off. PULSE NOVA, SONIC WAVE, WRATH, STUN, LIGHTNING, SCREAM OF PAIN. 4 sucked, 4 down, leaving 1 thd left where we easily picked him off resulting in a full wipe. A triple kill for hyhy and a double for me. They decided the game was over and typed gg and left the game. We felt quite “song” after that game, haha~

3rd game - The match against juju! or 5 NutZ. I guess their plan succeeded in making everyone’s name as NutZ resulting in us not knowing which is the real nutz so that we could aim him. I guess that match was pretty easy, all our towers were up if im not wrong. They just sticked but didnt farm. A overfarmed bb played by bouncy made us win the game by 50 minutes and there really isnt much for us to say in this match. Don’t think we played so well since everyone felt it was sort of like a pub draft match thing. The feeling was like, sure win so just play, no commands no nothing. Pretty boring game since they played so safe that catching them was a problem however they didn’t farm anything at all.

4th game - Oh well, I guess it always happens. Somehow whenever we play against people from dN* they will chu some sort of push strat against us which will never work. Team Mahjong picked warlock, pugna, zeus, es, qop and we picked leshrac, magnus, vs, ta, potm. I seriously do not know why they wanted to try pushing against a lesh mag strat which i found incredibly non-logical(i guess that’s a better word to use). The game was pretty much a wooping - I could walk inside 4 of their heroes alone and kill 2 of them(i was the ts, YES AGAIN -.-) the score was about 50+ - 20 in favour of zenith and they had no chance of winning. We won all lanes(except middle i think, warlock <vs> ta) and established full map control and won the engagements as well. Farming was also a huge advantage to our favour(zeus managed to farm up only boots & arcane by end of the game). I guess nothing much to say about this game except that ANT IS REBELLIOUS!!! HE DOESNT WANNA PLAY SUPPORT VS DESPITE ALL THE FUN AND IMPORTANT HEROES WE GAVE HIM!

Oh well that pretty sums up the whole tournament. I guess this whole tournament was pretty easy except for the Imprezza match. Seems like they will be the only competitor left for zenith in Singapore??? Let’s wait and see… O and i am damn happy i won a mp3 player. Needed it. I also shared same straw with hyhy when drinking sugar cane juice. SONG. Well guys, to end of the day all i have to say is…
STFU UNLESS YOU CAN PLAY A BETTER SF THAN ME
i love that quote

-ToFu

Many things have happened with Zenith over the past two months, even without any competitions.

I’ll probably wait until next week before saying anything, but in the light of this Chinese New Year it seems like zenith is on the road for long-term prosperity! Or something like that. Stability, rather.

And of course, the return of your friendly writer-correspondent. ME! After 2 months of no posting. Heh.

Stay tuned for next week where I catch up with two months of juice.

January passes, for once, with NO LAN TOURNAMENTS IN SINGAPORE AT ALL!

Yet DotA has never been so busy. With Winterchill just ending, let’s count how many tournaments we have to juggle…

ADC
SKOTH
MYM PriDe
MYM Nations

Oh right. And DotA Ballers League.

Plus plus?

We need more LAN tournaments! Maybe we’ll check over the causeway…

CAPL passes, ADC comes to the playoffs, SKOTH begins, and no updates yet because I’m either in Canada, or getting ready for NS and uni, etc. etc.

But finally! An update on the Zenith European Tour.Long overdue I know, but hey, no one wants to update in my stead.

Pictures hosted by DotaSG. Many thanks DotaSG_Papa. They’ve really been stepping up coverage lately, with many news and updates and tournaments and interviews. Mmmmm live CAPL coverage.

Do check it out to see… BALD WARNUTZ! A pugna-likeness.

Anyway, the full album is: http://www.dotasg.com/album/Zenith_07_III/index.html

Some pictures I do like to explain though.

Here’s us on a minibus on the first day. It’s crammed. We’re up to our necks in our own bags, and the worse thing is that this one didn’t bring us anywhere at all because of a miscommunication.

For something fresher, here’s someone taking a picture with us! It was one of our training days I think. I think this was the day we wiped BTB.

Here be our draft discussion on competition day. We had like two full rows of people behind us. Excitinggggggg.

Here be a picture of a video interview I had with some Russian website. I don’t know where it is though, but it’s about a full 15 minutes long and very very detailed. I talked quite a lot.

I can’t believe that after almost 2 months, I haven’t got a picture of this person up in a picture to thank him. This picture is taken in Sweden, on a train station that has a train for the sole purpose of running from Arlanda (the airport in Stockholm) to Stockholm City Terminal (like, the mega-airport-bus-train place. Think integrated terminal plus plus plus).

Mr. Andrew Tan here is TOFU’S FATHER. A shepherd leading 5 lost sheep around. Plus all the financial security, and a GREAT HELP in settling a lot of decisions when we were there. Made my job so much SO MUCH EASIER. Not being sponsored, he footed the whole ~3K or so to be with us in… well… a “business trip” to say the least. Not much fun included in the program. Plus, he did part of the most important job GPS had to do… controlling the fat one (to be more specific, the fat and white one, not the dk one).

Getting on with it…

Here be Dreamhack! Taken quite early on the first day of dreamhack. Already you can see the huge-as-heck CRTs and CPUs behind us dwarfing our little laptops. Bleh. Well, flying from Singapore, it would probably be too much of a pain to haul all that bulky CRT and CPU on two flights, plus the 3 days of travelling back… sometimes it takes a while to appreciate our handy small laptop, borrowed on short notice.

Here’s me playing frets on fire. Ha. How nice to have a picture of myself. You can see quite a lot of things around me though. First, the chairs. THESE THINGS GET STOLEN. Leave your seat for an hour, and you find your seat… well, you don’t find your seat. It’s gone. Then there’s the big plastic thrash bags which are quite convenient. The mess of wires… and the little plastic crucible there holds food. Their idea of Thai food. Which is surprisingly good, seeing as how I’ve never taken Thai food before, and also around 10 SGD per wok (that’s what they call it).

And here is Dreamhack around after 4pm on day one until the end. Everything is dark. For the entire day. It’s surprising how fast time can fly. You walk in at noon, and the next thing you know it’s 4AM in the morning.

Damn I wanted to post this long ago. A rare sight this is. One you’ll probably never find again for a long time. Well, not that long with ESWC around the corner, and probably a lot more global tournaments in the future. Here we have a picture of Team Zenith with SK Gaming after whooping them in 2 scrims in a row. Unfortunately without Drayich. We wanted to get a picture with MYM but we didn’t scrim them and we were kind of tired, plus slahser was in the washroom… for a really long time.

Damn, they are big. Puny puny people are we. No wait, who’s standing there with them looking almost as big as they are?

And here we are in our loser’s bracket match against SK. I know which match it is because of the headsets. We borrowed headsets from MYM to play against SK because our throats were tired from all that shouting. They’re really cool. Quite confusing at times because of the 1s delay between saying and hearing, but still, a great vacation for an overstressed throat.

And lastly, to end off everything, a picture of Zenith in CAPL. No surprise, ice STILL is doing his best to avoid everything media related. I have no idea what happened here since I was in Canada skiing, but I guess Tofu has risen up to be the Zenith spokesperson. *SNICKER*.

*Louder snicker*.

This picture also illustrates a very important announcement! Now, examine the picture, and who can you not see clearly and why?

ice is back!

(final image merely added for comparison with previous image)

We probably would be much happier if we had actually played better T_T

Our performance in the LB finals against SK was one of the worse we’ve put up in a few months. It was quite disappointing, we probably would have lost to most local teams with that kind of playing.

On another topic, we really can’t thank enough the people who helped to keep us in MYM, Underminer most of all, but when we realised that we were going to play our elimination rounds back in SG anyway, and right after our abyssmal loss to SK… well, I think to say that ZX was playing SF should suffice as enough information.

We have a bit of prize money as a consolation though.

The longest part is around now though. Zenith will be back in Changi airport some time after 5AM on Wednesday. It’s now around 10PM in Singapore, so you can imagine just how much travelling we’ll be doing…

In review, the entire tour was quite an experience. However, it was DAMN TIRING. At least the most tiring part is at the end, after all the games are over.

We’ve got a one day stop in Russia though, so we might still be amusing ourselves with some internet time.

Well, that would be the end of the Zenith European Tour.

The playing standard we put up was rather disastrous. We had a rather commendable record in scrims against top teams, but somehow tournament playing standards were rather lacklustre.

The lack of preperation perhaps showed itself. As strong as the new Zenith team is supposed to be, it is weak merely because it is new. The experience however, as much as I could say is once in a lifetime, I truly hope it WON’T be once in a lifetime. Zenith American Tour? Zenith Scandinavian Tour 2008 anyone?

The tour would have been impossible without our sponsors, HP and AMD. Laptops, as low-end as they might have seemed, faithfully lasted us throughout our entire tour very pleasantly. In fact, I’m growing rather attached to it T_T. Not to mention of course, the financial investment that we would need to put in if not for them.

We were the only Asian team here at Dreamhack, in fact the only non-European one, playing DotA. However, our performance was rather lacklustre, and we were horrendously unprepared. Perhaps next time we might see something better from another international tour.

Plus, I hope with this step, DotA can start to become a game with international LAN competitions.

We’re now awaiting the results from the final game of MYM vs SK, and we will play the loser of that match in a undetermined best of 1 or best of 3 match. The match is about to go live, be sure to catch it on GGTV for those of you whom ain’t at Dreamhack.

We lost out best of 3 game against SK 2-1 yesterday and are now in the losers brackets. As for how the game went, i won’t comment on it till we get back to Singapore or something, watch the replays!.

We’re starting our matches in the losers brackets soon and hopefully, we’ll play well this time!

We have progressed to the semi-finals of the dreamhack compy, and we will be facing team SK from Sweden at around 9pm sweden time, 4am sg/msia time.

We’re in a rush to get back to our hotel now for some much needed rest and bath, we’ll be back here later! The games will be shown in the arena and streamed live on ggc.

Weeee im the first one awake on day 2 of DREAMHACK!

Me(zx) and ant spent last night sleeping in the assigned sleeping area, but what we didn’t know about, was that we were gonna be sleeping on hard solid ground, in the WINTER. Despite the shivers and some crazy swedes yelling for no apparent reasons, it was a rather productive sleep i guess.

The tournament continues today at 12:00 CET, we spent last night playing some tournament games and scrims against SK and other team, we also managed to take photos with team SK and hopefully MYM soon enough. It feels totally great to play without any form of delay whatsoever, will the day where internet connections around the world improve to the extend where we can play from our homes in Singapore against them with almost no delay?

We also met Poddy and his teammates whom have helped us a lot of administrative stuff and introducing some of our players to IHCS in the past. Of course there are also people whom we have never hear of or known approaching us to take photos which we are more then willing to oblige. So if you guys want a photo with us, feel free to ask!

It has been a great event so far, with friendly people and decent food (add crazy swedes somewhere in there) everywhere and it has only been the beginning. Day 1 was sorta a setup day for people to bring their computers in and stuff, it is hard to describe to you viewers how big this event is and i hope in the near future, an event of this magnitude and grandness could be held in our own country.

I’ll leave ant to update on the pictures instead of trying to spend my time typing on a keyboard to describe this event (ps : my vampirism game is starting soon too ;))

Btw, i promised NutZ that i would bring some snow to Singapore for him… And to some teams out there in Singapore, when you lose a game clearly, do not attempt to invoke some rule violation on a situation which has no effect to the outcome on the game to overturn the results of the game. I’ll deal with you nubs when i’m back in Singapore Gl when you meet us in any form of lan competition whomever i’m talking about.

Some links for updates on dreamhack events

http://dota.gosugamers.net/
http://www.mymym.com/en/coverage/420.html
http://www.webbkameror.se/dreamhack/dreamhack_webcam1.php
http://www.pack4dreamhack.nl/danish_team.php