Competitive CS:GO

This year mark's the 16th birthday for Counter Strike, which started out similarly to DoTA with humble beginnings as a mod for a game popularly known as Half-Life (Half Life 3 confirmed). What started out as just another mod back then has earned itself a top spot in the eSports community with millions of dollars worth in prize pool and the filling of entire stadiums today.

ESM Katowice 2014

So, how did this happened? Well the first obvious reason is, Valve. If it weren't for Valve to see the potential and pumped money into the mod to make a standalone version for the game it probably wouldn't have garnered that much attention. 

Back then, the eSports scene was very different and young, fast paced shooters dominated the scene with games like Unreal Tournament and Quake. In 1997 the very first tournament was sponsored by Microsoft for Quake with the grand prize of a ferrari. 

Quake

Although the huge hype in fast paced shooting games one university student decision to create a game which centered on the conflict between terrorist and counter-terrorist squads spawned from a personal interest in the subject. Such a theme required a more realistic setting for the game, which was the main reason why he chose to mod Half-Life.

Following the release of the mod it immediately gained tons of attention and continued to grow as it involved a lot of community feedback. In fact the game was so community driven to the point that all the maps were actually made from the players themselves.

I believe that was the biggest factor as to why Counter Strike remained loved and played for so long. It is because the game was essentially made by the people of the community, who else knows what the players want more other than themselves.

Soon after in the year 2000, Valve took an interest in the game and acquired the rights to release a standalone version. Soon enough more games started emulating that style of gameplay with the release of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. Games that were steeped in realism started becoming more popular.

Fast forward a few years and Call of Duty actually beat Counter Strike in terms of popularity and player base, but with the recent release of Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) was able to reclaim its spot at the top. It can be seen that Counter Strike is more something for the eSports scene because of its huge emphasis on teamwork and I personally think there will always be a place for CS, because people appreciate that.

With that I think I explained a little bit of its past and touched a bit on why and how it became popular. I hoped you had fun reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. :) Stay tuned for more posts!

InterVarsity Competition.

Well I did something that I actually thought I wouldn't have the time to do again once I started university, which was to join some gaming tournaments. Then again it was only a rookie tournament so practicing was not really needed and furthermore there were some restrictions, one being that your teammates must be in the same school as you since this was an interschool competition.

We played our first game at around 12 p.m. and I took this picture during the loading screen. If you can't see the picture properly, the reason why I circled the guy on the left is because the 4 of us had a diamond border and  the guy I circled was playing on his smurf which only had a silver border so I felt like it kinda ruined the picture. :(

This part is just for clarification for some of those who don't play LoL. The borders that I mentioned earlier represents our rank which starts from bronze, silver, gold ,platinum, and diamond. To put into perspective, as I said earlier this was a rookie competition so the majority of people that went for it were around silver to gold. "Smurf" is a term used when someone that is of a higher ranking plays on a lower ranking account.






So basically I got really lucky in terms of teammates since there were 2 other semi-pro players and one of them being my classmate and with 2 other pretty decent players as well. We did really well (obviously) with every game being ended around the 20 minute mark (a game normally lasts at least 40 minutes).

The picture on the right was at the end with us coming out on top. I wish we would get sponsored by Taylor's. #FreeAdvertisingForTaylor's





Before I end this post I just want to explain more on the intervarsity competition, as you can see the banner on the left explains the stages that will take place until the grand finals with the grand prize of 5 iPads (which I will sell later on so if you're interested do get hold of me xD) and a prize pool of RM6000.

If you're interested in taking part you still have 2 more chances as the qualifiers is still ongoing, you can check out more details here.

With that I conclude today's post I'm sorry I've been unable to post frequently as I've been busy with some other things as well but I will definitely try my best to post a bit more often, have a good day. :)

DoTA 2

So, DoTA 2 the godfather of the entire MOBA genre. As a League player, I cri every time I hear someone say they play it (yes, that means you Adrian) but truth be told LoL probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for DoTA so I'm quite grateful for it. Admittedly the game has its own strengths and it actually is pretty fun, but sadly I just don't really enjoy it as much as LoL. Let's compare though and really take a look between League and DoTA.

MY OPINIONS ON DOTA 2
Before I start an entire war on this topic I just want to clarify none of the two games are better than the other, I just want to discuss some of my thoughts of the game and why I personally don't enjoy DoTA as much as compared to LoL. For this post I will go through one of the three phases of the game and I will cover the other two in another post as to not make this one too long.


LANING PHASE

The laning phase for both games last around 10-15 minutes and for both game whatever happens during that time is quite similar it's in objective, but the gameplay will be slightly different. Farming,  is a term used for last-hitting minions to gain gold in order to buy items for your characters to become stronger. The objective of the laning phase is to "farm" up so that after the laning phase each hero will have enough items to brawl against one another to siege objectives.

In DoTA you can last-hit your own minions in order to deny the enemy gold and experience that they could have gotten. That's some of the things I really liked and wished it would be implemented in LoL, especially since everyone is getting better at last-hitting and this would really separate the good from the great players.

Many people say that LoL is much slower paced as compared to DoTA. Which I don't really agree on, the other noticeable difference between DoTA and LoL is that in DoTA spamming abilities will be very cost heavy and you will run out of mana fast. Whereas in LoL during the laning phase with the low mana cost on abilities, you are pretty much encouraged to spam your abilities to harrass your opponent. So while you have to concentrate on last-hitting the minions you also have to watch out for your oppone

So that's all for now, this will be a short one as I don't have too much time to be writing a long post but for the next post I'm planning on writing one on CS:GO so stay tune for that. :)

nt's abilities and also keep the enemy jungler in your head.

E-Sports

Before I start, I just want to quickly address something that I forgot to do in my introduction post. As you all know by now my blog is titled "The Gaming Dinosaur". The story behind that is, ever since I started my university life I really got interested in competitive debating. Funny enough even debating has their own terms and one of them is "dinosaur". What that means is, someone, just like how in the gaming world the normal retirement age from professional gaming is around 25. The same goes for competitive debating so someone who used to be in competitive debating and still takes an active role in competitive debate is what we call a, dinosaur.

Now back to today's post, what does it take for a game to be successful in the world of e-sports? Well for one, it has to be a multiplayer game, obviously. Let's take a look at DoTA for a moment, how can such a game, that is at least a decade year old still maintain more than 20 million viewers and even streamed through ESPN on their most recent international championships which was in 2014, with a boasting $10 million in prize-pool.

1. Developer Support
Every once in awhile, something very new will definitely be added whether it be a new hero in DoTA or a new map in Counter Strike. This will keep the game interesting and refreshing for the veterans of the game so that there will be no point in the game's life where anything will be stagnant.

The one main reason for games being able to thrive in e-sports for the long-term is definitely because of the unending developer support and patches to the game. With new things being released there will always be bugs and or anything to be competitive the game has to be free of bugs and balanced. So in short, the developers have to take a very active role in the community to accept feedback and periodically release bug & balance patches.

Not only do the developers have to play an active role for in-game development they also play a very huge role in out of game experiences like sponsoring tournaments, improving viewership, managing the community, and etc.

2. High skill ceiling & Clutch Moments
Have you seen any professional pong players? I don't, that's because everyone can simply master the game in the matter of minutes. In e-Sports, games like DoTA, LoL, CS:GO, these are the kind of games you can't simply hop on and immediately sign a contract with some organization for sponsorship. It takes a long time to get in the right mindset and to acquire the proper skills to do well in professional gaming.

In games like DoTA the game can very easily go in-depth all the way to basic knowledge of your role to the mastery of literally the game itself. You see, eSports is the game of seconds, if you lose your focus for even half-a-second you may literally face defeat, which is what makes eSports so entertaining. Here in the video below, shows one of the best comebacks in LoL where the team OMG literally were one hit away on their nexus for losing that game.




So to conclude making a game successful in e-Sports is crazily hard. Although I barely scratch the surface of what a game needs to be successful in the competitive circuit and I do realize some of them are quite bias but I hope you found this rather informative.

Do tell me in the comments what more you would like to see in the world of competitive gaming, and I hope you're looking forward to my next post on DoTA as requested by one of you. Thanks for reading. :)

Hello World!

The first thing an IT student learns is how to make a "Hello World!" program, where we have the computer print out those 2 words. So, Hello World!

 I just recently started college and am currently studying IT, if you didn't already guess. Back to the point, I haven't had the time to be playing as much games as I would normally use to but I really love gaming and it was a big part of my adolescent years. So just like the title of my blog I guess you can say I am a gaming dinosaur. I'm getting old real quick, damn.

So a little more about me, I mostly played League of Legends. I started playing around 2012 and I still play on and off to maintain my rankings. So why did I stop playing? Well, nowadays I've been busy with my assignments so even if I wanted to, I can't. This blog is also meant for another assignment where I have to post about the things I like. So I figured what better than League of Legends.

This will be it for the my first post, give me some suggestions on what you guys would like to see posted on here as long as it is related to competitive gaming preferably League of Legends. ^_^