Anyone's Ghost

That sounds very amazing, Joyeeta, but I think I will not. Also, hi!

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Sometime last week I wrote down this word that I wanted to talk about here. It was in the morning as I left the house, and I can't remember which day it was, if it was a good morning or a bad morning.

I guess all of that doesn't really matter. This morning in particular was sunny and not too cold unlike the others (which are usually cold because of my abundance of early starts). I saw a lonely white butterfly. And I thought, cool, they're back.

Some period of time ago, that butterfly was a cocoon, after being a catapillar. And every butterfly I remember from previous years is dead.


the word was Butterfly

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It's 1:14 on Sunday, everything above was written about now, too. I think this post will be one that isn't written over multiple days, as long as I can finish it.


Yesterday I ended up sleeping at about ... I'm not even sure, around 3 I think. And then I woke up at about 6:20, earlier than I would for my 9am starts, to watch dota. A few other people woke up for it too, which I thought was pretty cool.

Where to start...

So there is this company called Valve. They make games and things like that, and are quite possibly the most successful and popular gaming company of all time. or at least recent time. I don't know, don't quote me on that.
Interestingly, wikipedia says "Valve is run as a flat organization without bosses".

And there is also this game called DotA. Defense of the Ancients. Except this wasn't actually a game. It was a custom, user-made map in a game called WarcraftIII. But what made DotA so notable was that it was more popular than WarcraftIII. People would buy WarcraftIII and then play DotA, a custom map, instead of the actual game. This is like ... well, I can't think of any examples.

So anyway Valve came along and made Dota 2. One of the most upsetting differences, to me at least, is that now it is Dota instead of DotA. Copyright issues and things like that, oh well.


DotA, a game so popular that people would buy WarcraftIII just to play it, and Valve, a huge company known to make pretty awesome things. When you combine the two together, you know it's going to be good.


So, because esports, Valve is running and funding a tournament called The International 3. There were 2 of these in the past, but this one is definitely going to be miles ahead of the previous ones. Some have called it the superbowl of esports, but to be honest I think it's more than that because this is international rather than a country (hence the name).

They started with a prizepool of $1.6m.

Then they made an in-game item for Dota 2. A "interactive compendium". It costs $10 to buy, and essentially is just an item that lets you be more involved with the tournament by having predictions and collectables and other in-game items. But the most notable thing about this compendium is that every compendium sold adds $2.50 to the prizepool of TI3.

So everyone who bought this would help to increase the prizepool of this tournament. If 100000 people buy this, that adds 250000 to the prizepool.

Right now, the prize pool is $2,798,122.

That means $1,198,122 of the prizepool is from the playerbase of this game. I don't know how many compendiums that is, but that's a lot. Almost $4.8 million has been spent by people buying this item.


I forgot to mention that Dota 2 is a free-to-play game. Anyone can get it and have access to the entire game for free. You don't have to spent anything. But people love this game so much, and they want to contribute to this superbowl of esports so much, they collectively spent $4.8m to support it.

I haven't bought a compendium myself, even though the majority of my dota friends have. Just because, I don't know, I shouldn't have to. It's not a bad thing to not do a good thing.


So anyway, the first day of TI3 was yesterday and I woke up at 6:20 to watch some it, and that was pretty cool.

There are 15 teams in this tournament, who were invited or qualified or something like that. But there are 2 more teams, who play in a "wildcard" match. Pretty much, you need 16 teams to have a proper tournament structure, and this wildcard match is just to add another dimension to the tournament I guess.

Whoever wins this match gets to play in the next part of the tournament, and whoever loses is out. It's quite tragic, actually. It's like ... flying to Australia because you want to study in an Australian university, but then failing an entrance exam. You get to stay around in Australia for a little bit of holiday, but it kind of really really sucks.


The wildcard match was between two teams, Rattlesnake (chinese team) and Quantic (western team).

One of the players on Rattlesnake is this guy called LanM. And he has a really interesting back story. Life story. Love story. Whatever it is, I recommend it. It's not about the game specifics, it's about life. The only reason I decided to start this post was because I wanted to share this. Also because I had to kill some time.

http://dotaland.net/2013/02/26/the-chronicles-of-lanm-stories-of-yesteryear-1-3/

They wondered why we were so into a game, said that we played too much and lost ourselves. Because they didn’t understand that this was our outlet for the pressures of the world, and this was the place where we learned teamwork, cooperation, forgiveness, determination in the face of defeat. It was here that we made friends, true friends, without the worries of real-life profit and benefit.

One of the biggest lessons from this game is forgiveness. It's a team game. Everyone has to pull their weight, and often the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Losing because some guy screwed up big time can be very frustrating. And I guess that's where forgiveness comes in. No one screws up on purpose. No one never screws up. Everyone knows this. But it is still very difficult to understand and forgive. I have been playing this game for a very long time, and I still have trouble with this. Because if someone screws up, it is their fault regardless of whether they intended to or not. 

You learn to forgive.


Tonight I played a game with one friend and three randoms. It was a really bad game. It's interesting. Some games you screw up early on, and then no matter what you do you can't win because you are too behind. When a team loses, it's really common (if you're playing with people you don't know) to have one or more people blaming others. So even if everyone on the team plays perfectly, since they are so far behind they will lose anyway. And despite the fact that no one screwed up in that particular instance, people will still blame.
I don't know if the absurdity of that is clear, or whether any of that makes sense or not, and I am not in the mood to elaborate.

I screwed up quite a bit early on in that game. And later on a couple of the randoms started blaming me, and I could have told them that they screwed up quite a bit too (which they did), but I didn't because that wouldn't have helped, and they were right - I did screw up pretty badly.

At the end I said something like, sorry worst game of my life, going to cry now good night. (didn't go to cry)

and one of the other guys said:
"kill yourself"
"jk"
 "i sometimes have bad games too"
 "never that bad though"

even though that might sound a bit offensive, all of this was jokingly. There was mutual forgiveness, and that was nice.


Today ... is the second day. Games from 2am aus time to 10am . I don't know when I will sleep. It's going to be awesome.

 I'm writing on my phone because It's started now.

 I think there was something else I wanted to talk about but I can't remember.


One of the things I learned from LanM's story was the importance of remembering what is important in life. I hope I don't forget this.

I read somewhere that it is much worse to regret not doing something than it is to regret doing something.  I was thinking something like this before and Only just then did I realise that this is an old idea.

I Remember thinking some time before that the chances are, everything I have ever thought and experienced had probably already been thought and experienced by countless people in the past.

I think I thought something like, well, everyone goes through hard times, and mostly everyone gets through okay. So if I go through hard times, it's nothing new. Easy times compared to most people, in fact.

Get over it.

I should make an effort to be more kind.

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I feel like I should try to sleep. Maybe I can catch one more game ...