April 2016 – Joakim Akterhall

Summary of the past week

April 30, 2016 by Akke, posted in Dota2, General

Just got home from the cinema! Went to see The Jungle Book together with Bummi, Loda, EGM, Kelly and our friend Isaac. Really liked it, was one of the better movies we’ve seen lately so if you haven’t seen it yet and like movies like that you should go and watch it!

Was very happy when I found out we got invited to the Manila Major a couple of days ago. I’ve had some troubles sleeping when I knew the invites were about to come out, waking up in the middle of the night just to check my phone to see if the invites were announced.. 😀 I like (not biased at all here hehe) that they chose to invite 12 teams rather than keeping the old system with 8 invites since it was hard to say who should be invited over the other. Even though teams that has qualified through the qualifier has placed higher than many invited teams in the past I think it’s good that you are rewarded for competing in tournaments outside of the majors and that you get rewarded for being able to perform over a longer period of time instead of just playing good during one qualifier. I would really like to see a point system of some kind and for example after every major the points are reduced by half (making it easier for other teams to catch up to the next major). Winning a tournament should give you a lot more points than the other placements, like 100/30/15 points for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. I think most players would agree with me that winning a tournament is so much harder than just placing decent in many since you have to perform throughout the whole tournament compared to just being able to win a game here and there.

Really looking forward to meet all the fans in Manila!

I really liked Valve’s decision to change the rules for the invites because it shows that they are willing to do what they think is fair and good for the current state of the teams and how the scene looks right now. I understand that they don’t want to go public with how the invites are handled and that having a point system could be bad in some ways because it basically remove Valve’s ability to adapt to how the state of the scene is. Personally I still favor a point system since it’s very clear how it works and when you know the rules you can’t really complain about it since all the cards are on the table. As it is right now we don’t really know what the best way to get invited to a major and TI is (which basically is every teams goal) and I guess that is what bothers some.

The Kickstarter for Animus Home is ending in two days (one of my friends are one of the guys behind it). Some of you might have seen my tweet that I did some time ago but for you who didn’t see it I got one of the early bird packs that they have available! They also released a new video a couple of days ago that got me hyped to get the product. They showed how you could have a funny quiz at home by just having their product and 3 smart lamps! I can see myself challenging my friends with some nerdy Dota-questions at home… ^^

Watching Bummi play some Dark Souls 3 right now while writing the blog post. We are both quite close to the end of the game, have had a lot of fun (mixed with anger and frustration while dying on bosses) playing so I’m very pleased with the game! Looking forward to finish it so I can start to watch some speedruns and see them killing the bosses in a couple of seconds that took me hours.. 😀

Cheers,
Akke

Dark Souls 3 & ESL Manila

April 20, 2016April 20, 2016 by Akke, posted in General

Last week just before we left for Starladder Dark Souls 3 was released in Sweden. I only had time to try it an hour since we were preparing for Starladder but I’ve played some more now after we got home and killed 4 bosses so far, really enjoy it! When I played Dark Souls 2 I choose to be a Mage (I always want to be a Mage if I can :D) so I thought I’d try something new this time. Have been playing as a Knight now and it’s more fun and challenging to play close-combat than to just run away and spam spells even though I liked that as well x).

Watching Bummi play right now. She is a bit further than me but really fun to watch and give each other tips on where to find things (even though Bummi seems to find almost everything but I’m too eager to get to the next bonfire so I miss a lot of items) and help each other out.

We are taking a couple of days break before we start to practice again so I’ve just been playing some pubs to keep up. My three favorite heroes in pubs are Phoenix, Oracle and Enchantress right now! 🙂

ESL Manila is starting soon, really looking forward to see the teams there play and especially Secret with their new roster. Quite hard to say who the favorite is, I think it’s very even between most teams there. But time will tell I guess :).

Cheers,
Akke

Post Starladder thoughts

April 18, 2016April 18, 2016 by Akke, posted in Dota2, Tournaments

Back home from Starladder today! We actually wanted to go back yesterday but there were no good tickets so we decided to stay and practice in Kiev instead. We ended up playing against MVP which was nice, they are always very serious so really good to practice against.

Me and Bulldog on the way to a restaurant

Going back to the tournament, we started out winning against VP but then lost to LGD in the semi finals and eventually to OG in the loser bracket. I haven’t watched the replays yet so hard to say what went wrong but the game that annoys me the most is the loss when we had Chen, LC and Sylla. It really felt like we had the game where we wanted after the early game but then we got too eager to push and just went in and died and lost our advantage. In a way I’m very happy that we at least won one game in both the series that we lost because it shows that we are very close to winning as well, but at the same time it’s very annoying to be so close but yet so far away. Both series we lost at the Shanghai major was also 1-2.. ^^

Having some drinks together with EGM and Loda while trying to forget our loss 😀

When we got eliminated we went to a restaurant we got recommended from Starladder that was quite close to the hotel we were staying at. We really enjoyed it, especially the desert! We had ice cream that they made in front of us while we were there in a way they used in the 17th or 18th century. They told us that back then it would take someone like 8 hours to make this ice cream but today they can make it faster (in about 10 minutes) because instead of using snow to make it cold they can use liquid nitrogen. Was a really cool experience and the food was very good!

The making of the ice cream! Was really fun to see! 🙂

They poured some liquid nitrogen into the wine to keep it cold 😀

Watched NiP play vs Navi in the Dreamhack Masters grand finals yesterday (CS:GO event). Really happy to see NiP win their first major tournament in 18 months! They’ve been practicing hard to try to get back into shape so very happy for them that it finally paid off. Even though I hardly play any CS:GO it’s still very fun to watch!

Hopefully a new patch comes out soon along with the invites for the Manilla Major. Even though we didn’t perform well at Starladder I still hope we get an invite because we won 2 big LAN events the past 4 months as well as finishing top8 in the last Major. Not very likely but one can hope at least! 🙂 If we don’t get an invite the next official is gonna be the qualifiers, otherwise the next official is in Moscow when we are playing the Epicenter tournament.

Cheers,
Akke