We arrived at the hotel in Manila yesterday evening after a very pleasant flight. Most of you probably know already since so many tweeted about it but we got business class from Valve on our flights to Manila and we are very grateful for that. You can really feel the difference, we actually felt quite rested even after flying for 14 hours because of the business class, instead of just wanting to go to sleep straight away when we arrived.
Caught S4 and EGM playing around with Snapchat 🙂Best part of getting business class was that the wine was much better 😀
Today was one of the media days so we have been taking pictures and recording some things for the player/team introductions. Other then that we have been playing some pubs and practiced against another team that isn’t in our group. Tomorrow is a day off so we will continue to play pubs and practice during the day.
At the welcome-dinner earlier today! 🙂Manila Major pastry
Just got back from midnight snack so it’s time to sleep quite soon. Been a pleasure to meet all the fans here so far and the people working at the hotel are very friendly and polite. I also recognize quite many here that have been working with Valve events before so I’m happy to see that they make sure that this event runs smoothly after what happened at the last Major. Hopefully the stream and all that comes with it will work fine as well when the tournament starts with the group stage! 😀
Got back last Monday from one of the best tournaments I’ve ever been to. It was almost like a TI, everything was organized very well. I really liked the stage setup with the wards and Roshan in the middle – looked really cool! It’s fun to see that the tournament was as good from a spectator’s point of view as it was for us with games starting almost always on time and not too many technical problems. The best thing was probably that whenever there was a problem, they were very fast at fixing it.
Present from a dedicated fan. The cookies were painted as Dota items – very well done!
Going back to the tournament the group stage started out a bit so-so for us. We were up against OG in the first round which we ended up losing 2-0. The first game was quite weird, we started out with something like a 9-0 kill score but when they grouped up as 5 we just lost every fight we took. Looking back at the game we should probably just not have fought until we got some damage items up because it was impossible for us to kill their front liners (Bristle, DK and Huskar) when they had Io and Dazzle backing them up. Easy to say after the game but hard to realize when playing.
Such an awesome shirt! 😀
After losing against OG twice the team was quite demotivated. I think you could see in the last game vs. them that we didn’t play as a team. We had a long and important team talk after that to recharge and go through the issues we had and I think it was very important for us that we did it. In the upcoming days and games we were all very hungry to win and really tried our best. I was very happy with our performance since we played as a team and was very close to win against Newbee.
Lovely view in Moscow, really liked the city!
The after party was a lot of fun as well. There was a room with a lot of games where you could challenge someone else and if you won you got a wrist band. The person who had the most wrist bands at like 1 am or something won a prize! I wasn’t there farming for so long so I ended up with only 9 but Zfreek from Complexity got like 19..! 😀 There was a game where you were supposed to hit a block with as few hits as possible that me and Loda played. I got to level 15 and he got to level 14 so we told one of the organizers that I won. The problem was that he didn’t watch us play and he didn’t believe us (he said almost no one gets over level 10) but it was easy for us to just play one more time to show him. He rewarded us with an extra wrist band. Profit!
EGM got a shirt from a fan. The cat (and EGM of course) is so cute! =^.^=
Playing in The Summit 5 qualifiers next week. First round is played the 26th at 17 CET!
The first days here at Epicenter has been very good! The hotel is very nice in general, the practice room was all setup and ready to go when we arrived and we’ve been well informed about the tournament, things like when we need to be ready to take pictures and stuff like that.
Loda playing Fifa 16 🙂
Since our first game is on Tuesday, the day today and tomorrow has been like a small bootcamp for us. We got to play some scrims today and have scheduled for tomorrow as well and whenever we are hungry we can just go to a room where they have food prepared almost the whole day. There is also an area where there is table tennis that we’ve played a bit. I just got back after playing some with my team and some of the complexity players – had to take a shower after and was so thirsty I drank a full bottle of water :D.
Table tennis!
Here are some pictures of the room. It’s so big I almost get lost when I want to go to the bathroom ^^.
Hallway when you enter the room.Quite a big bed for one person!The bathroom. Shower to the left and toilet on the right.
Gonna be some really interesting games tomorrow. Really hard to say which 2 teams that will advance from complexity, Newbee, No Diggity and fnatic. Will at least be a lot of good games both in the wildcard games and the playoffs after, that’s for sure! 🙂
Joakim Akterhall 