WCG 2008: Day 2 Results
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Posted by on November 8th, 2008
The second day of World Cyber Games 2008 marks the end of the group stage for all titles part of the event. Pakistan’s games for CS, FIFA and CnC3 have been completed and the results were not bad at all!
FIFA player ‘SmoothCriminal’ had a very impressive run in his group. With a total of four games that he had to play, he was up 2-0 initially. I personally thought he was going to qualify from his group since he was leading the points table at that time. He lost the next two games, however, due to which he was tied for second place. ‘Orchi’ from Bangladesh managed to win the tie-breaker between them and qualified from the group with SmoothCriminal finishing third. (EDIT: There was no tie-breaker between them. In fact second place was awarded directly to the winner of their head to head group match - Orchi).
Team ‘incredibles’ who are representing Pakistan for Counter-Strike went 1-4 in their group with their win being against Simplex. Their losses include a very close game against ’Assassin List’ from UAE.
For CnC 3, ‘Pantera’ was able to take two maps out of six, finishing 2-4 overall in his group.
WCG Pakistan finally announced!
Posted by on September 29th, 2008
While the national qualifiers for World Cyber Games 2008 have already been completed in most countries over the world, they just started here in Pakistan. After much confusion over the past few weeks regarding this year’s WCG, Wateen Telecom finally announced last week that it will be organising the qualifiers in Pakistan. Winners will get a chance to represent Pakistan at the WCG grand finals to be held in Cologne, Germany later this year.
Regional qualifiers were conducted at certain gaming cafes in 8 cities over the last week. The six titles that the organisers included are:
- Counter-Strike 1.6
- Warcraft III
- Command & Conquer 3
- FIFA ‘08
- Dota (Pakistan only)
- CoD 4 (Pakistan only)
According to Wateen the national finals will be held in Lahore on the 6-7th of October, where the winners of the regional qualifiers will compete against each other.
More information regarding dates and venues can be found at games.wateen.com/wcg. If you want to find out more about the WCG grand final itself, visit www.worldcybergames.com.
This year’s edition of WCG Pakistan has received heavy criticism because it was poorly publicised and is being held way too late. Other than that, the dates for the national final in Lahore were recently changed and the venue still hasn’t been decided! These are things that should be taken care of before the event is announced so that participants can plan ahead. Some people are even speculating that the winners might not be able to attend the grand final because there won’t be enough time for visas to be issued. For now we can just hope that everything goes as planned and not too many gamers are disappointed.
ESWC 2008 Grand Finals
Posted by on August 23rd, 2008
The sixth version of the Electronic Sports World Cup is right around the corner, being held next week between 25-27th of August. This year’s grand finals will take place in San Jose, California and will include competitions for Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Women, Quake III, Trackmania Nations, DotA and Warcraft III. The event boasts an impressive total prize purse of $200,000, which is to be split amongst the top3 contestants for each game. A detailed prize money breakdown can be found here.
The list of participants and pools for each game have already been announced (except for Trackmania) and can be found by clicking the following links:
GROUP STAGE 1: Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Women, Quake III, DotA, Warcraft III.
Live results and updates can be found on their website throughout the event. There will also be a live video stream for main stage matches which can be viewed here. Live games can also be viewed on clients such as Waaagh!tv, GarenaTV, HLTV and TMTV.
This ought to be a great event so make sure you follow it!
Awesome DoTA videos!
Posted by on February 19th, 2008
Excellent hits and combos. One of these DoTA videos have been made by MYM]Slasher, one of the best DoTA players in the world. This video is an example of “skill” in DoTA, kills, escapes, innovation, all are included. So, do check them out:
Chatting up Grubby’s GF: Cassandra Interviewed!
Posted by on February 4th, 2008
Let me give you a down-low on who this Cassandra person is!
‘MYM]Cassandra’ happens to be one of the most well-known names of professional WarCraft 3 guild than any other. She happens to be Grubby’s girlfriend, and a really loyal mate. Cassandra moved to Netherlands a while ago from Singapore, where she was formally knowns as ‘PpG’. He reason of fame was her career as a supermodel and her superstar boyfriends. If anyone of you remembers ‘DayFly aka aheadache’ another very prolific Orc player, he happened to be her former boyfriend! Both of them are seen on the right.
4Kings’ fall from glory due to bad managment and marketing!
Posted by on February 2nd, 2008
My friend BlooDLust pointed me to this article about how the 4Kings‘ legendary WarCraft 3 team came to an end on SK-Gaming website. The article starts off by explaining how a good team organizer in Tillerman was able to handpick success out of Europe. But after some player and manager changes, 4K was not able to cope with the pressures of modern day gaming and many mistakes along with many issues that they over looked were the reason of their sad demise. Read the entire write-up here.
Blizzard Loots $1.2 Billion From 2007, Thanks To WoW
Posted by on February 1st, 2008
Vivendi, of which Blizzard Entertainment is a division, released its 2007 earnings revenues today, revealing that the World of Warcraft publisher raked in $1.2 billion (€814 million) in revenue last year. WoW’s 10 million large subscriber base contributed the lion’s share of the Vivendi Games division’s $1.5 billion take (€1.018 billion). Blizzard’s revenue was up 58% year over year which can be attributed to strong sales of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and a subscriber boost of 2 million people.
Vivendi pointed to lower earnings from its Sierra label, with sales of Crash of the Titans, Spyro: The Eternal Night, F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, Timeshift and World in Conflict as “not as strong as the 2006 release slate.” Let’s hear it for World of Warcraft, ladies and gentlemen!
Vivendi Full Year 2007 Revenues Increase Significantly (PDF) [Vivendi]
Source: Kotaku
World of WarCraft sets population record… Again!
Posted by on January 26th, 2008
Once again, World of Warcraft has set another astounding record! The population of total WoW players has reached 10 Million, which excludes people that haven’t opened their WoW box sets (like me :/), says Yahoo! Games.
Which game boasts a population greater than Sweden, Israel or Haiti? Online role-playing phenomenon World of Warcraft is the answer: Blizzard Entertainment announced this week that subscriber counts for its smash hit fantasy RPG recently broke the 10 million mark. Warcraft players number more than 2.5m in North America, while Asian subscribers account for the majority of the remainder. (Mike Smith / Yahoo! Games)
I remember we discussed the same rise of number of WoW players a few months earlier where
Vivendi reported a 19% increase in their sales to to 216 million euros ($315.2 million). This phenomenal growth of sales has been attributed to their recent releases, the expansion to original World of Warcraft (WOW) called The Burning Crusade, and a new Real-Time Action Strategy brand called the World in Conflict. It was a well known fact that WoW had 9 million users as Blizzard announced late July 2007 that it had reached the 9 million user mark. (gamer.pk)
Where we also have happened to have said,
Which basically means that come maturity of The Burning Crusade expansion pack there will be more players playing WoW, than some of the smaller countries in the world. And there will be more revenue generated than GDPs of some of the third world countries. What if a country I ruled owned a company like Vivendi? (gamer.pk)
Soon enough, I will sit with a few Pakistani WoW’ers and ask them about their thoughts on such an astounding growth for such a product. This is really mind boggling!
WoW Hits 9.3m Users!
Posted by on November 18th, 2007
Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) means massively in the World of Warcraft as Vivendi reported a 19% increase in their sales to to 216 million euros ($315.2 million) this quarter. This phenomenal growth of sales has been attributed to their recent releases, the expansion to original World of Warcraft (WOW) called The Burning Crusade, and a new Real-Time Action Strategy brand called the World in Conflict. It was a well known fact that WoW had 9 million users as Blizzard announced late July 2007 that it had reached the 9 million user mark.
Gamasutra says,
Vivendi has chalked up the increase not only to its WoW subscriber base, but the release of its The Burning Crusade expansion, which saw release in China in the latter part of the third quarter.
“Revenues also included initial sales of the highly rated action-strategy game World in Conflict from Sierra Entertainment, developed by their internal studio Massive Entertainment and released in the third quarter,” read the company’s statement.
The company also noted that its subscriber base has continued to grow from the 9 million mark it celebrated in July to more than 9.3 million, which it says is up more than one million subscribers since December 31 of last year.
Which basically means that come maturity of The Burning Crusade expansion pack there will be more players playing WoW, than some of the smaller countries in the world. And there will be more revenue generated than GDPs of some of the third world countries. What if a country I ruled owned a company like Vivendi?
Massively notes,
That means that WoW has grown by the size of one and a half EVE Onlines or two whole City of Heroeses in just a few months. Or put another way, the population of World of Warcraft is now greater than the population of Sweden. We think it’s safe to say that World of Warcraft will be the dominant title in the industry for a while longer.
Marty did the math and reports on the post on Joystiq.com,
Assuming everyone paid $15 a month (I think the hardcore players probably don’t do month-to-month, which brings their cost down to around $12 a month, but still…), that’s $139,000,000 a month to Blizzard. $1.67 billion a year. Just thinking about how much money they make is making me feel ill.
WoW in Pakistan is fairly popular for player that have access to high-speed internet. Not to mention it has also become a bane to the gaming community as more players tend to play WoW for it’s ability to engross you completely, and locked onto for hours. Just for $15/month 
Does this all mean we go buy ourselves a WoW CD? I don’t know, but it sure as hell means we go buy ourselves a Vivendi share!
For the Legion of the Undead?
Posted by on October 21st, 2007
The other day I had the weirdest dream, and you will call me weird for this. I was looking at the Talent Build feature in the World of WarCraft for the Mage class. There are three major talent categories for them. Arcane, Fire and Frost.
It is a settled fact that both the Undead and the Human factions from the WarCraft 3 are masters of two different elements. Fire is for Humans or humanoids, and Frost is for the Undead. Arcane falls as a neutral set of skills that both these factions are a master of and those that abet their major spell specialization.
The Archmage however is a master of the Frost element! Blizzard, and Water Elementals are what is from the Frost talent’s tree.
The Undead Legion, also known as ‘The Scourge,’ in WarCraft 3 has a hero called the Lich. And the Lich are masters of the Frost talent. Spells like Frost Nova, Dark Ritual, Ice Shards, Frost Armor give the intelligent Lich Magi immense destructive power.
This master of the Frost is what is beginning to be the base of the next World of WarCraft installment ‘The Wrath of the Lich King.’ The Lich King is the great fallen Alliance hero, Arthus himself.
‘The Alliance,’ of which the Humans are a part, have another hero in WarCraft 3 that is from the nationless Blood Elves. The Blood Mages. These Blood Mages are a master of Arcane and Fire elements.
However, in view of all this discussion, we should remember there have been huge hints of usage of Fire at the Undead side, which leads one to think that there might be possible cross-over of skill amongst these two arch-enemies.
Which leads me to ask the Blizzard developers if they are hiding the fact that they have a plan of ultimately bringing the aloof man on the horse to the Undead?
I had a lot of time on my hands so I typed this out -.-
