COMPETITION(S)

It is amazing how strong is the competition on W3Arena. There are no easy games nor easy opponents. Every clash provides the most entertaining replay materials and everyone seems to be improving their game with each new day. I am releasing my second replay pack later today and I am dedicating this article to my hardest opponents, Haburinho and Vankor.

I never thought that I will be playing this game like I played it many years ago. Simply, the conditions that met our scene in past few years never allowed me to think in that way. Broken ladder, trollish tournaments competitions that could only bring me match or two against 1-2 players that I consider to be respectful opponents were the reasons why not only myself, but the army of amazing players quit playing and left the scene for good, leaving it to the self called Night Elf pros and wannabe Random playas who invaded ROC.

In such atmosphere, player like me, doesn't wanna get involved because getting involved would be closest thing to betrayal of the good old times. How can you let yourself jumping into trap that one day your biggest rivals are HLA and Pumpa and next year you find yourself playing a final of some trollarena tournament against some NE newbie who started to play yesterday or was a newbie till yesterday when every decent player left the scene?

Now, with the opening of this great W3Arena server, we are able to judge and say which of the players who were the most active in the past few years are able to compete on highest levels. And I gotta say that I am very surprised that players like DvD[SpaiN] (I believe that this is how his main account is written), ListenToUrHeart and Witek are more than respectful opponents and that there are no easy games against them. Plus, they are there for playing the game and not showing off nor hiding under some smurf. Pleasant surprise that gives me a lot of joy and proves that there are great new era players out there who can meet the criteria of highest gaming levels.

Next to them there are players from once a great AT team - Arno and Byby who were always great players and I am happy to see them around I wrote it many times that I believe that ArnOrc is/was/will be the best AT player of all times. His solo is great as well, but his great game knowledge comes to the best in AT. It is simply amazing how precise and concrete is his gaming in this type of the game.

And now I came to the most entertaining part of this article and that is the story about my two hardest opponents on W3Arena - Haburinho and Vankor. Most of you know Haburinho from battle.net because he used to be active there since, I believe, 1.18. After meeting him in ladder for several times I invited him to join good old clan w3 crew and he accepted the offer. While we were becoming friendly in chat room and games we got closer to the greatest ROC clan league ever made and in organisation of old website www.w3roc.com where USA players also took part in. 

In the most entertaining clan war that we played against USA clan mmk (name meaning mamak which is channel on US-West like keko in Europe) as a captain  I decided to let Tomas (Haburinho) to play a bo3 match against US legend Nihor. I decided to do this because of many factors. Nihor was amazing versus Undead and our team consisted of UD players as well - eS.Rus and S_A_I_B_O_T and I wanted to play against LNo because he was a kiddo with big mouth but skill that could never meet mine.

And should I say what were clan members reaction on that? Everyone was at least surprised if not shocked when they realized that great Nihor is going to meet a player from the ladder. But should I say how everyone was shocked when Haburinho went over Nihor with the score of 2/1? And of course, I pwned LNo and the overall score of that clan war was 5/1 in favor of clan w3.

As I said before, this clan war and this clash determined which server has the supremacy.  And Haburinho was part of that. The biggest thing to note is that, because US players always whined how they come to Europe to meet us on our hosts and they are forced to play with the lag, we played whole clan war on US- East sever. And we ate them, with lag, against the flames, we shut their big mouth. Forever.

So Tomas bought the respect till that day and ever since he is been considered as a great player. Truth is that  he mostly plays for fun and you can rarely see him trying hard to actually win the game. He never participated tournaments but he enjoys the beauties of the ladder. When W3Arena got open and when I saw him in channel I was very pleased because I knew that great games against him are coming. And I was not mistaken, because we already played numerous of amazing games and I am sure that we are going to play much more in near future.

Now, most of you are familiar with the ROC history and part of you who were not there to witness it were able to learn it from my posts. I dedicated many articles to ROC players who used to play this game long time ago but since it is impossible to remember every single of of them I didn't write them down in order to introduce them to you. Now I will introduce you Vankor, one of the best European Undeads of all times.

Vankor is Greek, and he is, roughly, my age, so around 25 years old. He won WCG qualification tournament in Greece in 2005 and qualified for the final tournament where he went through second phase by beating every single opponent in groups, including Undead Korean monster - 4K.Fov. In brackets he finally broke down against Norwegian 4K.Creo, losing 2/1. He played under fnatic tag and in 2006 he fully retired because of obligations in real life.

He stands for an aggressive, brilliant player who played ROC as well. When I first met him on W3Arena he was very kind and it took us time to realize that we met eachother in battlefield 7-8 years ago. After that we did few great games that I will upload later today.

The point of this post is very obvious. You are either there, or you are not.