The International e-Sports Federation (IeSF) 2011 World Championship took place in Andong City, Korea on the 6th thru the 11th of October and Team DefKon won the chance to represent the United States at the AVA tournament there.
We blogged about DefKon heading out the Korea a few weeks ago: DefKon goes to Korea
We were fortunate to catch up to one of Defkon’s players, the inimitable, Jeff “emongg” Anderson and we asked him about the tournament.
BS: Emongg, congrats again on being selected to go to Korea as America’s representative for AVA. How was the trip?
Emongg: For me personally, the trip was long and exhausting but obviously amazing at the same time. Previously, the longest flight I had ever been on was around four and a half hours, which was back in 2007 for WSVG in Dallas. I guess one positive to the whole long flight thing is that now, when I travel from Boston to LA, the trip doesn’t seem long at all to me anymore. After taking a twelve and a half hour flight from LA to Seoul I can deal with a meager 5-7 hour flight to LA. Also, the trip was kind of a redemption trip for me, after missing out on Korea in ’09 because of personal issues. It was awesome to get a second chance. Those second chances don’t come around too often in eSports and fortunately enough I was able to regain the trust of my teammates to go. It was a great experience and I definitely would do it again even after the duration of the flight.
BS: Andong Korea was the location of the tournament. What was the venue like?
Emongg: Andong really wasn’t that great. I mean, it was awesome being able to visit a Korean city, but the city certainly isn’t at the top of the list of best cities in the world. From what my teammates have said, for the past 2 years the site of the IeSF championships were set in amazing places and the tournament was just an awesome experience. At the 2011 championships, we were put into a hotel thirty minutes away from the venue, with no internet, barely any food, vending machines that ran out really quick and I would have preferred sleeping on jagged rocks than the beds we were given. Still though, a free trip to South Korea trumps all of that, so I had no problem dealing with any of those issues. The city was cool at night, bright lights, etc. Andong features a lot of cultural highlights though, but most of us “nerds” really aren’t there to learn about the history of rice and wooden printing blocks.
BS: Can you describe the sights, sounds and crowds at the tournament?
Emongg: The crowd and atmosphere was really spotty. If there was something big going on there were a good amount of people standing behind the players, but for the most part there really wasn’t anything huge going on. Considering IeSF plays all their prelims in a tournament area and only streams their finals, in Korean, on the last day, it’s really hard to gather a huge audience. When we played, we probably had 6-7 Video cameras on us. People sat behinds us, etc. Obviously with what happened last year any USA match was going to be pretty big. But really, outside of that there was nothing. During one our matches I did an amazing 3 kill against Japan and the guy behind me kicked my chair out of awe, was kind of awesome and awful at the same time.
BS: I’ve heard Korea is crazy for eSports entertainment, did you feel that too?
Emongg: Based off of the crap-ton of PC cafes and people not looking at you like you’re insane in the streets, I would say, yes, Korea is crazy for eSports entertainment. I think in Korea it has come to the point where it is just naturally accepted just like any other sport. I still consider gaming to be like Soccer in the United States. It is big in some way in every country — except America. MLG’s are obviously huge, but in other countries, gaming has become a lifestyle, not just a hobby.
BS: Which teams did you face?
Emongg: We were only able to play against Japan, Netherlands, Germany, and Korea. Unfortunately the other teams China, Taiwan, and Thailand were eliminated in the Asian preliminaries the day before our matches. We would have loved to play all those teams, unfortunately it didn’t happen.
BS: What was the format of the competition?
Emongg: It started with Asian Preliminaries which had Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Thailand and China. Eventually three of those teams were eliminated into a new Prelim with USA, Netherlands, Germany, Korea and Japan. Following this based off of how teams do in the prelims they were put into certain parts of the brackets. The winner of prelims automatically went into finals, 2nd place of prelims was put into semi-finals, and 3rd/4th place played each other in quarterfinals, while the 5th place team was eliminated.
BS: Gametypes played?
Emongg: There was only one gametype, which was demolition.
BS: What were the maps you played?
Emongg: The maps were based off of a random map pool. These maps were Cannon, Hammer Blow, Black Scent, Fox Hunting, India, Dual Site and maybe another map that I already forgot.
BS: So how did you do?
Emongg: We went 3-1 in Prelims, losing a best out of 3 to Korea 2-1. Then we lost in the semi-finals to Japan 2-1, who we had beaten earlier in the prelims 2-1. All of them were very close matches except against Korea we got 7-0ed on the fairly new map Airplane.
BS: How did you feel you did, personally?
Emongg: Outside of my 2-8 score vs Korea I felt like I did pretty well. But, we still only got 3rd place so clearly it wasn’t good enough. It’s also a team game so a lot of the time individual performance is more based off of what you do and how you do it, rather than score.
BS: Did you have a lot of strats going into the tournament? Did you change your strats during the tournament?
Emongg: Honestly, we really don’t have many set in stone strats. With the strat caller from last year being unable to play in the tournament, Michael3D had to call strats which he hates. So ultimately our strats were just random run around and shoot people in the face, there really was never any timed pushes or set strategies. It was either Go 1 or Go 2.
BS: Did any of the teams you played against impress you? If so which and why?
Emongg: All of the teams there did pretty good, and we expected a lot of each of them. Obviously Korea and Japan were impressive because they play a completely different type of style so some of the stuff we saw was new and impressive.
BS: Back to the loss against Japan. Did you guys dissect the game and find out why you lost? What would you differently, if you could replay the game?
Emongg: Winning the clutch situation is the only reason why we lost. We are terrible at Cannon, but surprisingly it didn’t come down to our lack of being good at the map. It came down to us just not converting on the 1v1′s. We lost 6 1v1s during that match and when you lose a map 7-4, if you take those six rounds and win even 3 of them we win that match. Only thing we could have done differently is just win those clutches, otherwise there wasn’t anything else we could have done. We also played them on Fox Hunting which we had beaten them on previously, so we should have won that once again. Instead we played a passive style of play and completely tried something new which failed miserably.
BS: Do the Asian teams play much differently than the North American/Euros that you have scrimmed against?
Emongg: Yes, the Asian teams play a more slow and methodical play style that is rough to get used to. Me and my teammate Michael3D have always played a in-your-face-style, dating back to CoD4, so when a team plays extremely slow it was rough to adapt to at first. Eventually we were fine, since a big part of tournament play is adapting but at times it gets really annoying. It honestly felt that at times Korea and Japan went and got a water break and came back to their computers with 25 seconds left and did a push. With there not being many good teams in AVA it’s hard to prepare for something like that, but at the same time it isn’t impossible to deal with. Patience is a virtue and for the most part we handled it well.
BS: Finishing 3rd in an Asian tournament is still very impressive. Are you happy with your performance, does this experience make you want to work even harder next year?
Emongg: No, not happy with the performance at all. 3rd place is all nice and dandy but anything less than 1st place is considered a failure.
BS: Where do you go now, what’s up next for emongg and Defkon?
Emongg: I know that Michael3D and I are moving to BF3 once it comes out, since it will have some sort of competitive scene for a while. There is a possibility of an AVA tournament in China sometime around January so we may stick around in AVA for that. Still that is yet to be announced so until then I don’t see us playing much AVA. For the other DefkoN guys I cannot speak for them. We still hang out on mumble etc so I guess we will just have to say.
Check out some great pics taken by ex-CoD and AVA eSport great, Eric Brinkley (aka “Snatcch”): Link to photos
Here’s emongg (left) and his buddy Michael3D (right): pic
The whole DefKon team is in this one (left to right: Michael3d, Snowshovel, emongg, chilly, skadoodle): pic
The official results from the 2011 IeSF World Championships for AVA:
1st Place: S. KOREA Team
2nd Place: JAPAN Team
3rd Place: USA Team
Congrats to all involved.
Here’s a vid showing Defkon hangin’ with the team from Japan
Remember to subscribe to emongg’s Youtube channel and watch for more videos to come from him.
awesome