2000-x were the beginning of the epoch of eSports. In those days, while still in school, I played in the local CS 1.6 team and at the same time I was the organizer (like manager) on the team (then we called them clans) on Warcraft 3: TFT. Today I would like to talk about the times of Warcraft.

It all began with the magazines "Game Land", which with special care passed from hand to hand, from class to class. Then the boys began to appear, dreaming of becoming cybersportsmen. We looked at WCG (World Cyber ​​Games - the largest tournament of the time in the most popular eSports disciplines), memorized the tactics of such progamers as Grubby, Insomnia, Moon, Lucifer, and replays of the finals were reviewed a dozen times.

I am very tightly hooked on Warcraft, but alas, the slow Internet and the lack of a licensed version of the game (without it, you couldn’t play ladder on Battle.net) prevented you from doing this seriously, so I began to study the amateur scene and watch non-pro teams. So I decided to create my own team.

During its existence, we changed the name and the lineups many times, but I want to talk about the most stable - Just Play Gaming.

These were times when 10-20 amateur teams for half a year fought in the leagues for a prize fund of $ 0 (!), Although there were people like that where they could win $100 (for all).

It was like a battle for Respect, several times a week we had matches that went from 3 to 6 hours, depending on the system of conducting and counting. I remember when we played qualifications for the WGSeries against teams from Peru, Australia, Korea, which took place mostly at night, right after the match I was going and went to the university :D

When I was looking for info about these times, I ran into a problem - most of the league and team sites no longer exist. Still, 10 years have passed. Therefore, we will be content with what has not yet been removed.

During the search, I found even one mention of us on liquipedia.net (this is quite a respected e-sports resource). About our fused match against J4S on qual at New Moscow League Season IV Qualification

During its existence, we did not win anything :D usually ended the season in the middle of the table or closer to the bottom. And on shooting gallery-2 international tournaments on 4-5 rounds usually did not reach. But on our matches some pearls constantly happened, here are a couple of the

  • We played a match against the Australian team and we needed a neutral host, usually German or American, to have the same ping for both players. We just registered a new ACC with the US flag, as a result, the Australians played on the Belarusian host with ping ~ 400

  • We constantly received penalty points because of our French player, who saved our abusive phrases in a notebook and uncovered them while interacting with the judges. They did not want to believe that he was French after the phrases "gavari svoy adress suka, ya viezjay" (its mean "f**k off, i gonna to your home" in russian :D)

  • Once, he lured American human-player Flipstar right during a match against his team. At the end of the match, he agreed to join our team)

  • I got notoriety for the organizer due to the fact that I did not disdain to take technical victories at any opportunity (unless of course the rules allowed). On ESL Ladder it happened on 3-4 matches in a row, which I won “in solo” with technical help.

It is a pity that in those days the team died with the amateur Warcraft and the team, although it was possible to switch to the related discipline of Starcraft 2, but alas, study \ work \ real life won this battle =(