2GD on ArenaCast and Call-in Show Next Week!

2GD joins us for the week of December 3rd as the ArenaCast crew covers a huge array of topics including Arena, Wintergrasp, uh, lots of ****, I can't remember. We'll be back next week, 6CST on Wednesday. See you then.

Next week we will probably have a ~10m period at the end of the show where users can possibly call in and ask a question or comment on the show (OMG YOU CAN TROLL US YAY). We'll see how this goes, though. Perhaps just stick to talking in the Ustream chat.

Philly wrapup on Sunday Night

Tonight we got a group of players together who had one thing in common - they all lost to this event's underdog story, Trade Chat Allstars. The victors themselves were unable to attend due to their mad dash to the aiport after receiving their oversized check, but we'll grab a few of them for a live show Wednesday night later this week.

Instead, we got to share in the grief of lower finishers, including GotGame West, Gravitas Gaming, and the team that came one round away from their first championship, GotGame East.

The group talk about just how Trade Chat Allstars blitzed the field of experience contenders in their inaugural event as well as how they think their prospects may fare in Germany next year.

We'll be back Wednesday with the winners, but for now, enjoy the show!

Imeem Audio Stream  -  Filefront Download

ArenaCast: Live it's Saturday Night!

Tonight we hosted players from every team still left in the tournament - GotGame East, Evil Geniuses, Gravitas Gaming, and Trade Chat Allstars - for a chat in our room, kicked off by head ESL WoW Admin David "Shawn" Kugelmann talking about how the tournament has run so far and the controversy in the Pandemic vs. Fnatic match.

Topics for discussion included the difficulty Rogue, Mage, Priest has had at the event despite indications it would dominate in the level 70, 3.0 metagame, how each team felt they performed, who they considered the MVPs of the tournament so far, whether Priests can remain the dominant Arena healers, and the strength of Hagu's Shaman.

Listen to Jordan "HappiMinti" Mance boost Zyz's ego, Isaac "Azael" CB refute Kollektiv's critics, DJ "Celex" #!*$ Arcane, and Ryan "Realz" Masterson ruin his prospects for a MoB sponsorship.

Check back tomorrow for an event recap and a meeting with the champions and the three teams who will represent the USA at the Intel Extreme Masters Global Finals in Germany next year!

Imeem Audio Stream  -  Filefront Download

EG takes first group

In something no one predicted, Evil Geniuses blistered the competition in their group here at ESL Philly using some unorthodox and unexpected class compositions to their advantage.

They easily dispatched GotGame West running the Bladstorm train with Azael on Warrior, Zyz on Rogue, and Kollektiv providing Bloodlust. The only blip in that game would come in round three as Didy switched from Warlock to Holy Paladin in an attempt to mitigate the insane melee damage produced by EG.

GotGame had already beat Gravitas in a close 3-2 series using RLD, still countering to some extent the RMP Gravitas used - but only because they insisted on running a Frost mage. After EG's win over GotGame, though, Gravitas could still take the group if they beat EG with a 3-1 or 3-0 score.

After the first two rounds, it looked like they'd do it as EG's Rogue, Destro Lock, Shaman composition didn't seem to have the power to outdo Gravitas' RMP. The next three rounds, though, EG played an amazing game as they did all the little things, allowing them to take the series 3-2 and win their group

The group of death is next as Pandemic kicks it off against GotGame East, a tough match considering GotGame's success online against RMP with their Resto Druid, Rogue, Mage lineup.

Expect us to put together an audio show later in the day featuring the winners from each group and predictions on how day two will play out!

ESL Philly underway, ArenaCast coverage later

The first set of group matches will begin momentarily with GotGame West, Gravitas, and Evil Geniuses duelling for an autoberth into the double elimination bracket. With eMazing Gaming missing from the tournament, each of the three teams will advance to the single elimination relegation round, but only one will forego that round altogther.

Later today, the group of death - Pandemic, Trade Chat Allstars, Fnatic, and GotGame East - will get underway.

Warmup matches have proved to be an interesting barometer as to the level of many of the teams competing in a tournament where they prepared minimally considering the lack of a tournament realm with the proper level 70, 3.0 tournament metagame. Aside from the occasional five second (literally) Ring of Valor matches, there have been quite a few enlightening games.

Trade Chat Allstars in particular look to be an early dark horse favorite, considering their RMP lineup featuring an Arcane mage has run circles around Pandemic and Gravitas in warmup. Both of the veteran teams were still testing Frost Mage effectiveness, but so far is looks like Arcane will reign supreme.

Fnatic managed to knock off a few RMPs - including Gravitas and the aforementioned Allstars - with Ret Paladin, Warrior, Resto Shaman, moving Hafu to a class she's barely played for more than a day. With Windfury Totem and Heroism, though, it isn't too intensive, and she's managed to play it adequately, so far.

Later in the day, expect some audio shows with the group winners and losers in the ArenaCast style, as well as more updates with insider info about all the action!

Catch ArenaCast from ESL Philly this weekend!

On Friday, JP McDaniel and Samuel Lingle will join the top World of Warcraft players from around the continent in Philadelphia for the culmination of western hemisphere's portion of ESL's Intel Extreme Masters event.

We'll be providing daily shows including insight from both us and the players on all the daily action at one of the most important WoW tournaments of the year.

Make sure to check out our Philadelphia preview featuring Pandemic's Nathan "Kintt Quinn and Keith "Igoaf" Trahan as we talk about which teams have the best chance to earn berths in the Extreme Masters global finals and predict what will happen in this unpredictable level 70, patch 3.0 metagame. Other topics of discussion include the results from the RMP-infested Korean continental final as well as what it's like to finally play Wrath of the Lich King - and why Wintergrasp PvP sucks.

See you in Philly!

- Nov. 20th

ArenaCast Going Live Wednesday!

Click here to access the live show page @ UStream

ArenaCast is going live! Wednesday 8 p.m. - 10 p.m. CST (so all you EST nerds can still go get in line to get WotLK) we'll be going live bringing you all of the pro players and anyone else who wants to come and talk with us on Skype.

The cast this week will feature myself (JP McDaniel), Sam 'oplaid' Lingle, Jared 'vhell' Coulston, Nathan 'Kintt' Quinn, and Keith 'Igoaf' Trahan unless he is pre-occupied. We plan on calling Ming and Jasi again but that is up to them if they want to talk.

Other guests will be all the professional players you can think of. I believe Happyminti should show up too - he wanted to have a quick word with Ming. He wasn't too happy apparently.

As for that Starcraft II beta giveaway - it's still going on. We'll do the 'drawing' live on air so if you want to register to win make sure to post on the World of Warcraft forum post.

About the WotLK CD-key giveaway: Team Pandemic has been gracious enough to go out and buy 4 Wrath of the Lich King CD-keys and donate them to the show. So how are we going to give them away? Every 30 minutes on the show we'll be giving one away. Listeners will be asked a question about past podcasts and the third (since Patch 3.0 is well... 3.0) person to PM me on irc.gamesurge.net will win. Simple as that.

From here we'll most likely ship the games out the following day. If you request beforehand that you would just like the CD-key (since you're going out to buy the game anyways) we can send it over just as easily.

So make sure to tune in this Wednesday as ArenaCast will be going live for the first time! Now you can see just how dyslexic I am without edits. See you then.

Win a BlizzCon 2008 Beta Key!

And now an announcement! Since I was so late with the Ming podcast, we're going to do a giveaway! Yay! Free stuff! What kind of free stuff, you ask? How about a BlizzCon 2008 Beta Key for StarCraft 2?

So how can you enter and win? All you have to do is go HERE and post your opinions on the cast. You can post as many times as you want, I don't care. From here I will use a program to randomly pick a post number, and announce that character name on the next podcast. If that person doesn't respond to me within a week I will begin posting a name every 2-4 days on this blog until sometime responds. Enjoy! And look forward to the full launch of ESFI World in the near future. Take the tour if you haven't yet at www.ESFIWorld.com.

The Ming Episode. Finally.

Yay, we did it! We have our own page now. Albeit it, not a full, fleshed out ArenaCast page with custom skinned, embeddable players etc, but its a start. I'll start to blog more often now about upcoming shows. But for the first ever entry, I suppose talking about the first show to be "hosted" here on ESFI would suffice.

The Ming Episode. Finally no more reading private messages and death threats about releasing the damned thing. The downside to this is I don't think it can anyway live up to all the hype. But it is a good cast, and some pretty good conversations came out of talking with him - not Naruto based...even though I made a fool out of myself and showed the world just how white I am in trying to pronounce a certain phrase from the anime.

So since the Ming and Jasi interview was conducted so long ago, we decided to do 30-40 minutes of recent news which we added to the beginning of the show.

Personally, I think this was one of our best casts. Everyone was more much relaxed this time around. It was also our first cast where we had no edits! Yay! I'm lazy, sorry. But you get two casts for the pri... for something!

For the first part we had: JP McDaniel (myself), Jared 'vhell' Coulston, Isaac 'Azazael' Bentley, Keith 'Igoaf' Trahan and Nathan 'Kintt' Quinn.

Shownotes (Part 1):

- ESL Montreal Recap
- Nerd rage in WoW e-sports
- Back stories on both cases of nerd rage from Nathan and Isaac
- Talk 3.0 with the pros
- ESL talk
- Kintt and I challenge someone to a tug of war

The cast that we had for the Ming episode was: JP McDaniel, Jared 'vhell' Coulston, Sam 'oplaid' Lingle, Jasi and Ming.

Shownotes (Part 2):

- We get personal with Ming and Jasi.
- Talk with Ming about some hot topics such as Noktyn, Naruto, and of course Estelle
- Ask Jasi how he got started with WOM among other things.
- Origins of World of Ming - how did it all start?
- why WOM so much like WWE? Was this intended or just what gets hits?
- What do you think about current e-sports coverage?
- Do you think you are progressing e-sports coverage? Or are you simply feeding off the trolls?
- Current state of WoW / Current state of WoW Arena / Current state of WoW e-sports
- Beta impressions - anything that needs dire attention? any suggestions for Blizzard?