At 5 am Beijing time, there was a moment of silence at the IEM 2022 “StarCraft 2” World Championship Finals in Katowice, Poland.
Li Peinan left the keyboard with both hands, clenched his fists, and then raised his head and cut it into the air. In the face of such tremendous success, he was a bit at a loss.
There was a small step between the player’s bench and the trophy, but Li Peinan was stunned when he walked down. He knelt on the ground with his hands on the ground, and quickly adjusted his posture to stand up, ready to receive the interview that belonged to him.
All the lights in the Katowice arena were turned on, the milky white rays of light swaying in the middle of the sky, the star-shaped lights gathered together flashing blue fluorescent lights, and the cool light fireworks on the podium spray into the air, everyone’s eyes They all turn to the figure on the podium.
When the host stepped forward to ask questions, the champion, who should have answered the questions complacently, knelt with his head in his hands.
From becoming a professional player to being on the podium that belonged to one person only, this player who has been in the professional field since the age of fifteen has walked for a full eight years.
Of course he was lucky. No matter what kind of sports players, the “world champion” is the flower in the mirror and the moon in the water may not be able to touch after exhausting the most precious years.
But he wasn’t so lucky either. Even after he won the championship, many people still don’t know what kind of game “StarCraft 2” is.
After all, this is a “Dead Game” that was sentenced to “death” a few years ago.
Time goes back to 2020 three years ago.
On July 27, 2020, the game “StarCraft 2” presented its 10th anniversary.
Blizzard timely updated the new “Commander Prestige” system in “Cooperative Mode”, allowing many players to see the possibility that the game will continue to function.
For this ten-year-old RTS game, players’ expectations for Blizzard are not high. Expanding the “cooperative mode” of the PVE part of the game, and appropriately adding some recreation, is enough to make players excited. After all, most players are no longer young, not only do they not have as much time and energy for PVP, APM may not be able to keep up with their former self.
But what no one expected was that an obituary-like publication more or less appeared on October 16, less than three months after the 10th anniversary. Paid content like war chests”.
Obviously, for the “StarCraft” series, which is basically impossible to get “3”, “StarCraft 2” is likely to be the last swan song of the series, and “stop producing new content” is undoubtedly a tribute to this difficult game. , sentenced to death.
My professor colleague Diandian described Blizzard’s operations at that time as “the new content for the 10th anniversary made everyone feel that it could continue for a few more years. I didn’t expect Blizzard to pull out the oxygen tube with afterwards.”
In 2020 when “StarCraft 2” was “disconnected” by Blizzard, Li Peinan was 20 years old.
As a professional player of “StarCraft 2”, Li Peinan is already well-known in China. Early in the morning of October 12, four days before the Blizzard announcement, he also defeated the Korean protoss player Zoun with the old ID of TIME, help the KZ team to succeed in winning the “StarCraft 2” Gold Team League Autumn Championship.
But just four days later, this professional player with better and better grades was greeted with the announcement that “StarCraft 2” would stop updating content. He was so stunned that he posted on Weibo, “What is all this?”
In the face of such an irresistible “house stealing” event, Li Peinan was more or less disappointed, “Youth always regret”, but he felt it was a shame to give up like this, “dedicate the best years to this game”, so he decided to “finish the three-year ESL program”.
Obviously, at this point, “StarCraft 2” is already declining.
For national server players, the “day” is particularly “thin”.
In 2011, when the national server of “League of Legends” was launched, there were more than 600,000 simultaneous online players, and the peak number of domestic online users of “StarCraft 2” in that year was less than 100,000.
This was only ten years ago, and in terms of the story in the last ten years, how MOBA games have crushed the RTS category in all aspects of the scale of the event, the treatment of professional players, and the number of players, and even the A mobile terminal has opened and harvested extremely popular e-sports events. We Nature knows better than anyone else.
Regardless of whether it is RTS or MOBA events, in e-sports, Chinese players have a difficult mountain to overcome – Korean players.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, South Korea has emerged as an “e-sports powerhouse” in the world’s e-sports field. They are all Asian players who are proficient in calculation since childhood, but the growth environment of Korean professional players is clearly not only one and a half stars higher than that of domestic players.
Whether this point is only related to network speed or not, every gamer knows it well.
In the “StarCraft II” event, Korean players almost dominated the World Championship. In this IEM2023 World Championship, except for Li Peinan, a Chinese player in the semifinals, the other three players are all from the Korean competition.
From the quarterfinals, almost all of the players represented the strongest “StarCraft 2” players. , in the first human civil war in the finals, Li Peinan even crushed the world number one human player Maru 4-1 and won the first world. Chinese “StarCraft” professional player championship.
After not even having a match server, a young man who had lost consecutively in the previous competitions, and even the fans and the elderly who were not so optimistic, won the world championship which symbolized the highest honor competitive games.
If it is said that Li Peinan is still able to “stretch” and answer some questions logically when answering the host’s questions in English, then when sending messages in his native language to the fans who stayed late watching the game from afar, the young world champion, It is very difficult to hold back.
Li Peinan broke down on the podium in tears, “Last year was very difficult”, and he once thought that “StarCraft” was over for me”. The same goes for the fans in front of the screen. Brother Bird was crying in the live broadcast room. I offer my most sincere blessings to this champion who has never been seen before and who is likely to be second to none.
This is the 25th year since the release of the “StarCraft” series in 1998, and domestic players have been exposed to “StarCraft”.
This is the 8th year since “StarCraft 2” professional player Li Peinan became a professional player.
This is the third year that StarCraft II has stopped updating new content.
This is the 20th day since Activision Blizzard and NetEase officially stopped cooperating, and all Blizzard games on the national server were suspended.
It was also the first day when Li Peinan became the champion of the 2022 IEM World Championship.
All Chinese “StarCraft” players, and even Blizzard game players, will remember this day.
Under the horror of all the world, the boy broke down in tears and held the trophy aloft——
“I can even win the world championship, what else is impossible.”
