Startupcraft: a Starcraft tournament for startups in SF | Hacker News Reader

Startupcraft: a Starcraft tournament for startups in SF

startupcraftsf.com

86 pointsjustin78 comments

You should fly Day[9] out to SF to commentate. He's done a few noteworthy things other than be awesome at Starcraft that are valuable to startups:

* Never give up (eg: play SC for 10 years)

* Build a huge following around his daily series

* And my god he is so evangelical about what he loves, he exudes love for the game - http://blip.tv/file/3486428

/tenuous.

I will second this recommendation. I watch that video every time I need a motivation to keep working hard. I've never been much of a Starcraft player, but the way he explains his passion for the game and the dedication he has put into developing his skills is amazingly inspiring to me. Most of the points he makes about training for Starcraft can be applied to any other field.

Hopefully people aren't too good at Starcraft 2. The worst Starcraft team should get a round of funding.

Yeah, because they're probably spending some of their time working on their product.

i'm sure you meant it in jest, but it still really bugs me: this idea that startups shouldn't do anything but work. who does that, seriously.

Definitely meant in jest. I was a fan of the original Starcraft way back in the day. Even now new games come out that still provide me with a little distraction.

"Sad is the developer who knows not fun."

I dunno. I wouldn't fund any startup that can't pull off a good zergling rush.

Hey pops, zerglings are so 1998.

You can still do a 4-pool rush: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rTCRg9_7Hw

Silly Noob, it's a six pool now.

Also, really a seven pool because it makes sense to make a drone instead of saving for the spawning.

The ideal rush is an eight pool, unless you wish to do some sort of timing attack.

Really, there's an article on the front page about timing lessons. If you can't time an attack in an RTS, judging by what the competitor has and when you should release your force, how can you expect to release a product in a much more complicated situation?

That's a shame, because you'd rule out great companies like Quora, Dropbox, Posterous, Gaia Online, and Serious Business.

What percent of good starcraft players do you think are developers like that?

What percent of good developers do you think are good starcraft players?

You should ping HDStarcraft to see if he wants to cast. He lives in the bay area.

So does Trump, if you want to do a showmatch vs a progamer. He is ranked 159 or so in the world right now....and lives near Cupertino I think

What is novice? Silver league and below?

Trump is awesome. His stream is live right now at http://www.trumpsclive.com/ if you want to get a sense of him... (when it ceases being live it will no longer have a big red rectangle saying "live")

Definitely a good idea. We've gotten him to agree to cast the finals of an internal Google SC2 tourney that's going on right now. (I'm an intern)

You should consider playing at Startupcraft :)

If Mongoose is playing, we could have an intern-only round! I could use an excuse to fly back to San Francisco for a weekend.. :-D

Or perhaps an intern team would be more appropriate. Either way.

Sounds good. I'm in Seattle, but I'll be making a weekend trip to SF in a couple weeks.

Realistically, novice is more like platinum and below. Blizzard went to a lot of trouble to name everyone's ranks in a way to make them feel good even if they're bad. Unlike iCCup which ranked tons of people with grades like "D-"

Agreed. I'm a Platinum 1v1 player, and completely terrible.

Well iCCup bills itself as a gosu server, so it's understandable. D on iCCup must be about the top 4% of the SC population or something. C would be 1%.

Blizzard did try to make everyone feel good about their ranking. However, the flaw in your argument is that hardly anyone ranked D- in ICCup was actually a novice at Broodwar.

I would recommend getting 'novice' defined for this tourney... reading through this thread it is apparent that people have wildly differing views on what novice is.

Would hate to enter as real novice (beat cpu on normal) and be up against gold players.

Stay away from the beginners cup, unless you want to face the wrath that is DISQUS :)

your name is ALMOST zerg... I have a feeling you're a Starcraft Shark.

Is it faux pas to do this? If so, please let me know and I'll delete it, though.

I wrote a response to some of the comments on this page about the StarCraft tournament in the form of a post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1661616

Nice post!

Makes me wish I'd jumped on the wagon sooner and gotten my skills up to par.

This is great! Thanks for hosting, Justin. Let me know if you are looking for other sponsors. We'd be interested.

We are! You can contact kevin 'at' justin.tv to find out how to help.

Solo founder beginner-league looking for a second. Send me an email. I may be unranked, but I pwn n00bz in the practice league.

This will be after the Terran nerf patch comes out, so there are no guarantees on how good I will be.

This is so cool. My partner and I play at least an hour a day of 2v2 at the end of our work sessions. It'd be a lot of fun, AND cool to meet other startups.

AND its hosted at Justin.tv! Damn you San Francisco, damn you.

*We're not in SF :(

We might do a simultaneous East coast satellite section of the tournament if you are in NYC to open up the event to New York startups. Talking to some friends about hosting in their office. Stay tuned.

Working on locking down space right now. Should know in the next couple of days.

DAMNIT. Apparently I just HAD to move out of SF before this happened. The poor location, cost of living, and everything else don't matter when Starcraft 2 is on the line.

You can always come back to play!

Hmm... don't tempt me, haha! I think my girlfriend would kill me.

It's interesting that they chose to use a region-locked game. Alone it's all well and good to have an event like this in SF, but at least use a more open medium. (I mean, even a weakly open medium like Age of Empires III or something.)

I feel like there's a clear line where 'closed' is bad for everyone, and though I'm not sure if the SF startup community has crossed it, StarCraft II clearly has. It sends a bad message, as I see it.

Are you saying someone should play an RTS other than SC2?

AoE3 is the best RTS I've ever played. The problems were; a fairly small online community, and some balance issues.

But the "home city/shipment" dynamic broke new ground.

Starcraft 2 has a huge community and no balance issues.

Rise of Nations was the "real" Age of Empires sequel, and much better than AoE3.

Then organize a competing tournament with a more "open" game.

I don't live in SF. The tournament has a regional bias on multiple levels. Not that I take this event incredibly seriously, but I do consider Activision's region locking deeply offensive, as someone with dear friends on far-flung continents, some of whom I have fond memories of weekend college LAN parties, and I occasionally like to revisit those memories with them.

Fortunately, all of those (RTS) memories are of Age of Kings and Age of Mythology, so I can't say StarCraft's locking affects me too much lately. But I'm not going to stay silent while people try to wall off the Internet out of greed. Games should be an opportunity to come together without barriers of language or nation.

I think the point is warranted. Blizzard has some pretty onerous terms, like the necessity of going through Battle.net and requiring permission from them to run a tournament. Justin.tv probably got sanction, but having to do it really ruins the neighborhood casualness of it.

Starcraft is great, but people should play StarCraft 1 broodwar with LAN instead. Most StarCrafters agree that it's the better game at the moment.

Of course this is just my minor feelings on this point. Startupcraft sounds like fun and good luck to everyone involved!

This is a bit like saying the iPhone is "bad" closed ... most founders still have iPhones.

Except the iPhone isn't as worrisome as StarCraft to me. Ultimately, the iPhone's problems are going to force Apple to open up, because they are decreasing the quality of the iPhone ecosystem.

And even if it doesn't, the iPhone platform is not actually a communication medium. Obviously it contains one, and people build communication media on top of it, but Apple, as far as I know, doesn't prevent you from making calls to China, or from communicating via any app that is distributed both in China and here in the States. Your provider may charge you a pretty penny, but you're free to do it.

Compare that to StarCraft, which represents a vision of a terrifyingly closed Internet, where every nation has its own walled garden and you cannot get out. Apple has a walled garden, but you're free to enter or leave any time you want.

I'm confused, you can still not play Starcraft.

What if this spreads? It seems pretty clear that they've proved that you can region lock and no one will care.

Many oppressive world governments like Iran and China would love it if the Internet itself was segmented in this manner. And the large copyright owners would love it too, since it would make copyright enforcement much easier.

There are some very big players looking to make Starcraft the model for the Internet, and yes, I can not play Starcraft, but there are some big principles at play here, beyond the traditional FOSS vs. proprietary mudslinging.

Wow, too bad I am not around. :( Any plans to make this a recurring event? Also, post the replays!

Yes, if this is successful we will do it again!

This is on the front page... guess I will be seeing a few of you guys @ Blizzcon this year.

Hah, definitely not a surprise that Justin.tv is sponsoring it.

Any other solo founders interested in this? I am diamond 2v2.

Yes! I'm in the gold, but will keep practicing. Email me, Taylor at printfriendly.com

Hot tip for investors: invest in the companies that lose in the first round, as their employees are probably too busy building great products to play games.

I hope you realize how insulting that is to any developer (or anyone, really) that enjoys playing games (or doing anything aside from work).

Is there a button you can click in Starcraft II that will upgrade your sense of humor?

I build and run a very successful startup and I'm at the top of diamond :-)

A functioning craftaholic.

I've never played Starcraft, maybe just because I didn't grow up in America. Can anyone explain why it's so popular among entrepreneurs?

The costume competition pic is sooo deceiving.

Haha. Well we thought it would be fun... we'll see what happens!

I promise I won't dress up as Ghost Kerrigan

You should come in full SCV costume.

I'm investigating how I can get a probe costume.

Yeah, I'd say it's rather cruel to get the hopes of a bunch of nerds up like that...

Why no 1v1?

Startups are about putting together the right teams, and we think Starcraft is more interesting in team games.

Justin, 3v3 is like THE traditional Starcraft team battle. You need to have a 3v3 in the tourney, 4v4 makes the map too crowded and 2v2 means one of our co-founders can't play. C'mon man!!!! make it happen please

You can probably pick up someone at the event for a 4v4.. already had teams sign up so can't change now!

If anyone wants to play SC2, feel free to add me: pushespretn@gmail.com

Because clearly startups are overloaded with free time... ;)

This is what I've been training for! Count Wolfire Games in.

Damnit. I wish I lived in the area now.

OMG - it's on!

I'm down!

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