Today's lovely drama, brought to me courtesy of Julian, is the mysterious identity of Hearthstone player MagicAmy, there's a long-ish summary here. Pretty funny drama, from a spectator's point of view, lots of speculation going on.
TL;DR Some people have dug up "evidence" that popular player MagicAmy (a female player from Korea) doesn't actually play Hearthstone at all, but she is on camera while a Canadian guy living in Korea is the one who actually plays. Nothing concrete has come out yet, as far as I know, but a lot of the evidence does point to it being the case, or at least points to MagicAmy being somewhat shady (someone posted a screenshot of various transfers from him to her to the value of about $5k).
One of the pieces of "evidence" was the fact that during some tough games, there were some tense moments like the opponent managing to draw the one card he needed to get out of a sticky situation, and the entire time MagicAmy just looked really bored and expressionless, where you'd expect a regular player would look shocked or concerned. It makes me wonder what my expression is when I'm playing Dota. I think controlling my face is the last thing on my mind in the middle of a tough fight, because there is just so much information to take in, and you need to be able to process it all really quickly, you don't have any brain power spare to be worried about what your face is doing. It's kinda like the O-face. I doubt many people outside of the adult film industry are worried about their facial expression in the middle of an orgasm.
I don't really care all that much about someone pretending to be a girl online, but I do care if the accusations that she had someone play for her/coach her during her qualification match for the ESL tournament turn out to be true. The former is not the best situation, but not too horrible. The latter, in my opinion, is completely unfair. Still, as of this moment, I don't think any concrete proof has come out yet, although MagicAmy has been released from her Hearthstone team - though both sides seem to be trying to imply that it was a mutual decision.
It's kinda crazy how much of this goes on. There was an all-girl Dota 2 team, whose name slips my mind right now, who were playing in an online tournament, and refused to check-in on Skype (which is part of the tournament rules). The organisers allowed play to continue, but after the game ended, the tournament organisers declared that they had performed an investigation, and one of the team members playing was actually the boyfriend of one of the players, rather than the player herself. They said that among other things, they thought the playstyle of the person was far more advanced than that player had demonstrated in previous tournaments.
It seems to be a bit of a hot topic at the moment - can female players ever be on the same level as their male counterparts? It's 11:30pm now, but I have just finished the photo book for the wedding (hooray!), so I'm going to reward myself by going to bed now. To be continued someday...
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