在WCG之后大家一直关注着Creo是否因为WCG夺冠而继续他的职业生涯，我们今日终于得到了他的答案，在他于4K网站发表的日志上他说到自己将不会改变决定，离开War3，继续自己的学业。这篇日志他回忆了自己的War3的职业生涯以及在4K的生活和WCG的夺冠，本篇日志比较长，我们翻译组也尽快为大家带来翻译，先送上原文：

　　Hell, it's about time... for the mandatory WCG blog as well as some info of tournaments before it. As I tried to avoid the topics which usually get repeated in interviews it might seem kinda halfway, but go to catchgamer if you want to know the answers of the ever so interesting questions - "how do you feel right now?".

　　Early times in 4K

　　I joined up with 4K in Spring 2006; about one and a half year ago. I had already played at a pretty high wc3l level in 64AMD and fnatic, but it was a naturally a rather big step to join arguably the most successful wc3 team of all times. Just before I got the offer from 4K; I was already thinking about gaming less as it took quite a lot of time just to prepare for wc3l matches and small tournaments for fnatic. I decided that if I was to join 4K I better give it my best try and thus took a year off studies to just concentrate on gaming. Of course it was a rather radical decision in a country which doesn't have any traditions in terms of esports and gaming. I'd say quitting school to play a computer game all day leaves you somewhere between the drug addicts and the jailbirds in the social ranks. However it's probably one of the best decisions I've taken so far =)

　　I believe the first tournament as a 4K'er was StarsWar in Xi'an. It was a good tournament for my part, where I ended up beating the korean team but losing the first round to suho against China. Inconsistency was a rather big issue in the start playing for 4K, especially in the teamleagues I kind of wanted to win too much, thus getting more stressed and nervous than reasonable, and eventually losing the match. Nervousness is a significant issue for most gamers who are relatively new in the scene. I suppose it's sort of individual how you sort it out, but in the end it will always be a lot better once you just get a little more experience. For my part I also attained a "don't care"-attitude in the game which means you won't get affected if things are going good or bad, you will just play as good as possible all the time and not get affected by anything around or within the game. "Do your best" is enough for me, and I'm usually more angry at myself if I play bad and win compared to playing good and losing. Some of this might also be the reason why most rts are rather calm even though they just won a big match. As for me I will usually be more happy (or sad, depends how the game went) the day after a tournament than immediately after the game. There's always a lot to do right after a big stagematch, so it might not be too strange that you end up delaying the feelings and get the taste of the victory once you are done with everything and can relax. I suppose it has a lot to do with which game is being played as well. In fps games things change a lot faster as opposed to wc3 where you usually have a hunch of how the game will end up.

　　After StarsWar there were plenty of tournaments and I got to travel a lot, although having really big problems against the very best players. Spring 2007 was a pretty silent time in terms of tournaments. After extreme masters and ecg was over in March it was almost 3 months without much happening, meaning no tournaments before the summer started. I used this period to practice as much as possible for the upcoming challenges, but I also had a small fear that the tactics I practiced could prove to be inefficient in the first real tournament against a good player, and then months of practice would be worth next to nothing as I would have to change everything again. Fortunately you improve a lot more than your strats from practicing. There seems to be a general agreement that wc3 only has two aspects; micro and macro. Concerning how most people define these two terms it's kind of worrying, as there are luckily a lot more to wc3 than the average joe can see at first sight. "Sun Tzu: The Art of War" is recommended if you haven't read it multiple times already!

　　Summer tournaments

　　This summer started with Dreamhack, then Eswc, Starswar, PGL and later Blizzcon. I felt like I was very well prepared for eswc, unfortunately I became too predictable before the final and lost to Soju who played very good throughout the whole tournament. Starswar and PGL was a big downfall for my part as I lost to almost every opponent I played and was beaten two times by sky in PGL, which meant I had to watch the rest of the tournament as an observer the remaining 5 days or so which it lasted. I was kinda sick of it all after Starswar and PGL ended as I had lost so many games even though I felt I had improved much in the first half year of 2007. I thought the skill level looked just so much higher in Asia, coming from 2nd at Eswc and losing one of the first days at PGL. Makes you wonder what would happend if the biggest wc3 nations could have 10 spots each for all tournaments.

　　When Blizzcon started I was already really motivated to play this last tournament and then start studying again. Funny enough I won it, much thanks to playing mirror every round except the first one against Nilknarf (which was probably the closest one as ne vs hu is probably the matchup I lose the most at). Just after Blizzcon I moved to another city because of university and didn't bother bringing my old pc. I had already ordered a laptop when I moved, which unfortunately didn't arrive before the very week ahead of WCG. However I went to the ngl finals not so long after school started to meet up with the 4k guys. I only played one official game in ngl (lost against fly), but we played an internal tournament within 4K which gave me some well-needed practice. If you look away from the ngl finals I was inactive for around one and a half month. But it's not like you forget something you have been doing for many years in just a month or two, might only be a bit rusty when you start playing again.

　　The WCG tournament

　　And a rusty start it was, indeed. I barely made it out of my group, losing to both slh and swift. Against slh I made a bad call trying to creep the expo when he was around, ending up with him killing my priest and both my archers getting ensnared by the creeps. Then a bit after I made a 2nd bad call by deciding to go for a push instead of bears when I didn't have enough units for it. Against swift it was elf vs ud on closepos turtle. I hadn't practiced any of the updated strats like dh panda archers dryads t3 very late bears, so I went for the old beast archers strat and tried beast solo which didn't work out at all. I passed my group though, but wasn't too confident about beating xlord when I looked at my own performance in the groupstage.

　　I played generally a lot better the next day, most likely because I was getting warm in the game again and the mouse sensitivity didn't feel all messed up anymore (which is a feeling you can get if you haven't played sufficient amount of games). I lost the first game on gnoll wood against xlord, where my whole face was like a big questionmark because I knew exactly what would happen in the game but still couldn't manage to control the flow of the game. I won the two remaining maps EI and TM though, so it was alright although I still was pretty annoyed that I couldn't manage to counter his expo and hit and run tactic on gnoll. My next opponent was xia0t, who had said in an interview before WCG that he his favourite matchup was against elf on EI, so I was pretty much expecting him to pick it as his map. I also lost to him at EI in PGL so I already knew that he was very good on it. I picked TS as my map, while GW was drawn to be the 3rd map. This series I played possibly the best of all my games in WCG, maybe xia0t underrestimated me to some degree, but at least I managed to win 2-0 and didn't have to bother with GW being the 3rd map. On TS he played an offensive strat which made it impossible for me to do a 1 archer 1 berserker tech with a closed base, so I was only showing half of my archers and went for a t2 push with fl 2nd and aows. On EI I basically won the game by cancelling his beastiary at least 4 times which meant that he pretty much didn't have ensnare before I had t3 and master talons.

　　The last match of the day was against Xyligan. I was kinda expecting to meet ToD, but as he lost to Myst I suddenly had a chance to revenge the quarter final loss I had to Xyligan last year and hopefully make it to the final. I lost to expo and tanks on tm which was my map, and even though I played pretty sloppy I really felt I had nothing workable against that strat. I won on TS where he overtowered himself with two expoes, which was good for my mass glaives push. On the 3rd game I saw his blacksmith really early and went for many archers and no boots which works well against mass range push in mirror. Having more archers than the usual gives you later tech, but as most humans use the same timing it would just mean I had a stronger army to defend myself midgame and could creep dh to 3 faster.

　　Sky in the final

　　Suddenly I was in the final, up against sky who had just beaten moon 2-0. Fortunately I had one day to prepare for it which helped me extremely much. I had time to watch old replays and vod's in my hotel room although I basically knew the strats already. It was just about trying to find a working counter which wouldn't need to be anything more than a one-time-only strat. I had some ideas and the next day I tested some of it in real games and not just in theory (a BIG thanks to ToD for the practice).

　　In the first game on TS I came a bit too fast when he wanted to expo because I didn't have my timing prepared enough. As I didn't manage to kill anything when he expoed, he could concentrate on stopping my expo which lead to a really one-sided game. Game2 was on Gnoll and I was expecting an early expo. Due to 2 aow hunts I managed to stop it and killed quite a lot of footmen just after that. I felt I could end the game right away and tried an AP push where we traded towers with each other and then I had a bigger army once the towers were down. In afterthought it might not have been the safest way to do such a push against a human who can get mortars in addition to towers, but I'm glad I did it as it put some kind of pressure on sky before the 3rd game. It sort of showed that I wouldn't hesitate to AP push if he overstretched himself, which forced him to play slighly more conservative.

　　I was lucky and got TM as 3rd map. Normally I'd rather play turtle instead of TM because of the easy expo to tanks strat, but seeing how the 2nd game went I suddenly had a strat which could stop the standard human opening. It looked like sky was a bit shaken after the 2nd game too, as he made 2 guard towers before tech and went for rifles+2arcane. Even though I didn't even have closepos I got 4 peasants kills + 1 elemantal and sky also lost a peasant while creeping. I got some footmen kills when he tried to stop my aowcreeping of the merc camp, and got dh 3 pretty fast. I almost blew my advantage away when I was too slow of getting out of his base and thus got my naga surrounded. What happened was that I had owls around the map and I saw his army which looked like he was walking back to his base to flank me from behind. I finished off his shop and was ready to go back, and thus didn't see his incoming tp. Suddenly one of his militia started running towards me, I just hit it once and killed it but at the same time I got my naga stuck between his army. I still had fair-seized army and decided to just revive the naga at the altar instead of using the tavern. The push was a bit harder to hold than expected so I decided to play it safe and just try to pick off one unit at a time as my dh was getting closer to 6 and I didn't have enough mana yet on my two bears to use rejuv. I was sitting pretty tight in my base already at that point so if dh 6 made gold from silver is one discussion, but at least it was cool to get metamorphosis in the final game =)

　　I was probably more surprised than happy just after the game as I didn't really expect to win and did quite some mistakes in the final games. I suppose the good games which are fun to watch are the ones where both players make some mistakes and you actually have units and heroes going down in battles. Overall it felt just like the opposite of eswc; where I was supposed to win and relied on the strats which I had practiced a lot before the tournament. Overall it was a fun event; the hotel was high standard, no disconnects at the event, cooling fans in the playerbooths etc. It looked like WCG was very well prepared overall, but it got overshadowed for one thing by the incidents with duckjumping in CS. Bo1 in the groupstage and no seeding for the groups seems very awkard compared to most tournaments, but I suppose it's a deliberate decision from WCG, which often leads to a surprise or two in the brackets. As for next year the rules should be updated and maybe it's better to have a random draw with #1 and #2 seedings for the single elimination stage. The way it is now it's possible to predict all your opponents by the bracket and just practice for that, and the players at playday2 can see the results for playday1 before their start their matches, which can lead to players losing on purpose.

　　The future

　　So what happens next? I said as a joke when I was 2-2 in my group that if I win WCG I'll think about continuing as a fulltime gamer. Note; I'll try to avoid using "always" and "never" as most things aren't written in stone. However I've decided that I want to go on with studies and I'll stop gaming as I planned before, even after having a good event. There are a lot of good arguments for both continuing as a progamer and for stopping, money is not among the most important ones. As I've already tried a year going around the world at tournaments and playing nonstop all day long I think a 2nd year would end up being much like the first, only that I'm more experienced now than one year ago. To be honest I'm more motivated to do something else than gaming which I've spent so much time on for multiple years. I've been fortunate enough to have some good placements at the latest events I attended, but that alone is not enough for me to change my decision. I'll be sure to check the latest wc3 scene news and results from time to time. As for now; See you when I see you =)