Become a Professional Gamer

A user writes "An article in the Wall Street Journal covers events in South Korea, where, even more so than the U.S., there are increasingly highly paid professional teams competing in games such as Blizzard's StarCraft. The article notes: 'Last year, [pro StarCraft gamer] Lim Yo-Hwan made about $300,000 from player fees and commercials. Another top earner, Hung Jin-Ho, whose fingers are insured for $60,000, recently signed a three-year deal with telecom provider KTF Co. that will pay him $480,000 altogether.' So now you can claim your time gaming as 'job skills training'!"

He says it himself...

[Mz6]

"It's work, not fun," says Mr. Lim, who trains 10 hours a day with his eight teammates and their coach in a two-bedroom apartment.."

Not to mention...

[Universal Nerd]

CS Player Ola "elemeNt" Moum's sale (or buying out of his contract) from Schroet Kommando (SK) to NoA.

More info: SK's site [schroet.com], NoA's site [teamnoa.net] and CSNation [csnation.net].

Re:Whatever.

[icedcool]

This is true, as a former pro-Counterstrike player I can vouch for this. We would practice daily up to 6 hours, just so we could get down a strategy juuuust right. Then you would be constantly in practice so that you had recoil figured out. Getting guaranteed headshots 100% is a challenge. But making it work also made it not fun. The stress involved to perform was intense. It started taking priority over other parts of my life like school.

Every now and then I play for fun, and that's what it is.
It is nice though in that becoming a professional gamer doesn't have any limits to it like the physical barrier in becoming a football player.

Clarification on the 400 APM

[silverHat]

In the article, the author noted that the top player(s) can reach upwards of 400 APM.

This needs clarification about exactly what's going on here.

First off, this number is derived out of all the combined actions over the course of the game and divided by how many minutes the game was. There is a simple program created and written for this that analyzes each game through the replay details. If _anyone_ here plays StarCraft or it's younger brother WarCraft 3 (as both are considered professional games in Korea with WC3 becoming more and more popular) then you will know it's damn near impossible to accomplish anything efficiently with that high of an APM in the early game for about the first 2-4 minutes. To get that APM, keep in mind, he has to be clicking away approx. 6 times a second for the WHOLE match.

Yes, players can do this, but we gamers give it a special name: Spam clicking. As an avid gamer, spam clicking is one of the most obnoxious ways to show off your 1337 skills.

How do I know that 400 APM isn't possible, or at least where every click actually does something? Very simple, I've seen these replays, and by comparing top replays of players who spam click vs. those who don't, the highest _most efficient_ number is more are 150-175 APM, well below the 400 number the author glorified these players with. As you can probably tell, this works with marketers and advertising business, because I once tried to spam that much myself, and couldn't get higher than 250. People think it's supernatural.

CPL

[smallguy78]

The US already has someone similar, in the form of http://www.thecpl.com . Prizes of $100k for counter-strike tournaments, and teams like 3D, Schroet all getting sponsered by intel, ati, amd and nvidia.

Re:This is getting out of control.

[Frizzle Fry]

See, that's what makes it a joke.

Re:I am a professional gamer

[darc]

Try amazing your boss. Open minesweeper, type in:

xyzzy

[left shift]

and watch the upper left most top pixel of your screen as you pass the mouse over the mines. Yep. That bastard had a REAL mine detector after all.

XYZZY is actually a zork reference, amazing that the MS folks programmed in a cheat..

Re:The Wife+Gaming=No sex

[twigles]

I've found that gaming up until I go to sleep actually *does* kill the sex drive. Not sure why, kinda sucks. Also, you *can* get paid for looking at pr0n all day [slashdot.org]. You just have to been part of an insane plot to force everyone to conform to fundamentalist christian standards of morality.

Re:Clarification on the 400 APM

[Sevaur]

While there's clearly a certain amount of showboating going on with extremely high APM's, it's pretty short-sighted to claim that 150-175 is the maximum efficient number of actions (not sure what 'highest _most efficient_number' actually means here). I can't speculate too much about warcraft, but I was a top US player in starcraft several years ago, and I have definite experience there. Most of those actions are not mouse clicks, but are using keyboard hotkeys: primarily cycling through hotkeys of production buildings, producing units while out fighting or scouting. Cycling through over and over may be a bit overkill, but the added efficiency of never having an empty building is one of the key advantages of a better player. If you check your buildings only when you think they might need new orders, you're liable to be missing valuable time. That said, before the program to measure APM (http://www.bwchart.com) was created, even the professionals had significantly lower APMs, with few players over 250. Now most pros have 300+ APM, probably due to the prestige of it... My own opinion (though it's a pretty hot issue even in the hardcore starcraft community) is that it's hard to compete at top levels without an APM exceeding 200 (less may be ok for Protoss players). As to the assertion that it's hard to get over 250, I suspect you were relying on the mouse instead of hotkeys (which composes a large percentage of top-player actions).