"Papa Bear, Mama Bear..." Li Xianghe sang his favorite children's song softly, feeling rather pleased with himself.
Everything was proceeding according to his plan. While losing the club 00 was a great pity, the Chinese truly dared not make trouble at the venue. Moreover, domestic support in South Korea had been unexpectedly high, with all Korean netizens uniformly supporting the organizing committee's decision. This experience of overwhelming support left Li Xianghe immensely satisfied.
Not to mention that several companies in South Korea had already expressed their willingness to continue supporting the WCg.
Among them, the most prominent was South Korea's most famous telecommunications company, SK Telecom. In addition, Hyundai, Lotte, SK, LG, and others had all indicated their intention to support the WCg. After all, public opinion in South Korea was crucial, and major corporations were eager to win public favor through actions that cost little but achieved much.
Even Samsung, which had previously been unwilling to continue its support, had re-declared its willingness to remain the WCg's chief sponsor, even planning to sponsor one or two clubs themselves.
Suddenly, the situation for the WCg organizing committee looked exceptionally bright, with everyone within the committee praising the decision to eliminate the 00 e-sports club as an extremely wise move.
With this, even if 00 managed to find a way to have the venue prohibit their use, they could simply move the competition back to South Korea. Since they had the money, they could spend it as they pleased. Li Xianghe even somewhat anticipated the Chinese taking such action, as it would give him an excuse to heavily criticize the Chinese in public opinion, and even use it to ban Chinese participation, thus completely barring most Chinese from the WCg. In this way, the Chinese would never be able to step onto the highest stage of e-sports.
Although public opinion on foreign websites was not favorable, with players from almost all countries, including their "Fatherland USA," condemning the WCg organizing committee's actions and expressing extreme dissatisfaction.
However, the organizing committee remained unconcerned.
As long as they had domestic support, no one but domestic forces could remove Li Xianghe from his position as chairman of the WCg organizing committee.
As for the dissatisfaction from abroad, if they had the ability, why not refuse to participate in the WCg? If they had the guts, why not refuse?
In fact, only netizens dared to publicly express their dissatisfaction. Most clubs and professional players remained tight-lipped, clearly fearing becoming the next target of the organizing committee's crackdown, as the honor of being a WCg champion was a supreme honor that no professional player or e-sports club could easily refuse.
Just as Li Xianghe was basking in his success, his staff reported news that made him rather uncomfortable: the 00 e-sports club had announced that they would be hosting the Gangnam Cup World E-sports Championship.
Even the date for the first e-sports championship had been set for February 21, 2006.
The date of the event made Li Xianghe's jaw drop, as the exact date of the WCg was also February 21. The Gangnam Cup World E-sports Championship in Gangnam would be held on the same day as the WCg.
"Have these Chinese gone mad? To do something so ridiculous!" After the shock, Li Xianghe and the entire organizing committee were almost amused to death.
"I understand these Chinese are extremely angry, but no matter how angry they are, they wouldn't do something so foolish. Truly, our Korean nation is the most outstanding nation in the world! The Chinese are inherently poor!" Li Xianghe said with a chuckle to his subordinates, who had no doubt about their chairman's assessment, as the Chinese decision was indeed very bizarre. xxs壹贰
First of all, it was already February 10, 2006, with only 11 days left until February 21. The falling out between 00 and the organizing committee had occurred on February 8.
In other words, even if they started preparing from February 8, they would only have a mere 13 days to prepare, making it impossible to complete a world-class e-sports competition.
Of course, the date set by 00 was definitely intended to annoy the WCg. But this also brought up a problem: during the WCg's broadcast period, all players could only participate in the WCg competition and could not participate in any Gangnam Cup.
Therefore, this competition, held out of spite, would certainly be reduced to having almost no famous players, with only second-tier players who couldn't qualify for the WCg.
Well, the people from the 00 e-sports club would definitely participate, and these players were naturally well-known, but if only they themselves were playing, it wouldn't be called a world championship, it would be called an internal practice match!
Thus, in the eyes of the organizing committee, the Gangnam Group's decision was undoubtedly the most foolish decision in history, showcasing nothing but the stupidity of the Gangnam boss.
"However, we should also stabilize morale," the chairman mused with a smile. "You represent our organizing committee and issue a statement saying that we absolutely do not accept any player participating in other competitions while participating in our event. This is disrespectful to the WCg, disrespectful to the game, and disrespectful to all spectators."
"Once such a situation is discovered, their eligibility will be immediately revoked, and they will be banned from participating in the WCg for three years!"
"Yes, I'll draft a notice right away!" the staff member immediately replied. Soon, a new notice was drafted.
However, this notice was not directly published on the official website but was directly sent to various clubs and players, with strict orders not to leak the document.
After all, if this document were directly published online, anyone could see that it was retaliation and targeting of the Gangnam Group, which would appear ungracious.
Of course, this document would definitely not be kept from the Gangnam Group, as domestic Chinese clubs would also receive this notice, so it was soon placed before Leng Zhimeng and Huang He.
"Ridiculous!" Boss Huang couldn't help but laugh after glancing at the document and then said to Leng Zhimeng beside him, "Zhimeng, modify this document and send it to all clubs and participating players in the same way!"
"How do I modify it?" Leng Zhimeng asked excitedly.
"It's very simple. Just change all the mentions of WCg and WCg Organizing Committee to Gangnam Cup and the International E-sports Federation!" Huang He said with a smile, and Leng Zhimeng also smiled and opened her computer to start modifying it herself.
Meanwhile, Huang He made several phone calls, with the first sentence in each being, "Send your notice to the WCg organizing committee as well!"
"Chairman, this is a notice from the Gangnam Cup that our South Korean e-sports clubs have just received!" More than ten minutes later, a staff member placed a printed document in front of Li Xianghe.
Li Xianghe took a look, and his expression instantly turned extremely unpleasant. "These bastards actually changed our notice, and word for word!" Li Xianghe slammed the table in anger, his fury evident.
However, his subordinate quickly comforted him, "Chairman, this is just a death throe from the Chinese. Such notices only show their inability to cope, and they can only rely on verbal attacks to annoy us, without any other ability to deal with us!"
"Yes, such notices are basically useless except to amuse people. Who would actually pay attention to this so-called Gangnam Cup, and give up our WCg competition to participate in the Gangnam Cup? It's impossible!" Several subordinates agreed with this reasoning, and Li Xianghe felt much better.
But at that moment, the fax machine suddenly rang with a clear prompt, indicating that a fax was being transmitted over the phone line.
"It's not that ridiculous notice from the Gangnam Group again, is it!" a staff member said with a chuckle, then clicked the receive fax button. The fax machine began its whirring work, and a document slowly appeared before them.
"Chairman, this is a document from Blizzard. The header of the fax is the Blizzard company logo!" a staff member exclaimed in surprise. Hearing that the document was from Blizzard, the chairman immediately came over, intending to read the fax immediately.
Now, the WCg involved over ten different games, but three of them were Blizzard games: Warcraft IV, StarCraft 1, and World of Warcraft PvP, three different projects.
Warcraft and StarCraft go without saying. In this world, due to the greater influence of World of Warcraft, and Blizzard's special development of an e-sports mode for World of Warcraft players' PvP, World of Warcraft PvP officially became the first online game project to be included in the WCg.
Compared to player PvP in the game, the e-sports mode for World of Warcraft was clearly fairer.
The e-sports mode for World of Warcraft was a mode that did not exist in the previous life; it was a fair competition mode specifically developed by Blizzard for this world.
First, the game competition was divided into single-player and team modes.
The single-player mode was a best-of-seven format. Participants had three minutes to configure their characters before the match.
The system would provide all players with character choices for all races, and all characters would be automatically set to the maximum level of 80, along with all corresponding professions for their race, professional skills, skill points, and even 100,000 skill proficiency points to allow players to freely upgrade their skills.
Finally, even all the equipment in the game could be freely selected.
In other words, all players could create different combat characters according to their preferences in a completely fair and just manner.
However, there was one point: after the match began, all characters, professions, skills, and equipment could only be chosen once. After that, other characters would not be allowed to be selected again.
This resulted in many different variations and strategies for character configuration. The first task for all World of Warcraft professional players was to master how to configure their character's combat power and predict how their opponents would configure theirs.
In any case, many people stated that the difficulty of playing professionally in World of Warcraft was even higher than playing professionally in Warcraft, as the former relied too much on one's mind!