Interview: “Chill” Blake Muzar

The Strategy Czar Shrugs

Known amongst forum junkies as the moderator who cleaned up TeamLiquid’s Strategy forum, Chill has become one of the most visible and audible members of the titanic website’s staff. Most notably, he is currently casting games for the TSL opposite “Day[9]” Sean Plott.

On Thursday, a day after beta launch, I asked him about StarCraft 2. He laughed.

“I’m not excited,” said Chill. “Not because I’m afraid of it killing StarCraft, but because everyone seems to be rushing into it at full speed. It’s really sucking a lot of the fun out of it for me. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when I can actually play it, but I saw a quote from Day[9] – something like ‘Downloading the beta is like downloading your future job’. I definitely don’t feel that way.”

It’s funny that, in the few days of amped up expectations and impossible hype following beta’s launch, Chill’s voice occupies a minority position. Of course, this has a lot to do with the fact that those who have succumbed to the beta hype – endlessly watching streams and reading blogs from testers – are bound to be louder than those who are simply not as excited to put the pedal to the metal and move on.

Shrugging simply doesn’t require the volume that hyperventilating does.

But the relative disinterest is not due to an attachment to the original.

“I don’t think I’ll miss Brood War,” Chill explained. “I’m ready to move on. I’ve pretty much stopped playing and after TSL I don’t imagine I’ll play again unless SCII is terrible. Keep in mind I switched over to Warcraft 3 for six months before coming back to StarCraft, so anything is possible.”

Chill, a 25-year old Project Engineer from Canada, has not played StarCraft 2 since the last Blizzcon. Although he’s not short on breath like some of us when we speak about the game, he does have a good overall feeling about what he has seen.

“Everyone complains about everything,” he said, referring to viewer’s purported difficulties in following action on streams. “It’s actually pretty ridiculous. The game is fun and plays pretty well. There seems to be some ‘problems’ developing that it seems to be better to let melee units automatically attack rather than micro them, but I have no issues with that. The game will evolve to play around it’s strengths. We don’t need to inject micro into it, micro and tactics will develop out of necessity. From a spectator’s point of view I enjoy it. It seems easy to watch.”

One of the biggest question marks for StarCraft 2′s future as a e-sport is Blizzard’s ability to maintain a high quality ladder – that is, fighting abuse, keeping maps fresh and balanced, investing money for prizes and infrastructure and doing it for the long haul. In this regard, Chill seems optimistic.

“They seem to really be getting on the e-sports hype train,” said Chill, “so I’d imagine they’ll be able to do it fairly easily if they devote resources to it. R1CH [the head TeamLiquid programmer and mastermind behind TSL's back-end] says SCII talks to the server and not P2P and he says that makes abuse harder. If it’s good with R1CH then it’s good with me.”

Although whispers of hacks have already been heard, the community does seem to be widely hopeful regarding Blizzard’s chances against abusers and hackers.

However, one problem which has always plagued Blizzard-run ladders is that of the maps. Now, after investing in a dedicated e-sports team and openly declaring their allegiance to professional competition as well as privately taking steps to ensure they profit from the game’s e-sport potential (see: The KeSPA/Blizzard dispute), how will Blizzard solve a problem as old as Battle.net itself?

One suggestion has been to contract Korean mapmakers.

“People need to let shit go and be open to change,” said Chill. “There’s no reason to think that Korea is going to run the show, because at the beginning of StarCraft they didn’t. Frankly, neither as a player nor a spectator do I care about who hosts SCII tournaments.

“Koreans aren’t some master race bred for RTS. I don’t see why their map makers should be any better than anyone else at making maps for SCII, just like I don’t see why people insist ‘What do the Koreans think about SCII?’ Who cares? This is a new game and we’re all on an equal playing field.”

There can be no doubt that that strange mentality has become nearly ubiquitous. The myth that Koreans are an RTS master race ought to be extinguished.

But there is a such thing as reasonable deference to the Koreans. The cause for that is the accommodating e-sports culture which, importantly and distinctively, is already in place there. The map makers there will be doing it for a living, unlike in America or in Europe. We as players are on an equal playing field in some ways but i don’t know that it’s exactly equal with the Koreans, simply because they would have the professional support that would be harder to come by here.

Either way, the Battle.net ladder will likely be the preeminent competition, the Koreans will surely be among the premiere competitors and Chill will remain amongst the best commentators in the game.