The second day of the tournament here in Wuhan is over already. It is now almost 1 o'clock in the night and just on the other laptop there are sitting Wind and SeCdi translating a Chinese interview into English.

Normally something like that should go quick and without any problems. But even though Wind has a very proper Chinese (and perfect English) it is hard for him to translate a talk that is mainly about strategies and stuff like that. So it takes them like two or three hours to translate a 10 minutes interview where like 7 minutes consist only of talking about matches. Despite of that every video also needs some editing and rendering to make it look nice for you in the end. Well, and of course we also need to upload it. As you may have noticed, we upload normally all videos on Blib TV since the quality there is pretty good, but unfortunately that site is blocked for any reason in China. That forces us to upload on YouTube and stick with a lower quality for now. It always takes hours to get one video up, since all the rumours about the bad connection in China are true. Also the upload just often stops and the file needs to be re hosted, quite annoying.

Despite of that the event here is going fine so far. Today some public holidays started in China which made a lot more people visit the event then yesterday. ROTK is actually only one of a couple events that are hold those days in a large exhibition center. Also CGS pan Asia finals take place here in a huge arena with hired fans that have to cheer on command. ROTK doesn't need to hire anyone, since the top players attract fans automatically. Quite impressive to see actually that the amount of people watching even group stage games is much much higher than the amount of people that watched the final games on last year's WCG in Seattle (btw, I consider that event still as one of the worse in 2007). In fact there were so many fans here that even not all of them could find place in the huge arena where the matches were held.

A huge different compared to Europe. I remember to hear happy organizers when events in Cologne or Leipzig lately could unite a few hundred fans in one hall. Chinese would maybe just laugh about it. The dimensions here are really on a totally different level than Europe. The only thing that doesn't work pretty good here are the admins. A couple of issues popped up during the whole day. Since it was also for me hard to get a clear inside view to all issues, I just want to skip them and give you only one example: All teams and players are supposed, according to the rules, to be at the event at a specified time in the morning, even if their matches start hours later. Today WE had their first game in the afternoon, but there was no way to find Sky and Co. In the morning, they showed up 30mins before their match started. MYM plays in the Playoffs tomorrow in the afternoon, the admins didn't allow that they show up after lunch. You say to the admins that also WE showed up late... but then suddenly they can't understand you any longer - if you don't speak Chinese.

For me as an independent Journalist it doesn't sound very fair. And that example is just a role model for other stuff that happened today concerning Chinese and non Chinese players but also admin decisions in general. Sometimes rules are not taken that serious as they should be.

So now I am sitting again in the hotel, tired as hell, didn't sleep much the last days, but it feels good to be here and to experience an event like that. And I just get every day more the feeling that we can learn a lot from China - but that also China can learn a lot from us. They got the fans and the sponsors, we are maybe better in organising and to guarantee a smooth run of the event with less delays and stuff like that. And it works much better at events in Europe and USA that everyone is reporting from and about them.

It was always hard to get information from events in China since the different languages were always the number 1 problem. But it seemed to me that Chinese tournament organizers didn't care much about this. Yes, why should they? They got all the fans and the big market in China, they don't need Europe. But we need them, and they need us if they want to expand.

So one step to bring Europe closer to China, and to help China to get closer on the other hand to Europe is one of my goal. That is why Wind and I are in China for quite a long time. We want to give you impressions from China since it is really an other world and the atmosphere is different.

eSport in China is different and unique, the atmosphere is special - we should pay even more attention to their events!

That's it for now. If you managed to read until here - respect! I hope you could gain something for yourself from that blog.

Stay tuned for more content tomorrow, good night!