"I enjoy the taste of a well-traveled pretzel" pic.twitter.com/DozrpNrcv2
— Adam (@Parkzer) June 7, 2016
That is Ed excitedly holding his well-traveled pretzels. I delivered the well-traveled pretzels
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Earlier this month, I went on a trip to Los Angeles, California for the Heroes of the Storm North American regional, as part of the global championship circuit. On my flight back, I was messaging Ed Lam (better known online as Grainyrice) via the wifi on the plane.
He let me know that he wanted me to save the airline pretzels for him, because enjoys the taste of a well-traveled pretzel. I posted a screenshot of our conversation on Twitter:
That is Ed excitedly holding his well-traveled pretzels. 
I went into the stands and met up with Gelda, one of the content creators and producers for Tempo Storm’s Heroes of the Storm division, who works closely with me. Because there was nowhere near a lack of chairs, I was able to watch some games with him. I took a photo when Astral Authority were facing Naventic.
Once Tempo Storm got eliminated, I spent a majority of my time working and gathering information from people, so I didn’t really have much of a chance to have fun or take additional photos. But, I did catch Srey’s team’s series and took a picture of him from the front row of the stands.
(He’s the one behind the computer monitor, he’s one of my favorite players, and a former member of Tempo Storm.)
I also unexpectedly had my photo taken while I was watching the game from the stands. As you can see, I’m not very skilled at posing for selfies.
Yesterday was travel day, returning to ORD from LAX. It was quite a feat to even get on the plane itself. My flight’s gate was changed literally six times, and to thank me for running all over the airport, American Airlines then proceeded to add a 2+ hour delay to my flight.
I listened in on the announcements and discussion, and apparently, they ran out of airplanes, so they didn’t have one available to take us to Chicago. So, they had to send one over from Mexico City to come get us.
Luckily, even though this was a flight almost three hours after the one I was supposed to be on, the flight number remained constant, so I was able to get my window seat as originally scheduled.
The flight was as eventful as a flight could possibly be. My friend Ed Lam (better known as Grainyrice online) asked me to save him some airplane pretzels, because he “enjoys the taste of a well-traveled pretzel.” The guy sitting next to me pulled a sandwich out of his neck pillow. I dropped my can of Coca-Cola and it seemly went into a different dimension, because it disappeared without a sight.
Late into the night – somewhere around 2 AM – we finally touched down in Chicago, and my good buddy Josh was there to pick me up and drive me home.
The ESL admins promptly contacted some techs to get our audio problems resolved, but nothing seemed to be working. Some players had audio input and output problems, some players were hearing static, and some players’ white noise wasn’t working.
(For those who are not familiar with the tournament setup, the players wear earbuds for voice communication and in-game sounds, and headphones on top of their earbuds with white noise to block out outside noise.)
For over an hour, ESL techs went in and out of the game room trying to fix our problems. At one point, Tomster nearly had his eardrums blown up when a tech said all the audio problems should be resolved, but then proceeded to transmit a brain-bustingly loud crackling noise through his earbuds. After a massive delay, ESL finally got around to fixing everything.
This is where the real clown fiesta begins.
Because we don’t have a real draft built into the custom game interface in Heroes of the Storm, we have to use a third-party website to do our draft. Unfortunately, this website doesn’t really work properly, and the players have to constantly spam Refresh in order to see when picks and bans are locked in. Every several seconds, the whole thing would stop loading. At one point, for a little while, Zixz only had access to picking 10 heroes in the draft screen.
Once we finally get the draft website working, we discover that our observer had sent the wrong draft link, with only one ban instead of two. We obviously have to remake the draft lobby.
Then, the observer proceeds to send Tempo Storm one link and Naventic another link. Both teams immediately ready up, then sit and wait for the other team. After the countdown timer went down by a couple hundred seconds, I got suspicious and went over to the other side of the curtain to see what was going on with Naventic, when I found out that we were waiting for them, and they were waiting for us.
The observer finally sent both teams the same link, and we got started. The problems still weren’t entirely fixed, though, as the website continued to stop loading once in a while, and Tomster’s draft randomly crashed and gave 502 Bad Gateway errors. At one point, the drafting website force-picked Nova for Tempo Storm when we wanted to pick Uther.
Eventually, we ditched the website and did the draft in the lobby, which helped us make some real progress towards playing the game.
Unfortunately, Tempo Storm HotS dropped the series 0-2 to Naventic, but had some decently close games. This will place us in the lower bracket tomorrow, facing off against Panda Global in the second series of the day. If we rise victorious in this series, we will face the loser of Naventic vs. Astral Authority to decide who moves on to the semifinals on Sunday morning. 
There’s one missing from that photo because our support player (who is role swapping to tank for this tournament) lives locally, and he was driving this morning and wasn’t able to make it in until about an hour or so later due to the notorious Los Angeles traffic.
To start off the day, they assigned the garage near the studio as our practice area. At first, I figured that it would mean we’re going to burn to death in the California heat, but then we found out that it was actually an air-conditioned garage.
For some reason, there were train tracks right next to the studio, about ten feet away from the garage. This is a photo I took out of the window, because it seems so strange to have train tracks so close to a building…
After our first round of practice, we were pulled into the multipurpose room for our media session, where all the players got their photos taken so ESL would have assets to use in the broadcast. They usually don’t have a makeup artist, but they had one today to make sure everyone looked pretty for the camera. This is Zixz getting his makeup done.
After everyone got their individual photos taken, it was time for the group shot.
Once the photo shoot was over, it was time for our second round of practice. We were moved from the garage to the multipurpose room for the second half of the day.
After a long day of practice, Zixz got tired and wanted to take a nap. Fortunately, the chairs they got us recline quite a bit.
