Chapter 17. Ten Years in the Making: The EVA Jianxin Patch Pack

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十七 EVA剑心补丁包十年造

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 6, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19631937

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

People who played Warcraft III solo ladder might never have touched Dota, and Dota players might never have touched solo. But whichever mode you chose, if you played Warcraft III at any point in those ten years, the EVA Jianxin patch pack was right there with you.

So who is EVA Jianxin? How did this well-known figure from behind the scenes in esports end up on that road? Was it a smooth ride or a series of setbacks? And what is he doing now? This instalment of The History Behind Chinese Esports tells the story of the ten years of the EVA Jianxin patch pack.

EVA Jianxin, whose real name is Liu Jiguang, was born on January 19, 1984, in Shaoguan, Guangdong. His family did not have much money, so from 2003, his first year at university, he regularly wrote Warcraft III match reports for the magazine Popular Software and the newspaper CBI Computer Business Information to earn a little living money. Poverty makes children grow up early, and it also forged the diligence and persistence that have stayed with him.

EVA Jianxin came to Warcraft III early. From 2002 to 2003 he was learning the game on War3cn.com, the site run by KinK (real name Weng Leteng), a former moderator of the StarCraft Academy forum and founder of War3CN. In his first year at university he joined War3xp.com, founded by Anhei Wangzi, the Dark Prince, and took charge of updating the front page.

EVA Jianxin had always been drawn to technical things. In high school he taught himself FrontPage so that he could build a website for his own team. In his first year at university he noticed how many people needed help upgrading and localising the Warcraft III game program, and he began studying how such patches were made.

EVA Jianxin was a computer science student, but a first-year undergraduate is still some way from decompilation and program development, so he used a very crude method to work out what the code did. He searched Google for what each Warcraft III file was for, but there was little to find and what there was consisted of highly technical English material. For the many files he could find nothing on, he could only compare a file's actual effects before and after modification, again and again, and deduce what each one did. Even today there is not much documentation for the Warcraft III program online, so you can imagine how much time and effort EVA Jianxin spent in those early days.

That is how it began. EVA Jianxin started making patch packs with Warcraft III version 1.10 in 2003. Because he updated promptly and his packs were simple to use, by version 1.16 the rival patches of the same period were rarely being updated at all, and almost everyone was using the EVA Jianxin patch.

In 2004, after Blizzard officially released The Frozen Throne version 1.18, players used the Warcraft III World Editor to make large numbers of custom RPG maps. RPG maps were easier to pick up and more casual than solo ladder play, and at the same time EVA Jianxin's patch pack added a great deal on top of Blizzard's official Chinese release. The barrier to entry dropped sharply and the number of players surged. The EVA Jianxin patch caught that wave and spread on a large scale.

An aside here about the story behind the Chinese localisation of Warcraft III. Before Blizzard released its official Chinese version, fan localisation groups did an enormous amount to spread the game. One example is the Kuankuan localisation group, a very well-known games localisation group that produced Chinese patch packs for StarCraft, Red Alert, Civilization and other titles, and had a lasting influence on Chinese games culture. There was also the well-known NGA moderator Maide III, who is a woman. Her deep knowledge of the Warcraft source material made her translation of the Warcraft III campaign story more accurate and more detailed than anyone else's, and it was recognised on all sides. The culture around Warcraft III, and around World of Warcraft after it, was able to settle and grow because of the constant effort of countless localisers.

I cannot name every one of these people here, but I want to say that Chinese esports did not reach where it is today on the sweat of players and casters alone. Even where the names and the websites of a great many of these behind-the-scenes workers have already disappeared, history will not and should not forget what they contributed.

The trial at Jingxing

In 2005, two men who had secured sponsorship approached EVA Jianxin. They wanted to build a completely new esports website carrying written content, images and game videos. The salary was only 2,000 yuan, but the model sounded promising and he would be doing work he genuinely cared about, which was what he had always wanted. He accepted and started again from nothing.

EVA Jianxin says 2005 was the year he learned the most.

The new company was based in Guangzhou and started with fewer than ten people. EVA Jianxin not only built the web pages himself and watched over the site's content, he also had to learn server maintenance and administration. The servers sat in a telecom equipment room next to Diwang Plaza, and he often went over there to deal with technical problems. The company also produced live video. It brought in MsJoy and Xiaose and made programmes such as Warcraft Night, StarCraft Night and The Ten Great Warcraft Heroes. To push the live video stream out, the boss even bought a video streaming machine, but the manual was entirely in English and none of them had ever handled anything like it, so they ground through the English and tried the buttons one by one.

Looking back at that time, EVA Jianxin feels that although the company did not make money and the work was hard, taking a lot of offline events just to keep it going, he was still happy, because he learned a great deal every day and his colleagues were full of drive. At lunchtime they often pooled their money to buy food from the roast meat shop and ate while discussing how to do the job better. By then the EVA Jianxin patch had a substantial market share, and with users coming across from it the site began to attract attention.

Reality was still harsh, though. The model and the direction were right, and they had the place and the people, but the moment was wrong, and that makes a good outcome very hard. Even from eight years later, video on demand and live video only started to make money after casters integrated deeply with Taobao at the end of 2010. In the wider environment around 2005, video platforms such as Youku, PPS and PPLive were only just getting started. So Jingxing, the site EVA Jianxin and his colleagues built, could not hold on past 2006.

The failure of Jingxing hit EVA Jianxin hard

He was thoroughly lost about the esports business at that point, disheartened would not be too strong a word. He put down everything to do with esports, including updates to the Warcraft III patch, went home for a while, and in July 2006 followed a friend to Zhuhai to go into the computer hardware business.

In the days after he left his dream behind, EVA Jianxin had no time to feel sorry for himself, because doing business in a computer market is relentless. He was up at six in the morning and working until midnight. Plenty of people were buying computers and the cash flow looked healthy, but competition inside the computer market was fierce and the margin on each machine was very low. He also had no real business experience, and after six months he found the books were in the red. Carrying on would have left him with no money to buy stock, and the new year was coming, so EVA Jianxin wound up the business and went home.

At the start of 2007, Warcraft III version 1.21 was released. It was a major update, with a great many changes to game balance, and Blizzard also changed the way CD keys were verified, which meant that every patching technique used before it had stopped working. Countless people flooded EVA Jianxin's blog and forum with messages asking him to put out a new patch as soon as he could. He was still working in the computer market and was too busy during the day to read them, so he could only read them after closing each night. Faced with more and more voices calling for him, he suddenly realised that the patch had become a child of his own. It was a responsibility and he could not put it down. So he worked through the night, finished it and released it.

Support from his elders

At Chinese New Year in 2007, EVA Jianxin's spirits were still low. Talking with the older members of his family, he mentioned the failures of the past few years in esports and in the computer hardware business and said he felt completely lost. He had expected them to tell him to let it go. To his surprise, they told him a great deal about their own lives and told him not to give up. That gave EVA Jianxin real encouragement. He began to come out from under the cloud of his confusion and set about actively looking for a new job.

Setting out again, at Ouyou

In March 2007, at the invitation of Zhu Xuebao, founder of the Wuhan site Ouyou, EVA Jianxin moved to Wuhan to take charge of Warcraft III and StarCraft content. He was at the lowest point of his life by then. After buying daily necessities in Wuhan he had five mao left, and for the first month he got through on meals his friends paid for. Ouyou had fewer than ten people in the whole company and stayed afloat mainly on offline events. What stayed with EVA Jianxin most was the WSVG competition they ran at Optics Valley Square in Wuhan. The very first edition included a World of Warcraft arena event, the venue was packed to bursting, and it worked extremely well.

The offer from U9

At around the same time, EVA Jianxin's patch and his network of contacts caught the eye of Liu Liang, the CEO of U9, who also sent him an invitation. EVA Jianxin felt it would be wrong to leave Ouyou so soon after arriving, so he politely declined. Liu Liang never gave up. Not only did he talk to EVA Jianxin in person, he went to EVA Jianxin's father to work on him too. A brief aside: this small episode says a great deal about how unusual Liu Liang's methods were, and it is also why he took U9 to a new level. I will tell his story in detail in another chapter, so I will not go into it here.

Back to the story. In April 2008, moved partly by a year of persistent invitations from Liu Liang and partly by the sense, after several meetings, that U9's twenty-odd employees were people who got things done, EVA Jianxin moved to Xi'an and joined U9, taking charge of the single-player games site, the Warcraft III patch and guides, and the RPG side of the business. U9's Warcraft III and RPG sections were already at two million page views by then, and its Dota site, which had only just started up, was already at more than 200,000.

EVA Jianxin's connection with U9 went back a long way

Back in 2004, when U9 was still a personal website, its founder Huilin asked EVA Jianxin what he thought about building a dedicated RPG forum. EVA Jianxin said that although RPG was not yet a mainstream esports discipline, it should have a future.

In 2008, EVA Jianxin set about building U9's Warcraft III and competitive gaming sites. In 2009 he became head of the single-player games group, in 2010 a senior manager, and in 2011 deputy director of the content department. After three hard years, U9's Warcraft III sites had become the biggest in the business by common consent, and in 2010 U9's Dota site reached a peak of ten million page views. None of that would have happened without the elite team he led.

Looking back at EVA Jianxin's work at U9 from 2008 to 2011, it comes down to four things.

One. Through the patches and the guides site, he took Warcraft III RPG to a new level. At the time around 70 per cent of the traffic across the whole site came from the single-player games group.

Two. Through the Dota simulator and news content, he took the Dota site to ten million page views.

Every time Dota was updated, U9 could refresh its guides and its simulator quickly, and could even get material from IceFrog ahead of everyone else, so players had information about the new version in the shortest possible time.

Three. In 2009 he led the team into League of Legends on the North American servers, making U9 the earliest gathering place for League of Legends players in China. He also released the U9 Super Assistant plug-in, with a Chinese localisation of the North American client, to make things easier for players.

At TGA in 2010, the American League of Legends project team came to Shanghai, and EVA Jianxin interviewed Guinsoo and several of the other foreign leads himself. They talked in depth for more than three hours, and he found out a great many interesting things.

As everyone knows, at the height of Dota's popularity, League of Legends made the very bold choice not to copy Dota. On the contrary, the team changed a great deal: they removed denying, designed jungle buffs, added brush a player could hide in, made death cost you no gold, and so on. What were they trying to achieve? Was it accidental experimentation or deliberate change?

That interview was the first time EVA Jianxin got a real answer. He found that the whole League of Legends team knew the game extremely well, and that these design choices had a very clear purpose: to narrow the gap between strong players and new players, so that players would not feel so much frustration.

EVA Jianxin's report on that interview gave Chinese players their first clear understanding of the design philosophy behind League of Legends and where it was heading. The League of Legends team was also very grateful that a professional interview of this kind had brought them closer to Chinese players.

Four. He took U9's StarCraft II site to one million page views.

EVA Jianxin says the most valuable thing he gained in those years at U9 was learning how to lead a team well. His promotions came quickly too. By 2011 he had risen to deputy director at U9, managing the work of more than ten single-player games groups.

But every family has its own troubles, and U9's were complicated. It formally shifted to being a general games website in 2009 and successfully launched its first online game site, for DNF, yet revenue remained a problem afterwards. On top of that the company was based in Xi'an, where it could neither recruit top talent nor keep it. EVA Jianxin could do nothing about that, and the feeling of being unable to make your strength count in the best of times is very dispiriting.

In 2011, EVA Jianxin felt that he was getting older, and his family wanted him to work somewhere closer to home. So he accepted an invitation from Duowan Games and returned to Guangzhou to take charge of content for new online games, starting over.

EVA Jianxin says there are many people he has to thank, in particular Liu Liang and Wu Feng at U9, who gave him a great deal of guidance and help in his career and in his life. The team members and the friends who came through it all with him are his greatest asset.

EVA Jianxin had just become a father, and he was delighted as he showed me the photographs. Watching him, I suddenly realised that the nearly fifty esports people I have interviewed for this history have almost all had children recently. They have families and careers now. It is finally the turn of our generation, the esports people born in the 1980s. One of them joked that we could organise an esports parent-and-child gathering one day. We are all about the same age, so the adults could catch up while the children became friends.

I believe that idea will come true one day.

Just like the EVA Jianxin patch pack, Chinese esports took ten years to make.