The perfect training partner
First an imaginary friend, then a patent, and now a gaming companion who plays competitive games like StarCraft. Nova learns from every gamer he plays, always improving with you.
Subscribers only
The launcher, the league network ID and every version of Nova come with a pro-gamer subscription, from five dollars a month. How many matches you get against him is the only thing your tier changes.
Nova has been three things: a young boy’s imaginary friend, an engineer’s patented family assistant, and now a gaming opponent. It has been the same core idea each time; only now it is an icon of our league.
One Childhood
Nova started as an imaginary friend.
Not as a metaphor, and nor as a brand exercise, but an actual companion a lonely child made up to psychologically survive things no kid should have to endure.
Years later, he wrote it down.
Nova appears as a supporting character in Fighting For Redemption. A comical companion who keeps the protagonist hopeful through struggle when nothing else will.
Two Wolven Industries
After growing up and starting a physics and engineering firm called Wolven Industries, that little boy, now a man, tried to make Nova real.
Nova MK-1 was a patent-pending machine-learning assistant, powered by Google. Similar to Tony Stark’s “JARVIS,” Nova was an ML core that learned from what it was shown, spoke by voice or text in different languages, and ran on the family’s own hardware rather than a company’s servers, so nobody was listening in.
The patent filing said the quiet part out loud. The concept came from an imaginary character of the same name, and the job was the same job: be the companion.
Three OPLeague
Nova is now a competitive gaming companion running on a private server that plays StarCraft, for now, but will play other games later, at any hour you want, and keeps what it learns about you.
Nova began as one unlikely boy’s imaginary friend consoling him when he had no one else to play with.
He has now become a potential companion to millions: never bored of you, and quietly getting better at making you better.
“The original concept and inspiration for Nova stems from an imaginary character of the same name, depicted in Fighting for Redemption, a memoir. The character served as a companion to the protagonist of the story.”
Wolven Industries · Nova MK-2 · Patent filing US 63/261,349. 2021.
Nova plays Protoss, Terran and Zerg. Same opponent, same ever-evolving memory of you, three ways of coming at you. Each race has its own temperament and its own rating, and Nova is learning in all three at once.
The race Nova is strongest in, and the one that punishes a loose opening hardest. If you want to know how far you have to go, play Nova’s Protoss.
Siege lines and map control. Most people meet Nova here first, and most people lose here first. Nova takes ground and makes you come to it.
The race Nova is most teachable in. If Nova surprises you one week with something it has never done before, it is usually here.
Nova questions
No mystery and no marketing. Here is the mechanism, in full.
It joins your lobby like a human player would. Early on, it chooses a strategy based on a coin toss.
At the end of each game, it records which plan it used against you by name, and whether that plan won.
The next time it sees your name, the plans that lost to you get less likely and the ones that worked get more likely.
It communicates with you through the OPLeague launcher you have to install to play against it.
It files all of this under your in-game name. Change your name and, as far as Nova is concerned, you are a stranger again.
We would rather tell you this up front than have you find out and feel sold to.
Nova is far above the average human opponent, but well below a genius-level human.
However, even if you are one of the rare few who ever manage to beat it, it will still provide advice on how you could beat it more efficiently.
It sees what you see.
No map hacks for peeking at your base, no extra resources.
It does click faster than any human ever will, and that is the one genuinely unfair thing about it.
Currently, Nova can only run on the 2009 version of StarCraft, as the current version of the game locked bots out in 2017 and that will never be undone.
If you want to play Nova, you need the old client, which you can find on this site.
Online at any hour, and yours to practice against. How many matches per month depends on your subscription tier: 2 on Amateur, 4 on Pro, unlimited on Partner.