EPTI am Peanut, and I love StarCraft.
I am starting this blog to chronicle and provide motivation for a personal project: I'm going to make it my job for the next 4-8 weeks to get into the North American Diamond League (1v1).
I am not a particularly good StarCraft player - I started playing SCBW in high school but mostly played with friends on money maps/fastest or, later on, WWI UMS simulations (thanks Cholera). I was ranked D- on iCCup about 2 years ago and I think that was the high point. I played a bunch of 2v2 matches in the SC2 beta with a friend, but I think I could count the number of post-release games I've played on two hands. Most of those have been 3v3 so I haven't even been ranked 1v1 yet.
My involvement with StarCraft has so far been as a fan, promoter, tournament organizer, community site mod, journalist, evangelist, and entrepreneur. It's been really fun and all, and I definitely intend to keep doing it, but I also often catch myself saying "I wish I were better at StarCraft." And then I keep on doing what I'm doing and laugh ruefully when people challenge me to games because I know I'd never win.
This ends now. I want to stop shaking my head and start exchanging Real IDs so that I can pin down a date and a time to lay the smackdown on someone. I want to be able to win.
Further Background Info
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I'm currently unemployed after having two intense gaming industry jobs back to back over the past year. I was the Community Manager for a f2p MMORPG called Aika Online and then did a stint at a social game developer/publisher as an Online Content Manager (kind of like a marketing manager but more community/player-oriented). I had some great times at these companies, and I got a lot of great experience, but I want to step back and do something for myself for a while instead of working my butt off to make other people's products better.
The Setup
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Place: Temporal's apartment in Mountain View, CA (where I am living rent-free 
)
Rig: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD 4890 GPU, Windows 7 Home Premium, Logitech G110 keyboard and MX518 mouse
)Rig: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD 4890 GPU, Windows 7 Home Premium, Logitech G110 keyboard and MX518 mouse
The Plan
- Devote at least 7 hrs/day to StarCraft II Mon-Fri
- At least 4 hrs/day of this will be spent playing
- Vacations for events such as BlizzCon and job interviews are acceptable
- Write 1-3 blog entries/day about the experience Mon-Fri
- The first blog entry in a day must contain a summary of the previous session's activities, including win/loss record
- Evaluate progress at the end of 4 weeks
- If in Diamond League --> GREAT SUCCESS!
- If in Gold/Platinum League --> Keep going
- If in Bronze/Silver League --> Crawl back to real life
Misc Goals
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- Cut back on red meat, junk food, simple sugars
- Jog in the mornings 3+ times/week before training
- Keep the apartment reasonably clean and organized
- Give back to the StarCraft/TL community in some way
- Jog in the mornings 3+ times/week before training
- Keep the apartment reasonably clean and organized
- Give back to the StarCraft/TL community in some way
What It's All About
This thing isn't just about getting better at a (really awesome) game - it's about training myself to be better at something I'm bad at, namely pursuing independent projects.
I think I rely too much on having other people around to motivate myself to see a task through to the end. I tend to put other people's needs above my own and do things because I want to make other people happy instead of because I want to make myself happy. This is a trait that's valuable in a team-based environment (like at work), but I think in the long run it's good to offset it with the ability to plan and execute projects which enrich yourself.
This is what it comes down to: when I'm on my deathbed with all my progeny around me or whatever, I want to be able to look back and say that I trained hard and hit 1v1 Diamond League in StarCraft 2 because I thought it would make me a better person. I think now is the time.
Why This Blog (and You) Is (Are) Important
I'm a very community-minded and social person (when it comes to games in particular) and I enjoy getting feedback about things I'm doing. I think I'll be much more likely to stick with this project if I can feel like there are people out there I'm entertaining or benefiting in some way with it instead of it being a purely private thing. I really hope that people will read this and find my story interesting enough to keep up with what I'm doing, even if they're just trolling the comments section or whatever.
I hope Chill trolls me. Chill, I love your trolling the best <3. Miss you, bro (no homo).
Anyway, I also want to use this blog to give back in a more concrete way to the StarCraft community, but I have to figure out what that way is. And anyway, it won't be any use if people aren't around to read what I'm writing. So, we'll get to that part later.
First Steps
First I'm going to go back to SCBW and finish the single player campaign, because I love the story and I meant to go through the whole thing (SC + SCBW) before SC2 hit but ... didn't happen.
I start tonight. Wish me luck!
Major shoutout to Temporal for making this possible.
