EPTI pre-ordered Starcraft 2 after hearing about it through various mediums. Now, I've played a few RTS in my time. A dash of Civ 4, a little bit of Star Wars: Empire at War. I was mainly an FPS player, played a lot of CS:Source, even made it into CAL-IM with a team of me and my friends (Not really much of an achievement but it was my first taste of competitive play). So when Starcraft 2 was released, I played through the campaign, and I remember I was really tentative about jumping into multiplayer. I played a handful of practice league games then did my placement matches. I was placed into bronze. Back in the first few weeks SC2 was released, I had a couple of friends from CS:Source who bought it as well, so we played a little bit. We were all in bronze and would do team games a lot. However, I was the only one among them who had any interest in going farther than bronze league and I've come a fair way I'd say. I started SC2 with ZERO understanding of general Starcraft mechanics, e.g. resource gathering, any form of macro, etc. I was THE generic noobie at Starcraft.
I'm currently at 3361 points in diamond with random as my most played race, however I fancy myself a Zerg player. I remember I was so driven to get to diamond. I had initially four-gated my way into diamond, literally every single game. Just hammering it out in like five hour sessions. Then one day, I started tilting really badly and just started cheesing every game as random. Cannon rush, six pool, seven pool, proxy 2gate, proxy rax, you name it, I probably did it in that tilt session. Needless to say I lost almost all of those games and was demoted. This was where I really hit my stride in Starcraft. Needless to say I was sort of skeeved that I lost that fancy icon and the (false) satisfaction I had when I got to respond "Yeah i'm xxxx point diamond" (This was around December, so before Masters' League) I started maining Zerg, and I remember I eventually got back to rank 1 in my platinum division. One night it was 4:00 AM or so and I was just absolutely bent on getting back into diamond. I got promoted that night.
So now, I'm kind of at a weird place. I'm just about to hit masters, but I have this weird qualm about laddering. I WANT to ladder constantly, but for whatever reason, I don't. Like this last tuesday for instance, when the servers were down for 1.3.0 I was really agitated, and I remembered having a huge urge to ladder, but when the servers came back up, I played maybe one, two games then stopped laddering. I think this is due to two reasons, one being I hate losing (go figure). Two being that I have nobody to talk to about Starcraft. Not one person from my school, family, or job plays Starcraft. A couple of people I've played on ladder have added me but I don't really clique with them and I don't think they could talk about Starcraft as much as I would like to. I constantly talk and theorycraft with myself (Weird, I know) when i'm alone in the house because I have nobody to talk to about it. I would love having some awesome people who are likeminded who enjoy just talking about the game. If you're reading this, and this sounds like you, send me a PM :d.
In conclusion, working from ground up to get where I am now (random diamond scrub), while that isn't much for some, it's quite a bit for me. Out of all the gaming communities I've seen, some such as BF2, Diablo 2, Counter strike, WoW; the Starcraft community has to be the most tightly knit. Most everybody's willing to lend a helping hand to those who need it, and the vast majority of the community is very mannered. Out of all the games I've played extensively, Starcraft has definitely taken it's place as the game I'm most proud to play.
