EPTin my first blog post i gave some backstory to my gaming online career so far, which was almost exclusively Quake3 Teamgames (CTF&ClanArena) for the last 10 years. At the end of the first post i stated, that i would post about my time with starcraft2 this time, but i changed my mind, and think it makes more sense to give a short sum-up of my starcraft:bw experience i had before i installed the sc2 beta, to shove all of the past stuff out of the way first.
So, as mentioned in my first post sc:bw was heavily played by me and my buddies in our little 8-person-basement-LANs between 1998 and 2002. And by "heavily played" i mean, we played 2v2v2v2s or 4v4s on maps like Hunters(BGH) or some other "Fastest Maps" or what have you.
Picking a race was totally off-limits, it was all-random all the time baby. So our games went literally like either 4pool zergling rush or the good ol' 30+ cannon defense into mass carrier. Keyboards were rarely used and micro-heavy units like templars or defiler were just labeled as "not worth using". So yeah, compared to anyone who played online, we sucked ultra hard, but -hey- we had tons of fun with it nontheless. My role in our little microcosm was the mediocre guy, u know, the guy that gets picked 2nd in a 4v4 team or is paired up with another mediocre player in 2v2v2v2. Strangely enough we never ever played any 1v1 matches. If only two guys wanted to play, they did a 2v4 co-op vs. the AI or sth. like that, which seems really stupid if i think about it today.
So its fair to say, i am definetly not what you call a "natural" at RTS games. I experience it quite often that, if i am in a multitasking-heavy environment and some level of excitement is mixed in, my brain has a strong tendency to forget the most blatant things. It happens all the time in board games like seddlers of catan, where its super close to the end and some one is like "okay, i do this and this and that and ... voilá i won" and then i go like "ah darn it, congratz, dude", shake hands and then when we put all the stuff back in the box i look at the cards in my hand and go "FUCK, i had the perfect counter card on my hand all the time".
Conveyed to starcraft this means for example: i see DTs ripping apart my lair and i type "gg" and in the replay i see an overseer hovering right around the corner, that i made like 5 minutes ago. This is, as you might imagine turbohard frustrating.
I´ve learned that its really the excitement that causes this, so the only way to get rid of it is constant repetition and trying to stay as cool as possible. Which can be really hard, as you might know.
Okay, sorry i got a little side tracked, but after 2002 our basement-LANs got really scarce and i focused completly on Q3 and played sc:bw at max like twice a year or so. Only when big Esport events like WCG took place i would take a glimpse into whats going on in broodwar-country, in between the q3 games
So now as i have my sc:bw background AND some psychological oddness about my brain out of the way, i can finally write about my approach to sc2 in the next post
