EPTdue to some work issues this post got a bit delayed, but i finally have time to sit down and write. This time i am gonna finish this third episode of the journey through my gaming history by telling you guys what my experiences with sc2 have been until this very day.
What did i miss so far?
In my first post i told a bit about my gaming history in general and my relationship to first person shooters, namely Quake3Arena and in my second post i sumed up how my history with sc:bw is and that i am not what a you call a natural talent for RTS games.
Lets play the beta!!
So at the end of March 2010, i already quit playing QuakeLive and was spending some time on women and reallife stuff when by complete coincidence a SC2 Beta Key fell into my lap. Not even one but 3! Of course i caught the sc2 hype that was going on in the internetz at that time, so i was super psyched to have a chance to get a glimpse of the game. So i gave the other keys to some friends of mine and started playing the beta.
In my first game my good mate mAo told me, he already decided to try to learn Protoss first, so i figured i should pick something different to begin with. I remembered to dislike Terran from sc:bw, so i went with Zerg. In my first games i sucked ultra hardcore, as i hadn't played any RTS games in quite a while. So after figuring out the absolute basics and testing the units and stuff, i started to play 2v2s with mAo. We started out in the infamous Copper League and played around 50 games up to Silver League. Furthermore we played some of the early custom maps, but i didn't play a single 1v1 match vs a human opponent in the entire beta phase.
Discovering the Starcraft Community Universe
Besides playing the beta itself, my interest in the starcraft community grew heavily. I discovered sites like TeamLiquid and especially LiquiPedia and learned about the "Starcraft Slang" and began incorporating those phrases into my own vocabulary. I was blown away of the pure amount of content that was generated by the community, be it strategy guides, VODs, articles etc. Eventually mAo send me a link to a guy who would produce a daily webshow about starcraft analysis, and so i watched my first Day9Daily at #99 (Jinro vs Naruto TvT). After watching Epsiode #100 the next day, i was completly amazed by the passion that this dude put into the game and so i am hooked to the show ever since. Or i should better say, hooked to the starcraft community ever since. As my time allows it, i try to watch as much as possible both the big tournaments as well as ordinary user streams.
SC2 is released!!
But back to me playing the game. So as the sc2 release finally happend and i got my copy, at first it was campaign-time. I played through the whole shit, enjoying it as much as possible. I was spellbound by the achievement-system, repeating missions multiple times until i got all of those and all missions on brutal difficulty. By then some more of my friends picked up the game too and we had a little "competition" going on, who could achieve the most of those award-points. As far as multiplayer gaming is concerned our little "group" decided on two playdays a week to play some teamgames on the ladder.
Rise of the desire to improve
So we did that for a while and had great fun with it, but pretty early it became obvious that most of my friends had a different approach to the game than mAo and me. With my background of years of competetive Q3-gaming, i was already trying to improve my game as much and as fast as possible by watching replays, practicing against AIs, reading build-order guids, watching vods, figuring out hotkey settings, playing multitasking-trainer-maps and so on. My friends on the other side are what you would call "casuals". They don't really care about effectiveness or speed, they just build what they think is the most fun
Stalling without perspective
So around december 2010 i was stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand i wanted to get better at the game and be at least somewhat decent, on the other hand i had a bunch of casual-friends to play with AND my mindset wasn't even aware of the fact, that the real deal is 1v1 playing. So the result was that i turned into casual mode myself, hunting some achievements and stuff.
Again the coincidence helps me out to get back on track
That was until i met a guy at a party, who i knew played some Q3 back then aswell. We had a small talk and he told me he was playing sc2 a lot and was grinding out 1v1 ladder games and that teamgames were pretty much just for fun only, and that 1v1 would be where the real shit is happening. Back then he already was in diamond (there was no ML or GML yet) and i knew he pretty much sucked in Q3, so i thought to myself: If this guy can get into diamond, i sure can do this too. He told me about an IRC channel where a bunch of cool guys would hang around that he would play practice games with on a regular basis.
So i played my 5 placement matches for 1v1 ladder and got placed into Gold with 3/2. I joined that IRC Channel, and i suggested to my friends to stop goofing around in 3v3s/4v4s for a while and play some 1v1 custom games instead. At first everyone was like: "Yeah cool, lets play 1v1s instead" but after the first few games, all my casual friends were like: "Nah dude, 1v1 is way too stressful".
This was at the beginning of feburary and basically after that reaction, my good friend mAo and i began socialising with these guys in IRC and actually starting to focus almost entirely on 1v1 matches.
What happens next?
In the next post, i will write about my first steps in this new "territory" and why it is really really hard for me to keep the motivation for improving high. I hope you didn't mind that this post was a little longer and had somewhat of a good read.
