EPTwelcome to the fourth post of my blog, where i share my experiences in transitioning from a FPS Teamplayer to a SC2 1v1 player. In the last three parts, i gave an overview over my gaming history and my history with sc2. This time i am gonna wrap up everything that is left to mention and in the next posts i will switch the style from this blog into more of diary kind of thing, where i´ll post how i struggle through the battle.net.
So, lets do this 1v1 business!!!
Okay, it was around Feburary 2011, when i decided i really want to improve at 1v1 and become at least somewhat decent. I had my good friend maoiste who was kind of in the same mindset and we began to play 1v1 custom games. Only after a few games i realized what my biggest flaw was: mechanics. My hotkeys were fucked, my keyboard control sloppy or easier said: my hands weren't able to execute what my brain was thinking. So i started to work on that, by refining my hotkeys, trying out different inject-methods, memorizing shortcuts for upgrades and paying attention to little things like not putting drones with minerals in hand in gas.
Ladder, here i come!
After a good amount of custom games i felt like it was time to hit the ladder. I already had played my 5 placements and got into gold with 3-2. And instantly i went on a wicked win-streak. Within 2 days or so i went up to 15-5 or sth. like that and -booyah- got promoted to Platinum.
Theorycrafting: Blessing or Curse for an improving player?!
Around that time i began to scavenge through various strategy forums heavily. I soaked up every tinsy bit of tactic and strategy i could find, because i thought if i just read about solutions to every possible situation, i would just simply smash everybody with my superior knowledge. Same thing with all those streams. I watched like one or two hours of various streams every day. What sounds reasonable at first was more like a curse for me. What i didn´t take into account is, that you have to actually play to get better. Reading and spectating will only get you so far. So in my head a disparity grew between what i knew to do theory and what i was able to actually pull off in a real game.
Welcome to frown-town: the first big frustration!
This led (to no surprise) to my first big frustration phase. For example, one day i got bunkerrushed on the ladder like 5 times in a row. I perfectly knew that i'd have to pull around 6-7 drones and that i'd have to prevent the bunker from going up, but with only around 20 to 30 games under my belt, i simply wasn't able to do it mechanicly. And even if i held it off, i lost the games because i was thinking about tons of cutesy stuff instead of just macroing some shit up and steamroll my opponent. So i went on a losing streak, on the ladder as well as in my custom games against maoiste. When at first the games went around 60%-40% in his favor, at that time it was like 95% to 5%, with the 5% beeing a 7pool. Furthermore i kind of jumped on the "zerg is underpowered"-train and got really upset with beeing overrun by protoss-deathballs or seemingly endless streams of marines (LosirA knows what i'm talking about). This ultimately led to me stopping to play and falling back to only watching streams/vods.
Overcoming the frustration is tough.
In fact thats nothing special for me. I took frustration-breaks from Quake all the time back then, but they were mostly limited to a few days or a week at max. But to be completly honest, this first big frustration phase lasts until today. I really wanted to grind out laddergames as soon as the ladder-reset was done, but somehow i am still really demotivated in regards of playing. Every evening i persuade myself to be to tired, not in shape, really lazy or what have you and instead of playing, i end up watching streams or even worse: going out with friends or doing sports and stuff
This picture nails my current situation perfectly: http://imgur.com/s/Eg1X5 :D
What next?!
So you guys know my what i am struggeling with at the moment. My next post will be on the topic this blog was intended to be about in the first place:
The inconvenience of starcraft duelling (if you are not used to 1v1 gaming).
Because i think this is a big factor why i have such hard time finding the motivation to ladder or to simply play practice games, but more on that in the next post.
Thanks for your time, i hope you had somewhat of a good read!
