EPTLet's begin a few weeks before the realease. I had just bought a new PC for video editing and was bored in my dorm room. I wanted to test it with a recent game and a friend of mine told me he'd offer me an SC2 beta key if we did an applied mathematics paper together. We did, and I tried the beta. It was my first PC game involving a mouse. The only 2 PC games I played were Death Rally and Trackmania, 2 game I played solely with the directionnal arrows. I had tried CS in friends houses but never really got into it. I wasn't a PC gamer.
I tried SC2 and kinda liked. The ladder was fun and I played around 50 matches on it in silver league.
The the realease day came. I bought it one day after the official realease because I was partying at a friend's place, playing some BlazBlue and Guilty Gear. The collector was darn expensive and I chose to go with the regular 50€ version.
I then went back home and installed it.
After the install, I remember I launched the campaign and went straight to the 13th or so mission, in hard. I played until 2AM and was terrified at the idea I would likely be doing that for one more month as my gf was in Japan until september and I had a 2ms ping with Bnet servers (I live 2km away from them).
But sleeping 2AM was just the beginning.
I finished the campaign in less than a week and then jumped straight into ladder. I couldn't custom anyway as I didn't know anybody playing the game.
I got placed in Silver, and promoted to gold on the second day. Then begun the story of my ladder climbing and PC gaming discovery.
By the time my gf came back from japan, I was #1 in my platinium league with 250+ matches played. When home, I was playing 100% of the time (but don't worry, I wasn't always home).
I then discovered a friend of mine who was playing the game. His name was Hamb and he was a top Diamond player, ex CS and War 3 player.
It motivated me to push forward and I got promoted in diamond in october after about 300 matches.
Here is my skill graph over time if you want to see this slow but steady progression : http://www.sc2ranks.com/team/239174#alltime
I then swapped my old wireless mouse and my crappy keyboard for a G9x and a Filco Majestouch. This is the point where I got serious about the game, and tried to reach the top. By the end of november I was #1 in my diamond div and happy about it.
I tried to enter a few tournaments but quickly chose to stop as I wasn't satisfied with my skill. I didn't want to play without thinking I would win. And then I hit a skill wall by the middle of december. My world ranking stopped moving up. Even though I was playing, I needed to improve faster now. This is where I begun castin.
Because yes, I'm mainly known as a caster among my fellow french players, but originally I have the mindset of a player. And I'll never let go. So I begun casting, got good feedbacks and around 200 viewers per video in the first month, rising to 400 the month after, people liked what I was doing. I was still playing but couldn't go further anyway.
This is the time where aAa contacted me. They liked what I was doing and wanted me to join them. As a caster. Being the only French team I knew, I gladly accepted, even though I knew it would be more time consuming than my current casting agenda. This offered me a real opportunity to reach a certain recognition among the French players. But still, this was as a caster and hurt me deeply. I also wanted to be good. So I continued playing, got to masters at the league's opening, but still, I had troubles pushing forward.
I was part of the e Sport community. People asked me to sign autographs in LANs and recognized me on ladder. I begun receiving haters messages, even directly from TL.
This is where I left aAa. I didn't fit in this. I begun as a freelance free speach caster, and the aAa managing team asked me to be nice with terrible players asking terrible questions when I was casting. Apparently, calling somebody an «idiot» for asking if straight Colossi would be a good response to a 4 gates was mean. Some of the other casters where in gold and where plain stupid, insulting recognized casters when they couldn't even provide a single good quality programm. I just couldn't take it anymore, and I left the team alongside Nerchio, Paranoid, Sarens, ... Everybody in fact.
This was the beginning of my pause. You can see it on my points graph, nothing moved near May. This was my third pause and my longest to date, I even uninstalled the game and wrote a blog about it http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=214197. And I remembered I could beat anybody at this game had I continued progressing.
I picked it up again and retook casting, but independantly on justin.tv. I begun streaming all my ladder. I finally could call stupid viewers «idiots» without caring of what would happen. Maybe am I a despisable person, but some comments I see on the chat are just plain terrible. It gathered an even higher hater number than before, and my youtube views dwindeld, from around 6k to 4k. But I regained confidence and begun loving what I was doing again, which was the whole point. Casting topless, being rude, listening to gay K pop, all of this was fine again. Even though that meant I'll never get a sponsor, I stopped caring.
And then I begun climbing the ladder again. The season 2 was my comeback season. I begun playing on the US server as well as the EU. My goal was set to US GM : http://www.sc2ranks.com/team/12501495
I finished with 1840 points and was quite proud of me (don't take into account this season's beginning, I had to play with a crappy connexion against mass all inners, it's hard \o/).
I had just begun playing the pro players. In the last week, I faced Ret twice, Stalife (aka steak), and Desrow. I even managed to win one of those games. I knew those names. They had been good for a whole year and where already top when I was playing in Silver league. I had caught up.
This feeling was simply the best I had felt for a long time.
Being an old field hockey player and VS fighting lover, this was the first time I reached a level that high at something having so much players.
It has now been one year since I begun playing this game, and I slept after seeing that yesterday's evening :
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IIM2Q.jpg)
I know this doesn't mean much as points still are far from the MMR but it still warmed my heart to know I was so close to them. So close and so far at the same time.
I still have a lot more to work on.
)
