EPT
I got into Starcraft 2 through The Escapist's series Starcraft 2 Beta 101The Escapist's series Starcraft 2 Beta 101 while living with my mother in Malaysia. I especially liked the Zerg series so I booted up Brood War and went into a custom made map that I made and is terrible. And fiddled around with the Zerg tech tree. Unfortunatly no one at my school in Malaysia would play Brood War with me because they were all to focused on Modern Warfare 2. ( .__________.)
Anyway, so that year I decided to move to Canada and live with my father. I arrived in Canada sometime around June, and was playing Guitar Hero for a couple months until I heard that Starcraft 2 was being released!
So I told my dad that I wanted to get this game, and he said okay but we're going to go to a cottage this weekend. So I went into Wall-Mart and got my very first copy of Starcraft 2. While at the cottage we went to I tried to install Starcraft 2... However as it obviously mentions on the box. You must have an internet connection to install the game T.T
My cottage week was then spend playing Spore on my (bad) Apple Laptop and swimming. After we got home from the cottage I immediately plugged in my laptop charger in and loaded up the Starcraft 2 CD. I glanced at the estimated time..... It said 2 hours O_O, and my dad was calling for dinner so I left the computer on my bed to install Starcraft. After coming downstairs, Starcraft was about 50% done. So I went outside and jumped on the trampoline that my dad got for my 2 year old brother and I.
I got back about 30 minutes later saw that Starcraft 2 was installed and did a little jump, but because my ceiling is too low I accidentally hit my head. I plug in my Razer copperhead and Lycosta into my laptop and settle myself on the floor.
I log into Battle.net, and am faced with a dilemma, I had to choose and ID. I pondered over what my ID should be for well over and hour. My previous online ID's were Drakeneo a combination of my name (Drake) and neo ( from The Matrix). But I had already decided that that was a very lame ID and needed a new one. I play bass and I was set on playing Zerg after watching some IdrA games at this point. So I took the most (second?) iconic unit in the game for zerg; the zergling :D And thus my first ID of Bassling was born.
I decided to jump right into the multiplier since that was what people were talking about on The Escpaist. So I click on multiplayer and it says "Do you want to play in Practice League?" I'm like well practice sounds good lets jump into that. My first game was getting mutalisk rushed on Desert Oasis without understanding what was going on... However about 5 games into the Pratice League, I won my first game :D, it was a zvz on Blistering Sands and I just broke down his rocks with roaches and he had no units :D.
Anyway, so I kept playing the practice league for around 40 games until I decided that I was ready, I was going to do my placement matches. I immediately get destroyed by 3 bronze players and a silver player ... going 4-1 in my placements. I sighed and got placed into Ze Bronze League. With that I had lunch and decided to play more after some guitar hero. Now I have to tell you that at this point in time I was playing on ~9 fps on my stomach on the floor because my desk hadn't arrived yet. And I hadn't saved enough money to by my current computer. (Which isn't much better but can at least get a consistent 60 fps on low settings.)
After around 20 games in the bronze league and going 0-20, I had negative MMR. Which I really didn't understand, at this point I was still trying to figure out division ranking and points, ect. I was still watching HuskyStarcraft's channel and I seriously love this guy got me into competitive ESPORTS with the HDH invitational. Watching IdrA get second place to White-Ra was fantastic. And while watching the finals, I stumbled across Day[9] and that would shape the rest of my Starcraft 2 career. Now I'm going to be completely honest with my first impression of Day[9], and this is only because I was a MASSIVE IdrA fanboy and thought that his name was pronounced eye-dra not ihd-ra. I thought that Day[9] was a really annoying, however smart caster (mostly because of the eye-dra ihd-ra thing) And refused to watch anything else to do with him..
Until, Husky gave a shout out to teamliquid.net saying something along the lines of its the hub for Starcraft players. When I got here I was playing terran because I found it easier to win with
and actually got positive MMR on ladder. I was sooo close to getting Silver at this point. Anyway, I stumbled upon Day[9]'s Daily's series. At first I only watched Day[9] Dayily #100 because it was the one that was the most recommended. After sitting on the floor for 2 hours watching this masterpiece I shed a tear and watched all the terran Daily's and then as much as I could started to tune in live to the Daily's.I found that watching the Daily's increased my knowledge of Starcraft so greatly that despite my 9 fps and 10 second lag at the beginning of the game I was winning, and winning, and winning until..... Finally Promotion :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D I was finally no longer forever bronze after about 2 months of trying super hard on this terribad computer :<
And that was when I decided that I was going to get good at Starcraft, I loved to competition of ladder I loved Day[9]'s Daily's I loved Husky's commentary and I wanted to have a game casted of me by them (still has yet to happen, but it will dammit!) So I went to Newegg.ca and purchased a tower, bad cpu. 2gb of ram, and a motherboard with onboard graphics. Now, this is far and a way a pretty bad set up on its own, however coming from a 9 fps computer and going to a ~30 I was stoked.
I switched back to Zerg after getting promoted with Terran. I figured that I understood the race enough at this point to overcome all my previous flaws (Pretty much I banked 2K minerals and gas every game) And on New Year's day I got promoted to Gold :D
I don't know about anyone else but for me Gold league was the second hardest league to get out of apart from diamond to masters. It took me a good 200 games to get out of gold league and into the platinum league. I was awarded for my hard work and countless hours of playing with a very shiny badge under 1v1. And to reward myself for this achievement I bought an actual graphics card for my computer raising the fps from 30-60. But when I was promoted to Platinum the weirdest thing happened. I was already ranked #1 in my full Division, with 1400 points the second guy only had 500. After about 50 games in Plat, I was promoted into diamond. When I was promoted. I literally jumped out of my (bad) chair and hit the ceiling and proceeded to scream "WHOOO" for about 5 minutes. I thought that I had done it, gotten to a good league, where I would be noticed, but I was wrong.
About 2 weeks after promotion; Blizzard announced Masters league. When it got implemented I played my first game praying that I would get placed into the top 2% of Starcraft 2. Alas I was not. Crushed by this realization that I wasn't as good as I thought I was I started playing with my IRL friend for team games. I played about 500 2v2's before finally going back to 1v1. And after playing so much Terran in 2v2 I found myself sucking with Zerg and playing better with Terran.
And that started the Terran resurgence inside me! I was playing for about 9 hours everyday and at lunch watching Daily's I completely neglected doing any homework and eventually my dad decided to unhook the internet for my own good. But what he didn't know was that I knew where he hid the internet so every night when he would go to sleep I would play Starcraft until around midnight (I could wake up at 8 am so it wasn't affecting my sleep schedule). And eventually, my grades started going back up to 70%'s which in Canada is a B. On a side note Canada has the dumbest way of grading students period; 50% is a D, 60% is a C,70% is a B, and to get an A you have to get 80-100% how does this make any sense. To fail in Canada you have learn less then 50% of what was taught and even then you can still pass.... Whatever /siderant
This was around my birthday the 23rd of April and my dad and grandma decided to get me a nice chair because I spent so much time on my computer anyway. And man do I love this chair~~.
With my birthday over and my grades up my dad decided to give me the interwebz back :D
I actually did my homework this time and my grades were stable, but I was also playing for about 6 hours a day of hardcore ladder. Until one day; I played a bloke named Zilea on Backwater Gulch. And this really stuck out to me, I hadn't be checking my opponents ranks, however I remembered someone posting him bm'd them in the thread for that stuff. At this point my standard TvZ was to go mass marine into marine/tank because I loved to marine split. However I decided to switch it up just for Zilea and went for reactor Hellion expand into blueflame/rank/marine. I roasted like 15 drones with the first 4 hellions and was feeling great. But then he started to bm me and my spirit started slipping. Luckily I knew how to block people in game, so that was the last time I had to hear from him until the end of the game. He eventually beat me with infestor ultra T____________T.
After the game I watched the replay and figured out that my transition wasn't very good so I reworked my build in the replay. However since I couldn't read what he was saying in chat I was absolutely amazed at how bm he was to me. I messaged him after the game and said. "I had you blocked so I didn't know what you were saying. But after watching the replay I can conclude that you sir, are an amazing asshole." And he blocked me on the spot. After telling me that I would never hit masters X____X
At this point I had put in at least 2000 games of Starcrarft 2 in assuming I had a 50/50 ratio and had switched races so I decided that it would be best to get a second account with new MMR to get masters faster. And to my credit I did. But before I hit masters, I got to play a certain someone again. That's right I had my rematch with Zilea :D this time however I destroyed him. And for wrecking this magnificent bmer I was awarded with MASTERS. I was fist-pumping to some dubstep for at least 15 minutes and went outside and did 10 flips in a row before collapsing and going back to ladder. He immediately re-blocked my new account so there was no bm again.
Now that I was masters I had confidence in my abilities and went to join a clan. I join Relentless Heroes a very large clan, and I didn't really have a huge impact on the team so I decided to leave. And that was when I met a kid named SinN on ladder. Another 15 year old, and leader of the Clan iC. He asked me if I wanted to join and I said yes. And since then I went on summer vacation. My mom came to visit me in Canada and I went all try hard mode with practice. (I even 5-0'd infinity gaming in a clan war :D) However after Anaheim, people found out about the Blue Flame Hellion T_________T
I
Was
Not
Prepared
The TvT meta-game shift was hard and fast. And I quickly found myself losing every TvT I ever played on ladder and I couldn't find anyone who actually liked the match-up enough to grind out 30 games with me. So after about 3 weeks of this I switched back to the Swarm.
And that's where I am now.
Final thoughts: To anyone low-league and you don't believe that you can improve, trust me you can, just believe in yourself :D
Thanks for reading my blog.
EDIT: On yea and yay 90 posts I probably should have done this after 10 more >>>>
glad im not the only one.
