EPTIt's been a while since I posted a blog. In my first, it was pretty simply just saying that as a personal challenge for something to do over the holidays as well as to work on my work ethic, I was going to play SC2 full-time. I was Platinum then. A couple of days later I posted a quick update that I was Diamond and I felt like I was improving pretty quickly.
I haven't been playing full-time every day. A lot of real life stuff popped up. However, on some days I've been playing roughly 25 games a day, which has really helped my concentration problems. Sometimes I tab out, then I tab back and press that button.
My goal, anyway, was to make Masters next season. According to the post on battle.net, I needed 850 points to be guaranteed the promotion, a few days ago I had 650 points and the last 3 days I've been playing heaps getting closer and closer to that number. And then today...
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/R9rxg.png)
But that's not what this blog is about. I don't want to give the impression that I made this blog to gloat about my promotion, because I didn't. I've been meaning to write this lately but I've been putting it off to go play more Starcraft. And now that I have my shiny new league, I figured that time is now.
So my story begins with the fact that I've always been ludicrously competitive. SC2 is the second most competitive game in existence, after SC1 of course. Over the months of me being a scrub I kept telling myself that I wasn't taking this game seriously, to cover the fact that I really wanted to be good. I didn't want to put the hard work in, though, and I didn't want to cheese/all-in my way up either.
Once I started playing full-time I contacted my old CoD4 team from 2006 who I saw were competing in the PDCL (Platinum/Diamond Clan League), I saw a tagged member in PRACBUD (practice partner channel) and joined up. Wearing that tag was the start for me, the start of the point where I wasn't just playing to improve any more, I was practicing for clan matches. I spent days refining my build and such, practiced with team members and stuff like that.
We all-killed the first time I showed up to a clan war so I didn't get to play. A week later the team we were supposed to play didn't show so we just had a friendly and it was casted. My 11 year old female cousin, who plays the Starter Edition from time to time/watches me play when she's over/watches GSL with me even tuned in to watch my team play. We were 3-1 up when I was sent out, lucky she had to go to bed...
It was PvZ, the matchup I was practicing for days, refining that build. It was so mineral tight that scouting was extremely delayed, I knew there was a risk of dying to early pools but I had to take it, I knew it could beat him no matter what he did. Anyways, I made a fatal misclick after pulling probes off the line to fend off lings, I missed the mineral patches while I was microing my units at the front and I lost in embarrassing fashion in my first ever casted game, and first game playing for my team.
As someone with an inflated ego who takes everything very seriously, I was crushed. I felt terrible, I knew it didn't matter to the team but that was my "moment", y'know? The moment where I could show off how hard I'd been working. I gg'd out, ragequit vent and SC2, and just lied down for a while to calm myself. About 10 minutes later I came back on vent, turned the stream on, joined the channel and laughed about it. As a kid who grew up as a dickhead with temper problems, the best way to get over things is to be able to laugh at yourself. I watched the replay and laughed.
Suddenly, after that, I'll be damned if I'm ever intimidated by ladder. On SEA, you hit the same person on ladder frequently. If I hit that high masters Terran and he's beaten me 3 times in a row, I'm queueing up straight away, I don't care. It was almost as if my catastrophic fail helped me, it gave me confidence that I couldn't fuck anything up as bad as I fucked that up :D
If you've ever been on SEA or followed the community, it is extremely Zerg dominated. PvZ was my weakest matchup and I had to work on it a lot, it eventually got to the point where PvZ was a free win. And then, for the last two days it's been literally nothing but T/P. I played 2 Zergs today, and that was it (the same guy 3 times, the last game got me promoted). PvP I feel relatively comfortable with but playing the same guy over and over in PvP has some heavy mindgames and I don't find it very fun.
PvT was always my biggest struggle. I had a relatively good winrate, but it was getting into the midgame that I had trouble with. Terrans on ladder never seem to man up and make a CC when they see Nexus first, which is fine, it took time and practice to be able to hold the 2rax from a Nexus first, but that never evolves into a macro game, it's always one sided either way (the attack does too much damage or I'm too far ahead).
The other style of PvT I play is 1gate expo into 3gate pressure. This always serves me well, except I've always had difficulty with the decision making of whether to try and break it if a 1/1/1 is coming or to go home and defend. There are just so many variations of the 1/1/1 that it's very difficult to know how to respond and because Terran doesn't have to do much sitting on one base they're always very good at denying Observers. A teammate of mine does this marine/tank/medivac all-in and I've held it once, on the worst possible map for it (Daybreak) when his push was delayed. Don't worry, though, he said someone on ladder held it...once.
Midgame transitions were a problem as well. I always followed the CreatorPrime style of throwing down double forge ASAP and sometimes my additional gates/AoE/third/whatever are late and I die to stuff. It's stuff like that that makes this game so amazing, though. The feeling you get when you hold the 1/1/1 and the kid doesn't gg (they never do), or when you land sick forcefields, overcoming obstacles and feeling like you've improved is why I find this game fun even though many people say once they get to plat and upwards it's not fun any more.
To sum things up, in a time when my life was horrible, SC2 gave me something to work on. I've worked harder at this than I've ever worked at anything in my life (sad I know), I really feel like I can maintain focus and such better than I could before. I learned to improve from my losses, I learned that playing ladder with my heart on my sleeve is a really bad idea, and I learned that Immortals are good units.
I've improved leaps and bounds just by playing a bit more. If you wanna know how fast you can improve if you play consistently, analyse your matches, read guides on TL etc, I'm top 8 masters with 228 ladder games won (from the achievement thing) and probably around 50 custom games. I've seen people in Bronze with 800...all you have to do is learn from your mistakes and push yourself to improve. And that's where the real magic of this game starts.
GM next? GM by the end of next year, that's my goal. I think I'm going to set my self goals of ladder points for each season in Masters to give me something to work on, kinda like how I pushed myself to get the 850 points this season so I could get promoted next season (it came a bit early). Wish me luck, anyway
P.S. I'm still allowed to play out the season of the PDCL
all-kills incoming methinks
