EPTJust a little bit about me: I'm a 20 year old male living in the US studying Econ at a 4 year uni. And than here's a not so brief story about my experiences with StarCraft, a topic which I hope works a little better at shedding some light about my background and keeping this post interesting.
(Walls of text ahead)
From the very beginning... It all started one merry day back in 4th grade (2001) when one of my friends started talking/hyping up SC1 to the rest of us. But of course, mere words can only do so much to make younglings like us elementary kids excited, so it wasn't until he managed to install it on a school computer that we began to realize the epicness that is SC. Mind you, this was during a time when I mostly played fighters (SFA3, Tekken) on the PSX and my only hint of what PC gaming entailed was browser games like Neopets and Runescape, so it was doubly mindblowing to play a 3D RTS game like this for the first time. So pretty much from that day on, SC became a pretty big deal for us, even if we each didn't all own a copy to play at home. I remember during lunch breaks, we would quickly finish the cafeteria food and just run straight back to the classroom to play whatever SC we could get in those precious 30 minutes. And naturally, I did my best to hog up the lone computer with SC each time :p. I think it was already cool enough that our teacher even let us play during those breaks, but then eventually she even had her husband burn us copies of his SC disc!
And so SC made its way into our homes, and even though there was definitely some CD key sharing and a lot of single player at the start, somewhere along the way we got individual keys and those fun times rolled in. From discussing 2v2 strategies during class to having these epically bad mass Carrier vs. Carrier/Scout battles, we definitely took SC to heart. Then one day my friends showed me some tower defense maps and brought me into the world of UMS, and I was just amazed that there were entirely other games within SC. Pretty much I became addicted to those DBZ/SpongeBob/Smash Bros mass unit games, along with the occasional DBZ RPG or Sunken D map. Before long, I stopped playing actual SC altoghether and just loaded up the UMS type every time.
But then soon I grew tired of that game type and SC in general, and my friends just as quickly started to drop SC as well in favor of other games. CS 1.6 and SSBM was all the rage back in 6th grade, and we pretty much migrated over to keep up with the trend. But SC was still pretty influential for me, in terms of both introducing me to PC gaming in general and RTSes as a genre. It also made me start looking for other RTS titles to play, but it's safe to say that SC made me have unrealistically high expectations of other RTSes. I remember getting WarCraft2 and thinking, "Wait a minute, both these races are exactly the same!" Disappointed with WC2, I tried my hand at AoE2 and could only shake my head. "Is there no Attack Move? Are you telling me my troops have to walk to point B AND THEN start firing?!" Of course both these games are great in their own regard, but at the time, I was spoiled by SC and could only look at other RTSes through the lens of SC.
Anyways, fast forward to 11th grade (2008) in the middle of the AP exam studying season, when I found out that my friends started playing SC again. Revisited B.Net for the first time in a long time, and got beat pretty bad in various 1v1s I played with them. It was then I started to look into playing SC 1v1s the correct way, picking up the basic tenets of always making workers, keeping resources low, etc. After all that learning, I could start trading some wins with them, but I wanted more. I got into the competitive side when I realized all the skill it took to play the game, with mechanics, strategies, and whatnot. I settled on maining T, since managing between drones/units seemed impossibly hard for Z, and as much as I like P, I couldn't get used to reaching the other side of the keyboard to press 'P' to build probes. Stupid reasons, but that's why I chose T, for better or worse.
This inevitably led me to TL, where I just browsed to learn about build orders like the FD vs. P and to find out about the iCCup ladder. Still, ladder anxiety got the best of me, and I never made it out of D-. I just always fired up a 1v1 vs. the Protoss AI and did the FD build over and over and just quit after like 7-8 minutes into each game, looking to improve my APM more than actually just playing ladder matches. And that practice got tiring too eventually, but at least I still looked up OSL/MSL VODs by nevake/jon747 on YouTube frequently. 2008 seemed like an especially good year to start watching the competitive scene, especially with that one OSL series of Best vs. July. I even drew a picture of Kingdom's reaction to the crazy game 2 of that series, because of how shocked he seem, even more so than Bisu after that drone drill:
+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/1418/42944514.png)
But by 12th grade, my interest in SC started to wane again, and I didn't really care much about the excitement surrounding SC2's launch. Sure, some of my friends quickly picked it up, but glances at the reports of the radical changes left me thinking that it was completely different and that I couldn't get used to it. It wasn't until I tried out the Starter Ed. 3 months back that I decided to get into SC2 (mostly just the multiplayer). I felt the same old charm of SCBW, albeit slightly prettier and easier. Again, I picked T for some continuation and because I thought my reasons from BW still held this time around (Except I didn't know making a probe was 'e' and that you could customize hotkeys until this month! Also why I thought it seemed to make sense that Ailuj kept reaching across the keyboard in that MLG game vs. Losira). Went from Silver to Plat in about a month, but I started racking up a lot of losses at end of S4 in trying to get promoted to Diamond. And so at this point I'm sure I'll be posting a bit in the Strategy forum for help, but I also hope to discuss/play SC2 with the rest of TLers soon!
Anyways, thanks for reading if you made it this far!
TL;DR: Been playing SCBW/SC2 for a while and hope to meet other TLers!
