EPTImproving: A Casual Perspective
My name is Ed. I'm what you would probably call a "casual gamer". I love playing video games, even though I suck at them. I'm 30 years old, I'm married and I have a kid - as you can probably imagine I don't have as much time to play video games as I'd like. But, like most anyone who might read this blog, when I do play, I prefer Starcraft 2. I played Starcraft 1 when it was new, and it was about the best thing ever. Now, I was never into the whole competitive scene - in fact, I never played multi-player Starcraft outside of LAN functions I set up with friends. Mostly I played the single-player campaign over and over because I loved the story. But Starcraft has been one of my favorite games for as long as I can remember.
When I got my copy of Starcraft 2 installed, obviously the first thing I did was play the single player Campaign. After finally figuring out how to beat Kerrigan on the All In mission, I decided I'd try my hand at some multi-player. After my first couple of placement matches I soon realized that I was not going to be instantly awesome at the game. I placed into the Bronze League and immediately started to work on what I thought was "improving".
What I was really doing was just playing a lot of games. I won about half of them thanks to Blizzard's matchmaking system, but I could never really feel myself getting better. I was getting better, but not at a tangible rate. Finally I decided to ask Google about it. Google led me to some Youtube videos with some replays, introduced me for the first time to Day[9] and led me here, TeamLiquid. It was in that moment, after I typed "How do I beat a cannon rush?" in Google, that I realized just how clueless I really was.
Finally, with some resources and a community to draw on, I was able to claw my way from the bowels of the Bronze League. But that's pretty much where the improvement stopped. Why? Because I reached my goal! When I earnestly set out to improve, my goal was to get out of Bronze League. When I reached my goal, I stopped caring so much about improving - I quit watching my replays, I didn't play as much, etc. I got into forum Mafia here on Team Liquid and it kidnapped a lot of time that would have otherwise been spent playing Starcraft. Generally speaking, I just stopped wanting to play. But this got me thinking: why? I still love the game. I watch streams of some of my favorite players, I follow NASL and GSL, I recently attended the MLG Winter Championship in Columbus. If I still love the game, why am I no longer as interested in actually playing it?
So I've decided to play again. I've decided to try and improve and set a new goal - By the end of Summer, I want to be out of Silver League. I decided to start this blog and kinda chronicle my journey - because not many casual gamers actually care about improving, and it might be an interesting perspective - and to give me incentive to actually do it. Mostly I intend to use the blog to bitch about games I lost and summarize what I learned playing (I'll probably write one of these whenever I actually sit down and try and play for any kind of stretch.)
When I booted up the game today, I didn't HAVE a league. Season 7 has apparently started, so I had to play a placement match.
It was against a Zerg, my worst match-up by far. When I scouted him, he had no pool down so I went for a Fast Expand build. I'm not sure what happened after that - a couple of times I thought I should maybe scout again - see what's happening, you know. But I never did. I just kept massing zealots and building probes.
By the time I started thinking about a second expansion, the lings poured in. I fought them off handily and immediately started throwing down a third. Now, generally you'd move your army somewhere between your second and third, right? Nah, I tucked it away behind the wall formed by my expansion (I play Toss
) and the instant my third nexus had completed, a swarm of zerglings surrounded it and destroyed it just before my army could reach it.Great, so I guess I gotta go build that again, right? So I send probie to go build the shit and I start figuring out where I want to go tech-wise. Keep in mind that I still haven't scouted my opponent's base and I still hadn't seen anything but a mess of zerglings. So my answer was, obviously, a Stargate. So I plop down a Stargate or two and get some phoenixes in production when I hear "Minerals Depleted". Man, it's a good thing I just expanded again, right? But when I go to where my third is, my probe had never built the nexus! I wasn't paying attention to him and there were like 3 lings burrowed!
So yeah, scramble for detection and by now my Phoenixes are popping so it's time to go have a look at what's going on.
I regretted it immediately.
It seemed that while I was dicking around with my second expansion, my opponent had taken a third and a fourth! And to make matters worse, he had a MASSIVE ARMY already - had to be maxed out. All Roaches/Hydras. They just melted all of my dudes. But don't worry - he was bombing his record to get demoted, and quit the game just before his obscene army obliterated the last of my buildings.
I was defeated, but this game taught me a very valuable lesson: if you think your opponent might be too quiet, then he probably is. Go find out what he's doing, or attack him or something. Don't just sit in your base. That's not improvement.
Yeah, I was placed back into Silver League. We've got a lot of work ahead of us.
