+ Show Spoiler [My story of how I got to this site] +
First of all the story of how I got to this site that now plays a huge role in my life:
I am registered to this site since July 2010.
I never knew about competitive Brood War, I just played a little Starcraft for fun back then when I was younger and gave up on it after playing through the campaign without even realizing that there was a huge scene with professional players and all that stuff.
But then I heard about Starcraft 2. I was slightly interested in that game and then I saw the Battle Reports with Dustin Bowder and Rob Simpson:
The Battle Reports on StarcraftWikia
and I was hooked. I loved the graphics, the way the units interact and Dustin Bowder's passion casting these games.
So I registered on battle.net, hoping to get into the SC2 beta. I was lucky and got a beta-key directly from Blizzard still in the early stages of the beta. So I started playing Protoss (the units looked awesome!) and tried to understand how this game works.
I noticed pretty fast that I did knew nothing at all about the game and that I needed help.
Luckily there is Google. And Google sent me to the Day9Daily where I found some help.
Sadly I can't find the old casts of the Zotac cup (the first things I ever saw about competitive Starcraft).
I guess I'll just post another interesting video of the old times:
Jinro vs Haypro on Desert Oasis
In the cast of the Zotac-cup guys like Nazgul, Demuslim and Dimaga were playing. When Nazgul was playing Day9 naturally mentioned TeamLiquid a lot and how the site teamliquid.net was the biggest foreign SC:BW site and so I started visiting TeamLiquid. I didn't register for the first few month but I lurked quite a bit, finding guides and strategy discussions and all the other stuff. And only then I was finally realizing how huge and awesome the Starcraft-community was.
That was more then 2 years ago and nowadays TL.net is the site I visit the most. When I am online, I am on TL.net, no matter if it is in university, at a friends house or at home. I think I can say that this site and this community plays a huge role in my life now.
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Okay, after telling my story of how I came here, I want to show you some of the reasons why TL.net is as awesome as it is.
I want to apologize in advance because I can't post everything in this blog, it would be a little to much work and also I probably forgot a lot of stuff.
I hope this shows some of the newer members some things they maybe missed and remind some of the older members of some things they may forgot about.
Let me begin with the place were I made most of my 2k posts: The Live Report threads.
LR's are awesome. Why, you may ask. Well, LR threads are a little bit like the twitch.tv chat channels, only on a little bit higher level (not always though). And for some reason a lot of people (including me) enjoy talking about the games while they are happening.
LR threads taught me a lot of things, for example that mayonnaise is a must-have lubricant when performing necrophilia and it gets even better if you put in some of this.
For a brief (but a little outdated) overview/guide about LR threads, see Drazerk's LR Guidebook
That potato salad/necrophilia discussion (derailment?) took place in the TSL4 LR thread which reminds me of really good video that gave me quite a lot of nerdchills.
The video I speak off was Chill's hype video of the TSL3, which showed a brief overview of the TSL1+2 and made me so damn hyped about the TSL 3 even though I had never heard of the TSL before and even though I didn't even know half the players in the tournament.
+ Show Spoiler +
Another thing that helped building up the hype was the awesome TSL 3 Cheerfuls thread. If you never saw this before, take a look at it, especially at the Goody cheerfuls (and watch the VODs of his games against Nestea)
Okay, on to something different: The Automated Banlist Discussion Thread.
The place where a bunch of weirdos hang around and laugh out of schadenfreude about posters getting warned and banned.
Well, thousand pages of malicious joy and countless derailments lead to probably one of the weirdest but also most awesome 1000th page in the history of TL.net.
Take a look at TheToast's post on that page.
A community as big as this consists of quite a lot of idiots (as you could imagine, if the Banlist warrants a discussion thread of almost 1500 pages already) but we also have quite a lot of really awesome members. People who stand out of the masses with their special writing skills, drawing skills, analyzing skills or whatever else. I want to present some of them here and share the entertainment they provide with the people who may not know about them yet.
- Gheed's Blog: Worker Rush and The Bronze league
Find out how deep the rabbit hole goes and follow Gheed on his trip into the darkest corners of Starcraft hell......
Everything started with a simple worker-rush - Orek: Artosis Pylon Art, high level analysis, all the small things Blizzard did for this game that you most likely didn't even notice and much more
To say it with Orek's words: "If you liked my thoroughness, check other thorough research/work that might help you." - Excalibur_Z, Not_That and Skeldark: understanding Blizzard's ladder system, finding the hidden Matchmaking Rating function and making it available to see for everyone
- juicyjames: Weekly recaps of everything happening in SC2, so that you don't miss a single thing, even if you can't be on TL.net as often as I am
- WronchiAnimation: Yeah, we got really talented guys here.
- Glider: Oh, Glider, you and your awesome player portraits. And then there was this huuuuuuuge voting contest to get you featured on youtube. I stayed up till 3am, voting for you as many others did as well. It was a tough fight, but we won in the end.
Okay, this post is getting quite long, much longer then I expected it to be and there is still soooooo much more to tell. I am just scratching the surface here. Well, since this is only my 2k post and since I want to post in the LR again I'm gonna cut it here. I guess I'll make another of these posts when I hit my next 1000 posts.
I apologize for my lackluster English, here take a cute overlord as excuse:
(More cute zerg pics by Miss Satori here)