EPTpart 1: Me picking up Starcraft 1, finding out about progaming/Teamliquid/Iccup, my bw history and winning vs B- friend.
(Next parts will be more about things that casual players don't get to experience/have no idea of)
Okey so let's begin back when I picked up Starcraft 1 in november 2009. Back then I was still 15 and I had just started high school. I had been looking few months for a online game that would interest me longer than few days or a week. It really felt so pointless to play a game only small period of time. All the online games I tested were so boring. Just pointless leveling, killing same and same monsters and hunting for no-practical goals. Finally I decided to test Starcraft. One friend of mine had actually recommended it to me long time ago, but I had taken a quick look into graphics and thought that graphics looks terrible and decided not to even test it (which was a terrible mistake ><). I was searching up info on Google about Starcraft and I somehow ended up watching a game of white-haired Jaehoon vs xxx on xxx map. I was amazed from start to finish. Cool looking players playing live in booths in front of large audiene, people cheering for the players, commentators being so enthusiastic, all this in Korea... I had no clue about this kind of world. I didn't have any idea what was actually happening in the game and commentating was obviously in korean, but I was definitely interested about this. I watched more games and looked like this was the game I was looking for.
Next day I decided to try out this game. I had played some Dota in garena last summer and I recalled that you could also play Starcraft there so that's where I played my first games. I somewhy decided to play with Terran, had no idea what to do and tried to just somewhat imitate the games I had saw, but I of course got crushed (most of my opponents were ˜d/d+ players in iccup and I was playing with 0 experience with no idea about anythingˆˆ). Worth mentioning that I tried to play a few games of BGH and some other custom games, but 1v1 was only thing I was really interested in and the graphics that looked terrible first were actually looking great to my eyes already. One of my opponents adviced me to visit Teamliquid and to play some campaign and that's when I discovered Teamliquid. First I tried out playing campaign, but I got bored already in first mission (Never actually played further from second mission). Then I visited Teamliquid and found it to be the most awesome community ever(still do). I found out about foreigner SC scene, LR threads, Iccup and in overall what was this Starcraft game about. I read some guide for total beginners, learned the basics and switched to protoss since it was easiest race to start playing with and I had watched protoss games the most. I started to play in Iccup, kept visiting Teamliquid almost daily, followed scene and started to spam useless posts. I remember that especially TSL and the EVER OSL where Movie placed 2nd were the tournaments I was most keenly following (how crazy is that I actually got to play myself in TSL later). I was Bisu/Movie/White-Ra fanboy back then.
I played very little (actually for still long time from this point on) back in those days. I shared a computer with my little brother and we had rule of stopping playing at six o'clock the latest so I was using a computer for max 2 hours a day 6 times a week (expect weekends/holidays I usually played a bit more) and my time was pretty limited. In around 2010 february I decided to buy own PC and gear so I could play more Starcraft and have reasonable gear for it. Also the Starcraft 2 beta was announced to be out soon so I was really looking forward for that and I figured out it would be great chance to start playing a game from early on in order to have better shot at being better player in it. So I bought my own cheap (˜300euros desktop) computer and set my goal to win actual money from a tournament (Starcraft 2 one).
I kept playing bw as I was eagerly waiting for the beta and managed to reach d+ or well actually I managed to be c- with only proxy gates (almost C actually), but wouldn't really calculate that in
. I avoided PvZ completely, because it was way too hard for me and I never was really good in bw. My greatest achievement was winning in normal game against my b- friend PvP in Heartbreak Ridge. I asked him to play a game with me and he accepted both expecting him to crush me. I learned about this 4gate mass dragoon strategy from liquidpedia and I studied the build order and I had won almost all of my games in the maps it was playable (no ramp). He was playing very safe 2gate robo build and wasn't really expecting that 4gate build from me since I guess it was pretty rare build and I managed to just have too many units and win the game with one strong attack. I was really happy and we both were very suprised about the outcome. I managed to play around 300-400 games (100 being proxy gates :D) in total, before getting Starcraft 2 beta key and switching to Starcraft 2 totally.part 2 will tell about beginning of playing beta, getting to top8 in my first tournament ever in beta (upsetting haypro in top16) while being complete beginner, winning first tournament, joining pro team and more.
Please feel free to ask guestions/give feedback about writing style/grammar errors!
