EPTI don't want to be overly repetitive or romantic, but it really does seem like yesterday that I wrote my original blog about my transition from competitive WoW raider to competitive* Starcraft 2 player (*hopefully). Since then, personal, professional and life otherwise have been a cavalcade of ups, downs, and sideway's.
When I first entered into the Starcraft community, I knew I had a huge undertaking at hand. When I pursue a competitive state in a game, there's no half-assing it or focusing solely on one aspect (to draw parallels, similar to gaining knowledge about both PvE and PvP in WoW- not to be confused with Protoss v Protoss). As most, if not all progamers know, this is a limiting factor in your specific racial and game knowledge, but you become more well-versed overall.
Unfortunately, there was no, "Abandon hope all ye' who enter here!" sign at the door of Trying to Learn All Races. I started with Protoss. For whatever reason, they appealed most to me and seemed like the most logical place to start. My only memory of Protoss as a kid was making walls and walls of cannons and then making Carriers. Operation Cwal was a success. After 4 months of slamming my head into walls and trying to learn on my own (which got to me low Diamond), I decided I should invest in coaching. At this point, the only part of my game that got me anywhere was my mechanics. After all those years of being as fast as possible in WoW- barring the limit of the GCD- I had something that translated somewhat well, if not directly.
Thanks to some lessons by my now progamer hero, Geoff Robinson- as well as Richard "FXOFuture" Almand, and Clarity's Shew, I started to learn Protoss relatively well. Once reaching master's league on one of my accounts, I decided I was happy with that level of progress, and decided it was time to start anew with an off-race.
One thing I forgot to mention. Learning Protoss that well took me over a year! Without boring you with the dregs of my depressing personal life, let's just say some things went sideways and some bridges were moreso blown up than burned. I digress.
I now realized that I had to make a choice; be a professional with one race, or be a competitor with all 3. In one direction, there's an exclusive and truly awesome club of people dedicated enough to their craft to make a profession out of playing the game they love. On the other, is a slightly wider community of competitive players and gamers that make the most of their free time by improving themselves and their knowledge of their game. For me, the decision stands unmade. However, one thing has been determined; I will continue learning, practicing, and improving as much as I can in the limited time I have to play and study.
My next project is Zerg- appropriately for HotS. While I have a rudimentary understanding of all 3 races now, as I have taken breaks to learn the others, I wish to improve and perfect each race in and of themselves at some point. HotS may complicate this, but I believe it possible. To draw yet more parallels to my old game, players would frequently have to relearn mechanics, spells, or their class entirely with new expansions. It's just part of the game.
It took years to go from one of the best WoW players, to one of the very very best. So I'll sit tight and take my time here too.
Hopefully I'll be updating and writing more throughout instead of once every 2 years. I realize this blog is pretty piss-poorly written, as I'm just fucking off at work basically; however, I hope you enjoyed the read, and will continue to enjoy my ramblings and banter as I see fit to spew it over the interwebs.
Thanks!
