EPTHello.
I'm writing this blog to explain how Starcraft impacted my life and to explain to myself how I'm continuing on after it. Maybe you'll get something out of some of my stories and maybe i'll get something out of your input.
My name is Richard "Eifer" Gayler. I've been a minor member of the North American scene for the past year or so. While not many people have heard of me, I participated in the scene relatively extensively compared to my exposure. http://goo.gl/zF23N
I used to stream at twitch.tv/eifersuchtig with anywhere from 30-100 viewers during my brief shot at competitive play. Sadly OBS doesn't support my laptop graphics card so my close viewers don't get to watch me play on my bed (which is awesomely hilarious since I have my blackwidow on my lap, laptop between my ankles, mouse to the side, with my body relatively supine on my bed).
I was not supposed to write this blog. I told myself that I was done playing Starcraft about two months ago when I uninstalled it. But I reinstalled it to help coach some people recently, and I've started playing casually again.. so I'll write what I intended on writing at the start of this year.
I talked to Kawaiirice when I got back, and he agreed that we never quite quit this game. The amount of time and effort that grandmaster / semipro/pro level players put into the game means we can't just abandon it. You leave it be for a week or two and then start thinking of anti-timings to the new meta you see on WCS casts. You let it leave your brain as you chase after new girls, but can't stop thinking about that time you yelled "FUCK, TWO SECONDS TILL BLINK" out loud during an intense starcraft dream while spooning with a suddenly very confused girl. You try and get this godforsaken game out of your mind just for a minute so you can concentrate on the new things you're doing, but you just can't escape thinking about how to optimally micro that one scenario you were thinking about the night before.
And then you do it.
You reinstall it.
Fuck.
Me.
And one last game. But you're rusty! So you lose to the 6pool you opted not to scout. And when you lose that game, you remember how 14 years ago, your brother got a copy of original Starcraft and beat you with a 6pool. And then you get reminiscent and shit. So you write a blog.
So here it is.
How I got started.
On my brother's 8th birthday, he got gifted a copy of Starcraft. At first he loved it and played it often, but just like every game he purchased for the next decade, he'd try it and eventually toss it aside for the next flashy game [Starcraft's "Flash"y enough for me by itself amirite?]. For me though, I knew I loved Starcraft. I didn't know anything about South Korea. I didn't know about Kpop. I didn't know about the special things Korean girls can do. I just liked the strategy. So from the time I was turning 5 till I turned roughly 16, I played Starcraft and subsequently Brood War for fairly consistently 1-4 hours a day.
Unlike a lot of other current players, I played tons of UMS games. Diplos, Cat n Mouse [winter ofc], HoI TGS [germany, who else?], Starship Troopers Whiskey Outpost, every LOTR, madnesses, and practically every other non - run ling run type game. I didn't even know those funny characters were Korean. I just knew that if I joined, every 100th one or so was a team game to show a blue girl's tits where having to unburrow a defiler to jump a drone over mineral patches was just as foreign a concept as the Korean instructional characters scrolling down the screen. But the UMS scene stole me away, and I spent the majority of my computer time playing Starcraft.
It never dawned on me that there might be community sites like Teamliquid, so I largely kept to myself. I would, however, friend the other good UMS strategy players to start games more quickly. But when I finally entered high school, I transitioned from SC:BW to WC3 ROC and played the more developed strategy UMS like LOTR 3rd Age, Rise of Nations, every Risk map imaginable, and footies (more developed strategy ldo).
After playing all those years I got really good at strategy UMS because i'd optimize my openings based on each map. Also just sheer volume of playing got my mouse clicks to be quick & efficient, while still using control groups to most effectively hold off the 3v1 backstab I would be faced with as the inevitably dominant risk power in the mid game. So while people like Thorzain were honing their skills at delicate Knight-based strategies in 1v1 WC3, I was spending my time doing less "productive" things.
After I started to become involved with too many activities in high school, (varsity XC, boy scouts, science fairs, band, debate, and frisbee) I had to cut back on video games. I never forgot though the anticipation that I felt for the release of Starcraft 2.
There was only one problem.
"College apps"
Those time consuming, soul-crushing attempts at selling yourself for a shot at rolling the dice at the crap tables of college admissions. So I did the only wise thing and spent a whole summer procrastinating and then cramming into three days all my essay writing for an early admission app to Yale, promising myself that I could get Starcraft 2 [that was already out!! FML] on January 1st, 2011 - the final deadline for apps.
Is it bad that when I got in to Yale, my first thought while my parents were going nuts around me was, "Fuck yeah, now I can get Starcraft?" Well either way, get Starcraft I did. But what I found in the new Arcade left me so inconsolably disappointed. I was crushed. The games sucked. The UI sucked. Starcraft, as I knew it, now sucked. It was several years of build-up. And then a total fail. I wasn't going to let Blizzard stop me from enjoying Starcraft! So I went the way of 1v1 and applied all I'd learned over the last 14 years of applying my strategies and optimizing builds to start this incredible journey.
I'm not totally sure how I'll structure this yet.
SC2
Along with the discovery of Teamliquid and Day9, I started laddering just like i'd played custom game after custom game. Now Starcraft had come back to a focal point in my life, and I was really happy... for four short, sweet months. As some of you probably noticed, in my alltime graph was a very noticeable dip at the beginning. It wasn't because I lost interest.. on the contrary. I just had a difficult choice of choosing either a girl or a game.. and she won.
But thankfully I quickly came to my senses as I left for college and returned to my habits of consistently putting in small amounts of time to practicing 1v1. I was lucky that my suitemates thought it was really cool I was in masters league [pretty LOL now], so I would occasionally play playhem's or CSL matches and they would use them as drinking games. It helped that I wasn't just chilling in my room all day grinding ladder, but instead when I played it could be a social outlet too.
With courses, club frisbee, and female interests, I didn't have that much time for Starcraft, but I found that every week or two i'd jump up another rank or three in my masters division until I was steadily getting top 8 in Playhems. I remember that my first game against a solid Korean was vs. ST_RainbOw on Calm Before the Storm where he did a 2 base 2/2/2 marine/tank/cloakshee allin that I couldn't hold. And that was the story of playhems I guess. Holding the 1/1/1 or 2/2/2 from strong Korean players to try and bink top 3.
Top Master
When I was high master, I wanted to get the experience of playing live against a real opponent. I saw a LAN in Boston that I wanted to go to, so I talked it over with a friend on my CSL team, Raul, and we went together to the event. It was by far the most enjoyable moment of playing Starcraft that i'd done at the time. I loved sitting across from my opponents as I coasted to the WB finals. I beat my Terran opponent, Cygnus, 3-2 who then went on to win the LB finals and play me again in the Grand Finals. Playing a Bo10 was really taxing. We had our share of allins, macro games, and weird trick builds. I ended up taking the final game for another 3-2 win with a prize of ~$320 in cash. And for a kid that never had much spending money, that was awesome. I felt on top of the world. It was a small tournament with a small player pool, but the feeling of satisfaction and success was totally worth the practice i'd put in. So I kept practicing a little harder.
I remember how much it meant to me to beat grandmasters at the time. I had a little widget installed to overlay your opponent's win/loss/league/division rank over the unit portrait for the first x seconds of the game so I'd be able to know when I was playing a GM or not. And when I won, I was ecstatic. It felt amazing. It was kind of like a drug - I kept chasing it and started focusing more on improving to try and get that feeling more.
And the better I got, the more interested in CSL I became. I started to follow the teams, see how my school could get into the playoffs, and who my next week's opponent would be. I would research their previous XvP games and see if they had a particular style that I could soft counter. I ended up participating in ~20 CSL matches dropping only three or four iirc [couldn't find my page bc of their new site]. I didn't know that i'd end up meeting the CSL participants in person later on though.
Close to the end of my freshman year, I decided to participate in a new tournament - the WCS USA national qualifiers. After a shot or two, I ended up binking first by taking out Fitzyhere, Caliberlight, and some high master T's to secure the trip package to MLG Anaheim 2012. I looked for the VODs that were up for a long time but sadly couldn't find them.
And that's where I'll leave off for now. I've gone to five or six MLGs and an IPL. I have a lot of stories I want to write out to remember them, if not for other people then for myself. I'll write them soon.
