EPT
I thought it might be good to write a short little blog post about myself, what I've done already in the TL community, why I'm posting my SC2 notes, and some things I'm planning on doing.
First off, I'm a musician, I come from a background of music. I played piano for 12 years and headed into college doing a piano performance degree. Throughout high school, I picked up a few other instruments including violin, guitar, mandolin, percussion, and a little bit of ukulele. When I was in 11th grade, I knew for sure I wanted to write music and create beautiful things for people to listen to. Unfortunately, things didn't work out, and by my sophomore year of college, I realized I hated playing piano and I didn't want to be performing on it the rest of my life, so I quit. Since then (a little over a year ago), I've been on a bit of a quest to find some new interests and find something to be good at.
Enter Starcraft. In the summer of 2011, I was suddenly awakened to Starcraft 2 and, not having a machine that could run it, I used to watch every tournament I could, every single Day9 video and Husky video. I ran out of stuff to watch, so I began to watch streams regularly. It was something so sudden and strong, I didn't know what hit me. I knew I had found something uniquely awesome and special. In a desperate attempt, I tried to download the Starter Edition and play through a game or two on the lowest graphics settings (which still cause a ton of lag on my laptop). I began to play BW in attempt to play something similar to SC2 (and this is when I discovered my love for BW as well). I spent all day thinking of strategic ideas and positioning and compositional ideas and ways I could play SC2 and make myself known. And while Starcraft 2 may have been the spark, it's not that I hadn't known RTS games before.
When I was young, I used to play Warcraft 2 as well as eventually Warcraft 3. I played Command and Conquer (original as well as Red Alert). I played lesser-known RTS's such as a game called Total Annihilation. I even played through the BW campaign once or twice in my youth. Of course, being young and inexperienced, I was AWFUL at all the games, and most of them I had to use cheats on because they were too hard. But I think I always liked the idea of building an army, controlling it, and using it to defeat my enemy.
My older brother played several games (and perhaps is the reason why I was so interested in games) as well, and at one point was a semi-pro at both Quake 3 Arena and Counterstrike. I remember going into his room and watching him practice all the time and being amazed at how well he played and wanting to play games just as well.
The first really major game for me was Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. I remember getting that game when it was brand new and playing it for the first time. It was spectacular. Of course, at the time, heroes were WAY TOO fucking overpowered and tower rushes were the norm. So, generally, I skewed away from ladder games and played a lot of customs. I used to have friends over all the time and we'd hook up several laptops and play LAN together and play different customs; it was fun. Over time, I slowly gravitated toward ladder but was never able to break level 20 on that game. But it was a good experience for me. It was the first time I learned how to interact with people online. It was where I learned how to type. It was where I learned all of my basic RTS skill. It was a great game.
When I first started becoming aware of SC2, I started playing WC3 much more seriously, refining build orders, picking deliberate creeping patterns, watching professional games, etc. However, in the end, I felt that WC3 was a dying game. I needed a PC that could run SC2, and I had to try my luck with that. Eventually, I was able to afford a new computer and took my chances, loading up SC2 for the first time only days before Thanksgiving two years ago.
I started out in Gold playing zerg (which, BTW, is the best BW race, jus sayin). Over a few weeks I got into platinum, where I was stuck for a few months. After race-switching several times, I finally settled on terran, making the jump into diamond. Last summer I began to transition back into protoss, deciding that protoss was a far more interesting race (and I still believe it for sure). It was really difficult at first and I dropped from first place in my division to the 50s, but I kept up the hard work and soon figured out how to play protoss in a macro style (this was during the really rough times of the Stephano maxout where PvZ seemed beyond unfair (which, to be fair, it WAS unfair)). After several months of hard work after that, I began to play masters players often. I had a masters friend who would practice with me all the time and give me hell with precision micro and actually decent macro; it was a challenge, but in the end, I won 40/40
. About this time was when I quit playing piano.If there's anything I've learned from music, it's these things: 1) I just KNOW how to practice. It's easy to me to isolate certain things and get the most out a single hour of practicing. 2) All practice takes at least 2 weeks to kick in.
So around this time, I felt like I had to look at making some life decisions. Without music or school, my inconsistent 1-2 hours of practice a day turned into 5-6. My daily game number went through the roof. And for the first time I was seriously considering becoming a professional gamer. I set a goal for myself: masters by the end of the year. Masters by the end of the year meant that I would have gone from a relatively talentless kid to one of the top 2% in just over a year; this meant that I could improve at a fast enough pace to be grandmasters the next year, and possibly winning tournaments the year after. It was a good goal. Unfortunately, I didn't meet my goal. I fell off due to inactivity - perhaps due to the stale WoL metagame or the exciting new things in the beta - but I fell off nonetheless. So I abandoned the thought of professional gamer and set my sights for something more achievable. Hopefully I'll be going back to school soon to major in something standard yet interesting, like English. But what I've taken away from the experience is realizing that I like studying Starcraft more than playing it; I'd rather study it all day and teach it than spend countless hours trying to perfect my mechanics.
Since the advent of HotS, I HAVE a reached a masters level of play. I played zerg for about a month when HotS came out, then got bored and switched back to protoss, occasionally meching as terran for fun. Looking through my notes, however, I realize that back in those days, even the early ones where I was still a terran scrub just barely clawing into diamond, I had really good thoughts and ideas that were worth sharing. I single-handedly came up with an original bio-only build order against zerg at the time when 6-queen builds ruled the ladder and zergs weren't getting gases until 5:00 or later every single game. It was a brilliant build order that took full advantage of the meta and hit a very specific ~20 second timing window as well as a followup attack that hit just before drone saturation occurred. Looking back on it, it was a really really good idea. When I posted it as a guide and people kind of shrugged it off, I was sad and thought perhaps it was no good. But looking back, it was incredible, I'm amazed I thought of something so sleek and beautiful.
SO. Long story short, moving forward I want to share some of my thoughts and notes with the community, not just so I can get my ideas out there, but to help myself be diligent in studying and also to give back to the community. I know a lot of people can benefit from good guides, good resources, good thoughts about the game, and I want to share everything I know and everything I'm learning with those people.
Wow, this turned out to be a much longer post than I thought. Anywayz, I hope people have learned some more about me and will continue to follow my blog posts, guides, and articles. I'll do a followup post later this week about influential posts I've made and some plans for future posts.
If you read this far, thanks! :D
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