EPTWarning: this is going to be a long post as it covers all my personal experience with Starcraft 2.
It was January 2011, when I decided to buy Starcraft 2 as a total newbie to this genre of games. Of course I heard of the title: this was the game that the best gamers in the world play and the skillcap is immensely high. The only thing I had played until then were the Age of Empires-series, and even that was against the AI
, and I think I’m not the only one who used to enter cheat codes to obtain resources in those games hehe.After playing a few missions in campaign, I hopped into the ladder and boy oh boy, was I in for a surprise. How can people have flying airships, millions of tanks and just a massive number of units overall, while I am still on my first bunch of marines? How can you even defend yourself if lings come in after 2-3 minutes?
Totally flabbergasted I start my search on the internet; I couldn’t be the only one who had no idea what to do against this? After searching for a little while I come across a video from a guy named Day[9]. He explains the basics very clearly and it seems it’s also fun to listen too! After practicing a few times, I step outside the practice league, and get placed in silver simply to following up the basic advice (spend all your money son!).
As a happy little teenager, I find out that live matches are being streamed at the internet, even with commentary! It seems so much more action-pact than my own games, are these players really superhuman and essentially playing like perfect robots? In the meantime, I find myself watching more and more Day[9] Dailies, even in the archives there are plenty of those to watch and every time I open a new one I see and learn new things. I was totally surprised when Day[9] said that everyone, from bronze to masters, could imitate the pro’s to a certain extent, and play exactly the same! For those of you who already played for a long time: yes, I was also one of the newbies who mindlessly practiced the 4gate and just did it for quite a few games. It was easy, worked very well and felt it was a free win every time I used it.
But after a while, a brick wall was hit. Some people could just stop it, regardless of my level of execution. As an angry little kid, I just told myself that there were all cheating: how could they know that I was 4-gating? Again, searching at the internet has had another great result this time: www.teamliquid.net . In this place, people discuss about Starcraft, you could find streams, and everyone was so nice to each other! You could always post your problem, and there were people who were there to give you advice and help you dealing with it.
My eyes opened after reading the following statement: Every player has a mouse and a keyboard, there is no reason you can’t do what others can. It seemed so simple and obvious, but I’d never thought of it that way. With that mindset, I started playing differently: every time I lost, I opened the replay, and searched for the thing that killed me, thinking about what I could have done different to prevent that. After a while, I found myself back in diamond league, which I’d never expected to happen when I bought this game.
Then I hit another brick wall: I went from silver to diamond in 1 month, so I expected to keep rising at the same pace and hit masters. But after 3-4 months, I still was diamond. Whatever I tried, it seemed that I could not get any higher, and the metagame has become a little more stale. Again a moment of flashbacks for some of you: it was the time EG.Puma just came out of nowhere, and 1-1-1 was an incredibly hard push to hold. Teamliquid was flooded with threads about this single push, it seemed no one knew how to actually stop it without coinflipping. I thought Terran was a lame and OP race. Then I remembered a wise saying: if you can’t beat the enemy, join them. I thought that I could just play Terran, and win using those mariners :D.
Boy oh boy, did my opinion change a lot after playing Terran. This race was hard as hell, and it seemed like all my Protoss mechanics were useless if I played Terran. Even today I respect all the Terran players out there: this race is the hardest in my opinion, be proud of yourself if you can pull this off!
The only thing left to do was to switch to Zerg. After a month of losing numerous games, I felt myself making progress, also physically playing faster over time. It was certainly more work APM-wise as Protoss, but it felt very rewarding to win after pressing keys like a madman. I finally reached masters with my new race, and remained there for a year or so.
Then, a big change came into my life. I moved out of house on weekdays to live at a student house (went to the university), and I couldn’t use the desktop at home anymore. All I had on weekdays was my laptop, which was too crappy to play Starcraft on. Sure, on weekends I could play at my parents’ home, but it felt like I played too little to maintain my level and I started making lots of mechanical mistakes, which angered myself.
I had to stop playing Starcraft; that is the decision I made. Occasionally I still watched some tournaments, but those became kind of repetitive at the end of WoL. I could mostly predict what was going to happen, and it came out. Starcraft 2 was dying and desperately needed HotS to stay popular.
On the other side, I heard my roommates played LoL, and while I thought it was a bad game(sc2 people weren’t that enthusiastic about that, and that’s an understatement), I gave it a chance in order to bond with my roommates. Finding out that LoL also had a ladder, I thought it would be easy to climb it in a fast pace; after all, SC2 is such a hard game, if I could play that, I can certainly play LoL. I followed the same procedures as I did when laddering at SC2; find a streamer I like, and follow the builds he/she does and understand why to do certain actions at certain times.
For those of you who don’t play LoL; I’m not going deep into the mechanics of the game, just saying the most general things in gameplay which also applies to Starcraft in some sense. Basically, the biggest difference between those two games is that one is a 1v1 and the other one is a 5v5. And man, people flame A LOT! It seemed like there were only little kids playing, who just start to whine whenever they don’t get it their way. Some people don’t even care if they win or lose; losing can be worth it just to piss people off. At first, I tried to be the man who set up peace treaties between team mates, but that only results in people flaming you too. The forums were filled of toxic people, this was nothing like Teamliquid
. Just a little fact about the ladder system in LoL; once you reach a certain league, YOU CANNOT DEMOTE! The reasoning behind this is to prevent ladder anxiety, but in reality it makes people don’t care about ranked games once they hit a certain division. They have nothing to lose, so they play whatever they like and don’t care about the team anymore. “Go 1v5? Why not? There is nothing to lose.” It became more frustrating to play and after a while the fun was gone. Also, the fact that it is a 5v5 game, it’s harder to climb in ladder, because you are also dependent on other people.
Then we arrive in the recent past, that’s about a month ago. I saved up enough money to buy a new laptop, I could install SC2 again and play the game I loved for so long! Starting with a fresh account on a fresh game (HotS felt like a new game), I came to a shocking conclusion. Playing LoL has made me a bad person, I tended to blame every loss on something(lame all-ins, just not feeling well, having bad luck) in my first games. I also couldn’t say gg after a match. Having to stand against the amount of flame, I unconsciously picked up bad habits.
Now I realize this, and try to change it back for the better. People in SC2 are awesome. You can start a game, talk a little about recent tournaments for example (did you see X-player with that X-build? That was awesome!), and whatever the opponent does, the game is always in your own hands. There is nothing to blame. Lost to a timing? Scout better. Failed a timing yourself? Improve the execution/play macro etc. There is literally a million things to improve on, and we have it all in our own hands. You can always try to ask at Teamliquid.net, and I’m sure people are happy to help you out.
I am back to where I belong, in a fun game where your own skills matter, with a great community, streamed events with a professional presentation.
This game is awesome, the casters are awesome, the whole community is awesome.
Thank you all, readers on Teamliquid, players on Battle.net, and everybody else who is even remotely connected with SC2!
