EPTI have spent the last five years away from home, and away from you, while serving in the US Navy on a guided missile Destroyer out of Japan. While the experience has been a once in a lifetime opportunity, and in the process I have seen and done things I would most likely otherwise never get the chance to see or do, I have missed my Starcraft family. I have done a rather large blog entry with details of my experiences, if you are interested you can find the link here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=231829 (yes, I stll plan to continue it!)
Let’s take a step back for a minute and let me introduce myself. During BW I played ladder mostly under the id ilovepj, but I also used the name iR.Babyblue on WGTour, and went by make7-upyours on US west. Some of the more old school players might remember me, but for the most part I am a general unknown.
I have been playing Starcraft since I was around 13 years old, sometime in 2001. I was always on the edge of being a “good” player, achieving the highest rank possible on WGTour during a season where there was 90+ people who made it(thats a lot for WGT), and B on PGTour, and my most impressive “achievement”, B+ on iCCup. I have played for various Team USAs and Team USA Bs, but never had any impressive results in nation wars. I worked tirelessly on improving, and for years I dreamed of being recruited into a Korean pro house, but as hard as I tried, I was never anywhere near the skill of a Rekrul, Idra, Draco, or Nony.
Late in the life of my Starcraft career I started becoming friends with another highly motivated USA protoss, who like myself was more interested in playing and learning with the Koreans than with other foreigners. His name was Eric “G5” Rothmuller. After quite a bit of discussion, we made plans to fund our own trip to Korea, in an attempt to live there for a while, focusing entirely on our training with some of the best players in the world, and work on making contacts with some the Pro gaming teams in the area.
We both had rather large networks set up on US West (the “Korean” server) as far as Korean practice partners, but we wanted more. Don’t get the wrong idea, we in no way had the skills necessary to pull off this endeavor, but we had a dream that we didn’t want to give up on, and this was the way we thought was best to follow that dream. We had contacts in Korea helping us with the transition, and we had a number set for the cost it would take to stay for the duration that we wanted.
Eric came from a rather wealthy background, and the money side of things was never an issue for him. I however, was a poor kid from a lower income family with around $2.5k saved up from a few previous jobs, but it wasn’t enough. Eric said that if I could come up with half of the money he would pay the other half, but it never happened. I was slowly adding to my bankroll, but I never got to the $5k goal. Eventually Eric decided he wasn’t going to wait anymore, and he went without me. I can’t say for sure if his trip proved worth it or if I was better off not going, but it is still something that I regret missing out on. I don’t think Eric regretted his decision at all, and to this day I have a great deal of respect for him for having the drive to follow through with this decision, even when I couldn’t go with him.
Missing out on this trip didn’t put a damper on my motivation however, and I continued playing hard for another 6 months or so, but wrist pain was quickly becoming a serious problem, and I felt like I was at a giant plateau in my skill level. One day I sent a message to one of the best foreign players ever to play the game, ToT)Testie. He had also been suffering from severe wrist pain, and at that time had been taking the steps necessary to remedy this, and was in the middle of an extremely difficult recovery. We talked for a little while about my wrist pain, and eventually told me that if he was in my situation, he would quit. At the time my life was so heavily involved in my goal that I didn’t know what else I would do if I quit, but I slowly began to distance myself from Starcraft, not because Testie told me to, but because I was starting to question if I had the ability to achieve what I wanted. I ended up taking up WoW and raided heavily for around 6 months before realizing that my life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go. I could always go back to college, but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, so picking a degree seemed impossible. Instead, I joined the Navy.
Now it is 2013, and I have served my time and after spending 6 months in India with broken legs(that's a story for another day!), I am finally at a place in my life where I can get back into doing what I love. I have played a little bit of SC2, but I am a relative noob to the game, hovering currently around mid diamond simply due to my mechanical understanding of the game. My friend recently quit playing and has donated his account to me, so I will have access to full time play for the first time since SC2 was released.
When I was playing previously I would play games on my friends Masters account and do relativly well in early WoL, however the game has evolved so much that just going on my mechanical background isnt enough for masters anymore. People are better!
Now that I am done with everything I plan on taking some time off from any kind of work or school, and returning to the dream that I had 8 years ago. I have almost $60k from careful savings during my time in the military, enough money to last me for a long time if I believe its worth it to continue. It has been almost 5 years since I gave up my goal, but my motivation to be a part of this community has never faltered. While the goal I had when I was younger to become pro seems a bit unrealistic due to my life other life goals, I do want to put enough time and effort into this game to make an impact.
The time spent away from the Starcraft community has shown me how much I love it. I love the scene, the teams, and I love the game. But beyond everything else, I love the people who play it. It takes a specific type of person to play Starcraft on a competitive level, and I like to believe I fit with that personality quite well. I remember some years back there was a poll about personality type on Teamliquid that included a link to a Meyers Briggs personality test. Something like 80% of the people who answered ended up being either an INTP or an INTJ, a strange anomaly considering those are two of the least common personality types.
We are a unique community, one that I have always considered myself to be lucky to be apart of, and I hope that I can structure my life in a way that lets me do everything I can to improve this wonderful thing that we have. As much as I want to succeed in the eSports world, my number one priority is helping it grow and evolve. I want to be involved in this huge thing that is happening right now, because I think that when we look back on this in 30 years, this will be the time that set the foundation for a new era, not only in entertainment, but also in history.
Enough about the sentimental side of things, lets talk business. I believe that the reason why I didn’t make it to the top level in Starcraft, was my inability to push myself past limits that I was uncomfortable with, and to a lesser extent a lack of structured practice method. While I was in the military, I spent 12-15 hours a day on watch, so I have had a lot of free time to think over the past few years, and I have tried to refine my methodology into a system that I believe will give the best results. I have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is just keep it simple, and not overcomplicate the learning process.
I narrowed it down to a few main topics to remember, and a few rules to follow.
Push your limits. I think this is the hardest rule for people to follow, because pushing your limits means that you are taking yourself outside of your comfort zone, generally making yourself worse for a certain period of time before making yourself better. Some examples of this are things like, if you lack the APM to micro a certain battle and keep your macro up, and you are accustomed to simple A moving and then going back to macro, you need to force yourself to try to do both. Most likely at first the only result will be you messing up both, but by working on it eventually you will bring yourself past your original point, something that would never happen if you simply stayed within your comfort zone and did what you knew would give you best results at the time.
Don’t give up on your build. Do the proper research required to find a build that you want to use, and stick with it until it is perfected. Too often in SC1 I would give up on a specific build after a string of losses, beginning a completely new style. Find the build for that matchup, be stubborn about it, and make small changes to your build as necessary.
Focus on one or two things at a time. Every game should have a focus. At any given time in any matchup, you should have a set group of things to work on, be it something as large as making sure to keep your money below a certain point, or detailed things like remembering to build proxy pylons all around the map for scouting and flanks.
Watch every loss. As cliché as it sounds, too often in the past I found myself blaming my losses on some stupid choice I made 30 minutes in the game, and telling myself that I know exactly why I lost and have nothing to gain from studying the game.
While learning, try to think rather than react in game. This is another one that I think people have a hard time with. While I think reactionary play is the best way you can play the game at the highest level, while you are in a learning state, it is important that you have cognitive reasoning behind your choices.
Positive attitude. Think logically not angrily, and don’t let things get to you. Be able to overcome any obstacle, and most importantly, believe in yourself.
I’m sure that as I play and as I use this practice methodology it will continue to change and evolve. Perhaps one day when I feel a bit more qualified I will write an entire article about my practice method, but for now I am still in the process of learning how to learn.
Initially I plan on cutting my areas of focus into the smallest pieces that I can at one time. First I will be focusing on the early game, working on perfecting a single build order, most likely a 2 base timing attack for all matchups. After I feel I have perfected the build for each specific matchup (will be 100s of games per matchup), I will begin to move forward in my outlook, focusing instead on finding a 3 base timing attack for all matchups, while still occasionally integrating my 2 base timing just to keep it sharp. After this is perfected (I expect this will take quite some time, don’t want to change again before high masters or even GM), I will move into a purely passive style, designed to take a fast 3rd and then transition into a lategame focused army.
I will be streaming all of my games, and going over the replays of my losses in a systematic evaluation process, doing the best I can do record my thoughts on stream. I will be doing this for two reasons, first of course I am interested in providing instructional content to the community, but at the same time I want a video log of both my games as well as the process that I was using for improvement, so that I can go back and watch exactly what I was doing, looking for holes not only in my gameplay but also in my learning style.
I will be playing almost entirely on the Korean server, not so much because I believe I will have better practice (at least, pre GM), more because I enjoy the peace of mind that comes from laddering against people who can’t speak English. I will compete in the North American daily Playhem tourneys that I used to see Axslav do on his stream (by the way, I recommend watching Axslavs stream for any protoss trying to learn, grubby is amazing to learn from as well) for two reasons. First, it will develop you more as a tournament player rather than just a ladder player, and second, it will be a good tracker or improvement, something that is extremely important.
I plan on going over all my losses in extreme detail, similar to Artosis in his stream, reviewing all of my replays in a purely analytical style.
I will be making regular blog posts about my progress, as well as how I feel my practice methods are working, and how I plan to adapt them as I continue.
Link to my stream can be found here: http://www.twitch.tv/iamdreamface
