EPTHello! I'm Wardí. In December of 2011 I made a post on the TL forums asking European Gold-Diamond players to come join our small group of 4-5 friends to improve our practice & fun in Starcraft 2. I had been playing the game for around three months at this point and had quickly risen to Diamond league. I originally bought the game near the end of the summer holidays as some of my WoW Guild-friends suggested it to play Tower Defence on. I had no idea what Tower Defence was, or what Starcraft 2 was really. I got the game and I found tower defence dull. I thought I would test out this '1v1' thing. Damn, people were good at this, but how? I couldn't win at all, and so on and so on. You guys know the general 'I'm new to this game what am I doing?' story.
It annoyed me. How did they know what to do? So I started looking into things. On journeys I would be googling SC2 strategies. I found Team Liquid and I found some Youtube videos and I kept searching and I kept finding. Then I found some Blizzcon Europe qualifier. What? People play this game for money? I was enthralled. Video games had been my life forever. When I came home at night from days of skate boarding after school I would play games. Raid on WoW, grind on Runescape, headshot people on CS:S - whatever grabbed my fancy. But the world of eSports gripped me like nothing ever before.
I had played games hardcore, I had pulled all-nighters, but there was something about this Starcraft 2 thing which was different. Little did I know then that three years later I would be where I am now. Little did I know I would still be playing/actively taking part in the Starcraft 2 community while never having taken a break. I did not know that this game was going to take over my life more-so than any game ever before. I did not know how life-changing making the post on Team Liquid in December 2011 asking for practice friends would be.
At first we were thrilled - we had sat in a chat channel on Battle Net waiting for anyone to join us. Then someone turned up! Then another! By the end of the day the channel had twenty people in it - you couldn't imagine how thrilled we were to have so many people so interested in being a part of our group. We made the right thing at the right time. With-in two months the channel was maxed every day, 100 people were in there at peak times. Everybody was enjoying meeting others who shared their passion, who wanted to play the game, who wanted to discuss their strategies. We had a team speak, we Skyped with each other, it was actually amazing.
So here I am, a 17 year old kid who just started University. I had more free time than ever before. The first year topics weren't challenging to me and the thought of only have a handful of hours a day, compared to being out the house at 7am and home at 5pm for school, was unheard of for me. So I took my free time and began to build on the momentum I had lucked upon with SC2Improve.
The name SC2Improve sort of came from nowhere. I just made it up on the spot. It made sense - it was a SC2 group for improving. Seemed good to me at the time. As time went by my founding members left and the group/organisation was essentially mine. I tried my hand at setting up a Wordpress website and I began asking people in the channel what they wanted to see. Tournaments were the popular choice and so it began. In February of 2012 I started the SC2Improve Weekly as well as volunteering for the SCVRush.
SCVRush - My teachers and my future.
In the middle of 2012 I had made friends with SCVRush - we were two organisations who had similar goals. I helped them out and they helped me. Originally I adminned tournaments for them. I will never forget Monday evenings where me and my admin friend Wham would sit on Skype and laugh and joke about the silly questions and the obvious smurfs and whatever else the night had in store for us. Vogin - the CEO of SCVRush - was very helpful. He was always a man with a plan. He gave me my first admin lesson and I went from there. It turned out I was quite good at this administration thing - being able to type faster than the majority of people means that when you get spammed with a variety of 5 questions about 10 times a minute you can get through issues pretty quickly.
They taught me to admin and how to run a tournament and this was the basis I was able to build the SC2Improve Weekly from. A popular chat channel saw the weekly grow rapidly - in 5 weeks we were pulling over 64 players into the tournament. People began streaming it and attempting to cast it. SCVRush continued to help me out. One day they were short of a caster and I offered to step in. I had never cast in my life. I sort of knew what to do - talk about the game, get excited and shout at the screen if the Bronze/Silver/Gold players ever took an engagement against the other. It was my first cast where I first talked to the man who truly changed my view on life. I was 18 at this point and had my whole life ahead of me - but it was Jack Tancey who made me who I am today.
Writing this brings me to tears - it's amazing when you look back and realise just how life changing somebody has been to you. Yet at the time I didn't even think twice about it. At the time Jack Tancey was a good laugh to me. A funny guy with funny opinions about the world. The truth is Jack gave his entire life to the SCVRush. He quit his job. He made it his job. He spent all day writing to sponsors and sketching out ideas, he spent all night casting Bronze/Silver/Gold and Platinum/Diamond tournaments - in Europe and in America. I believe very few people who ever played in these tournaments - then or now - knew what Jack Tancey gave to help form SCVRush.
While it may not have been the smartest decision & he may not have gone in the right direction there is no doubt that Jack Tancey was as inspiration to me. He inspires me to this day to give everything I do in life more than just one-hundred percent. He is the person I think of when you see all these motivational 'You have x hours in a day' or whatever quotes. I did not realise it then - but this man genuinely inspired me to put everything I had into what I loved.
I now have no contact with Jack and I have not spoke to him since the start of January 2013. One of the last times I talked to him was the day before my grandfather died. I knew it was going to happen, I went to him because I did not know what to do. He gave me some words which I will never forget.
[08/11/2012 19:45:23] Jack Tancey: Yeah, not much you can do, you know?
[08/11/2012 19:45:29] Jack Tancey: Work on what you're going to say to him.
While I don't want to disclose what I said, his response :
[08/11/2012 19:56:41] Jack Tancey: That's really great.
[08/11/2012 19:56:43] Jack Tancey: Really.
[08/11/2012 19:56:51] Jack Tancey: I knwo that's what someone would appreciate hearing.
I never got to speak to my grandfather again - he died less than 12 hours after this conversation, before I could get a train home from University. I'd never known someone close to me to die before and not getting to say what I wanted to say to him would have left me broken if it had not have been for my conversation with Jack the night before.
I fell out over an argument with Jack at the end of the same month. He wanted me to merge SC2Improve with SCVRush. I didn't. We argued. A month later he apologised, but then I never spoke to Jack again. It was not until a long time after this I realised what an impact on my life he had.
Onwards with SC2Improve
You may wonder what the point of the last few paragraphs was. I don't know really, all I do know is I feel that it shaped me as a person and with the way I handled things as time went on. I would not be here today if it was not for the way he had pushed me and taught me along with the help of others from SCVRush as well. At this point I had been running the SC2Improve Weekly for a long time, we had opened the event to Master League players as gradually our member-based levelled up with each other and began hitting the master league. We had been streaming on the SCVRush channel but we changed to my own channel after the argument with Jack. Over the Summer of 2012 I had attempted my first larger event, the SC2Improve Summer League. With 25 viewers for the finals it was a huge success and going into the winter I was organising the SC2Improve Winter League. After one year, I made this Reddit post : http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/155zb0/one_year_ago_today_i_started_a_golddiamond/
I learnt a lot over this time - skills which I was applying to real life. I was improving my casting, which helped me to speak to others, give speeches, answer questions with fluency and with good structure. I was learning how to organise larger events which helped me a lot with time-management, communicating plans with others and a lot of other things. I had ran over 40 weekly tournaments and was putting more and more time each week into Starcraft 2.
The new year came around and we ran the finals of the Winter League. It was a huge moment for me - mostly because we got featured on the TL Calendar. We got 79 concurrent viewers at one point and our champion,
Adonminus, was crowned. There was a feeling which I could never recreate on that night. A feeling I had never felt before. From nothing, I had created something. Something which over 250 people had taken part in, which a lot of people had viewed and just in general occupied their time with. I had entertained people, with my own event, my own production and my own organisation. It was probably the most useful thing I had ever done in life. What was my greatest achievement before then? I had gotten the grades I was expected to get (I won't lie, they were outstanding grades) but it didn't satisfy me - it was just expected of me. I had gotten into University - well I never doubted this, it was expected of me. I disappointed myself really - I hadn't tried hard enough. I got the grades to go to a better University, but I didn't put the time in to research where was good or whatever.This was the first time in my life which I had exceeded expectations. My own expectations. And that feeling is something I had never truly felt before.
#passion
It was also a draining experience. I had spent 3 months stressing over people turning up, PMing people, casting, adminning all amidst my January exams & more. I needed a break and this is probably the only time since I picked up SC2 where I genuinely lost interest in the game. It was at the weirdest of times - because HotS was coming and the hype was huge. This was probably partly my problem - I had been so wrapped up in my tournament that once it had ended everybody else was playing the Beta and had been for some time - yet I had not had the opportunity. I felt behind and left out and it was hard for me to pick it back up. I ran a couple of HotS Beta tournaments, but my passion was not there.
Old-school Runescape came out and I got addicted. I raced to 99 Farming, and after 2 months of playing 16+ hours a day I placed second in the hi-scores and reached my goal of 99 (a child-hood goal I had never reached.) I no-lifed pretty hard, and it was awesome. Something I will truly never have the chance to do again. I was in my 2nd year of uni. I was fortunate enough to be clever enough to get by without much work at this point and so I did. I came back to Starcraft 2 in April, a month after HotS - and I was ready to do it all again.
Planning began for the SC2Improve Summer League 2013. I planned the dates, a new format and anything I could think of. I set out e-mails, PMs, added people from the Winter League and asked if they wanted to play. We hit the 100 player sign-up mark. We had to move website because we had too many players. They kept coming. Qxc signed up amongst other pro-players (JonnyREcco and Tefel). The hype was inside of me and I couldn't hold it in. I could not wait to start it.
Two days after my final second year exam - Sunday the 19th of May 2013 - the SC2Improve Summer League 2013 began and I entered a whole new phase of my life and the beginning of SC2Improve;s true rise as a tournament organisation and of my 'casting career'.
I didn't really expect this to go on so long so I will leave this here for now. I will post part 2 about the last year and a bit soon. Hopefully by splitting it up I can go a bit more into my emotions of running the tournaments, the positives and negatives, the good days and the bad. A lot of this has been on my mind for a long time, so I hope you enjoyed the read and if you have any questions at this point feel free to ask.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/806r6Wr.jpg)
