EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WyNvhSK.jpg)
I hate this fucking unit more than I ever hated broodlord infestor.
Distant though it seemed, Wings of Liberty was just a few clicks away, waiting in the gameplay tab of the options menu. Quite abruptly I found myself back in 2010, staring at a screen informing me that 5 placement matches awaited me. Uncertain of what to expect, I hit Find Match, and wound up in a TvT on Daybreak.
The feeling that I got being thrown into a TvT on Daybreak after two and a half years deserves a moment’s discussion. I wasn’t really playing Starcraft during #Dreampool, so I never got the experience of returning to old maps until now. Looking at that familiar spirally shape, those watchtowers, those center rocks – the only word I can think of, and it isn’t even a word, is “nostalgasm.”
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VSCNpXg.jpg)
nostalgasm (n.)- a feeling of nostalgia so overwhelming and intense that you feel it in your loins.
Related words: nostalgasmic (adj.), nostaljizz (v.)
I let the nostalgasm wash over me as I tried to remember my standard WoL TvT. Fast expand opening, I believe? Yes, and take gas on 15. Then get a lot of hellions and a starport, a viking, a raven, and eventual tanks. Okay, cool, there’s my gameplan.
My opponent, a gold leaguer who went by Havoc, was doing some sort of one base build. Okay, slight modifications: make more marines, a bunker, and turrets. Keep the hellions across the map to see when he moves out. Then just make tanks as soon as I can, and wait for the attack.
And I waited.
I was starting to send out units to check for hidden expansions, when finally at about eleven minutes, two medivacs full of marine+marauder walked across the map, took the watchtowers, and tried to come kill me. By then I had a viking, raven, hellions, and a couple tanks, so I defended with ease. Taking a moment to nostaljizz over the 250mm strike cannon upgrade on my factory tech lab, I made a bunch of hellions, a few vikings, a raven, and four tanks, and went across the map to kill his natural. He sniped the tanks at the cost of his entire bio force, and I was just getting ready to go roast his whole worker line when an odd comment came up in chat.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/QmMmhVX.png)
I’m sorry, what?
Confused but otherwise unfazed, I went ahead and killed him, then jumped into another game to find myself in another game… against a gold leaguer named Havoc.
Here’s the first thing you’ll learn if you go back to play WoL: nobody plays WoL. The few remaining opponents are numerous enough that your queue times are usually under five minutes, but hitting the same opponent repeatedly is inevitable. This isn’t a totally unknown phenomenon in HotS, of course, but it’s usually only if both of you queued immediately after a game, and even then it’s pretty rare. In WoL you’ll hit the same person repeatedly even if you both had matches in between since your last meeting, and when you do both queue immediately after games, you’ll often play four or five games against each other, at least.
Given my opponent’s misunderstanding of the word “cheese” at the end of our last match, I thought I’d show him a real cheese. So on 8 supply I rallied my command center to my opponent’s natural on Ohana, and built a barracks behind his minerals on 11. Then I built a tech lab, and assaulted his ramp with a bunker, a couple SCVs, and concussive shell marauders. Because this is cheese.
This was a brutal build in WoL, and it was no surprise that he didn’t really know how to respond to it. Pretty immediately he typed into chat:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/35gyJXn.png)
Say “all’s fair in love and war” all you want, there’s still something cruel about pulling out proxy marauder against a noobie.
I hit Havoc a third time, and felt a bit conflicted about what to do. On the one hand, it seemed cruel to be pulling out these obscure cheeses I learned from pro streams in 2011. On the other hand, the only way I could get to face better opponents was to win against the bad ones,and it would go a lot quicker if I could win games a little earlier instead of drawing out the macro game every time. What about a common rush – something he had surely seen before, but which I could still win with pretty quickly? Then he’d have a fair chance of defending it, but I could still outplay him if I really was the better player.
I settled on a cloak banshee rush. I hadn't done the build in a long time, so it was a little rusty, and I got supply blocked a couple times, but I still had a banshee headed for his base roughly on time. It arrived to no turrets, far too few units, and no scans; his worker line was forfeit. Again, he flailed for a moment before giving up fighting to type into chat that he hoped this was my last placement match. I told him truthfully enough that it was only my third. He left on this remark:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ugfe4vu.png)
Am I both?
Luckily for Havoc, I hit other opponents for my remaining placement matches, won handily, and was placed into silver league. Perhaps I’ll discuss those games in another blog, but for now I’ll fast forward to several games later, when I hit Havoc one more time. While I killed him with the same fast exand build from the first game, he talked to me about a lot of things. He apologized for his poor behavior from our previous games (this marks the first time in my almost 6000 matchmaking games in Starcraft 2 that an opponent raged at me for a loss, and later apologized; and his rage was pretty innocuous!). He explained that I had ended a 17 game win streak for him, and he had been hoping to break through into platinum. He inquired whether I had won all my placement matches, and what league I was placed in, and was shocked that I was only in silver. In a truly kind gesture, he reassured me that I was, in his estimation, “at least platinum” and that I would advance quickly enough. As it happens I wasn't particularly bothered by my placement, but it was touching nonetheless that he would be sufficiently concerned for my happiness and sense of self worth to suggest I shouldn't take my assigned league to heart.
I talked with Havoc a while after the game. He acknowledged that my first game against him hadn’t been a cheese, and even that the fast cloak banshee build wasn’t all that cheesy – that was a pretty common mech opener, after all. He told me about how everyone plays mech in TvT, but he really wants to make it work with bio. He told me his favorite player is Maru, and that Maru is the best Terran in the world, and he wants to play just like him. I tried to give him some pointers, and offered to go over some of his replays to talk about what he could do better, but he told me no, thank you, he just needed to get in a lot of games so he could improve, and went ahead into his next match.
What touches me most about Havoc is how much of myself I see in him. I remember being that player: basing so much of my pride and self-worth on my rank, even as I struggled through silver league; setting my sights on the absolute highest level of play, and insisting that I would achieve it some day, even though I could barely keep a command center constantly producing; gobbling up online Starcraft content when I was too scared to hit 'Find Match' on ladder; picking a top Terran and deciding I wanted to be “just like him” (and, interestingly enough, my Terran of choice was MKP); eschewing all advice from higher level players, or analysis of my own replays, and insisting on improving simply by playing lots of games. It’s as if my 2011 self was picked up and transported – aspirations, insecurities, and all – to 2015, and given a new screen name.
I wish I could share some of the insights from my four year journey, and help him along a bit, but in 2011 there were plenty of players better than me willing to offer advice, and I either refused to seek it out and listen or was unable to understand it. The best I could do is refer him to Day[9] archives and hope those would help him as much as they helped me. In the mean time, I had a fat bonus pool and about a million games to win before I hit any decent opponents. I’ll leave that story for another blog.
