Qxc's life after pro-gaming, Year 1.5

On March 24 2017 20:54 Heyoka wrote:
man you are crushing it with Aeon's End, that's awesome. One of my friends who loves board games was telling me how great it was a few months back too, kind of out of the blue.

I know the kind of issues you wrestle with, there's always a sort of difficulty in making sense of certain areas of your past and realizing you didn't have the knowledge to tackle the challenge, and reconciling the feeling that you do now. In a way though it almost has to play out that way sometimes - because without having that past experience you don't have anything concrete to look at to know what areas you need to work on improving. It becomes an anchor point, and if you had the lessons without it they would float away into space going unlearned. There are certain lessons we just can't learn without experiencing the opposite side, so while it can be hard to deal with seeing unfulfilled goals they are a springboard for future success. It's a needed foundation.

On March 25 2017 04:52 Apom wrote:
Hey qxc, I had an opportunity to play Aeon's End (a gaming buddy of mine bought it).

Deck-building is not really up my alley, and I generally dislike open-knowledge cooperative games, so I thought I'd just try it once and move on to something else... Well, I was surprised to actually enjoy it. Not in my top list of board games, but definitely way better than the rest in its category.

On March 24 2017 09:29 qxc wrote:
It’s been about 1.5 years since I retired from Starcraft. Doesn’t feel like that long ago sometimes. Sometimes it feels like a different life. The most random times I’ll think of my days streaming. We had so much fun trolling ladder, scanning the island, playing Amnesia… just all the random little things that happened. Other days I remember a tournament. I remember being on stage, event after event, often to be met only with disappointment. I did ok overall. I carved out a living and a space in this scene for years, but I never stood atop the mountain like I always dreamed of. Before I ever started playing competitively, I imagined myself as the best player in the world. I imagined going to Korea and being ‘that foreigner’.

While I’ll always remember my GSTL all-kill fondly, I never reached my goal. That all-kill was a drop in the bucket compared to what I really wanted. So, with every memory there is disappointment. There is something like regret, but not quite regret. I don’t wish I had done something else with my time. And I understand why I made the decisions I did. I did the best I could given my understanding of how to practice, how to improve. In the end, that didn’t matter. My best wasn’t good enough. So, I look back on those days and imagine how I could’ve been better. I walk through an event in my mind as if it were a replay and look for all the mistakes I made. I’m not talking about my play. I can barely remember that. I’m talking about my mental and physical preparations.

I just didn’t know how to consistently perform at my best, particularly when I had to travel for an event. I’ve learned so much since retiring. I discovered what sort of food I need to eat and how often. I discovered how to sleep well, consistently. I discovered how to improve more consistently. Everyday, I try to improve my habits and understand the world better.

Now, it feels like it’s too late. I’ve moved on. My board game, Aeon’s End has demanded my full attention since retirement and continues to do so. The same improvements I’ve discovered about myself, the same improvements that tell me there’s a chance I could be a pro-gamer again, are the same improvements that have given me so much success with my game that I don’t know if I’d even want to come back.

We’re onto the second Kickstarter, featuring a whole new set of content that greatly expands the base game. Within 3 days we made almost as much as we made in the entire month-long campaign last year. There’s probably a future for me as a long-term designer of Aeon’s End. I can continue to grow the franchise in new and interesting ways because the initial content has been received so well.

I started playing again a few weeks ago. A RL friend had been complaining for months that he wasn’t able to get GM. Finally, I convinced him to take up coaching. When his ZvT lesson came up, I volunteered to be his practice partner. He’s ~5K so I figured it’d be good enough, but I needed to rinse the rust off a bit. I took to the ladder a few days before and remembered how to play this game. After a few quick losses in TvT, I discovered cyclones were… different. A quick peek online gave me the build order for the 2 rax medivac and I felt ready to be a practice partner at least. You can see this lesson with PiG here.

Turns out, I actually like Starcraft. A lot. After the lesson I kept playing on and off, although I don’t have a lot of free time with all the work I have finishing up Aeon’s End for the kickstarter. Fast forward a few weeks and I’ve been pushing around 5.9/6k. I even got a chance to play against Snute on ladder. Predictably, I got crushed, but the game was pretty back and forth. I felt like I even had opportunities to win.

I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I expect to have a fair amount of free time when the kickstarter ends.

On March 27 2017 19:04 Chosi wrote:
I recall stumbling across AE exactly because an article mentioned it was made by a former SC pro which caught my interest. I backed the first kickstarter and was so impressed with the game. Most games (even the popular and good ones) have missing and unclear rules and a lot of stuff that begs to be fixed. Also getting into the game and learning the rules is usually a frustrating task (nothing worse than figuring out you missed or misinterpreted a certain rule making a 2 hour game-win feel sour as it was probably way to easy) and once you got it you find out that there is little or no depth to it.
I started playing AE with my wife and it felt like starting a really well polished computer game, that teaches you the basic rules in a few minutes while instantly letting you know how much better you will be able to play once you get more experience. We played about 20 game so far (having a small kid and jobs this is a pretty huge chunk of our spare time) and we still love it. Yesterday I backed the standalone expansion and love the improvements (more cards, less deckbuilding).

With all the praise there are a few things that I would like to see improved:
- too little T1 basic nemesis cards. I can see that the start of the game shouldn't be too random but since all you always use all cards but one there the T1 deck is pretty much the same all the time.
- you should consider including sleeve protectors. Some decks (turn order, rageborn strike deck,..) need to be shuffled every few seconds and if those cards get markings it screws the game pretty heavily. A lot of my friends would not even know a think like sleeve protectors exist and I think the cost like nothing.
- Not sure if this is possible but maybe you can come up with something. Putting the game back in the box is always a bit of work anyways (if you put it in unsorted you will need an hour before you can play the next time). If there was a way to sort the game back in the box AND prepare the next game (assuming you know the number of players and the nemesis you want to play) so that when you are in the mood for a game you can start like right away. Setting up AE is rather easy (compared to something like Axis & Allies..) but for lazy parents like us it still feels like so much work that we end up not playing. Maybe I could figure this out myself, but as I said, lazy parents with little time :-)

Anyways, thank you very much for this game!

On March 24 2017 09:29 qxc wrote:
I discovered how to sleep well, consistently.