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This past month I've experienced first-hand the dread of playing on a laptop. Before I've always relied on my old stationary, which my fiancee hatefully calls "the dinosaur". The stationary has a great keyboard and my huge CRT screen is excellent.
It's hard to say what kind of skill I'm at. I imagine I would get C- on the old PGTour although I never really laddered enough to tell for sure. My APM is about 110ish. Everyone calls me a low APM user.
Then I went home to my parents' house with my laptop, eager to continue my BW career. I also took my mouse with me because I know the mice at my parents' house are impossible to play BW with.
The games I've played this month have shown me 2 things. A widescreen display will cause misclicks all over the place. The keyboard has flat weird keys that are clustered together with no tactile means of identification. To add to this, there is a huge flat space in front of the keyboard which makes it impossible to comfortably play BW without hurting your back, neck, shoulders, arms and hands. So really 3 things.
It is just insane how much your "skill" declines from playing on a laptop. With me there is a 60% chance that I will miss unless I take a good 2 secs to click something. So I'm constantly assessing if it's better to risk the misclick and have to repair the damage or to accept the 2 second time penalty. Sometimes you just don't have a choice such as when performing the split or trying to spread out or retreat marines and medics from lurkers. It also makes you give up on precise and spasming micro. I start playing like I did in the good old days by attack moving and retreating depending on how the battle seems to be going.
The keyboard does not help with the situation. For one thing you can't navigate the keyboard anymore by using touch. You constantly peek down to find the right keys. You try to merge 2 high temps to an archon and for some reason you accidentally cast psi storm on yourself. Your 1a2a3a4a5a key sequences always leaves half of your army not responding. Anticipating this, you go through it 3 times instead of once. This costs valuable time.
There is nothing more distracting than having to repeat all your actions 3 times and slowing down for the most basic things. It makes multitasking impossible. And it teaches you to choose the easy cowardly solutions instead of the best ones.
My APM is about the same as it was before. My skill has been reduced to that of a drunken D- player with a broken wrist. But this month has truely taught me humility. I now understand what it is like for the people with even lower hand speed than me. And more than ever I have all the more respect for people who play well on laptops every day online. If you guys had proper keyboards, you would be kings of the starcraft world.
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well you can just plug in an usb keyboard and configure the drivers so it doesnt stretch to widescreen but keeps 640x480 resolution with black bars - problems solved 
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I started playing SC on my father's laptop, which I had to sneak to install SC on...he wouldn't have allowed it, but it was the only chance I could play games on bnet - internet connection wasn't really common in Hungary back then, especially not in our district It didn't seem much of a pain back then (but heh, I had like 80 APM, so what do I know :D)
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Yeah, playing on laptop sucks. But like snowbird says, you can change it so it doesn't stretch across to widescreen.
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It does suck, I feel you. I have had to do this for the last 2 months as I've been in Taiwan and didn't bring my desktop. I can still play well enough to participate but it's a major blow to skill. The keyboard is total ass. My keyboard is even curved for typing purposes so it's so goddamn annoying. And I hate playing with a minimouse.
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goddamn do i hate playing on laptops
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i got used to it after a year ;]
but i feel like i was much better on the desktop XD
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I've been playing on a laptop for 3-4 years >_>
Whenever I play on desktops at friends' houses, it's impossible for me. I think we're all just used to what we've used for a long time.
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infinity21
Canada6683 Posts
On July 20 2007 13:03 LiLu wrote:
I've been playing on a laptop for 3-4 years >_>
Whenever I play on desktops at friends' houses, it's impossible for me. I think we're all just used to what we've used for a long time.
Yeah you'll get used to it eventually
I can play with over 200 apm easily with my laptop now ^__^
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i play lappy with about 50 apm, beat desktop Silver who has 140 apm about 1/10 with Carriers
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United States1655 Posts
I play on a laptop just fine. 
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plug in keyboard, plug in mouse simple shit makes sc the same guys, cmon think!
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i feel your pain, but i can play BW in windows, i found this helpful topic a few months ago
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=50034
it was a list of programs for starcraft, near the end is something that says Windowed StarCraft. I Taiche makes a reply somehwere about how to install near the end of thread i think...
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A surprising amount of responses. I was thinking this would just be ignored since it was really just a rant. I found out how to make the screen not stretch and it turned me instantly into a BW god. My mouse accuracy leaped back to normal. I still have keyboard troubles, but to be honest I don't rely as much on hotkeys as most players, so I'll survive.
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completely opposite for me =/
normal keyboard's keys are too far apart to press instantly in sequence and most of them crap out after pressing 3keys at once, making adding units to groups a pain. the widescreen increases your margin for error as there's simply more of a thing you can click on, this easily improved my accuracy a lot. the position of the monitor with respect to the keyboard is much more back-friendly on a laptop as you can tilt it however the hell you want to sit comfortably
only thing i miss is the numpad, which has no effect on star whatsoever
=)
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On July 21 2007 09:44 stenole wrote:
A surprising amount of responses. I was thinking this would just be ignored since it was really just a rant. I found out how to make the screen not stretch and it turned me instantly into a BW god. My mouse accuracy leaped back to normal. I still have keyboard troubles, but to be honest I don't rely as much on hotkeys as most players, so I'll survive.
Argh...
I don't understand why, my option to preserve the aspect ratio is grayed out. wah. I really wanted to experience non-stretched BW. I cry a river now.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/5045/omegagreyga4.jpg)
