EPTPART 1: The Noob Years
My love for starcraft flickers in and out just like a flame and I sometimes wonder will it ever be totally burnt out? It has been about six years before I found the love for starcraft and about three since I found affection for competitive starcraft. Like most players I started off playing starcraft with friends who would speak so highly of the game and have so much fun playing it. I still remember our noob battles wed having with no rush till maxed strats and people playing starcraft while talking on aim. When asking a partner what he is doing in a 2v2 it was always, “what are you making”, I was too noob to know about unit combinations. I used to love just playing with friends and exploring what seemed like infinite possibilities of builds and units. FMP and BGH were the games of choice along with the occasional use map settings. When I first immersed myself in the starcraft universe it just felt so huge to me and I soon became engulfed in it.
After the occasional game, maybe twice a week for a couple of years, I began to meet people on actual bnet and learn some channels. I slowly started to learn that there is a lot more to starcraft then sitting in your base and maxing. After three years a lot of my friends interest in the game started to fade while mine started to flourish. I was when I joined my friends the noob of the group but after three years I became one of the best. I still remember finally beating the people who taught me, it was an epic game of sixty apm players. So now that I was the best among my group of friends I started to join channels and think I was hot shit and I tried to bash people which worked about 70% of the time but little did I know I was playing horrrrrrrrible people. I was an extremely cocky player when I first started and HATED losing, which I probably normally would regret but I believe that urge to be skilled and the need to win, pushed me to actually learn the game.
I don’t exactly remember when I started to get a little serious about the game but I remember I would download some replays from yauyuan.com and try to learn builds or sometimes just merely be entertained at the skill. I still remember watching my first boxer replay, I heard about how “gosu” he was and that he was the best of all time. I watched an old replay of his and when I was learning, all I could notice that separated us was that he was able to control his units and make the most out of them. I did not know this as micro at the time but I noticed instantly that there was an extremely large gap between me and the professionals. This made me work on my builds, my unit control, and just overall gameplay. I would come on teamliquid.net and read the strategy section and make sure I tried to copy the builds to a t, trying to know the exactly food supply when to build buildings lol. I later learned that you cannot do this but teamliquid.net finally emerged me into the pro and foreigner scene.
Even though I was downloading replays, posting on teamliquid from time to time, I was still a total noob because I would play maybe ten hours a week max and half of that time was spent talking and the other half was spent playing east players. I still remember my first team I was in, iP on the east server. I joined after I knew a few people in there and I started to realize I needed good competition to learn, not just trying to remember a build order. I still had no clue about apm at this point but I was around 70 apm I am guessing. I started to play more to get skilled at this point more than a hobby but still only invested minimal time and hardly trained properly. The days of playing fmp with my friends were far behind me and I had my sites on bigger and better things. I slowly began to get skilled and a year later I grew out of iP, my first team ever, and began going west hearing of the amazing Korean dragons that I thought I could slay.
I remember how naive I was back in the day thinking that I was so good and that if you weren’t a pro gamer, why on earth should I waste my time playing you. I got a reality check very fast on west. I was losing TONS of games and shit talking after I lost would just make me rage even more and that’s when I decided to put my pride behind me and to play to get skilled. I came back to east with a new outlook on my skill and soon team hopped for awhile till I picked up bits and pieces of information from as many people as possible. I eventually was gaining recognition as well as some minimal skill and this is when I had, in my eyes at the time, a chance of a life time. I befriended some higher-ups on the mythical, the elite, the cream of the crop team, Clan X17. When I was on east I always went to the same channel, Clan X17. I always would see the gods among men float in and out in the channel hardly saying a word while anarchy and chaos went on in the actual channel. I remember from my iP days, thinking that X17 was the top of the ladder and when you joined X17 that shows you really made it. So I now had my chance to show that I made it.
