EPTAs the year comes to a conclusion I'd like to share with you today my 2009 starcraft story. Some of you probably won't give a shit others will probably have much fun reading what I have to say, so proceed if you wish, I warn you this shit is probably going to end up being VERY long...
I've played starcraft for years and years and years and followed events through TL, lurked for a really long time. Followed the pro scene since around 2004 but mainly I just gamed on USEAST fairly casually with a small pocket of friends. I met some great people through my years playing there. Guys like jimminy_kriket, hmm.britney(marine23 on TL)
violence(prozen) koreanair, later on the oldschool "7th empire" dudes like Magnum, Sentenal, Semih, StorrZerg and zillions of others who's names elude me at the moment (sorry!!! I still <3 u all!!)
I used to rape face in play/obs on east. It was nice being one of the best players there but after a while I found it started to become boring and trivial. I began to realize there were so many gosu players out there and I was missing it all because I was staying in my little comfort zone with my select friends. something I find with many foreigners and with sc:bw in general are pockets of friends form and they rarely branch out or leave that comfort zone. They will play iccup some but it'll only be on Python where they will cheese their way to C or C+ with 80% ratio and then go back and sit in their little circle and say look at me I'm 33-3 C+ woohoo. I'm not saying this is a really a bad thing, but I believe the community benefits more if people branch out more and leave that comfort zone more. try playing recent korean maps on iccup... try meet new people, hanging out in different channels. I've done this for the past year or so and it's resulted in me getting a taste of all areas of the community.
I will literally play a practice game against mtw.Infernal as he is preparing to play in the TSL and then I'll have somebody msg me to go on east to discuss something with a D+ level player. This happened just the other night. Quite honestly its WHACK and honestly I wouldnt recommend everyone to do this. What I do recommend is not being scared to play against koreans or on new maps. It's so dumb to deny yourself a big part of this game because of fear of losing. Unless your getting paid and losses could get you fired I would highly recommend playing new maps as soon as they come out. Foreign starcraft has a tendency to always be behind korean starcraft and I know that gap will never close but one of the big problems are people and their comfort zones on sc:bw. One reason why I avoided joining a team for a very long time was the freedom of being a sort of bw mercenary in some ways. Which is what I consider myself a bit haha.
It's really fun though to see all sides of the community as well as the koreans. It really gives you a full circle perspective on how many different people play bw and the different levels/commitment that they play. and I hope what I just talked about here helps give some insight into this...
Anyway enough about my fucked up bw family life on to the actual topic of discussion I wanted to talk about and that was my LAN/tournament experience this year specifically in bw.
Honestly it wasn't until this year did I actually participate in a bunch of live events and meet a bunch amazing sc:bw players in RL. Before this year I had always taken a more casual approach to bw like I mentioned before, I always loved the game so much and figured this year I'd involve myself a little more. Early in the year was pretty quiet for me but the latter half of the year was pretty crazy awesome. The highlight was definitely wcg USA. (from what I understand this years USA WCG sucked, was run terrible, had no offline prelims and was generally way suckier than past years but I woudnt really know I didn't participate in anything of past years just followed the results...) It was my first real go at playing in qualifiers and going to the finals as a spectator. And it was pretty kickass. I had a bunch of fun playing in the qualifiers, I played in like 4 or 5 qualifiers furthest I got was ro16. All in all I always got eliminated 1-2 it seemed no matter who I played. I lost to Day9 1-2, lastgosu 1-2,some random oldschool terran dude (Sorry I forgot who you were!) 1-2, some oldschool protoss dude 1-2, and timestop 0-2. (fukin ling allins rofl)
I was rolling through the random players no problem and against the higher level players I would win the first game against almost anyone and then get excited and totally fail in the next games. This was highly annoying! It was quite fun playing and having absolutely nobody in the scene know who I was though. Up to this year all I had ever done was just play laggy games against hackers on useast with a sprinkling of iccup games here and there (I'd play like 40 games a season, dodge koreans, go 35-5 and sit with nice stats most seasons)
I remember one of the last wcg qualifiers I was helping update the finals bracket on TL and Artosis was asking who the hell I was. He thought at first I was KawaiiRice on TL. Although back then Artosis hardly knew who KawaiiRice was and Kawaii only had like 20 posts on TL haha fun stuff.
Anyway the qualifiers wrapped up and after I lost the last one horribly I rage deleted bw and everything about it off my hd. Mainly in anger of playing so shitty and way below my standards... It was around this time that SuperiorWolf hosted a LAN in the DC area. since I rage deleted sc:bw off my pc after failing miserably in the last wcg qualifier I had hardly played for a month going into this LAN. but I still did quite well defeating most everyone there. (Except one particular TvT series and Superior. rofl fuk TvT) I made it to the finals where I narrowly lost to SupriorWolf (I was up 2-0 and freakin failed so hard in the Winners Bracket finals, then after getting through the loser bracket finals I was burned out... 27 games of sc in a row on this day was a bit much.
But it was an amazing day and I realized I had improved as a player after all because of playing in the wcg.
I'd never gone to a LAN like this before. (all the past LAN's I've been to I knew everyone there really well or was friends with people)
I knew like one person beforehand (StorrZerg) everyone else I had never met before in my life... But afterwords I felt like I had 30 new friends instantly. Staying there till 2am talking about all kinds of oldschool bw stuff and crazy random TL gossip... It was really awesome and right away I realized we should have monthly LAN's and since then we have been (for the most part when we aren't getting snowed out rofl)...
After that great LAN in July I knew the WCG usa finals would be in NYC. A 4 hour drive from DC this honestly wasn't much at all. I was back and forth with going to it since it was right during the school semester and I had a bit of a busy load but after talking to a couple people I realized I should do it. Xeris was going to be in the DC area and was looking for a way to get to NYC for the event and StorrZerg and I had decided to drive up... So we ended up going together all three of us bw nerds. The WCG trip was amazing. We ended up getting horribly lost in NYC, our GPS led us to a chemical plant (Probably was my fault I didn't know which 53rd and 7th avenue to put in the GPS each borough of NYC has it's own set of streets and avenues...) eventually we got there by KawaiiRice standing at a street corner and basically jumping up and down until we saw him. We got to the players hotel and ended up crashing in Kawaii's and Inka's room the first night haha. The next day was great, walked down to the hotel lobby and there stood all the top usa players. Artosis, Louder, G5, LzGamer, Machine... It was sick. Artosis knew who I was right away (primarily because of my rage blogs here on TL) which was quite awesome. It was crazy to have pretty much the biggest figure of sc:bw introducing ME to other people. I remember getting lunch with Artosis and Micronesia and Artosis goes "Do you realize who this is?" pointing to me and saying who I am... So fucking funny man I still laugh about that thinking back on it now. Here I am, basically 0 achievements in scbw (still 0 achievements in sc:bw) and the most known usa bw player who has qualified for like every wcg usa in the history of wcg's is introducing me to people.... rofl! it should have totally been the other way around...
Walking to the Javits Center with a bunch of fellow bw nerds was amazing. During the walk we passed a baseball field with a bunch of crazy hot chicks playing baseball in bikinis, (yeah rofl) a totally random (but amazingly awesome) sight to see as your walking through streets in downtown NYC. Probably one of the most comical and memorable moments of the entire trip tbh that we're still laughing about now months later rofl.
Overall the entire wcg experience that weekend in September was great. Alot of the top players are such good friends with each other, others bring good friends, meeting all the top players and everyone involved over this weekend was so fun. Other random people from TL were there too like pokebunny, micronesia and others...
One of the highlights for me personally was taking a cab ride after the games on Saturday with none other than Artosis and Idra... That was pretty epic. :D Having dinner later that night with G5 and PsyonicReaver was great too. So many interesting conversations about bw and other things... G5 is definitely one of thecoolest guys. He was totally different than what I had envisioned, a very cool laid back guy who is just so chill to be around in RL.
Psyonic is awesome too, people don't give him enough credit. He does SO much for the bw community and is also quite awesome. I don't even know everything he does because he does so much, so I can't go into too much detail but just know that he ROCKS.
incontrol was the media darling it seemed, always getting the interviews, always having the crowds watching him game... Probably one of the coolest moments was when he took a game off Idra, albeit it was a 5pool sunken rush on colo2 it was still a win. EPIC! Lz almost had Idra too in the second stage, had defilers and lurkers+swarm, forced Idra to lift his nat... But sadly lz forgot to macro at one point and had no follow up. *tears*
I've met so many bw people throughout 2009 and pretty much everyone I've met has been awesome. I suppose its because we all share a common interest and are so alike... It's quite awesome.
That whole weekend was great.
The following weekend I hosted another DC LAN where Xeris, Louder, LastShadow (rofl) Tossim, Slog and a bunch of other people showed up to battle it out. Sadly I lost to Tossim and Slog (games I should have won tbh) and didn't make it very far in this LAN but this was a chance to meet some old school bw players. Slog is awesome. :D It was also here I realized lastshadow has probably the highest apm in the usa... spam much??? he ended up getting raped by dt's too much in the finals. (what a skilless newbie) I realized in 2009 that louder is just too imba at LAN's. :D
Xeris was in the DC area for a few months over the fall, he hosted another LAN in November which was great, Nyoken, Machine, Gretorp, Semih and others all showed up for this one which was great... I ended up making top 8, I only lost 4 games all day, went 0-2 vs nyoken at the beginning of the day and went 1-2 vs machine in the ro8. Overall I could tell from the beginning of the year I was playing better. In 2008 I was a C level player. In 2009 I'm easily B-/B and honestly I have the confidence to at least play any top foreign player decently. I still lose quite often to lower
level players because I'm a dumbass but I know overall I am playing better than I was. It seems so hard to improve at sc:bw because u have tendencies and create bad habits that are very easy to replicate in games... its very easy
to make the same mistakes in games without consciously reminding/correcting yourself...
More recently I played in the TSL ladder stage hardcore(230 games) I was B- with 45-15 stats until utterly mindfucking myself and failing, especially in TvZ. I ended up only finishing at C+ after a stretch of going from B- all the way back to C (late in the season against horrible players too...) failing in my goal to get to B.
TvZ for me is very inconsistent some games it's solid, other games it's quite poor. My overall game foundation in that matchup has suffered because I spent most of last year going mech, 2port wraith, proxy fact, or other cheesy stuff that lucked me wins against top players but kept my overall standard game at quite a low level...
Overall 2009 was such a great year for me in sc:bw. Went to so many great LAN's met so many awesome people who are so generous and amazing... Even people I thought I might not like ended up being totally awesome. I hope 2010 is just as great. I know the days of bw could be nearing the end with sc2 on the horizon so I'm really making sure to enjoy this time. I didn't really become part of the action until recently so WCG and bw lan's have still been relative new for me but I hope to enjoy it while
I'm super excited that WCG Grand Finals are in LA in 2010 which should be awesome. I also can't wait to hear where WCG USA is going to be in 2010... I may attend that as well. (Or even qualify??? Yeah right rofl...)
Anyway I hope that was at least halfway interesting to somebody... I sure had fun looking back on it all as I wrote this... I hope everyone has a great 2010 both in RL and on bw!
happy new year everyone! :D
. Have fun trying to luck yourself into WCG USA 2010! WCG USA this year was super fun, I would be thrilled if it was near me again :D
