Greetings TL denizens, TL lurkers, and TL vistors alike.* I'm HypertonicHydroponic, not that it ought to mean much to you. I've never used this handle before, nor do I know if anyone else has anywhere ever before (google didn't come up with much for it). My background as concerns my purpose here is a long time SC fan and casual SC player. I've owned the original Starcraft and Brood War from just about day 1, and the same now with Starcraft 2. Like many, I've waited a long time for SC2. Some time before SC2 was out however, one day while on break at work I decided to look up YouTube videos of games I used to play: speed runs of Mario games, Half-Life, Chrono-Trigger, etc. I came across the SpeedDemosArchive of SC & BW speed runs and watched them all. Then I thought: let's see if anyone has frapps'ed just regular games of Starcraft... boy was I in for a big surprise. I came across Korean Pro games. Pro-Starcraft?! No way! So for the past two, maybe three years, I've been hooked. What's baseball? Sure, I will still listen to my brother as he spews sports stats at me, but it Starcraft is the sport I follow now (though not as fanatically as my brother with other sports... he doesn't have a job though...). I've watch NukeTheStars and RanshinDA fairly religiously, pretty close to when they both started commentating, and I must thank them for all of the hours of entertainment they've given to me and countless others, as well as helping me understand the game in a competitive sense, since I really only ever played casually before this period of my life. I've also watched a little bit of moletrap, and some of the other commentators for SC1, and now I watch quite a bit of Husky and HD, and a little of others like Hunter and Psy. Just not enough hours in my day to keep up with it all (and play SC2 on the side, heh). Anyway, it was somewhere in the beginning of my following Nuke and Ranshin that came across TeamLiquid, and that was cool for watching some filler games and looking up stats here and there. But I really didn't start following on this site until SC2 was in the works and starting to be discussed heavily. So I lurked, and lurked and lurked until finally......
I've entitled my blog "Where's My Supply Depot?" because of the change that has recently come out in the 1.1.2 patch where the supply depot has now become a requirement for barracks. Now, I've already started to make known what I think about this, and I plan to elaborate further when I get a chance. Originally, I meant to put up this blog as a place for people to rant about discuss this change before Blizzard made one of their sillier** mistakes -- in fact, it is the reason I decided to quit being a lurker and start to become a contributor. Since Bliz has made that moot (my TL "three days of darkness" initiation period didn't help), I'd like to make this a place where people can come and discuss game design issues I bring up. And just a note up front, I don't mind a little "whining" just so long as it has some solid critical thinking behind it. Whine haters need not apply here.
So let's just jump into it. Supply depot before barracks -- if it isn't blindingly clear from the above and maybe a quick search for my posts, I really dislike and disagree with this change. I dislike it for a variety of reasons ranging from emotional attachment to game play concepts. On the emotional attachment side, you have issues like "that's the way it's always been since SC1" to "it makes sense from the lore" to "what about all of those (in)famous Pro bunker rushes of yore?" On the game play side, well, the bunker rush issue overlaps a bit between the emotional and the critical, but there are other fast tech and rush timings that are now not available. Now, I know the bunker before rax change is intimately tied into the reaper issues, but as for this discussion I *really* want to try to focus on other reasons why depot before rax is a bad idea (I plan to make reapers my second topic of discussion).
{Note: to be continued...}
The above has been moved here.
Just a little bit more about me, I've got a background in Philosophy, Math, I.T., and Liberal Arts. I love(d) playing sports and love playing games (computer, board, PnP, basically any). I would love to be a game designer of some sort, particularly video games (just being a "normal developer" doesn't have the same flair), though for personal reasons it is probably not in my near future to make that sort of change of career, unfortunately. So in the meantime, I love to think about and discuss these things on the side. Bliz probably owes me some portion of their profit sharing plan with all of the friends I've hyped up and gotten into SC2 (and Bliz games in general). Umm.. yeah, I think that's about all that's relevant about me for this blog. Hope you enjoy and join in!
*yes, you are going to have to get used to walls of text in my blog... sorry.
**any time you see me use a form of this word, insert you favorite profanity!
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