EPTThe first thing I want to do here is introduce myself, and outline some of my goals and aims for this project. I am The_A_Drain; known in real life as Adrian from the UK which means be warned, I will spell colour with a u; and firstly, I have a confession to make.
I have never played an RTS game before, beyond one play through of the Dawn of War campaign.
Now that that is out of the way, I can get to my second point and explain what it is I want to do here, and why.
I come from a heavy background of playing Street Fighter competitively; while I am not any kind of noteworthy player, I do participate in tournaments and events when I have the opportunity. I have been playing Street Fighter ever since I was a little kid playing it on my second-hand Super Nintendo because I was too poor to buy a new one, hacking away with just the original World Warriors while other people were duke-ing it out on newer versions of the game.
Fifteen years I have played various versions of Street Fighter, and during this time the way I look at games, competitive games especially has evolved. I went through the stage every new player goes through “Oh my god, don’t tick throw, it’s so unfair” and “don’t use the Dragon Punch, that thing is so overpowered” but gradually this scrub mentality began to melt away. Needless to say I am a big advocate of David Sirlin’s book Playing to Win; Sirlin’s writings really helped me to look past a lot of these issues and to become a better player as a result. I really recommend it for anybody who has not read it.
So what does any of this have to do with StarCraft? Well, to begin with I had no interest in playing StarCraft 2, and if possible even less interest in multiplayer RTS titles. But then Blizzard, clever as they are released a demo version of the game. I relish demos as they give me the opportunity to experience a game without laying down the bones to purchase it, given that I study Games Design at university I am quite pro-active about experiencing as many games as possible (both good and bad, mostly bad)
Suddenly, I looked down at the clock and discovered that I had been playing the StarCraft 2 demo versus AI opponents for about 6 hours. This intrigued me because usually I look at an RTS game, and almost instantly step-back in revulsion because I simply do not play many PC games, my mouse control is terrible and hot keys scare me, but in spite of this I found myself immediately purchasing StarCraft 2 based solely on how long I spent enjoying the demo on January 1st 2011.
Aims and Goals
As it was downloading and installing, I found myself defaulting to something I might do with a game I was more familiar with; I was searching forums for strategies, reading up on blogs and checking patch notes, I stumbled across some podcasts and the Day[9] Daily (which is godlike, by the way) and other useful resources. This got me to thinking, how would somebody coming from another competitive game, with a competitive and logical mindset react when he suddenly reverts to being a complete newbie in a genre he has absolutely no experience with?
Will I go back to the old ways? Declare things as imbalanced/unfair, or other such ridiculous proclamations, will I become frustrated more easily, or will my status as a new player simply spur my motivation to improve and what will that path of improvement look like?
That is what I plan to document in a series of blogs I have entitled Newbie Chronicles. I intend to accomplish several things with a regular (hopefully weekly) blog that will detail my StarCraft 2 experience.
Firstly, with little time for Street Fighter at the moment (at least travelling for tournaments) I found myself generally kicking about a while, kinda wasting time here and there, so I intend to fill that time with something creative and hopefully useful at the same time as developing a new skill.
Secondly I want to document what happens when somebody who already has a competitive gaming mindset (or something approaching that when I have the motivation to practice) is suddenly a complete and total noob who doesn’t know his left buttock from his elbow.
Thirdly, a regular responsibility is something that I feel will help me improve not only inside the world of StarCraft 2, but outside as well. New Year’s Resolutions are one thing, but without attaching them to a responsibility they never materialise because the motivation simply vanishes by about the 6th of January.
My overall goal for this project is not going to be something crazy, I am not going to declare that by January 1st 2012 I intend to win the GSL, or even become a Diamond (or with Patch 1.2, Master) level player. No, the end goal I am going to set myself for this project is to become a competent StarCraft 2 player. It’s nice and ambiguous, but at the same time hopefully achievable.
So not only do I want to improve at StarCraft 2, but I want StarCraft 2 to help improve me as a person!
I began playing StarCraft 2 on the 1st of January 2011, and this series is going to document my experiences with beginning a brand new genre of game that I have never played before and my thoughts and feelings throughout the process. Each week I will set myself an achievable goal, and then talk about how I felt I did with the previous week’s goal.
Weeks 1 and 2: A Bumper Beginner Issue!
Given that at the time of writing it is the 12th of January 2011, I am 12 days into my StarCraft 2 odyssey and I can confidently say “I like this game”. Usually with a competitive game I find that I will enjoy it for 2 to 3 days before suddenly becoming very bored, the only exception to that has been Street Fighter. But I have become so addicted to StarCraft 2 that I have cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription and still have a significant pile of un-opened Xbox 360 games sat on my shelf unloved, from before Christmas.
Into the Void, Which is Apparently Cold...
After remarking upon how different Jim Raynor looks between StarCraft and StarCraft 2, I began the campaign as soon as the game had finished downloading. But my journey began before clicking that shiny “New Game” button.
In the 12 hours it took to download the Monster that is StarCraft 2 (my internet isn’t great) my competitive gaming instincts took over; soon I had discovered such illustrious sites as the Liquipedia II, Day[9]’s fabulous content, several marvellous articles with some standard build orders and strategies for me to begin thinking about. I dislike going into games completely blind, and information is something I crave but good quality content is hard to find and the StarCraft 2 community just blew me away with the sheer amount of quality content it has made available to new players should they choose to seek it.
Without any clear idea of what I should begin getting to grips with first, watching a lot of Day[9]’s content gave me a very clear and concise idea of what was going to be the most important aspect of the game for me to begin focusing on once I had gotten to grips with the basic mechanics.
Macro.
Initially, this was a concept I didn’t quite understand, and without the huge amount of quality video content available I would have missed out on the idea completely. The idea of not queuing up multiple units in a single production structure also confused me to begin with. I mean who doesn’t want more units, right? Well, I’d soon find out it doesn’t quite work that way.
So the game finished downloading, and I had a vague idea that economy and macro-management were going to be the most important aspects of the game. I was focused, and had a clear goal in mind before I even started the campaign I loaded up about 30 vs. A.I. matches and began just concentrating on cranking out SCV’s and Marines. Regardless of whether or not I won the game (which of course, to begin with, I didn’t even versus Very Easy) or even spent all the money I had, I would just crank out workers and try to keep them popping out consistently.
My goal was to put economy at the forefront of my mind for my play-through of the campaign, so that once I finished it I wouldn’t have to start completely from scratch to figure out what it was I should be practicing, and to hopefully form the habit of continually producing workers (as opposed the habit of not doing so, which I might have done during the campaign)
After practising for a decent number of games, and in the same breath becoming very confident at beating the Very Easy and Easy AI opponents I delved right into the campaign and did not come up for air again until near the end with only 3 missions to go. What a campaign! But that’s a story for another day. Even though I was only playing on normal, I was surprised to find that I was not failing missions, it was still challenging but I was able to breeze through it confidently, something that I attribute to that solid advice I began with, to make sure I was always building an SCV.
The Overwhelming Smell of Cheese
In the days that followed, for the first week or so in-between lectures and report writing I began to get confident enough with the mechanics of the game that I at least knew most of the units; as well as some of the counters for those units, most of the tech structures and what their general purpose was as well as becoming very confident at beating the normal AI opponent. While this isn’t at all impressive, even beating Normal AI is something of an achievement for me in the RTS genre.
At this point I began to scour the internet looking for ‘cheese’, the most noob-unfriendly strategies I could get my hands on, the most vile, horrible, underhanded... and most importantly effective rush builds I could lay my hands on.
My purpose with this was two-fold; firstly I wanted to discover what kind of threats I could be faced with early in the game and secondly what sort of precautions I could take to reduce their effectiveness. Now, to throw up a Street Fighter example (something I will try not to do too often, this is after all a blog about StarCraft 2!) almost everybody who has ever played a videogame will know the infamous fireball, or Hadouken. New players constantly complain about “fireball spamming” etc, because it’s an easy and effective way to damage your opponent without (seemingly) putting yourself at risk which usually makes new players blood boil, because they feel the overwhelming need to attempt to ‘counter’ or ‘punish’ everything their opponent throws at them with something flashy rather than avoiding it altogether or reducing its effectiveness with a proper defensive play.
I am determined not to fall into this trap, so I began relentlessly destroying the computer with (poorly executed) rush builds; zealot rush, early stalkers, 6 pool, cannon rush, marine rushes, banshee all-in, proxy barracks, just everything I could get my hands on. I spent almost an entire day doing this and while it was not news to me that I still struggle with basic game mechanics, I learned almost more information than I could process at one time and was introduced to a very important concept.
The ability to block off your base ramp with structures kind of blew my mind at first, but then rather quickly it seemed very logical. Any advantage you can gain in a situation is important, so if you are faced with the threat of an early attack blocking your opponents access to your base or merely delaying his attack is a good thing, even more so if you planned to build those structures anyway, for example, you must build a supply depot and a barracks as Terran, so why not place them in a way that gives you an advantage? This is not to suggest I am now the master of building placement, but it would give me a solid idea of what to do if I expect an early attack for when I launch myself into the dog-eat-dog world of online 1v1 and at least enough knowledge of some of the possible rush strategies that I could attempt to defend against them.
The First Big Decision
At this point, I was faced with a rather important decision one which came a lot easier than I expected it to. Given that there is only three races from which to choose from unlike Street Fighter, where SSFIV currently has 35 characters (with more on the way via Arcade Edition), I could not simply pick one and instantly have access to 4 or 5 similar characters by association through similar play-styles/move types. I would have to pick one of three very different races and make a pretty steep commitment to them before I will be comfortable branching out at a later stage into another race.
Surprisingly to me at least, the decision came rather easily. I decided that I wanted to choose a race based on which one I considered to be the friendliest to use for a beginner, and which one I personally thought was the coolest.
Unsurprisingly, this ended up being Terran. I quite liked the Protoss, but I absolutely disliked playing as them in the campaign, and Zerg is still a complete and total mystery to me. With my low level of mechanical knowledge of the game, vomiting larvae and creep seemed like too much to think about just days into learning my first RTS.
With that decision out of the way, I spent the next few days playing through my practice matches, and training against the medium AI when I got the chance to put down my dissertation project for a few hours.
E-Sports for the Win
I have always been a big vocal supporter of e-sports, actively singing the praises of Street Fighter in particular, so I knew a few names from the StarCraft world; Boxer, IdrA, Jinro, Moon, and a few others. So I eventually happened upon GomTV and it is safe to say that the GSL Season Ticket I ended up buying for this current season was worth the price almost instantly. I decided to buy the ticket after watching TheLittleOne vs oGsHyperDub from a previous season, the match completely blowing my mind. Then seeing SlayerSBoxeR’s TvT and Jinro vs oGsEnsnare cemented it for me, even if I cannot get to a competent level in StarCraft as a player I am going to be a fan for a long long time. Those games were so exciting to watch and the commentary provided by Artosis and Tasteless is good enough that even a noob like me feels like he always knows what is going on in a game.
Into the Future
With a ton of University work to contend with, this week is going to be a little packed so my goals for next week will be simple and unambiguous.
Goal for Friday 21st January 2011:Complete all my placement matches and discuss my experiences with an aim to analyzing my progress. On its own this goal doesn’t really help me to progress as a player, so in addition to that I intend to spend a few hours practicing getting to 200/200 as quickly as possible and trying not to get supply blocked.
That about wraps this up, what a monster blog post, as a closing remark I will just say that I hope to be able to do at least my part in contributing to the community by posting these chronicles on a regular basis and I hope the experience will be fun. The StarCraft 2 community seems very friendly and I am sure it will be a positive experience.
