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So I had a funny experience yesterday. I checked my player stats page while waiting for the matchmaker to find me an opponent. Then I quickly stopped searching for an opponent, because I saw something that deserved a moment's consideration.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/038msnZ.png) Do they make Hallmark cards for this occasion?
I've played 4000 games of Starcraft II. This was screencapped yesterday, which was almost exactly 2 and a half years after release of WoL. So in my Starcraft career, I've averaged a little over 4 games a day, every day, for the last 2 and a half years. Just recently this has picked up; for this season, I'm averaging 8.5 games per day.
I have no idea what the average length of my games is; if I estimate it at 20 minutes, that's some 1300 hours of my life. If I estimate it at half an hour, that's about 2000 hours of my life. For reference, I've played piano since age 4, and I practiced an hour a day until I left for college at 18. That's 14 years, at about 300 hours a year (I probably didn't do that practice EVERY single day), adding up to 4200 hours of my life. And I've spent at least a third of that time on Starcraft in just the past 2.5 years.
I suppose it was just something of a shock to realize just how much Starcraft II I've played. I knew it was a big part of my life, just like piano used to be (I still play from time to time). But I still thought of myself as one of the more casual players, who does more watching Starcraft than playing, and never really commits to a practice regimen to get better. Maybe relative to the TL population 4000 games isn't even all that much, but I seriously doubt I can really be considered "casual" with that number.
There are people in my life who would look at that number and tell me my priorities are seriously out of line, that I should focus more on school, or programming, or something like that. But to be honest, I look at it and feel a certain amount of pride. If anything, it makes me want to play more regularly, and get better more consistently. I used to be in diamond league before I took like a month break in December; I'd like to get back into diamond before the release of HotS.
  
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Haha, that's awesome. So much time put into games. Then again, do you come up against auto-leavers often? Still, that's a large amount of time put into something. Imagine if there was a timer also including time watched on streams, thinking about games, dreaming about the game, talking about the game, etc. I think I'll be coming close to you number soon!
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Congrats and I like your outlook on that number 
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United States579 Posts
I am not one of those people who will tell you that your priorities are out of line. Dude, you're right where you should be. :D Starcraft is one thing that I hope to spend TENS of thousands of hours on in my life, and I can say with confidence that I will never feel like that was wasted time. Considering I got Broodwar on release in 1998, played it daily for about 10 years, slowed down, and now play SC2 daily (although not as much as you have) I've got at least 5,000 hours logged between the two and I don't regret that for one millisecond, in fact I wish I had only played MORE.
I can't help but smile for your epic accomplishment man, thanks for sharing with us! This may not be as big as having a kid, or graduating college or something, but 4000 games to me is at least as much worth celebrating as an average birthday (22, 23, etc, one of the non-special ones like 16,18,21). If there WERE Hallmark cards for this occasion I'd certainly get you one. And sign it with love <3
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I think the average game length is closer to 10 real-time minutes, but when you count the amount of time in menus and custom games, it's definitely a long time :O
Another interesting thing to look at is when you save all replays and open them in sc2gears it tells you what time of day the games were played. It's interesting to look at what time of the day you play most at, especially when the computer is available to you for the most part of the day. (My most played times are late at night and early in the morning, almost never mid-day)
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I considered the influence of auto-leavers in average game time; but I don't think I encounter them more than 1/100 games, so they wouldn't throw off estimates all that much. As for including time spent watching streams, watching Day[9] Dailies, etc. I bet I wind up well over the 4200 I've spent playing piano :O.
I hadn't thought to include time spent on Brood War. Considering how awful I was, I like to think I can't have spent that much time on it or I would have improved at least a little. :p But now that I think about it, Battle.net kept track of wins/losses/disconnects, so I'd know how many games I played there. If I remember correctly, I had 700-800 games there, but those were almost exclusively me and a friend playing team games against computers. I never discovered the professional scene, ICCUP, 1v1 ladders, etc.
I figured the global average game time would be 10-15 minutes. My personal average is probably a little longer, though, considering that:
1) I almost never all-in (probably under 200 games out of those 4000).
2) When someone all-ins against me, I generally play very defensively and expand, so the game still goes fairly long.
3) I'm Terran, which means about 1/3 of those 400 games are TvT :p
I was estimating my average based on the rare occasions where I actually check how long a game took with a real-time clock, which is generally when I have to be somewhere at a certain time and decide I have time for one game. This doesn't happen that often, so the sample size is small, but the elapsed time is generally about 20 minutes; if it's a TvT, it's generally about half an hour (as my deadline approaches I become more inclined to all-in).
I don't use sc2gears, but I bet the time of day I play at is roughly a bell-curve, with 95% of its area between the hours of 6 PM and 6 AM.
+ Show Spoiler +
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EPT
