EPTI was going to write a post about context, and how a newbie can navigate the flood of Starcraft-related information available online, but from the replies I received to my first post it seems that there are quite a few people who misunderstood my post in one way or another. My intention wasn’t to write a one-time piece bashing TL’s strategy forum – I’m sorry if you took it that way. My intention was to introduce this blog, which I hope to use to share my experiences as a newbie in learning Starcraft, focusing on how we learn the game. So the resource I described in my previous post is what I look to create here. My hope is that resources like this and the discussion surrounding them can help new players get into the game without getting overwhelmed or giving in to frustration.
Before that though, I thought a little background about my personal experience with the game would help give this whole thing some context. So here goes!
First Experience with Starcraft
Eighth-grade, lunch time. My homeroom teacher shuffles everyone out the door, save myself and a few friends. Door closed, we all take a spot at a computer station and log-in. The year was 1999, and the game was Starcraft.
Mr. Ma was only around 24 then, fresh out of teacher’s college and was the person who introduced us to Starcraft. I recall us playing most of our games on Blood Bath, but other than that the memory is fuzzy. I had played other RTS games in the past (CnC most notably), but this one had a special lure that I couldn’t describe. I don’t know - maybe it was just that everyone else was into it at that time.
Fast forward a few years to Computer Camp (yes, if you’re counting, I was in computer camp in high school). During our game time one afternoon I witnessed a couple of ‘bullies’ picking on a kid, in a 2v2 game of Starcraft. The kid was playing Terran, and really didn’t know too much about the game, so the ‘bullies’ decided to repeatedly flood the kid’s base with Zerglings, only to pull back at the last minute and let the kid rebuild again. This was repeated until the kid gave up and left. He was only about 10 or 11 years old. I can remember vividly how frustrated he was, almost the point of tears.
I eventually bought my own copy of the game, played through the campaigns, and even made a brief birth on Battle.net. The game was still fun, but slowly become one-dimensional to me. I never made it past playing a 2v2 on BGH, and even shied away from that. Mostly I would play 3v5comp BGH. There was no draw, nothing attracting me in. I thought I had figured the game out – you build a bunch of stuff, and go kill the other guy – and in thinking so I lost interest.
2008 – I decided to pack my things and head to Korea to visit a friend who had been teaching English there. My friend lived in Suwon (future site of IEF) in a small apartment, which I inhabited during the long days while he was at work. Since I knew very little of the language, I decided not to venture out on my own too much, so most of that time was spent reading or watching TV. I think every geeky kid growing up in the West has heard their share of rumors about Asian television – my friend summarized it precisely with “everything is like Mr. Sparkle” - but none of those prepared me for this: Starcraft on TV. To add to the awesomeness of the event, the game that was on was the infamous ‘Heart-Shaped Pylon’ game between Much and FBH.
I was in awe. I’d never seen Starcraft like this before: battles going on left and right; units being churned out at high speed; every single inch of the map being fought for. And an audience! And on TV! Immediately my mind started spinning – how do they control all these units at once? Vultues? Who uses vultures? How are they so fast? Who were these guys?
After my three weeks was up I found myself back in Toronto and felt like a million bucks. I was rested and ready to roll on with my life. But one thing had to be done first – I pulled out my old copy of Starcraft and installed it on my laptop.
Getting Back in the Game
Seeing Starcraft played in Korea sparked a curiosity in my brain that felt I needed to satisfy for my own sanity. Not only did I want to see more, I wanted to understand. When I first come into contact with any complex system – a game, a machine, a piece of software, a person – it’s not enough for me to just be aware of its existence. I need to ‘get it’, to learn how it ticks, what the rules are and how they work to form that complex system. I wanted to get Starcraft.
I dived in head-first. I started by playing through the campaigns (still entertaining in 2008), then some local comp games. Slowly, my feel for the game started to come back. Unit production hotkeys felt normal again, so did multitasking (at 40apm). Then I moved to Battle.net.
Now, looking back I know that opponents on Battle.net today aren’t the best players out there. Many use maphacks and bots, will go with the same strategy each game and typically play the same map and matchup repeatedly. But they’re much harder today than they were when I first played online. Suffice it to say, I was getting manhandled. Back in the day with my limited abilities, I was able to win maybe 60% of my games. Now I was barely winning 1 in 10. I was also shying away from straight up 1v1 games on non-money maps, something which I’ll mention again soon.
Naturally I turned to the internet for advice. I remembered that there were sites in the past that listed ‘builds’ a player could use in games, so I thought that might be a good place to start. I came across TeamLiquid, GosuGamers, and a handful of others that listed builds by race, so I picked a few and went about memorizing them. By this time I’d already selected Terran as my race (funny how that happened), so my build of choice was ‘2 Rax’ (vZ build). I had no idea what this build was good for, but it was pretty straight forward, and it allowed me to get marines and medics out quickly. I had also only memorized the build up until 24 supply or so. But hey, it looked good, so why not use it? I used this build against everyone and everything: 2v2, 3v3, 2v2v2v2; the Hunters, Big Game Hunters, Blood Bath; Zerg, Protoss and Terran opponents alike. And hilariously, my win ratio on Bnet increased significantly.
Around this time, and after taking a thorough beating from a Toss on Python, I asked the player the classic question, “How did you get so good?” Amongst other pieces of advice he gave me (1a2a3a being one of them - really?), he told me to watch pro games on GOMTV. I didn’t know that such a thing as Starcraft with English commentary existed online, and after watching a few matches I was hooked. I started tuning in sometime during Season 2 of the GOM Classic, when Lilsusie was still doing commentary alongside Tasteless. It was awesome. Not only was there Tasteless giving me a taste of what high-level analysis is like, but Lilsusie was there to bring him down a peg and ask the questions that I as a newbie really wanted to have answered. In fact, my first piece of advice to any newbie today (as a newbie) would be to go and watch those casts, but that’s another topic.
Breaking into the 1v1 Scene
GOMTV was my door to the world of programming, and from there my understanding of the game and the scene seemed to grow exponentially. Before long I was reading the forums of TL and GG.net regularly, watching not only GOM but the OSL, MSL and Proleague, and going back to watch matches from old-school gamers. Piece by piece I was figuring the system out: the characteristics of each race, game flow, tactics vs strategy, etc. But though I was developing my theoretical knowledge of the game, my practical side was lacking because I just wasn’t playing many 1v1 games. I knew that I wanted to, of course, and that I could only really ‘get it’ if I did, but something was holding me back. I have an idea of what that thing is, but I’ll save that for my next post. What I will say now though is that for me it wasn’t as easy as just creating an ICCUP account and playing a bunch. There is an intimidation factor in Starcraft, created not only by opponents but by the game itself, along with your own personal expectations. What I needed was a kick in the pants.
Why It took me so long to join ICCUP and start seriously learning will be the topic of my next post, but thankfully just about two weeks ago I did. I had to do some adjustments to my thinking, and those first few games were incredibly frustrating, but I’m here now, playing and enjoying myself. Not only that, in two weeks my game has improved faster than any other period previous to this. And most importantly, I’m paying careful attention to how I’m taking in this information, how I feel during the process, what’s working for me and what’s not. It’s the way my mind has broken down learning since I was in my early teens. So when someone tells me to learn a thing, my mind isn’t all that focused on the thing, but rather I’m running through different learning methods in my head trying to theoretically find the right fit.
This is where the blog comes in. Today Starcraft players are blessed with multiple sources of amazingly detailed information on the game, available freely to anyone with an internet connection. This I’ve gathered from my time browsing forums and following the Pro scene. But looking in from the outside is one thing – trying to use that information in your own games is another. I’m sure there’s a point where a player understands the fundamentals well enough to put context on all the information they gather online, knows how they best learn and can practice effectively based on that knowledge. But that isn’t the case for a beginner.
There is a huge amount of room for a discussion around how we learn this game, and I hope to be a contributor to that by documenting my own experiences. This isn’t to say this, or discussions like this, are meant to compete with the existing body of knowledge that’s out there. I just believe that it’s a part of the game that’s not well understood and seldom discussed, which is why there is so much room for it.
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There are a lot of topics which I referenced as future posts, which I hope to flesh out at some point. For now here’s a list of ideas that I’ve been churning that I’d love to write about:
- If you had to make a list of ‘learnable skills’ in Starcraft, what would be on it? How would you rate the skills in term of importance to winning?
- I’ve always been interested in Pareto’s Principle (80-20, link). Can this be applied to Starcraft?
- What’s the best way to approach learning a matchup?
- What’s the most efficient way to learn a build?
Until then!
The part about the kid being bullied made me sad 
