EPTFirst off thanks for reading and putting down comments. Someone also wanted to know what my disabiltiy was, to put the short way it is chronic pancreatitus. The long way is, basicly the pancreas is the organ that produces the enzymes that break down your food in your stomach. Mine still does this but my pancreas gets inflamed and kinda digests itself. Not very much, just a very small leak, but this is very painful, I am in pain every second of everyday. Buts some days are good and some days are bad, so bad in fact that I need to go to the emergency room and put into the hospital for long amounts of time. There is currently no known cure short of takeing out ones pancreas, this is risky, takes about a quarter of my life expectancy, and gives me full blown diabetes. Not to mention haveing to take pills to digest your food.
But enough about that lets continue on in the story. Shortly after makeing it into gold league, I realized that it is really hard to try out new builds and stratagys in the ladder without killing your ladder ranking. I set a goal for myself, and that goal was to make platnium before the end of the beta. And trying out new builds and killing your rateing wasnt the way to go. At this point I was playing random in my 1v1 ladder games, this is twice as hard because you have to practice builds for every race. I knew I needed a practice partner. But I had no way to get one.
Now I know in order to get better I need a practice partner so I think I will just get my friends to play, I had one that was excited about SC2 comeing out, he played BW back in the day. So I go and I tell him, "hey man, if you reserve the game at gamestop they will give you a beta key and then we can play toghether". He doesn't want to get the beta, he is going to wait until the game comes out because he doesn't want to get burnt out on the game getting beat by people who know what they are doing. I tell him about the league system and how he will go against people around the same level as him, but he was haveing none of it. No practice partners there.
So I keep watching videos on youtube seeing what people are doing, I had no idea about teamliquid at this time. I just typed in starcraft 2 and videos would pop up so I could watch them. I would see something cool and want to try it. That is how I got the thor rush build that I won my very first SC2 match with. And during this time I played tons of games, and I mean tons I think after 3 days I had something like 200 or so games. But I wasn't really getting any better at the game.
Around this point I think to myself I am going to get myself a practice partner, and I decided to start asking the people I played against in the ladder, I thought he they are the same skill level as me we can get better together. So I start asking people at the end of the game if I thought it was a good game. Well games I won people werent happy they lost so they were BM and would ignore me and just leave the game. Games I lost I would get told they either didn't need a practice partner, had one already, or I wasn't good enough to practice with them. So I gave up on asking people.
Shortly after this I went on a bad loseing streak and got pushed back to silver. This was devestating to me, I felt so bad, I had no practice partner, I had below averadge stratagy, and then I played random this was information overload. But I kept going on, I kept playing. I knew I needed to do something differnt, but I wasn't sure what. I decided I needed to pick one race and just play that race, My plan was to not pick a race until the game actually came out, but I knew I would never reach my goal if I did that, and I want to make my goals. But I couldn't decide what race I wanted to play. The one race I knew I didn't want to play was zerg. So I had to choose between terran and protoss.
The reason I came to these two races was I had the most fun playing terran but protoss was the race I had the most wins with. So what did I decide? I went with protoss, remember I have a goal I want to win and I thought chooseing my best race was going to be my best race. So protoss it was, I also decided I was going to win, there is no such thing as cheese there is just winning and loseing. I didn't "cheese" every game, but if I though I could get away with it depeneding on the match I would do it.
Around this time I was addicted to the game. I was going to go hang out with some of my friends and play video games, I was so addicted to SC2 I brought my PC because the thought of going more that 4 hours without playing a game was unthinkable. So I hooked my PC up and started to play a game while my friends were playing tekken 6. I get into the mid game and am concentrateing on the game, I pull out a very close game and I turn around and there were all 4 of my friends behind me watching me play. 2 of them were hooked the next day they had thier beta keys. Awesome I now have not 1 but 2 practice partners.
My first friend gets online and plays hi 5 practice games and he wins a few and is ready to play me and show me what is up. He played BW back in the day and he thought he was going to be able to just do so well and win. So he chooses to play zerg. We are on Lost temple and I figure I going to do a straight up build and do a 4 gate push against him. I scout early and find him but he kills my probe with his drones, my probe went in his mineral line and got surrounded and killed, everything in his base looked normal he had his spawning pool on the way while I had my first gateway. Well fast forward and I get warp gates and my 4th gateway and push out with my 5 zelots, 4 stalkers, 2 sentrys, with another warp in of stalkers and zelots comeing soon. I get to his base he has just finished his expansion, and had 8 zerglings and 13 drones, that was it, no queen. Hrrmmm... I wanted a practice partner not the computer on easy AI. Now this friend took this loss hard, and he isnt one to take advice he will figure it out on his own. He goes on plays his 5 placement matches loses them all and plays a few more games and never played the beta again.
The other friend he never played BW online, but he watched me, he asked questions. I knew he wasnt ready to be my practice partner, but I knew I could help him out to eventually be my practice partner.
So still no practice partner, but since swiching to only playing protoss I got back into gold. I would cannon rush everyone, protoss cannon rush, zerg cannon rush, terran cannon rush. I won alot of games, except against terran. I didn't cannon rush zergs main, I would scout early and during this time they would do a fast expo. I would put the forge in my main so if the cannon rush didnt work I still had my forge. Then once I scouted the fast expand I would put the pylon behind the mineral field and then the cannon behind the mineral line, this way the un morphed hatchery didnt have view of the cannon until it was done. Then once denying the expo I would cannon their ramp so they would have to fight out, and I would put 2-3 cannons in my main mineral line to prevent muta, and then expo. I figured one base zerg has a very hard time beating 2-3 base toss, and I was right. DOing this I won about 90% doing this vs silver and gold level zerg players. And I will still do this every once and a while vs zerg.
I got myself up to about rank 20 in my gold league and was feeling good. About this time I was still watching SC2 videos on youtube, but I found HD starcraft. Now I didnt jsut watch games being played, I watched people playing and someone saying why they built what they did. This was eye opening. Then though HDstarcraft I found Husky and they were very informative and entertaining. But most importantly they mentioned something called teamliquid.net, something that would change my SC2 life.
After watching the video on where they talked about teamliquid I came straight to this site to see what was going on. All the forums all the videos, everything. Then I found it. What you ask, Day9. That first day I came to team liquid and found Day9 I watched 12 videos that day of him talking about SC2. Then I wanted to get on SC2 and put everything he said to work. I went back to playing random, because if I put all of these things he says to work I will be fine playing random. But like I said it was information overload, I was just watching Day9, I wasn't understanding the message. I tried everything he said in every matchup. And I went right back into silver league. All this should be working I thought, I shouldn't be haveing these problems. I didn't understand what was going on. Then I realized I need to be playing just protoss and put things he says into my mind and not try to recreate them.
So I started playing just protoss, I still watched the Day9 daily, but not to put everything to use, but to understand, to know what is possible. And sure sometimes if I saw something that I thought could imporve my protoss, I would try it. I would see if I could use it with the macro and micro at my level.
I didn't have a account on teamliquid yet, I just would read in the forums, afraid to post, I thought if I put something down and it was wrong or misunderstood I would be kicked from the site and banned. I was paronoid I didn't want to lose the site. Then one day I saw it, the practice partner thread. Wow, So I made my account and filled out the information, I fibbed a little bit, I didn't put myself down as a protoss player I put random, and I put that I was rank 2 in my gold league when I was actually rank 7. I feel bad about that now, but it wasnt that bad, and I did put in the line where you can write extra things that protoss was my best race and that I was only ok with zerg and terran.
One day goes by and I am excited that I am going to get my practice partner that I know I need to take that next step. The day comes and goes and nobody messages me. Two days come and go, five days come and go and still no practice partner. One week is here and in the middle of the day while I am in the middle of a game in which I am loseing to terran player. Now yes I know I could have looked up a player and asked them to be my practice partner, but I am very shy, I dont like starting up converstaions, I can talk and carry on a converstation but not start one. So I waited that week, and finally my practice partner wanted to play some games.
He was terran and wanted to practice against protoss. We played our first game and I was playing very basic going 3 gate, expo, and then robo tech against terran. But my practice partner was good he knew what he was doing I scout late and he is walled off so I didn't get to see what his tech was, the only thing I did see was there was no tech lab on his barracks and a marine out. I skipped makeing my first zelot and got my cyber core and got my first stalker out. After I got my 3rd stalker out and the fourth was on the way, there were 12 or so marines atacking my base, I got a few shots off from the high ground. His micro wasnt as good as it should have been and that was his only real weakness and I was able to use my 4 stalkers and 3 probes kill off the marines only loseing the 3 probes and 2 stalkers. I then used my 2 stalkers to move to his base and they were pushed back but I got one probe into his base while he was distracted and saw 4 rax, 2 getting tech labs on, one was getting a reactor and the other was just makeing marines. So I see that and make a forge and a twilight council. I figure I have a few minutes before he pushes out and put down my nexus and 2 cannons at my expo and get 3 sentrys. He pushes out again with this time about 4-5 maruaders and 12-14 marines and stim, and I was able to seperate them with sentrys and put down a guardian shield and lost alot of my units but was able to push him back once again. I then decide that I would hurt him with a dark shrine. When my dark shine is half way done the cannons holding my choke to my expo is getting hammered by tanks, he doesnt have many but enough to slowly kill them off. Tic, Tic, Tic I am getting my darksrine warping willing it to hurry... I see the last cannon getting hit and I put down force fields but I miss one and there is a gap where he can get units through. I hold for long enough and warp in 3 dark templars. Kill off the rest of his units, right as he kills off my expo because he was out of scans. I move to his base kill the few scv's at his expo while he just finished the CC. I then go to his main kill about 4 more scv's before he can scan and then he kills them off. Gets a raven and was able to push once more with the tanks and he killed me. But it was a intense first practice game. We went over that game over skype.
That day we played about 10 or so games, and discussed them and what we could have done better. He was a rank 5 gold. The next day I got to rank 3 in my gold league. He got on we played 3-4 more games and decided to take a break and play some 2v2 games, we did all of our placement matches and went 5-0 and both got our first taste of platnium. It was nice to get there, but it wasn't 1v1 and we both knew it. We planned on playing some more but the next day I was feeling so bad I went into the ER and stayed in the hospital for 8 days. Once I got out I didn't see my practice partner get back on.
But I was happy to get those games in. In the next few days after getting out of the hospital I got to #1 gold. That felt real good. Amazing actually, I knew I should be close to my goal, I watched Day9 still and improved my game by using little things. Getting a better split on my probes at the start, getting timeings better. All of these little things got me to rank 1 and would soon get me to platnium.
But the next day the patch that got rid of copper came out and put in diamond. So my new goal was to get into platnium. I knew I could do it. But Bnet was so bad, disconnects left and right. I wanted to try 3v3 and 4v4, and I did but you would play 5 minutes and get disconnected. Also I still wasnt feeling so well after getting out of the hospital, I slept alot and took my medicine and couldn't concentrate. But one week later they had fixed the lag problems and you could play non stop with out the game crashing. So I was ready to do my placement matches. And I was going to do everything I could to make diamond. I had watched some videos and knew that it was hard to play vs terran in the mid game without phoenix play and my macro is very good my micro is below adverage. So I decided I would do 2 gate pushes and proxy when I could vs terran.
So I start up my placement match against terran on scrap station. Im going to rush him. I get my pylon on 9 and gateway at 10 and boost out my first zelot out by his base. I then scout with my probe, I dont see anything out of the ordanary. I pull my probe out of his base and put my pylon down right outside his expo. I am still pumping out zelots and probes and as soon as I have 200 minerals while I have 2 zelots being made I put down my cyber core, and gas, then once my first stalker is on the way I push out with the 5-6 zelots I have. I bust through his wall before he can get his scv's down to repair. as I get in I see him makeing the tech lab on his factory and building his starport. I kill the scv makeing the starport and continue rallying units into his base killing off workers and anything he pumps out, he GG's out and my first placement match is a win.
Games 2 and 3 are both against terran 1 on lost temple and one on inceneration zone. I do the 2 gate rush and win both of them. I decide to take a quick break and play 2v2 playing random so I can take a mental break. After that game I decide to play my fourth placement match. I start it up and I find my opponent and see he is playing zerg and Im like cool not terran, and then I look and I forgot to put it back on protoss, my game was still on random. I think to myself please let me spawn as protoss, please dont let me spawn as terran. Neither happens I spawn as zerg and the mirror match. Ok I can deal with this, we are on scrap station, and I know I am going to rush him. I am going to rush every single placement match, you guys know most placement matches aren't against the greatest and the best way to beat a average opponent that you know could beat you every once in a while if they get lucky or play perfectly for them, is to rush them and get them off of thier game. So I am going to 7 pool this guy and send a drone with the lings and make a spawn crawler. I do it send my lings and first drone toward his base, around this time my overlord is getting into his base. As my lings hit the watchtower my opponent says "GL, this is my first game I just got the beta key a hour ago". Right after he says that I see him put down his spawning pool. What am I supposed to say? I dont want to be mean, and I have already rushed him. I say "Im sorry, but I rushed you and have been playing for a while." I get my zerglings in his base and the drone makes a spine crawler and I win. After I said this and won the game I felt bad and felt like a asshole. And I am sorry to that guy, I think I should have said nothing, and I don't want to give people a bad impression of the game. But it is too late now.
Im 4-0, one more game away from my goal. I start the game up right away. Its against terran on stepps of war. Ok I'm going to do my same rush and win. I'm Going to Win. We start the game I pylon on 9, gateway on 10 and send the probe to scout. I get into his base and I see barracks before depot and him getting gas. Reaper rush. Ok what do I do. I decide to just keep my stratagy up. I do as much harrass with my probe as I can. I attack his scv makeing the rax, but he brings out another scv and runs my probe off, but I know I want to stall him as long as I can. Right as he is about to finish his rax I put down a pylon right were the tech lab will have to be made. He has to lift off to build it as soon as he lifts off I cancel the pylon and try to keep my probe under the rax. But he finally is able to land and build his tech lab. I want to keep up the harass so I check his base and I see a scv going for his second gas so I gas steal him. Meanwhile back in my base I have my first zelot out and the second on the way. I dont want to give away my hand as I build my second gateway. As his reaper gets to my base I send 4 probes to attack him, He micros badly and loses his reaper killing only 2 probes, I now have 4 zelots now and enough to make my cyber core. After loseing his reaper he starts BM saying I am cheating because I was able to kill his reaper with just probes. The game was laggy but I wasn't cheating. I send those 4 zelots into his base, he didnt wall off since he had to lift that rax and move it around to get the tech lab down so I get those zelots right into his mineral line. There was 2 reapers there and I sent 2 of my zelots after those, and kept 2 in the mineral line. I killed one of the reapers and half of his probes and he gets another reaper out so he still has 2 but I get 2 more zelots in his base, and keep him busy running straight for his mineral line and kill off about 2-3 more scvs, meanwhile I get my first stalker and another zelot and send those Send the zelot into the mineral line while microing the stalker to kill 2 of the 3 reapers while killing off all but 6 of his scvs. Then I end up getting 2 more stalkers in his base and the game was over. I made diamond. I achieved my goal.
I felt great, I felt amazing. It was so much fun and even him saying I cheated couuld make me feel any worse. Now I have a new goal, and right now it is to make it into the top 10 of my platnium league. I really think I can do it. I think I can get good enough. I still need practice partners.
The friend I mentored and helped out Is close to good enough to being a good practice partners, he just got into platnium, and his goal is to make it into diamond and I will help him. It does feel good to make a goal and achieve it, even if the goal is starcraft. But like I said in part 1 I am going to devote time to this game. My overall goal is to eventually play in tournaments, get my name out there, and be amazing at starcraft. I will keep you all up todate and continue to tell my story.
Thanks for listening.
Onegu
