WHAT IS UP BITCHES!?
Opening this one in djWHEAT style, kinda feels shitty starting the 2nd post in the row with a shit lot of time in between, to my defense I have been fucking busy with school and basically devoting 90+% of my free time to Starcraft. So this blog will essentially be about my expirience with Starcraft 2 over the past 2 months ever since I decided to switch games fully.
Part 1 aka what I just said:
To elaborate on the sentence I just wrote: For the past (roughly) 2 months most of my under the week days (you may refer to them as monday till friday) looked like this: Wake up at 7 in the morning, go to school for roughly 6 or 7 hours, drink a shit lot of coffee to get some focus going, and then play starcraft for a couple hours. After that I either tune in to some player stream (destiny, tyler, huk to name some of my favorites that I tune into regulary), watch one of the onemoregame.tv shows or watch some gsl/tournament vod. And then it gets to the point where it's 8 p.m. and I either watch more starcraft, watch some of my own replays, or watch replays that my friends sent me to get some feedback on. Before I switch over to the weekend part of things I'd like to talk some more about that final point. Another part as to why I'm so in love with starcraft these days is the fact that basically most of my close friends play it and we talk about it all the time, I have a buddy in school that I talk about starcraft with every free second, I discuss it on the weekends with other friends and so on. And I really like the fact that my friends appreciate the feedback I can provide and that I get a lot of "yeah sent him some games he is fucking good at helping you out" which makes me quiet happy. Anyways back to my week schedule. On the weekends it's usually me either going out on friday and then getting home/sleeping over at my buddies (given that he switches nicks by the week I'll use his newest one Trollzerg, but in earlier posts I refered to him as mudda) and watching replays. That is followed by what we refer to as Starcraft Saturday which is basically us playing starcraft all saturday long. Sunday is a calming for me where I might watch a game or two and play a couple ladder games, but essentially I just chill and spent some time with the family.
GS fucking L:
Now even though I watch all the big events (dreamhack, hsc, nasl etc.) GSL is by far my favorite. I purchased my first season ticket this month for roughly 7 Euro, and let me tell you that it's the best fucking 7 euro I ever spent on anything. The sheer amount of stuff they release per week is insane, and even though I watch at least 1-2 hours a day I only managed to watch all of code s and some of code a, so given that we are one week away from the finals I still have around 20 or 30 code a matches to watch. And the great part about that season ticket is that I can come back at any given time and still watch those games.
Switching over to other tournaments: After MLG Columbus it was pretty much insane since it felt like there was a tourney going on every other weekend. For me it felt like it went from MLG into Dreamhack into HSC into NASL and during all of that I still watched a shit lot of GSL as I said. Throw in the fact that I spent about 8 hours a week catching up on onemoregame.tv's shows, you can roughly imagine how much time I devote to this game. Personally I really like how I put it sometimes: "If I don't play it I watch it, and if I don't watch I play".
Playing:
In my previous blogpost I talked about how much I love winning and getting better and in the last infamous 2 months that I keep repeating I got soo damn much better. I literally went from sucking at this game and being pretty much at the bottom of bronze to having a, atleast I feel like, great understanding of the game and a skill that is catching up to that understanding.
The first month of really comiting my time to Starcraft 2 was pretty intense, I went from having a few wins in bronze and being at the bottom of my devision to breaking into the top 8 with more than 1400 ladder point and literally playing against favored player almost every game until I finally made it into silver. And during that time I could really tell that I was getting better by the day and I started to figure out each and every matchup more and more and I learned to really understand my race (protoss aka that imba shit in zergs eyes).
One thing I'd like to talk about briefly here before I move on to "month 2" is my feel for the 3 matchups that I have to give a fuck about, which is PvZ, PvT and PvP.
Given that I don't give a fuck about alphabetical order I'll just start with PvZ. Now the great part about PvZ for me in bronze was the fact that before I really got into it Zerg was the race I had played the most against, said school buddy and mudda have been playing zerg basically ever since and given that mudda got into the game through me and I learned Zerg with him, I really understood that race well and that's what I feel made me win a shit lot against zerg. Combined with the fact that one of day 9's dailies really gave me a hole new inside on makro I was able to basically out makro every zerg the game threw at me. I'll just push back PvT a little bit since that one is kinda special for me and move on to PvP:
Essentially in my eyes PvP is by far the worst matchup in the entire game right now, not in terms of how well I can play it, but in terms of how I feel about it. It's still the most underdeveloped matchup and even though blizzard tried to fix 4 gating it's still there (just look up the most recent code a finals), BUT the homestory cup with the top 3 being protoss showed that PvP is starting to evolve, we do start to see more 3/4 Gate into Robo stuff, we do start to see expansions and DTs will become really really huge in my eyes (just go over to taketv.net and check out the final game between naniwa and huk to see what I'm talking about, or just watch the hole series, it is by far the highest level of pvp we have seen thus far). And one thing that I totally agree with is what Liquidtyler said on the recent State of the game podcast: Blizzard did not remove 4 gating as a viable opening, but given that a defensive 4 gate is starting to stop an offensive one we should see 4 gating as a viable opening and then have people transitiong out of it into immortal, or coloss, or expnasion build in generel. And that is what I believe is the future of PvP, and recently I have really startet to fall in love with a mix of blink stalker and immortals.
PvT:
This matchup was by far my worst one for a long, long time, part of it due to me rarely playing terran and mainly due to me not understanding terran. Now you might say "just go on teamliquid and get a standard pvt build order duh", but I fucking hate that. In my book you should never do anything because some build order you saw said it. And what I like to do is simply build my stuff based upon when I think I'll need it done and how much money I have at point x to spent upon it. And I remember that I had a wednesday where I literally lost 3 PvTs in a row I made two decisions:
a)I have to step up my micro (which gave me the win in game number 4 of that day)
but more important b) I have to figure out a way to fuck terran so hard that they would literally rage quit after I destroyed the shit out of them
So I sat down thought about some stuff and literally came up with my first build order. Essentially it was just a 3 gate expand into HT tech with some immortals, and at that time it was poorly timed, not designed to go past a maxed out 2 base attack and what not, but I went on a terran raping spree by storming/force fielding the shit out of the bio ball. And I feel that was a point that really put me on a hole other level. I actually sat down, looked upon the matchup at it's own, and really tried to do my best to destroy what had been beating me. Later on I realized how to deal with siege tanks and how to actually expand past 2 bases and what not, but me sitting down and creating this build order in custom games against the computer until I was happy and actually fucking some kids with it on the ladder felt great and helped a lot in terms of getting better by analyzing what went wrong in the games I lost and how to fix it (there is a pretty damn awesome day 9 daily about this as well btw).
Even though I did right quiet a bit about my feel about each of my matchup I'd just like to ad one aspec to the non mirror matchups:
One thing iNcontrol once said about Zerg that really changed my look upon that matchup is: "In a perfect world zerg would just drone up and expand all game long" and that recently let me to a point where I try to intercept with that, I don't necessarily try to kill him (him being my opponent mr zerg) but force him to not drone up, or maybe even snipe an expansion. And since I am not a big fan of anything stargate at this point I try to do this by either doing it huk style and take a couple units and see what I can do or use DTs, which I feel like is, besides air, stil Zergs biggest weekness. You either force a couple spore crawler (which costs money and drones) and you have him scared which results in him putting those on all his bases for the rest of the game, or you kill some drones and cause some damage, and you may even force him to morve an overseer and keep him with his army. You might want to check out Game 6 between Idra and MC at MLG Cbus to see my point. And I just played a game a few minutes ago which showed me a similiar thing in PvT. If Terran lets protoss Max out with a strong death ball army and you don't apply presure via drops you will either loose your army or trade armies which usually results in the protoss out makroing you due to gateways and chrone boost. And funny enough in that recent game the terran did not apply presure what so ever which allowed me to take 3 bases, max out and simple overrun that guy, his drop came way too late. So point is, I have to apply presure on zerg, while Terran has to apply presure on me.
Month 2:
Month two started with me ripping things up in silver and mainly getting matched against gold/plat guys, but blizzard being a bitch the season lock came and I could not continue to rise up into gold, but I'm looking forward to changing that starting next wednesday. Another thing about month two is the fact that I was at a point where I did not meet a zerg for a week or two which resulted in me sucking at pvz when I got back to playing zerg, but I managed to get back into PvZ and thanks to me playing Terran for 90% of my games for two weeks I enjoy fucking the shit out of terran. Or how huk would say: "Fuck me two ou"
Moving on:
I'd like to address to more things starcraft and then I'll wrap it up with some misc stuff.
First thing is that I have decided to combine one of my other hobbies, video editing, with starcraft. I'll "cast" some replays of my friends and myself pointing out mistakes and I'll be one of those people who do one of these "from bronze to grandmasters" thing, which is essentially my biggest goal in this game at the moment. So expect some youtube stuff from me in the close future. If you are interested in checking out some of my previous stuff checkout thevetoentertainemnt on youtube (too lazy to link atm) to see the halo montage stuff I have done thus far (especially the 2nd one took a lot of time and I put a shit lot of hard work into it). Plus there is that neat Elite fun video from halo 2 which I posted in a previous post. I'll keep you updatet with the upcoming sc 2 stuff as I get around to get it done.
Which leats straight up into point 2, which is the upcoming 6 effing weeks of summer vacation (given that I'll be done with school next year my final summer vacation as well). This will allow me to play a shit lot of starcraft, hang out with my friends, get all the stuff done and not be tired each day due to school forcing me to wake up early. Plus the 2nd and 3rd week will be the shizzle. Mudda's parents go to vacations and we'll essentially set up a gaming house for those 2 weeks. There'll be roughly 6 people coming over in those 2 weeks and we'll play the shit out of starcraft 2 for atleast 6 hours per day. It's gonna be so damn awesome and I'm sure it'll help us all at improving a lot. The final two weeks will be kinda bitter sweet. I'll go to france with my parents, which is sick and I'm looking forward to being so far away from home really getting away from all the shit I have to deal with her and just calm down and relax for 2 weeks, on the sad side I'm kinda scared of how it will affect me as a sc 2 player. Sounds pretty damn nerdy I know, but I guess I'll just find a way to play some bot matches to at least keep my mechanics on track.
Misc and wraping up:
Stuff like Xperia Play reviews will come out either during the upcoming six weeks or after I'm back from france where I'll get around to actually play all the games I already have, if you have the phone yourself please check out backstab hd, that game is insanly good. On another note I recently got my hands on a SC BW key (the person who is responsibly for that knows how grateful I am) and I fucking love that game, campaign is sick, I love how much more difficulty that mechanics are and I kinda hate battle.net 2.0 now.
Other than that thanks for reading, I appreciate it, and even though it s ounds lame by now: I'll try to not let another 6 weeks past till the next one. Next big post should be about the 2 week gaming house, expect me to be super happy about that. Oh and I'm predicting ZvZ finals between Nestea and Losira with Nestea snacking his 3rd GSL win ;) Feel free to quote me on that, sorry for any grammar mistakes I didn't read over the hole thing before posting. Peace out!
