PvP Adventures

Okay so this is one match-up I do not understand. Yesterday I lost to a guy who build a pylon right next to my nexus and then continued with a gateway. I killed his pylon with probes and yet he just built a new one!

I realize that I should have just built my own gateway. It would have been done before his and the won, but I panicked and used too many of my probes.

Today I had another amazing PvP on lost temple. A guy went fast blink stalkers and kept me in my base for far too long. In the end I won, but mainly because he entered in a few battles he shouldn’t. And the annoying thing is that only after the game was over, did I realize that the only reason he could blink up in my base, must have been because he had an observer there. An observer I should have been able to kill.

Expanding in PvP is something I never seem able to punish other players for doing and something that is suicide if I try it myself. It seems imba, but I guess it can’t be.

DSC#5 Coverage

So yesterday the Danish tournament DSC#5 started and I was asked to do live casting for the opening rounds. That is actually pretty overwhelming and I had to accept that.

So I started the live stream at around 6pm and did commentaries for about 4 hours straight. I’m amazed that the stream was stable for that long.

As for doing commentaries I think that it takes a time to warm up and be enthusiastic and in the flow. And as the show progressed I could feel that I was getting tired and basically losing my voice. All in all an interesting phenomenon.

As for the games I did:

• Round 1: StrinterN vs PzYs on Lost Temple
• Round 1: xDkFat vs Benya on Xel’Naga Caverns
• Round 1: FreshAJ (aka ActionJesus) vs Kamse on Blistering Sands
• Round 2: xDkFat vs CStorm on Xel’Naga Caverns (only the second game of the set)
• Round 2: eXe vs Rusten (aka RustenKokos) on Metalopolis, Xel’Naga Caverns and Scrap Station
• Round 2: PyZs vs Combi on Shakuras Pleateau
• Round 3: Navn vs Failo on Xel’Naga Cavers and Shakuras Plateau

The best part is that I also learned something about how to play PvZ on Shakuras Plateau. I think the Combi vs. PzYs game there was very educational.

Link to stream.

Terran Mirror Troubles

I has been playing a few Custom Games after I realized that you could smurf there and be matched up against people without a clue. It’s a good place to practice my Terran gameplay which by far is my weakest.

So today I met SouL in a Terran mirror match on Xel’Naga Caverns (download replay).

I tried a ghost rush which he stopped cold and then I was in trouble as he was containing me a pushing in with tanks. I thought that I had lost the game for sure, but tried to play on and it turned out to be a really exiting and long game.

For a long time I was under pressure and forgot to build SCVs, and yet I slowly clawed my way back into the game. One point I found particularly exiting was when I expanded before I had cleared out his containment and had to attack while building my command center under fire.

Eventually the game turned into covering the entire map and with two maxed out Terran armies.

What I still wonder is whether his tech switch to thors was cost effective versus my tanks or if they again were countered by my marauders? At least I think I conclude that in viking vs. viking battles you cannot run away and the guy with the lowest number will always lose.

After the game was over I looked up my opponent and realized that he like me, played Protoss on the ladder and that our score there was about the same.

Custom Game is the New Place to Smurf

Battle.net was kinda unstable on Monday, so I suggested to Qvist that we play a custom 2v2 against some random opponents. He warned me that people were pretty bad in custom games and he was right.

So we were Terran and Zerg vs a Terran and Protoss combo. At one point our Protoss opponent complained that his ally was a noob. That was true, but he was not any better and I kinda felt like writing it down. It all descended into funny name calling. Not too serious, but rude and funny as we totally steam rolled our innocent victims.

2v2 Frenzy

So I finally finalized the code that makes the Danish 2v2 ladder list work. That motivated me to take up team games again. Not permanently, but just to get my own name a little bit higher up the list. Anything else is too embarrassing.

So AiurAdun and I set out to play a truly epic series of games yesterday. And we lost. A lot.

We lost to people in lower leagues and won against teams in our own. Totally unpredictable. Maybe our race combination is a bit off. At least it seems to me that the early Marauder/Roach combination has become extremely dangerous after the last patch. Maybe we just suck. I feel so embarrassed by our expectation of rising quickly through the ranks, when in fact we did nothing like that.

Learning Curve

Learning something is never easy. Starcraft least of all. I know because I am constantly trying to improve and I also watch a lot of my friends try to improve. Watching them makes me realize how much I have learned in the past and which have become so natural to me, that I have forgot that it was something that had to be learned.

I remember back in the early days of Starcraft I, I won a lot of games simply because I knew how to a-move, rather than just move my units! Amazing difference.

So I watch a friend play and I realize how much of a difference it makes that you move your screen by double tapping a control group. I.e I double tap 0 to get back to my main nexus (and that in itself is a bad habit from Brood War) and I double tap 1 to get to my main army. I do this all the time and it allows me to be in two places at once to a much larger degree than scrolling by putting the mouse courser at the edge of the screen. At Bronze level you can probably win games by doing this better than your opponent. I think.

Making enough workers is a relative simple improvement in comparison because it does not require you to learn something physical in the same way. And even though it is simpler I still see friends who have major problems making more than 20 workers. How hard can it be?

Both of the above steps is something you don’t learn gradually. One day you pass the invisible boundary between not doing it and then getting it to work and you will take a jump up the ladder as a result.

At my level I am struggling with when not to make units. I know that in some matchups like PvP a secret is that you don’t need that many units before your fourth gate, but how many do you need? And when? I’m sort of stuck at 1000 points in my division and I think I need to “get to that next level” in my PvP in order to break the barrier that will take me 200 points up the ladder.

Starcraft in India

I was in India and as reported got my account locked from out there. Laughs all around. So what do you do Starcraft related in India when your account is locked?

Well, you can go to a mall to check out the local shops selling Starcraft and to see how the game is promoted there. Unfortunately that quest turned out to be in vain as I simply couldn’t find a game shop. And that got me thinking.

Is Starcraft even viable in India? Most of my co-workers out there are in IT, yet they are not into gaming at all. Why? Because to them software development is more about a good career, than about being nerds. Good for them I assume, but they are missing out on the wonderful world of eSport.

And then there is the common loss of all electricity and network connectivity. At least I experienced a lot of that so I assume it is common all over (I might be wrong). How would the “always online” experience of Starcraft II work out? I assume losing electricity would be bad enough for LANs, even though it is not unheard of in professional tournaments either