oh noes, Starcraft 2!

Ok, I’m a liar. I bought SC2 and said I was going to return it because I wasn’t going to play it. I’ve never played a rts (real time strategy) before, or rather, my most sad and pathetic attempts at Warcraft 3 had me quitting after a couple of games in favor of playing DotA (Defense of the Ancients). That’s not to say that I didn’t also suck it up at DotA quite hard, it just wasn’t as bad as me playing WC3.

I basically swore off rts forever and after that point. I happily played WoW as a giant noob facerolling arena 2s as a druid healer while being an omgwtf boomkin in the offtime, leveled a multitude of alts, and raided when I could. Then came the big day: I got hacked. After suffering the mental anguish resulting from e-theft, I decided I was entirely too invested in the game and decided to back off. I whittled my time commitment down to about 3 hours per week, if that. It was a good thing to happen, since it gave me time to smell some roses and shizzles, or something.

But then I got Starcraft 2.

I bought it, and didn’t open it for an entire month. I didn’t like what my friends had to say about it, so I decided it probably wasn’t for me, especially since I was such a big fat noob when it came to rts games. However, given the lazy bastard I can be at times, I did what I normally do and procrastinated. I procrastinated so long that I passed the deadline for being able to return the game. So I ended up saying, “f*ck it” and decided to try playing SC2. This decision happened when I was on vacation and had a little more time at my disposal. Thus, a brand new SC noob was born…hence the sudden drop off in frequency of already occasional posts.

Now, I hate being sucky at things. I just really hate it. Being really bad at something usually spurs me on to obsessively focus on improving my skills at whatever it is until I reach a level that I deem satisfactory. Most people I know will just brush it off and move on to the things that they are good at instead. Me, I’m all about the square peg in a round hole. (pound pound)

In the first 3 days, my noob stench was so bad that I couldn’t even tell my building structures apart as a terran player. Yes, I played the ultimate cheese race. Everyone said it was the easiest to pick up, so I tried it. I semi-improved, and I’m now approaching 2 weeks into playing the game. Oh man, what a two weeks.

Started off as terran, and just kept sucking quite hard. My noobness had no limits: I would sometimes wall off too much to the point where my own units couldn’t get out (thank goodness for flying buildings); I once sent a reaper rush to the enemy but then forgot to actually micro them, resulting in the enemy just killing them off quite easily; an enemy once built a bunker right in my own mineral lines while I was trying to be cute and harass them in their base. All in all, these things taught me that terran might not be for me.

After watching replays obsessively (I like to watch replays on my iphone at bedtime in the dark) and adoring players like HuK, TLO (<3 <3 TLO!), ITR, and Tester from afar, I decided that protoss have the most fun. Forcefields and psi storm and shizzles. So I switched to toss. Amazingly, I’m actually a better player as a toss! Go me. The difference in league matches has been dramatic—I went from always being the bottommost player on the scoreboard to top or second now, and middle of the pack at the very least. My improvement has been enough to catapult a once 2-5 record in 3v3 to 9-7…it’s actually a positive record now!

Am I addicted? I don’t think so. I still maintain my work-life balance; I go to work everyday, pay my bills, and still try new cooking recipes. Just because I like to spend a good deal of time on a game doesn’t mean I’m addicted. I’d categorize myself as “moderately obsessed.”