I am a Terran Starcraft 2 player who has made a decision to go on a crusade to become really good at the game.
This blog is as much for my sake as for anyone who might find it interesting enough to follow and the point of the blog is to track my progress from being a semi casual mid diamond level player to a competitive top master/grand master player.
Now that was the short version, anyone who is not interested in the in depth details can stop there!
My rts background goes all the way back to my childhood and a loving relationship with Blizzard rts games that started with Warcraft 2 but I never really played any of them competitively. For me it was always the single player campaign and then custom games with friends, but this was a phenomenon exclusive to rts for me. You see I have always been a competitive gamer and I love challenging myself in every other genre of gaming and while I have definitely always had the itch to play rts games more competitively I never really got into it. Partly because back in the day of Warcraft 2 and Broodwar, playing over the internet was not something I did much of. Most gaming for me came in the form of LAN parties, and I have always had friends who are very uninterested in playing these games against other people. The result was that whenever we played Broodwar, everyone refused to play unless we were all on the same team against the AI, that way no one would have to lose. But when Warcraft 3 came out the opportunities for me to play competitively over the internet were all there, I played a lot of non rts games that way but at this point I had developed a poisonous preconception about rts games, a preconception that I think a lot of people share. I basically thought that being good at Starcraft or Warcraft was almost a genetic trait, something you just had. And having played a few games on and off, I was convinced that I did not have this trait. I thought that, I can’t play fast enough or multitask well enough to play these games, and if I can’t do that now, I won’t ever be able to either.
As I got a bit older and wiser however I started to realize that anyone that is not impaired by an inability to learn and adjust, or held back by a physical disability would be able to get very good at any game with enough time and dedication put into it. I remember reading studies about talent, where scientific studies showed that it took 10,000 hours of practice to be really talented in something, be it programming, playing and instrument or what not. The number 10,000 should obviously not be taken to literally, the point such a number makes is that talent requires a lot of time. One should also not make the mistake to think that just mindlessly putting in the 10,000 hours will automatically make you a genius at the completion of the last hour. How good you can get, in this case at Starcraft and how fast you get there does require you to put in the time, but it also depends on how you spend that time. The bottom line however and most important point is that if you put in the time, and you practice correctly, learn from your mistakes, adjust and constantly challenge yourself to improve then you will eventually get really good and it was with that mindset that I headed into Starcraft 2 with a more competitive mindset than ever before.
The first part of my journey would take me from a complete and total rts scrub to high diamond league. Most people who jumped into Starcraft 2 made it straight into the top leagues because frankly if you played other rts games competitively you had the theoretical foundation to get there. For me however my placement games cemented me firmly in the very bottom of bronze league as a person with absolutely no understanding of how rts games are played. Concepts as timings and macro were completely alien to me. But I approached the task with a massive amount of motivation and determination. I played a lot of games, watched every single Day9 daily, I followed tournaments, watched streams and I tried to just “get” the game. With this attitude I worked myself slowly but steadily from the bottom all the way to a rank 1 diamond player who faced mostly master opponents.
But when I got to this point I started to run into problems. I joined a clan to further my practice, a good move but not one that I would utilize to the extent I could. I started to play more and more games, my goal of getting into master league being so close. But what I did not notice was that the closer I got the more I let go of the foundation of focusing on how to improve and the more I got caught up in my own ego of just wanting to reach that arbitrary higher rank or league or number of ladder points. I kept checking the league of people I played against and saw a lot of master opponents but then I started getting small tilts and losing streaks, the usual kind that you always get but at this point this was devastating to me. When I noticed I went from playing against master players to “only” top diamond I lost some confidence, when I saw my ladder points drop in 5 straight losses I was too caught up trying to figure out how many I had to win to earn the lost points back. I stopped learning from games and just dove into the next, the goal was now more important than the path towards it. In every game I played my head was still in the last one and the frustration grew and with it the tilts grew longer. I lost to all kinds of things that I really knew how to beat and small mistakes grew into major problems because I failed to deal with them properly. In the end my confidence was completely depleted and that familiar thought that maybe I just don’t have what it takes to play this game crept back into my mind. Eventually I just stepped out of the game and took a break for over two months. I had to ask myself if playing this game as a serious hobby was something I really wanted to do.
As I am now over 1000 words into this manifesto, you can assume that my decision was that I do want to keep going. The break from the game was just what I needed to get my priorities straight, in so many words my problem was that I could not see the forrest for the trees while I was too caught up in what had grown into an obsession about getting to some random place in the ladder system, when real progress is measured in how you improve between games. I worked hard to go from a total rts scrub into diamond league and a vastly better player. But the path from bronze to diamond, and the path from diamond to high masters/grand masters is just as long and requires a shift in learning. To get to diamond I massed A LOT of games. Now I did not just mass games blindly, I did work on theory, study my mistakes and generally I tried to keep good practice methods but during my break I have realized that to go the next step, those methods must be much more refined and applied consistently and with discipline and most importantly of all it requires a different mindset. To be quite frank, I had to drop my ego in order to get back to the game. I had to kill that part of my brain that was obsessed with climbing in the ladder because that was what ended up getting me frustrated in games, drawing my focus to how many games I would have to win in order to earn back the points from that last losing streak. That frustration made me just mass games, without really learning anything from them.
After having severely changed my attitude and my mindset, and started working on an in depth arsenal of methods to improve my game I now have a game plan and milestones for how to make my second journey in Starcraft 2. My mindset is refreshed and I am determined to focus on my game and how to improve it. This blog is part of it, a way for me to gather my thoughts and be able to step outside of myself and see my practice from outside. But it is also for those of you in the same situation, who will have the chance to read this blog and learn from my mistakes and successes in order to refine your own practice, and to some extent, anyone reading this blog will help me in my motivation as well.
This is where my journey begins, where it takes me I have no idea but I am just as motivated and excited as I was when I played my first Starcraft 2 game as a complete scrub who two port cloak banshee rushed every single game and just as I now, a macro oriented diamond player look back and ruffle the hair of that kid, I hope to one day look back at the diamond guy, laughing at his simplistic understanding of the game. My blog does state that this is a journey towards grand masters league but do not mistake that for obsession with that goal. I put that as the goal simply because for me, the end goal really always have to be just as high as I can get. Because to say otherwise would be to suggest that if I keep improving, there will come a point where I say “Okay, I am done, mission accomplished”. But that day will never come. It is very possible that I never reach grand masters, maybe I don’t even reach masters but that is in the end irrelevant to my new mindset. My focus lies on getting better at the game, every day a bit better than the day before. Wherever that takes me that is where I am going.
Starcraft is more than just a game, it influences our entire life, and I can honestly say that my journey so far through Starcraft has made me a better person and taught me things that I can use in so many other aspects of life. The one thing that is so amazing about Starcraft, is that the journey to improve never ends!
Vanguard 