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Hot Stories
Sucking at StarCraft 2
Jason Trent, Associate Writer
April 2, 2010
Hello everyone. My name is Jason, and I suck at StarCraft 2. There. I said it. Happy? Some say that the first step of recovery is admitting you have a problem, so hopefully this helps. A near and dear friend recently invited me to join the StarCraft 2 beta, and having been a die hard StarCraft fan, I happily accepted the offer. I remember playing the original StarCraft on my trusty ol' Pentium, a computer with a 90 Mhz processor (yes, believe it or not, this was once considered a gaming rig) back in 1998. I spent a lot of time with the game, and I eventually became pretty good at it. I wasn't the come all be all StarCraft kid, but I could definitely hold my own in online matches. Time passed and Brood Wars released. Again, with new fuel added to my addiction fire, I played compulsively for many years. I held LAN parties and played on Battlenet frequently and life was good. Eventually newer and shinier games came about, and my attention was taken away from StarCraft. Now it's 2010 and StarCraft 2 is finally nearing it's release.
Downloading the game took what seemed like a lifetime. From what I can tell, Blizzard likes to use something similar (if not identical) to torrents for distributing content, so my download speeds were directly related to the number of other people using the Blizzard Downloader and their upload speeds. I can understand the benefits of this to Blizzard, but still, it went slower than I'd have liked. I left the downloader running, and went to bed in hopes that my game would be ready by the time I got up in the morning. I awoke to the soothing sounds of birds chirping and knew that the day was going to be special. I jumped out of bed, and without bothering to get dressed, jumped on my PC to confirm that StarCraft 2 was ready to play. It was.
Blizzard took some steps to help make your first several games a learning experience. First, the game speed is cranked down to a near crawl. It takes a while to do anything, but you'll probably want to stick with this setting until you're comfortable with the new units and upgrade path. The other major thing done to ease you along the learning curve is that you're only matched with people who are also in the training area. This prevents you from being thrown into a game against someone much more skilled then yourself. If you're a StarCraft prodigy, don't worry. You can choose to skip this and move onto the normal matches. Everyone else will probably want to stay put for now.
I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again. In StarCraft, when playing as the Terrains, my favorite combination of units was having both Siege Tanks and Goliaths. Obviously I didn't do quite enough research before trying to play the game, so I thought I'd try a similar strategy for my first game out. It turns out the Goliath was nowhere to be found in the game, so this strategy crashed and burned as I wound up with few anti-air units while my opponent decided to use almost all air units. I failed miserably. The next game didn't go much better. I decided to play a 2-on-2 match, hoping that my teammate would make up for my inadequacies. The game started and he sent me a message somewhere along the lines of, "this is my first game. I hope you're good." I replied letting him know that I was also an amateur, though I'd give it my best shot. I guess one of our opponents was having a connection problem, or maybe he was frightened of the idea of facing such a formidable foe as myself, but he left the game, and I gained some confidence in knowing that the battle had taken a turn to make things easier for me. Though this probably wasn't going to be the most honorable battle I'd ever fought, it had the potential to be a self-esteem booster. To make a long story short, we lost, and we didn't just lose, we went up in flames. It was already a harrowing experience as it was, but then our opponent decided to point out that it was a two-on-one match, and he still managed to win. I was humiliated.
I didn't want these first couple of games to mar my experience, so I kept on with it. Eventually, I started winning games, and the universe was in balance once again, but for those of you who love StarCraft, yet let your skills wane a bit, keep in mind that there is going to be a bit of time before you'll be competitive like you once were. Don't let this deter you. Battlenet is setup in a way where it will intelligently set you up with others having a similar skill set to your own, so if you suck, you'll get matched up with people who also suck. Maybe you'll even get matched with me. If practice makes perfect, then it's probably true that not practicing makes you rusty. I'm coming to terms with myself and accept that I never be in the same gaming shape I was in in the early 2000's and that I may never impress my dad, but I'll still have fun.
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