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Just a warning first, that the boxed section in this blog might be a waste of time for some of you. There's nothing educational there, so only read it if you have time and just wanna get involved in my thoughts!

I guess I'm so bored at work I decided to do this. So the past few months of StarCraft... wait what? Wasn't I busy with Diablo III and Hearthstone? Yeah, suddenly all that hype died and now at the start of 2014 Season 2, I find myself back to this game after flings with others.

With the recent "comeback", I've discovered two new things related to StarCraft and I'd love to share my thoughts on them.

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The Core

Yeah, that thing where you've thought of trying but you thought to yourself it won't work out for you or it's plain retarded. I'm not gonna endorse it or anything here, because I've only used it for like 2 weeks. But perhaps I can share a bit of my thoughts about it...

It's pretty good, in the sense I don't have to move my hands about the keyboard anymore. No more pressing P for patrol, no more pressing L for lift and land, no more pressing O to unload SCVs from CC because you accidentally loaded them for some reasons. No more stretching to 8 or 9 just to get your last production building, and for some people, no more making your pinky feel awkward when pressing Ctrl or Shift.

I don't feel that I'm playing faster or anything yet, but I feel there's the potential to. I'm not utilising all the control groups yet since I'm still getting used to it and trying to make it muscle memory to macro. It's definitely easier when you just need to rest your palm at once spot, and then everything is just within 1-2 key spacing away from reaching it.

Ok, enough of the good stuff. What about the bad? Well, the bad is, it won't help everyone. As far as I know, no Korean pros uses The Core. Not because they don't know about it, but I guess it's because they're fast enough even with standard hotkeys, that they don't need The Core for it. Some of them have already played for at least 10 years (not counting their years as a progamer) with the standard layout, such that a switch will only be destructive.

Some of you would know that I have a pretty high APM (don't bash me for this, I'm on the side of the people saying APM doesn't matter too), and for my own standard I already felt I was fast enough. So the question is, why did I switch? Quite simple, it's actually none of the reasons I've listed above. I just wanted a different experience playing StarCraft, to make gameplay less mundane, that's all! It's just that, after switching, I realised about the benefits that came along with it and that's what I'm sharing about.

Please do not switch if you can't play consistently (at least 1 game that will let you hit maxed food, easily done in AI) for 2 weeks. If you have a tournament or competition to prepare for, you also fall in this category. It's really hard if you don't practice something consistently, as your brain is less likely to remember the patterns you press, blah blah and stuff that you know what I'm about to say.

Team Games

Yeah man, that retarded game mode that takes your #dedication away. I've come to fall in love with this and I don't blame anyone for this. Seems like it was just this part of me that wanted to play teams but haven't really done so for.. a year?

In team games (better so with friends), you get to experience a whole lot of stuff that makes your day. Because of the stress-free environment (admit it, there's a certain level of stress in 1v1 depending on how serious you take it), you just let it go and do all sorts of funny things and also get to see a lot of funny stuff happen. You have Schnitzel asking me to lift of to the gold, and I only realised there are rocks after lifting off. You have those awesome moments where you hold off 1 base pushes from the opponent's team in a 4v4 until the very end, and emerge victorious. You get to just go mass Toy-cars and burn every single crap you see.

I don't like the fact that every game spent in 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4 can be a game spent in 1v1, but I still do it nevertheless. It still improves you somehow, just not as much as 1v1. For myself, I'm trying to prioritise fun over the more glorious stuff like #dedication, #improvement and what not. So this season, I am aiming to just lay back and play in whatever mode I feel like playing for the day. After all, I'm not aiming to be tournament-material or anything!

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Oh, that wall of text. I guess that sums up my past few months (more like few weeks) of StarCraft! So actually the whole point of posting this was also to find out, how has the past few months of StarCraft been for you guys? Feeling stale, or maybe getting more motivated to be better? Just share it below!