SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

2011 was an absolutely horrible year in real life! The flood did ludicrous damage to my family in terms of possessions and morale. The place where I work was destroyed. I did a year at university that ended up accomplishing me absolutely nothing. I broke up with my girlfriend of almost 4 years in horrible circumstances. All in all, 2011 freaking sucked! However, every cloud has a silver lining:

I discovered StarCraft II.

And thus, I count down my top 5 moments of this year.

5 - Discovering StarCraft

Okay, I'm already lying, this wasn't a moment, it was a period. It's ranked 5 because it's hard to justify how little I knew then and how dumb I was. That said, let me tell you a tale.

I played WoW and such. I didn't really like playing it, but I liked the community, I was often on the forums and stuff like that. The point is, I torrented BlizzCon 2010 to watch all the WoW panels. And while I was there I torrented the SC2 finals - Genius (then on NEX) and Chinese player Loner.

I must have watched that series through 20 times over a month or something. Artosis, Tasteless and Day[9] casting. I didn't know what the hell I was watching! The cast was so noob friendly all you really saw were the units, both their bases seemed to stretch across the map almost in unison as the game went on. The colossus, the forcefields, the psi storms, it was just awesome! And thus I was a Protoss player. Took me longer after that to actually go and buy the damn game.

I couldn't find the exact date, but it seems I was Silver in Season 2. I started off playing Protoss, but it was so hard! I remember doing my practice matches (the ones with the novice maps with rocks and on Normal speed) and going for void ray rushes. I switched to Zerg shortly after and was silver super quick! Zerg was super duper easy. I was going undefeated against Protoss just by roach/ling rushing. Eventually, I decided that if I was going to put time in I should do the race that I wanted to play, rather than the one that was easier. In retrospect I wish I was Terran

I wanted to watch some pro SC2 so I torrented MC vs July. It was awesome! Seeing the Korean culture, the boss toss against the old legend, I was gonna steal the nexus cancel 4gate but I decided that it's pointless when no-one scouts in silver league.

After that I discovered TeamLiquid and State of the Game and the rest is history.

So that's #5, and it's not even a moment.

4 - MLG Columbus

This was a moment. This was the first big event since I started following SC2, and I was so pumped! As I'm sure you all know, MLG is at awful times here and most of my 'following' of this MLG was refreshing the bracket on my phone. But it was still fun! I watched some of it and it was the first time the Koreans were there. After taking a lot of shit for never performing IdrA was the highest placing foreigner and MMA took it home. Cool shit all around. There wasn't anything special about this event, it's just that it was my first. And who doesn't have fond memories about their first time

3 - Discovering the SEA community

This isn't a moment either. I'm quite terrible at this.

I knew sc2sea existed though I never really cared, to be honest. I wasn't much of a player and there was always so much happening on Team Liquid and stuff. I knew about a fair few SEA players but not much else. There were three stages of this:

Firstly: meeting mOOnGLaDe on the street; awkward as hell. He was wearing headphones walking down Queen Street Mall in Brisbane and I awkwardly stopped him, and fangirl'd like a bitch. It was the equivalent of meeting a celebrity. It was a few weeks before the start of NASL S2. It was so cool! Man I was retarded. Anyways, that was the first time SC2 wasn't just something in virtual space. I'd never been to a tournament and didn't know anyone else who followed it. But I saw the GLaDe in the street and made an ass out of myself. **** yeah.

Secondly, I went to the EB expo with a friend of mine. We went to the day and night sessions on Saturday and all the Aussie gosus were there for the WCG thingo. If it was just me there, I would have stood around and watched them play all day. I was there with my console gamer friend who drove me (and hit on me the whole time T_T) and he commented on how fast they were (he was watching iaguz's keyboard). I was like dood...that's nothing compared to Koreans! tgun was sleeping and I wanted to poke him and fanboy but I'm a nice guy and let the zerg get some regen. Not really eventful, just seeing all of these gosu players was cool. Shame they didn't have a good spectator setup though.

And lastly, there was starting to post on sc2sea. There's an instant attraction to the tight community, there are pros talking in the chatbox, you could sign up to an open tournament and have a good chance of hitting someone really gosu. I was originally snooping around to find a team after I hit Diamond but as I found out, it's an awesome community to be part of.

2 - Masters and winning PDCL

So I decided over the holidays I'd start playing full-time. It didn't really last, but I was playing hard and for long bursts a day a week or so. Naturally, I got way better really really quick, I made a goal earlier in the year that I'd be Masters by the end of the year and I did it! I had to have 850 ladder points by the end of the season and I grinded it out HARD (like 10 hours a day for 2 days) and got promoted before the season ended. ezpz!

After that there was winning PDCL. Thanks to Andy All-Kill from AsG (Nasch), I didn't get to play much, only that one game in the finals that won the whole thing. I didn't get to show off my play well at all, I was super nervous and couldn't figure out how to wall in on that stupid Blizzard map (whatever it's called). I won anyway, and it was cool that my team won. My game just royally sucked.

Joining AsG and practicing with people and losing to zealo's multiple forms of broken-ass bullshit added so much depth to the game and such. Just cool shit all around.

(oh, and this wasn't really a moment either)

1 - qxc all-kill of IM

This is a moment. Even if most of the others weren't.

So when FXO said they were going to Korea I was fanboying for them so hard!! I watched every night they played, it hurt to see them lose but even when they took games it was so cool. Their last time playing, against the legendary IM, not many people were watching. I was literally in tears when qxc beat Mvp in that final match. He comes out and his team is hugging him and shit, he's trying to hold back tears, he throws his bandanna into the crowd, it was just an amazing experience and captures the magic that SC2 and eSports have. There were so many great moments in tournaments all year...but none were as special as bandanna man.

Thus concludes this awful blog which forgets its original purpose multiple times! Hopefully you enjoyed it as much as my brain hurts when re-reading it (which is a lot).

Oh, and shameless plug: sign up for my tournament.