SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

Hihi! Decided to start trying to blog after being inspired by my friend x5Bard's improvements and progress blog. Also, my favourite Chemistry teacher said that putting goals down on paper makes them real and more tangible, which is why he got us to all write 'I will get an A in Chemistry' at the start of the year. I'm hoping by putting my goals down here that they'll be more real and I'll be more focused when it comes to playing Starcraft 2!

At the moment my primary goal is to only play Starcraft 2 when I have the free time to, basically ensuring that I balance my life and have the correct priorities. I think many of you would be able to relate to being quite busy with life but still spending more time than you should on SC2! So stopping this from happening and ensuring that I use the time I have to play effectively and efficiently is my primary SC2 goal. It's taken around a year to get from Bronze - GM in SEA and I'm hoping I can still continue to improve steadily with the time I have.

Now onto gameplay goals! I play Zerg and am low SEA. I honestly believe I should probably still only be in masters in SEA but Blizzard makes the ladder not me!

One of my improvement goals I have had for quite some time has been to play smarter and be less lazy. By playing smarter I mean focus on trying to scout more and react better to unit compositions and different timings instead of just relying on purely having more stuff and outmacroing. I don't want to have very linear or predictable zerg play and want to be able to greatly vary my play depending on the different situations that can arise ingame. Not being lazy primarily refers to not just going through games thinking 'derp derp derp derp' and assuming players are doing standard things because it seems more fun that way (scout more often lazy Dolo!) and not being lazy/impatient when it comes to unit engagements.

A large part of playing smarter is obviously understanding the game better (Raithen teach me your builds!!! ^^) and for me also being able to maintain a solid macro cycle when I'm in unfamiliar situations. I want to have a more solid understanding of the current metagame, including macro builds, rushes and timings and know how to counter these and why the counters work. In the past GSL helped a lot with this, along with watching pro replays/other tournaments however I haven't had much time to do this recently. If anyone's got tips on how they efficiently keep up with the metagame please let me know!

The second game play orientated goal I have is to become a more all round player. This is quite a broad goal so achieving it will require small steps or sub-goals. The first sub-goal I currently am working on is to learn to all in/pressure and do it well! Up until diamond I learned minimal strategy and would just rely on macroing (inject imba) and making fairly standard/strong (imba) unit compositions to win games. As such I have fairly weak micro/unit utilization in my play and know maybe 3 allin builds which I rarely use. To fix this I need to learn some up to date pressure and all in builds, learn how to best control/utilize units and how to follow up the builds in different situations. Following this I'd learn what other players look for when scouting for these builds and work on different building placement and how best to deny scouting in order to ensure the allin/pressure build is effective.

Learning how to pressure effectively and knowing instinctively when you can pressure are things I believe will make me a much stronger all round player at LANs specifically. It's great to be able to mix up your play in BO3 or BO5 sets at LANs/online tourneys. I love the mind-game/meta-game side of the BO3/BO5 games as opposed to ladder play and learning to mix up my game play dramatically will hopefully allow me to start placing better in things like the soon to be monthly Arena LANs!

Specific match-up problems:

ZvT - need to refine my early game again as the build I'm using is not timed out well at all. After I feel more comfortable with my preferred macro style I'll start trying to learn pressure builds.

ZvZ - At the moment for this match-up I just want to learn a couple of pressure builds that I can transition out of easily (shoutout to the RTS genius Raithen!!!). Will work on refining these builds and then focus on midgame/lategame ZvZ following this.

ZvP - This match-up used to be my weakest but as I've focused on improving it so much I believe it's become my strongest at the moment. My early game is fairly refined for this match-up, however for some reason the zealot + stalker or zealot + 2 stalker pressure some Protoss do seems to throw me off a lot so I'll be trying to focus more on not freaking out over a couple of units when I play!

I also should work on my responses to the Protoss third. I need to make sure I learn how to/when I can pressure the third properly (instead of derpderp make unit A move hope it works) and ensure I don't over commit on units when trying to pressure so I can remain in a strong economic position and eventually get my tech going. If the Protoss third does go up I want to be in a position where I can scout what 3 base timing they might do or what unit composition they'll have when they try to take a 4th. This is so that I can either hold the timing or pressure/deny that 4th base. Being able to consistently hold off the different 3 base timings (stalker+sentry+immortal or stalker+sentry+immortal+collosus) is probably my priority for this match up at the moment.

So that turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would be! Cheers for reading this far, hopefully it's at the very least been an interesting read! At the moment I might work on a monthly update period, only more often if I feel it's warranted based on the speed of my progress. Peace!