So this is odd way to put it but I guess this is one way of saying it. Might sound silly but I'm attempting to become a Starcraft 2 progamer and eventually make a name for myself the international scene granted the right opportunities.
My biggest issue at the moment is essentially burning out. You could say that if you truly wanted to become a professional at something you would love absolutely every element of it and not burn out but I don't think that's true. Maybe my mental strength isn't as strong as others or I'm forcing myself down a path to become burned out because I’m forcing out games when I just don't want to play. I have my reasons that make me want to play and to a degree that does help. When you constantly face negative feedback, you can't help but feel like you're not making any progress. By making progress you need to play more and in the end face more negative feedback, putting myself in a direction where I need to go but at a rate very slow. A rate which is affected by the will to learn and capacity to be capable of doing so. If anyone else has been down that path I'm sure you can agree that with constant negative feedback as strong as your will might be, there's something about the unknown that will always make you doubt yourself. Although to know that you tried to the best of your abilities to get as far as you possibly could is enough reconciliation in itself.
One of my biggest issues for me when I first started playing Starcraft 2 at the start of this year is that I skipped the "fun phase" so to speak. Instead of learning the game through the fun way of making mistakes and doing stupid shit I wanted to get where I wanted to be and as fast as possible. A way to make this game more interesting is to talk about it with the people that play it as it adds more interest, personal competition to achieve more and easier to converse ideas. So I’m proposing that if there are any people that are in the same boat or are at least GM/M on SEA or NA, or Diamond/Masters on Korea feel free to message me or add me on skype: zenaku6 to talk meta/play customs. I'm also currently looking for a team!
About me: My name is David Addati and I'm 19 years old! I have been playing games competitively since I was 11/12 starting off with
Call of Duty 2 -> Attended lans, was apart of team that became top5 in one of first seasons of competitive cod2
Command and Conquer 3 http://i.imgur.com/CUoy3.jpg?1 , Also was somewhat apart of Serious Gaming (recognised European team)->
Call of Duty 4 -> Paid to play to advertise for a team, voted as best mp5 in Australia (tied 1st)
Quake Live -> Top 5 Dueler at any point in time, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2LvybotJAc , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywGWG9v4CUo , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGaImoh95Fw
League of Legends -> Played 2.5k+ games during my final year of high school to focus on study. General idea of meta/how to play champions
Starcraft 2 -> Achieved GM on SEA(6/7 months), Masters on NA (don't play there), and Masters on Korea(11months), Haven’t mad many opportunities play in various tournaments but hopefully in the upcoming ACL!
Start of this year went to uni for 6 months, deferred to get better at Starcraft. Current schedule is Starcraft, Learning Korean, exercise, work and occasionally go out.
Goals: Compete in GSL by at least end of 2013/2014, be apart of an international team, attend various international tournaments and study Korean as a language in Korea
tl;dr: Let's all be friends and play starcraft
inb4 get a job you bum
I think it's awesome that you are doing this. If you want to be a pro-gamer then you have one realistic chance at doing it, and its between the ages of 18-30. University is always going to be an option before, during and after pro-gaming so don't let anyone try and sway you from what you want out of your life.
As far as improving goes - do NOT take ladder to be the benchmark of your skill or talent, only use it as a guide of progress. Playing 7-8 hours a day on ladder, treating it as the be all and end all of representation of skill, is very counter-productive and can lead to a lot of stress which will lead to slow improvement.
Instead, use tournaments as benchmarks of your skill. Find the weekly NA tournaments and compete in them every week. If there's none happening on SEA, find someone better than you every week to play in a bo5 or something with you, and use that as a benchmark.
Goals man. Goals are all you need in order to achieve them. A nice technique to try and avoid that burn out is to find some positive in the negative. If you feel like the last few games were pretty bad on your part, sit down and learn something from them and smile at the fact that good has just come from bad. Stop by the mGG channel in-game, I'm sure our m/gm players will prac with you.
@iMSundeR Thanks for the support. Not many people quite think the same way and as much as I look it at in the same light in terms of university not everyone quite thinks like that. Will definitely try do as you said and disregard ladder as much and try find more tournaments to play in. Personally I've found it quite it kinda hard to sift through all the information to get what I need whilst also thinking about all the other things that I need to do such as playing etc. Sounds like an odd thing to say but at times it feels rather overwhelming when it's hard enough to play the game at the perfect standard and not have to worry about much else besides just playing.
@MezjE, At the start of CoD4 I use to play for Zero Remorse who were at top5ish team at the time. I was actually kicked out then (being a tad immature myself and not quite grasping the situation) and moved into top8ish team Deus Ex Machina where we'd always be apart of CG-i (highest league at the time). After a while when CoD4 died out for a bit I joined a team called Dark Angels which included namely Nick who was a part of iM/voxe. Our goal at the time was just to be the best team in CG-o which was the only league they had running at the time which we won. It was kind of an odd situation but someone was offering to pay us to play in a tournament we know we would most likely do well in and so we played for ~6months.
@mGGDrGooSe Completely agree. I find myself in a position where I don't find losses too hard and as an experimental way to get better but not always is that attitude kept as much as it is ideal. If I'm ever on SEA I'll definitely check out your channel but I mostly float around Korea.
@Pandan Thanks ;p, as much as those goals seem a bit ridiculous considering how far I've felt improvement over the year and how much better I'm able to read games now I definitely feel like the potential is there, but I guess we'll have to wait and see!
@fray`fenner Thanks again! I recently took a 3week holiday to Korea to check out the culture and didn't really have that much time to practice much. At the moment I'm playing SEA until I feel confident enough with my mechanics and general correct responses before I go back to playing on Korea where I normally play most of my games
Also my ID/character codes are:
WoL
SEA - sRZenAku.329
KR - ZenAku.813
NA - Chaos.1904 (share account with a friend who sometimes plays on here hence the different name)
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