Discovering a Passionate Love for RTS at 43.
Yes, 43 years old. Me.
My family (husband AND 2 teenage boys) have always LOVED Starcraft. My husband never played any matches, just played the campaigns and went for just about all the achieves. My youngest, the League ‘specialist’ also plays Starcraft competitively (multiplayer … not sure how many v how many, but I know not 1 v 1.
At BlizzCon 2013, I watched a ton of the WCS matches, including the final. And, a song by Maduk, featuring Veela, called Ghost Assassin, is one of my alltime favorites. You probably already know this if you follow me. The song is totally fan-music made for Heart of the Swarm - it tells Sarah Kerrigan’s story in a way that really spoke to me before even watching a single cinematic. All this focus on Kerrigan, and the incredible excitement of watching esports live made me decide that I DEFINITELY needed to play through the SC2 campaign if only for the story.
So I started. And … I was loving it. So I decided to 'just see what PvP was like. I played the Stage 1 training game. I played stage 2. And I played the A.I. And I CANNOT get enough.
Totally and utterly surprised me. I NEVER expected to enjoy an RTS. I usually feel totally incompetent when competing against other players. And I like winning. But it turns out that I love the challenge, the learning, and the thrill of a StarCraft even more.
So what am I doing? Well, let me start by saying that I am obsessed. I’m nearly finished with the Heart of the Swarm campaign (mostly on normal). I have played through the Wings of Liberty first.
But I have WAY more hours in Training games and practice games against he AI.
It keeps bouncing me back and forth between Easy and Medium matches. Every time it bounces me off to medium, I am horrified. “Not ready!!”
I decided very early to 'do it right’. So rather than learning some 'bad habits’ - I went and watched some Day9 Newbie Tuesday videos.
My first decision was to learn control keys and hotkeys IMMEDIATELY.
So, here I am, at 43, LEARNING a VERY challenging and competitive game.
Some aspects feel a lot like learning to touch type long ago. Lots of repetition of purely mechanical processes (improving map awareness and actions per minute). But I decided to get into this habit as early as possible.
It is awesome. I love, love, love learning. It is invigorating. It is ridiculously exciting. And it improves my mental outlook. I feel thrilled to be learning and can just about FEEL my brain enjoying it. It’s GOT to be good for you.
Yesterday, I was feeling really really frustrated, because i was continually losing in matches against the AI. I felt like I was trying to do everything right, and I just got totally overwhelmed.
I know, now, a LOT of my mistakes now.
Anyway, my 15 year old came downstairs, after finishing watching some ultra important League match. He watched a TOTAL disaster of a match I was in the process of losing badly. Drones everywhere. Too many queued units. It was just a mess, and Protos were everywhere - all over my main base, it was unsalvageable.
He started saying something. He stopped himself, and then said, “No, I can see you’re panicking right now. I’ll come back in 30 minutes, and we can talk before you start again.
My James turns out to be an AMAZING coach. He came back, as promised, and told me, "Look at you, and all those good habits you’ve got!” He started by telling me a lot of things he could tell I had been trying to do right.
Then he pointed out: “You’re trying to make like ALL the units.”
He said pick a unit. And then stick with it, and go AS SOON as you can against the other base. He didn’t care what unit. He just thought I should focus on learning that one unit and how it plays at the time.
And he said, DON’T try to try to fix anything else until you’ve won 5 matches in a row with that unit.
And what do you know. It was amazing. I’ve won 3 now.
And I’m doing Day9 exercises. I’m obsessed.
I know I’ll never be up against truly good players, but I’d like to graduate out of Easy matches against the AI and have look at Unranked matches.
But we’ll see. The point is that I love, love, love learning how to play this game well.