As seen on reddit

2012-03-07T21:48:00.001-05:00

Other stinkers

2011-10-14T13:33:00.000-04:00

It turns out that I am so bad at blogging that I can't even regularly blog about Starcraft. I stink at blogging about Starcraft! Lucky for you, my idea of writing about Starcraft stupidity is not original. Check out the sites below to get your fill:

In So I Suck at Starcraft a guy from Denmark writes about his efforts to get better at Starcraft. He is significantly better than I am, but still trying to figure some things out. He recently switched races (in Season 3), which has allowed him to still sound like someone who has things to learn.
The Cynical Brit put together some videos of learning to play Starcraft. The learning process took place during the beta, but follows one player learning to play the game from no-experience to actually looking pretty good.

In addition to those two, there are all the sites I regularly use on the right-most sidebar.

TheRomanian & jPoDeN vs Zorgum & Coopy

2011-10-11T21:49:00.000-04:00

I've tried starting this post a number of times. I keep on wanting to talk about how stupid the cheese is and how good players do not cheese. However, deep down I know the truth. Cheese is really what a loser calls an effective strategy that works. What may make them unique is that their weakness looks obvious in hindsight.

My brother and I got cheesed the other day. He has started to play protoss, which confused the issue a bit. Although neither of us scouted, I saw the cheese coming at my base. A lone probe sat outside my base for a moment before building the pylon and starting the cheese. I told my brother about it, but he got confused because he thought I was confused by him playing protoss (instead of zerg). I tried to react, but I never got a critical mass up to drive the protoss out of my base.

Looking at the replay, their strategy is almost obscenely all-in. They had NOTHING in their bases. If we had just been able to hold out a little bit and have ANY kind of counter-offensive then we probably would have wiped the floor with them. In the end, we just quit because we weren't having fun.

Morals of the story

Scout. The best way to beat the cheese is to see it coming.
Don't panic. Breathe and deliberately react.

Replays

Download the replay from SC2Replayed.com

Idra rage quits . . . again

2011-10-08T21:12:00.000-04:00

I had intended to post some other content in between these two Idra posts, but in the interest of just keeping some content coming I am publishing this.

This game is not as clear as the other one (with the hallucinated void rays), but it is still Idra rage quitting from a won game.

Moral of the story

Do not rage quit
Remember that neither you nor your opponent can see everything going on

Idra rage quits

2011-10-05T23:45:00.000-04:00

I'll start by saying that the professional Starcraft player known as Idra is way out of my league. This should be obvious, but I wanted to make it clear that I knew this. He is brilliant and amazing at what he does. He also rage quits. I have done this before, although I believe my rage is probably a little more contained than his. My quits have also occurred in the isolation of my own apartment/home, whereas some of his "best" occur in a tournament with thousands of dollars on the line and many live feeds going out worldwide. Coverage of the rage quit below first brought Idra to my novice attention.

Idra had the game won, saw a bunch of the units that could counter his army (void rays beat brood lords), and then quit before he found out they were all hallucinations. Below is a sub-par (but still funny) Hitler-meme version of Idra finding out about the fake void rays (only has subtitles for the first half, which is why it's sub-par):

We will visit Idra's rage quitting again in the future. For now I will just say that I am impressed by anyone who is good at zerg, and especially impressed by someone as good as Idra. Even if his lack of maturity costs him games.

Moral of the story

Don't rage quit

Coopy vs Cameron

2011-10-01T23:29:00.001-04:00

My brother sent me this replay. He had recently been listening to Day[9] and was working on his drone production. I do not know what the other guy was working on. They both seemed to suffer from some schizophrenia. There are numerous points at which I had to ask myself "what the heck?" I think my brother probably should have lost this one, but he pulled it out. I am still not sure how it happened. My guess is that if I had been on either side of this battle then I would have lost.

Moral of the story:

Think about what you are attacking

Replays

Download the replay from SC2Replayed.com

Zorgum & Coopy vs PyroAcid & Magic

2011-10-01T23:18:00.001-04:00

A week ago my brother and I played a game against a real idiot and his poor partner. My brother and I are currently in the bronze league when we play together, and that is not an accident. This particular battle we played too conservatively. We were aiming for and achieved map control, but we probably could have and should have rolled them earlier. We also did not increase our production to match our resource accumulation. So they completely turtled and we didn't bother to try and break through until the end of the game.

While all sides exhibited some stupid behavior strategically, the reason this replay gets the honor of being the first real post is PyroAcid's antics. At the time they were pretty bad, but watching the replay they look even worse. Hypocritical and extremely stupid.

Other than a few pokes at their bases by my brother, no real engagements occurred for the first 18 minutes. Seriously. That's how badly everybody involved stinks (including myself). I should mention that Pyro had sent out a warp prism before, but it got killed by my turrets before I even noticed it and only saw it after-the-fact in the replay. The next time he tried to send the warp prism to my brother, but my brother noticed it and we shot it down too. That resulted in these gems:

19:39 PyroAcid: omg you guys are such !@#$%s attack or something
20:25 PyroAcid: go better !@#$ to then wipe nobbie %^& becouse they cant attack with small forces

Other than the two warp prisms, they had not attacked either. We had accumulated a nice army, but did not feel it strong enough for the frontal assault yet. We started to poke around their wall-in when they finally moved out. Initially, they drove us back and it looked really bad to me. My brother kept a cooler head, though, and we wiped out their offensive. That resulted in the following conversation as we counterattacked:

30:02 PyroAcid: we los tyto noobs magic
30:29 Zorgum: Mommy taught you some nice words
30:20 Coopy: looks like we beat some more noobs
31:18 PyroAcid: look who just build expansion just so the game whould last longer
31:44 Zorgum: No, we expanded so we would win
32:05 PyroAcid: no you expaneded all over to waste our !@#$ing time

Even though he had not done anything to attack us for the first 24 minutes or so, he complained about us not attacking. If he had just spent that time making a death ball then they could have rolled us, but instead he did nothing and just built carriers in the end. What did he think this was? Brood War? That really shocked me when looking at the replay: he had nothing the entire game until he built the carriers.

Morals of the story:

Ramp up production so that you do not accumulate too many minerals. We should have been ready to attack much sooner, and we should have been harassing more.
Map control => better economy => better army => win (usually)
Running your mouth makes you look like an idiot, especially if you swear and are losing.

Replays

Download the replay from SC2Replayed.com

I am currently using CamStudio to try and capture the replays because I am cheap. I do not know how to best set it up and I am not sure my computer can handle it, so the videos are really jumpy. Sorry. I would suggest just downloading the replay.

In the beginning

2011-09-26T20:56:00.002-04:00

I enjoy Starcraft, but only play casually. That also means I mostly play poorly too. While I hope to improve and eventually not stink so badly, I expect to never get to a point where I won't do stupid things. I will try to put these stupid things on this blog. I will also post replays when other players do particularly bone-headed things. I hope my visitors find humor and enjoyment in the demonstration of incompetence. I also hope they learn from the mistakes. Happy viewing!

I stink at Starcraft

As seen on reddit

Other stinkers

TheRomanian & jPoDeN vs Zorgum & Coopy

Morals of the story

Replays

Idra rage quits . . . again

Moral of the story

Idra rage quits

Moral of the story

Coopy vs Cameron

Moral of the story:

Replays

Zorgum & Coopy vs PyroAcid & Magic

Morals of the story:

Replays

In the beginning