Diamond... what?

Ok i have been quite inactive playing sc2 lately i have been playing some but not really doing that well, the ladder reset and i played a game, well rather i quit a game i wanted to see if me and Fafner could get in the same division as taht might spark some competetive athemosphere between us, who would reach the highest possision in the leauge?!, so we both join a game, do a count down and quit at the same time, only to find out that i got into diamond and left poor Fafner behind in Plat :-(

I dont quite know how i ended up in diamond sure i ended in top plat last season but it wasent like i was beating or meeting diamonds all the time mostly meet top plats

i guess i will have to fight for lower spots this season at least its only 2 month long :)

Also nice new ladder pool actually don't think i will veto any maps :)

What happend since my last update

Well I just wanted to post a brief update about whats been going on since my last update, and I’ll try to do it whitout getting to specefik otherwise it would probally end up being a wall of text.

1: Got into platinum after my placement match as the kickoff of season 2

2: Changed race back to protoss after a really bad losing strea as zerg

3: Got my stream up and running pretty smoothly www.justin.tv/aiuradun

3½: Made some introes and other fun stuff for the tournament in #4

4: Hosted and casted a tournament with the guys from kingscup.eu a Danish site that have weekly tours

5: Made a twitter account around a million years after everyone else!, you should be able to find me wwith my nickname AiurAdun

6: Updated my blog a little with some more different stuff like recent comment newest tweets, and all that kind of good jazz as Day[9] would have put it.

7: Tried playing a little LoL(Leauge of legends) in short( I like it more then HoN, but still prefere DOTA mostly due to the fackt that I know DOTA and how stats etc work, but I might play a bid more LoL because it was quite enjoyable.

8: And of course played some Starcraft 2 Last I checked I was rank 5 in my league and rank 1 on fafner’s ladder list (www.teamladder.dk)

The little gold that could

Well the season is over and i ended up in 7’th place in my Gold leauge which was enough for my goal of top 8. (still had loads of unspent bonus points.

After the reset I played my first few games and in the placement match got promoted to platinum league, which is not completely unexpected since I mostly played against platniums and a few diamonds at the end of Season 1.

It’s really hard to keep playing a race when you know you play so much better with another race, I really can’t imagine how Morrow must have felt and how many times he must have thought screw this I’m going back to Terran, at least I keep thinking screw Zerg lets go back to Protoss where I actually don’t suck that hard.

But I’m not ready to give up yet all though some losses really makes me crunch my toes(can you actually say that in English?)

End of season - Last week

Well the end of the season 1 is coming up sio I played a bid more just to get a league up before the lock, so now I am in gold,

I feel like I am getting more of a handle of playing zerg all though I still have quite a few issues especially with macro, and when to build units, but my grasp of when t drone and when to build units have gotten a lot better.
Currently I am playing against platinum players and meet a few diamonds; right now I would say my ZvsZ is my weakest MU.

After the promotion I am missing a few 100 points from reaching the top 8 to get the best possible end season rank :-) and I really won’t be able to accept not being in the top 8 so I’m attempting to reach that in this last week I need around 300 points for top 8 if they don’t play at all but they probably will so I will probably need quite a few points extra, but I am confident I will make it, and most likely get into plat or diamond with my first placement game in season 2 all though I don’t feel like my zerg is at diamond level at all yet.

Zerg is difficult

Well this is not new, nor surprising to me, but still i just wanted to point the obvious out.

1: Keeping up spawn lava, its way harder than throwing down mules or chrono boosting, because it's so detrimental to your play, and it’s harder to remember and do especially under pressure.

2: The choice between drones and units is again extremely critical to your play, and the worst part of it is that its extremely hard to know what is the right choice, especially in the lower leagues where you can't really count on anything.

These 2 things alone are giving me loads of grief not even mentioning forgetting overlords. damn the games I’ve lost where 2 x lava spawns just burst into 5 lava at each hatch and seeing the Terran move out just to see you are food cappet. Omg worst feeling ever!!... :-)

Even with some absolutely lame losses i'm still improving and i am at the top of my silver division playing vs goldies so i'm expecting to get promoted to gold quite soon.

eSports – Whats worth watching?

Well it’s been a while since IEM now and I’ve had the chance to watch quite a bid of the sc2 games but not really that much of the other games, which made me wonder a bid about which games are actually worth / fun to watch as an eSport.

Well the ones I’ve watched on a regular basis at some point or the other is:
Starcraft/BW
Warcraft 3/TFT
Starcraft 2,

Stuff I’ve seen a glimpse of:
Wow Arena
Counter-Strike
Street Fighter IV
FIFA

And well the stuff I’ve only seen a glimpse off I either found to be too confusing to watch while not playing or just boring to watch.

Wow Arena seems a bit to confusimg even though i've played my fair share of wow, also I don’t belive it would appeal to the masses you really need to be into it.

The same goes for SF IV and CS if you don’t know what it’s all about it really makes you lose intrest SF IV seems to be the same moves over and over again until you catch an opponent off frame and as a spectator you really cant see when / how that happens uness you are playing at a really high level yourselvf.

FIFA on the other hand is something people can easaily relate to but it really just seems dull to watch.

Of the games ive only seen a glimpse off CS seemed the most fun to watch for 2 reasons.
1 I do know the game and therefore I understand the lingo and even though I haven’t played for quite some years and i by no means where good at it, I feel like “I get it”.
2 They are really good at going beyond the game, it's not just the game it’s the team the players, you watch the players and the teams quite a bit and you follow them as competetors and see their ups and downs the team cheering etc, which really involves you as a spectator and makes it fun to watch.

And really that second part is really what have been missing a lot, you cant just cast games or show games, unless people really are at a competent level and knows the games really well the game alone is just not interesting enough for newer or none players to actually want to watch it.

Your need players like Ace pointing at the trophy and back to himself you need the cheering of fans you need to see their intense look and the rivalry between teams and players, this is what is going to make gaming appeal to the masses.

TL:DR?
Make games /eSports appeal to the masses by going more in depth on a personal level of the player and team and not just show the game.

Playing Zerg at a noob level

Hi there, well aftri reached a stable plateau of meeting Gold players and while finding random fun I also found it a bid to unstable and unsuited for training purposes.

So I decided to try out a Race and to become better at it.
I ended up chosing Zerg and well I already suck less then avg. with Protoss, and Fafner is doing his Terran thing so I thought I might as well go with Zerg.
Also I thought it might be fun to share my hopefully progress with everyone else I made I fpvod, unfortunately I did it in Danish but I might go ahead and do the next ones in English all though my English somewhat sucks and I tend to forget words and that kind of good stuff :), but well then the speaking would accompany the game play very well.

Well here are the playlist:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A14ACDA61F99AA2D
I Started out playing the game, then watching the replay straight after commenting on how much I sucked

Raising back up in 1 on 1

Now I’ve started meeting mostly golds at least meet golds in the last 3-4 matches so I am on my way even though I am still ranked as bronze.

While playing random my game Is swinging tremendously and I am losing some really silly games due to not getting all the MU’s an even if I get the MU the level of play is so unpredictable that you don’t really know what you can expect, also you see a lot of 1 base all-ins.

So I guess I need to Expect the unexpected and perhaps play a bit less aggressively with getting expands up / ignoring building defense
Also I am thinking about putting up a stream just for Fafner to watch my suckage 

Doing the FFA!

Well while i have begun to win my 1 on 1’s again I thought I wanted a bid of a different game experience, so I started playing some FFA’s(Free for all’s)
Well 1 thing is for sure it’s different, and its random, and you might as well forget everything you know about timings because ppl do the most crazy things.
I must confess I do find it to be rather fun, ppl go all in something with absolutely no defense, or they go massive defense with an expansion and just mass a semi high tier unit.

The first thing is possible due to ppl not scouting a lot except for the initial who is where an who seems to be a decent player scout after this it’s both too expensive and impossible to keep an eye / scout everyone. Also if you are to “active” on the map ppl are going to see you as a threat and you will be more likely to be attacked.
I Had 1 game 1 going for a DT rush ( The timing where Waaaaay before you would normally see dt’s due to absolutely no defense another guy went fast banshees again with no defense and they both showed up at my base 1 with the dt’s in my main and the banshees at my expo Outch.

Another Game this time on the map Metro I spawned close pos with a Diamond level 1 on 1 terran with me spawning as terran as well.
W mined out both outr mains our naturals he mined out the gold, and we fought over the middle expansion between us pushing siege tanks Thors Vikings for vision and a few bio units for support it was a pretty epic battle and drained all our resources, in the meantime on the other half of the map a platinum 1 on 1 player shared sides with a bronze 1 on 1 player, this ended up in a complete dominant position of the platinum player who could pretty safely take the rest of the map without too much troubles due to our hectic battle at the other end of the map and he could there by secure his win.

Well those 2 games I lost but I did manage to win a few games, I will probably play this a bid more in the future to find out what the best way to handle these games are.

Starting from scratch

Well I had a bid of a rough time starting out with 1 on 1 in sc again, and with the undying feeling that i where going to be demoted i kinda didn’t feel like playing.
After a while I decided what the hell if I am going to get demoted anyway it’s time for a “fresh” start I Chose to go down in ranks to start over to get the fun back and to not be to intimidated to play due to losses, So basically I started losing un purpose, either leaving or just do some completely awful stuff I ended up winning some of those and getting some of the achievements while doing it.

It took around ~60 losses but now I’ve hit rock bottom/Bronze) or close to it and after playing a few games in bronze for the last few achievements I’ve decided to start moving up, going to play random and see how far I can make it, when I don’t feel I will get higher as random I am probably going to switch to Protoss again and see if I can actually make it back into diamond however I doubt it the skill level really seem to have improved quite a lot since I left, but let’s see.

Is this somehow lame / bad sportsmanship / bad mannered? yeah I guess it kind of is, but then again if that is what it takes to start having a little bit of fun and to get the will to play, then I will gladly be a lamer :-)

Why some people don’t improve.

I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately, why some people don’t really seem to improve that much, last night I played with a few friends bronze leaguers, we usually just play some 3 vs 3 team games, I played ~500 ladder games most of them team games. The friends I played with last night however had ~1100 games played each, all of them team games.

Even though they have gotten better then they where the first few games I played with them before I went on my vacation they are still what I would call a low bronze level player in 1 on 1 comparison at least, it boggles my mind why they haven’t improved more than they has, I’m quite sure if you would just take a look at one of the 2 players mechanics and just taught him for like a day he would improve sooooo much.

I guess Quality > quantity especially with the very basics.

Sundance

Even though he is one of the main people getting sc2 into a more professional venue in the vest, for anyone who don’t know who “Sundance“ is, he is running the company that is making the MLG events, and that’s cool and all, especially if you want to see pro gaming in the vest and I do, I would love to have gaming at the state we have seen it in Korea the last many years.

But after listening to some different State of the game episodes and having heard him talk, I’m really not found of that guy at all, first of all he doesn’t know anything about the game at all, and secondly he doesn’t really seem to care to much about the community, I’m not exactly sure why I don’t like him, I guess it’s more of the way he talk to people.

The only thing you can hope for is that he has some guys working for him that actually know what they are doing because he just sounds a bid to much like “money” to me.

So i guess we need new maps.

It’s quite one of those hot topics right now and been for a while now, all the pro’s seem really keen on getting some new maps into the ladder, especially the GSL maps or just larger maps in general.

Blizzard however seem to be a bid reluctant (but not quite as reluctant as they were in sc1 / wc3) to implement and test out new maps, there are probably a lot of reasons for that, one being that they want to make sure the quality of the map is quite high, and it is still a map that is easy to get for newer players etc.

I do think a few of the maps we got now are pretty good, but i do deffinently agree that new and a bid larger maps would spice things up a bid.

Being 4 month behind

Well the first comment i got from Fafner was that my play style was outdated by approximately 3-4 month. And well it’s not surprising since I’ve been away for that amount of time and quite a bid have changed.

I stopped playing around the time where the patch with the roach range was increased by 1, and from that point forward, so other than losing quite a bid of my basic skills I don’t really know what changed in the Matchs ups so I am just doing what I did 4 month ago just a bid worse. So I am just loosing quite a few games except when I play vs Fafner :-) (More on that in another post).

But it would be really helpful to know what the “standard” is in the different matchups.

Getting back into sc2.

Well after 4 month break I’ve had my first few sc2 games,

And yes, I am terribad :-)

I’ve mostly been playing a bid 3vs3 and 4vs4 RT with Fafner, and 1, 1 on 1 - vs Fafners friend / colleague, he was only a bronze player so it wasn’t much of a challenge vs the player, but the real challenge was vs myself, remembering to macro, remembering to build pylons, remembering my scout remembering well basically everything you need to remember while playing sc2.
I played a very passive game to focus a bid more on my macro, this is not how I would normally play but I really felt like I had to focus on my macro just to get started again.
I ended up with an avg unspent of around 500-550, which wasn’t terrible bad considering I had an expo up, but not good either when the only thing I really had to focus on was to build crap.

Also ive watches day9’s episode 252 and 257, about basic mechanics etc, some interesting points there as well, ive tried to re pos my hands to use the hand pivot and to move my keyboard hand as well, it just feels terrible uncontrolled especially with my keyboard hand I can’t seem to do my grouping of units probably if I use my pinky finger as my Crtl key handler I mess up more then I usually do, but this might be one of those things you just have to learn and get used to but with more than 15 years of using my thumb for Crtl its tremendously hard to readjust.

What makes a good mmo?

I have been following the mmo market for quite some times and as of late I have been following a few debates about why mmo’s keep “failing”, and the comparisons keep coming back to wow.

One of the most used arguments in these discutions is that “new mmos looks too much like wow” and that is a reason why a mmo wouldn’t succeed,
Also you keep hearing about 1 mmo after the other with people arguing whether the game is going to be the “wow killer”.

I really don’t buy into any of the two, first of it’s not that it looks like wow or some of the mechanics works like wow’s, hell wow got most of their game mechanics from other games as well, that didn’t make them “fail”, it’s all about polish, and having enough depth / features.

Features is simple if you restrict the players from doing what they are used to be able to do, ie. Make guilds, send mails trade goods and a lot of these seemingly ordinary/simple features that people are used to you will see customers disapearing.

Depth, for a game to be fairly interesting there got to be some depth in the mechanics that makes it interesting and fun to play.

Polish, where I guess really a lot of the companies who have been releasing mmo’s have been lacking, it’s the last 20% that takes 80% of the time, time companies don't want to spend. This is a major mistake especially when we are talking about games, polish is what make everything feel right as it should feel, games are really a lot about the feeling you get if something feels off or wrong or simple just doesn’t work it is really going to turn people away especially in a game where you are expected to use a fairly large amounth of hours.

Why did wow succeed, well there are several reasons one being just hitting with the game at the right time. But one of the things that I believe truly made I difference is the one thing Blizzard excels at In comparison to all other gaming companies, they always ship extremely polished games, even in beta they are already more polished then most other games are at launch.

About the “wow killer” that’s just not going to happen, the only way wow is going to die or get beaten number wise is by Blizzards own next mmo, that being said there are room for other mmo’s but talking about beating wow is just nonsense.


For me the next mmo I am going to play is SWTOR, mostly due to kotor1 and 2 just being awesome, wheatear I am going to play the game as an mmo or just enjoy it as a single player playing through with a few different classes well, that will depend on the quality of the game, but I have no doubt the story part is going to be just as good as what I have come to expect by Bioware!

Switch!

Hi I'm back after my 2½ month vacation to New Zealand and 2 weeks in Australia which is why i haven't been writing on the blog.

The game Switch!

Yesterday I where at ITU for an anime marathon, and all through animes are cool that’s not what I wanted to write about, no I wanted to talk a bit about a game that were introduced to by one of the fellow anime watchers, a game called switch.

You got a 4-5 laneswith 4-5 players each in each and max 1 in 1 lane, the players can then move up and down swapping places with each other, on each lanes random generated pickups occur and like a side scrooller moves towards the players, for now the pickups are +star’s –(minus) stars, and switches and the rare all switch, ill come back to the switches latter.

The goal off the game is to be the first player to get 5 stars so you basically swap places to get the stars or to avoid getting minus stars or switches but you have a cool down on your switch so you can’t just switch all the time so it gets a bid tactical of when you want to use your switch.

This all sounds easy enough, but here is where the tricky part kicks in, the Switch concept, I deliberately explained player swapping as swapping and not switching to avoid confusion.

The 4-5 players all play on the same keyboard, each player have 1 up and 1 down button for swapping players, that might for example be Q & A for Player 1 (at this stage you have 4-5 x2 hands on the keyboard!,
And here is where the Switch pickups come into play, when your player hits a switch pickup one of your controls switches to an unbound key, f.eks. the A&Q player might switch to A & L and then after another switch it could be Y & L, this switch occurs quite rapidly throughout the game and with 8-10 hands on the keyboard it ends in quite a bit of fun and hectic chaos.

After we tried the game we gave some feedback, and I am looking forward to try the game again with the changes he decides to go with.
Sometimes simple games can be as fun as more advanced games and the sharing of keyboards really takes me back, it really adds a new or rather old dimension to games.

Also this is a good lead up to Nordic game Jam which is this coming weekend, unfortunately I’m not participating, but I have been quite impressed with the last few years participants the innovation and what they manage to create in such a short period of time, so can’t wait to see what comes out this year.