Sunday, May 30, 2010

2v2 Gold

I have been doing better in my 2v2's as of late. Before I was around rank 60, but I got down to rank 13. Hard to tell if I am actually getting any better though. I could be playing worse opponents or having better partners. Haven't played the past few days because I drove down to Texas for the summer. I will probably still be down here when the game is released on July 27th so I will have to install it on my laptop. Yes, I have a gaming laptop. Everyone will just have to get used to it. It is a few years old but it has a 8800 gtx card in it.

Edit: Managed to get down to rank 1 for my 2v2. I really feel like everyone else is just getting worse. I won my first game as zerg just now.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Custom Games

I have been playing a lot of sc2 custom games today. I don't know if it is on purpose but most of them are impossible to complete. I understand they are supposed to be really hard but they are literally impossible. I think they just haven't quite perfected all the levels of hp and damage to make it a balanced custom game yet. Another thing that I noticed was how laggy some of the custom games can get because of the overwhelming number of units. In broodwar that was never an issue because the graphics were so low. My 9800 gtx isn't the best but it certainty isn't terrible. It can play everything but textures on ultra, but when you throw in 1500 units running around it slows down to a crawl. I'd imagine other people are having the same issue so I keep having to turn down my graphics to medium when playing intensive custom games.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Platinum 1v1

Finished my placement matches finally. I was shocked to find that it placed me in platinum. I guess that is basically the same as what gold used to be, but I don't think I am good enough for this league. I've only played 10 games so far and I only have a little higher then 50% win ratio. I guess as long as I win around half of my games I should be in this league. Hope I don't get dropped to gold now. They changed the point system to start at 0 points so now there are tons of people at the bottom of the division with 0 points, and because you can't go below 0 points there are tons of people with technically the same rank.

Servers are up

Looks like the servers are back up after patch 13 killed them. The stats are all wiped so I'm going to get started on doing my placement matches again. Hoping to end up in around gold for 1v1 and 2v2 since they removed the copper league and added a diamond league at the top. The leagues in order are now Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. I've only played one placement match for 1v1 so far and I won terran vs zerg.

Edit: I keep getting dropped from games so I think I'm going to wait until the servers are fixed up. From the games I finished I managed to win all of them. So 3 out of 5 wins so far on 1v1 placement matches. 

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Patch 13

A few things have been added to the beta and a few things have been broken by this patch. They added 3v3 and 4v4 but everytime I try and play them I get unreasonable lag and then the game freezes. All of the usernames and achievements have been wiped, so you have to register new names. It appears they have taken away the identifiers for the username so you just pick a single name. If they do this in release it is going to be really confusing having people with the same names. On the other hand if it can't be the same then there will be a rush for good usernames before everything is gone. At the moment I have the name izzy so I'm happy. I haven't really gotten to play and 3v3 or 4v4, but it seems like it would be a rather hectic game. Maybe that will be fun, maybe not. I can't really say for sure yet.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Beta Closing

Not quite sure what I am going to do once the beta goes down for a few weeks. I am thinking about going back through starcraft and starcraft broodwar campaign to refresh my memory of the storyline before release. Without cheating at all it actually takes quite a bit of time to go through the campaign. The last time I played through it was probably around 5 years ago so I pretty much don't remember any of it.The gameplay is probably going to be frustrating after playing starcraft II, which is 100x more advanced in just about every aspect. I can usually tolerate going back to earlier graphics, but the units running into each other and the horrible pathing will be pretty bad.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Starcraft AI

I tried playing the cpu in an offline starcraft II game and very easily destroyed them. They sent about 30 zeglings pretty early in the game, but with any kind of wall and units you can kill a bunch of zerglings. I can only hope that once the actual release comes out there will be a somewhat difficult computer AI. The launcher I'm using doesn't let me do anything like 1v2 comps or else it would be a little more fun.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Rank 1 Bronze

Finally got to rank 1 in bronze league today. Not sure if it will bump me up to silver for 2v2 or not. I might have to play a bit more until it bumps me up. Currently have a winning streak of 10.

sc2 community

Lately I feel really annoyed by the general starcraft II community. The only thing I ever read about on the forums is people complaining about certain aspects of the game. Nerf this, buff that etc. It's like people don't realize that for you to win every game that means someone else loses. Then that person complains about whatever you are doing to win. It isn't possible to make everyone happy because not everyone can win all the time. This type of community most likely manifests because of the world of warcraft community, which is generally annoying and immature. People need to realize that this isn't WoW. They also need to realize that this is still beta and not all of the aspects of the game are official. Blizzard is changing things to figure out the best way to have the final game. They don't care about your beta records.

On another note I have been trying to learn zerg. I've mostly been zerglings rushing while trying to spec to hydralisks or mutalisks. Sometimes it has been successful but it doesn't seem to work very well. I love the way they look though, especially green zerg. I wish you were able to choose your color in ranked matches.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

New Headphones and mouse


This didn't happen today or anything but it is still recent. I got new headphones and a new mouse, both of which are really nice. The headphones are sennheisser 280 and the mouse is a logitech G9X. It is a little strange looking but it is actually very comfortable. The drivers come with in application that allowed you to make macros and button assignments etc. It also lets you change the macros depending on what application is open. Currently I only have three different settings. Default, Internet, and starcraft II. The idea of a gaming mouse to some people might seem a little silly. Maybe it doesn't make much of a difference in actual gameplay, but I can tell you makes me feel better. Even the slightest advantage of having quick access to certain keys at my fingerstips is better then nothing. The color of the LED's change color depending on the application and what you set them to as well. Blue for starcraft, red for firefox, and green as default. If you have the money to blow on a gaming mouse I'd recommend this one. The headphones are for the most part very comfortable. They keep sound in very well and keep other sounds out. That was really all I was looking for in the headphones so they meet the only requirements I was looking for. I'd probably get cheaper headphones if I was going to remake this purchase.

Release Date

Can't wait for Starcraft II to come out. It's finally been announced to to release on July 27th. It's only taken them around 5 years from announcing it to giving a release date. I'm not planning on pre-ordering it but I'm definitely going to get it when it comes out. They never sell out of things like this so pre-ordering is just a waste of 5 dollars. The game so far in beta seems way better then I would have imagined. There are a ton of people on the forums complaining about everything though. Some people complain that the graphics are subpar for a modern game, but the truth is that if the graphics in the game were any better you wouldn't be able to play at 60 fps on ultra settings without buying a 400 dollar graphics card. The amount of objects moving around in a fluid motion is just overwhelming at such ridiculous textures. Besides, real time strategy games are hardly about how realistic the graphics are. This game is going to be great.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Starcraft II

I'm going to try and blog about my progress on starcraft II. I recently started playing the beta and I plan to buy the game as soon as it comes out. Currently I'm rank 3 bronze on my 2v2 games and rank 20 silver on my 1v1. I've mostly played terran but I'm starting to get into zerg. I only have around a 55% win ratio right now so I need to step it up.