The Art of Random

Day9, Nony, InControl, CauthonLuck, and J.P. McDaniel have a radio discussion to recap the MLG Raleign tournament and talk about balance. One guy got 4th with ‘cheesing’ every game except one, so lots of discussion about that. Day9 agrees with me that it’s important that people do their ‘cheesing’ because the pros are just playing how they want to, free reign, without having to deal with a lot of little things and compensate for it, and so they just lose to ‘cheese’. My general opinion is that if your build can’t handle cheese, it isn’t worth using.

Anywho, check it.
Link

Great news! The FFXIV open beta sucks just as bad as the FFXIV Beta Phase 3 did! *gasp* Never would have seen that coming. There is TECHNICALLY more content though, since the other starting areas are open. Too bad they’re just copy + paste of the area we’ve had for a while, just with different models/terrain.

OMG LEVEL SYNC! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Basically like EQ2 mentoring without the overpoweredness. Now can play with other peeps with different playtimes!

Like really really really bad.

If you enjoy a good music concert here and there (but not in person cause there’s like…people…duh) I highly recommend checking out the Pink — Funhouse (Live in Australia) concert, as well as the Steve Vai — Where the Wild Things Are (Live in Minneapolis) concert. Both most excellent.

Whelp, I think I’m largely done playing SC2, especially competitively. I rather enjoy it, and it’s really nice to have to think and play really hard in my games. That said, it’s also bloody exhausting. The constant adrenaline dump makes ya feel like bleh after a few hours, and there’s so much thinking and speed, and then the intense bursts of anger from losing to stupid shit or stuff you feel helpless against, making tournament times when you live in a kind of funky timezone and work mids, etc. All that is well and good I suppose, if you don’t also have a full time job, heh. I won’t settle for playing at lower than the highest levels of play, and to do that I’d just have to play a TON.

Playing that much and maintaining performance in my job is pretty rough, so tired all the time. I’d love to do it, but just can’t unless someone pays me to do it, heheh. And you can’t get paid to do it until you do it yourself for a while so…..yeah. Spose I’ll settle for watchin matches here and there. Pity. FFXIV better not suck.

So I got a new debit card in the mail, as my current will no longer work past August 30th. I figure “Oh cool, they’re ahead of the game” cause my card expires in January, right. Well…my new card…expires in January. WTF are they issuing me a new card for? I didn’t report it stolen or report any fraudulent charges or anything…

Weeee, my game has been played for round 1 of the CEVO Sapphire Minerals tournament. ZvZ vs a very similarly ranked opponent (he has 10 more points on ladder than I do). I lost the match 1-2. Clearly my roach lead play needs some work, because the only game I won was zergling/baneling, and he just came at me with way more roaches than I would have anticipated the other two games. So I’ll need to look over those and brush up on that. My scouting failed a little bit towards the later parts of those games I think. The typical “awh shit, I made too many drones” situation.

Anywho, I’ve been dropped to the losers bracket, but I’ll be playing in round 2 in the coming days!

Our match will also be shout casted, so I’ll post a link when I get that!

Weeee, so I’m now out of the tournament officially. I must say that the tournament was handled very poorly by GosuGamers.net (not so gosu) this time around. The Map Pool wasn’t announced until super later and there was a lot of confusion over that. Several people were under the impression that the entire first thirty minutes were check in, instead of it being a smaller window 30 minutes before the tournament, so there was some drama there.

In addition, the bracket generator thingie didn’t work, so they had some technical difficulties there with creating the brackets. After they got it working, they ended up reshuffling and restyling the tournament several times. First only 130ish players confirmed, so they dropped it from a 256 seat tournament to 128. Then the first brackets game out, and I played my first game and lost. After that they stated that the first round must be replayed, and they shuffled the brackets.

It was another 128 seat round, and the matches were assigned and played by several people. I once again lost, and figured that was that. But alas, they shuffled the brackets again and declared it final, but the format changed back to 256 seats (with 143 players) with a lot of auto-wins on the first round. Thankfully, this ended up with my opponent and I passing the first round, so we got to play on Metalopolis instead of Blistering Sands. We got close spawn positions, and I got 1 gate rushed. =( Blah.

The protoss fella that knocked me out in the 3rd round is pretty cool though, and has offered to practice with me as well in the future. Sweet ^^.

I ended up playing some very high ranked people, which was cool. I liked my match on Blistering Sands vs Lyra =). I thought I was doing really well, I destroyed her first push (got a really nice split with my zerglings while she moved up!), but then got out-econned somewhere down the line. Fun though.

I played:

• Lyra — #194 region, #563 world — Terran
• Plzleaveduck — #378 region, #1275 world — Zerg
• Sid — #197 Region, #677 world — Protoss

^^

Weeee! In both of the nVidia GosuCup US Qualifier tournaments. First tournament is played tomorrow! Second next Saturday. 256 seat single elimination tournaments. Top two from each qualifier (2 US qualifiers, 2 EU qualifiers). In the final tournament (top 8), €900 for first, €450 for second, €150 for third. My goal is to make it at least to the round of 32! High hopes, maybe. Lota top peeps in this tourney.

5-6 this morning. The usual “Fuck I made too many drones” and random fuck ups. Least I can defend a 2/4 gate now. Thank god.

The losing streak continues. Woo! Hope I can break out of it soon.

Woot, I’ve been assigned a group for the tournament. I’m in group A! Thankfully doesn’t have QXC or HuK in it, but it’s not without competition.

People in my group:

• Gold Protoss
• Platinum Zerg
• Platinum Terran
• Low Diamond Random
• Gold Terran
• Bronze Random
• Bronze Zerg
• Diamond Terran
• High Rank Diamond Terran (#104 region, #283 world)
• Platinum Protoss
• High Rank Diamond Terran (#78 region, #213 world)
• Zerg Without a 1v1 record at all