Jolt Country

Welcome to SC2FWTB, the thread in which I will TEACH YOU, the horrible SC2 player, how to rise to the ranks of the merely bad! I feel qualified to dispense this advice, because I am a bad player. However, I used to be terrible, and have made tremendous strides by following the advice I will now begin to give you!

I will do this in installments!

Today's installment is called:

HOTKEYS.

Make no mistake! Without using hotkeys, you will always be horrible. Your first and only job, as a horrible player, is to learn to use hotkeys.

Not only that, but you need to learn to use hotkeys exclusively. A good training exercise for this (which will eventually become the way you actually play) is to play games against the computer, without ever touching the little selection menu in the lower-right. NEVER!

This takes work, as in the beginning, it will be much quicker for you to use the mouse to click on an icon than to recall the hotkey. But this is necessary.

Now we will play CHOOSE YOUR OWN GUIDE TO BECOMING NOT SO GODDAMN AWFUL AT SC2:

If you already know the standard hotkeys backwards and forwards, skip to "CONCLUSION".

If you still haven't learned any kind of hotkeys well enough for them to be second nature:

I want you to immediately click on "Options" in the SC2 menu. Then I want you to click on "Hotkeys". At the top of this screen is a dropdown, called "Profile". I want you to click on the dropdown, and select "Grid".

What does this mean?

This replaces all of the default hotkeys with the "Grid" hotkeys, which are so much easier to use that you would have to be an insane person not to learn them.

Essentially, it makes the fifteen leftmost (or rightmost, if you're left-handed) alphabetic keys on the keyboard correspond to the fifteen little icon boxes in the lower right of the screen.

This has three tremendous benefits:

1. If you don't remember a hotkey, you can just look at the icon, see where it is in the selection menu, and PRESS DAT KEY.

2. The hotkeys for all three races are now PRETTY MUCH THE SAME! No more "e" for probe, "s" for SCV, and... whatever the hell drones were. Now any time you need a worker for any race, "q" is where it's at.

3. More importantly, you never have to move your hand. You always wondered how the pros could do fifty million things at once and it never looks like they're flailing all over the keyboard hunting for hotkeys? This is why.

If you've ever dreamed of not being horrible at SC2, AND of being able to sit there calmly, your hand comfortably resting in the "home" position, being merely bad, then the Grid hotkeys are a must. There are two complaints you might have about Grid as a horrible player, which are are:

1. "The hotkeys don't make any sense!" REBUTTAL: Like they made sense before? Now you have to press "q" for a marine, instead of... "a". ?????

2. "'a' was always the attack-move command! The most important command in the game! Now it's 't'!! Arg!" REBUTTAL: Look. If you are right handed, and you've got your hands in the right position, "a" is located so you have to curl your ring-finger back to get at it. "t" is right where your index finger is. Now all you gotta do is MASH THAT T. "But 'a' stands for 'attack!!'" REBUTTAL!! Trust me, after the first ten thousand times you hit 't' for attack-move (2 games), you will thank me.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion... hotkeys!

In the original SC there was an online scenario wherein the six players would be teamed 3 vs 3 with a consensual 20 minute no-rush policy. They would then as rapidly as possible make their armies using different races for defense and offense. The terrain would be utterly bare except for eight vespine geysers per home base and one (hacked) mineral rock that lasted throughout the game. The victors would invariably be the players with the fastest hotkeys and the most precise placement of buildings.
My question is, does the new SC address any of this. Some sort of ranking system that allows slightly slower players some kind of advantage? Did they do anything about the
'cannot create more units' message that would always crop up just when you really needed more guys?



THE
PRESSING AS FAST AS AN
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:My question is, does the new SC address any of this.

Does it address the issue of better players winning games? No, they... did not address that issue.

Did they do anything about the
'cannot create more units' message that would always crop up just when you really needed more guys?

What message is that? When would you get that? What's going on here? Who are you guys?

In a multiplayer game I believe there was a maximum of 255? units that could be displayed. This was between the six different players. After that you had to wait until things got blown up before you could make any more guys. So the player that could create units faster would have more available when the max limit was reached.

It was all about rapidity and less on strategy. I could not bang the buttons as fast as other players. I would take maybe two extra seconds to locate buildings and respond to SCV units that announced themselves as ready for duty. This was a hindrance. My son had his deployment pattern down to a micro science and could create armies about 1/3 faster than I could, enabling him to overwhelm me every game. Which I thought of as unfair somehow.

AArdvark wrote:In a multiplayer game I believe there was a maximum of 255? units that could be displayed.

There are no such limits in SC2.

It was all about rapidity and less on strategy. I could not bang the buttons as fast as other players. I would take maybe two extra seconds to locate buildings and respond to SCV units that announced themselves as ready for duty.

Keep reading this thread, and you'll be microing and macroing like a champ! And set your command center rally point to a mineral field, so that you don't have to react to SCVs being built, they'll just start mining automatically.

faster than I could, enabling him to overwhelm me every game. Which I thought of as unfair somehow.

This is part of the skillset required for RTS. Faster == better. Not unfair, just the nature of the beast.

It's too late for me. My kid has already been playing SC2 for a couple weeks now. I could never hope to be in the same league as him. Plus the fact that I don't own the game


In an unrelated note; He installed it on a netbook with an external hard drive He rolled back from 7 to XP because of the game. Are there any major processing issues with the new StarCraft that would hog up an Atom 1.8 something machine? He says it runs better with XP.



THE
WHO WOULDA THUNK
AARDVARK

Dunno. I'm on 7 and it runs flawlessly.

What's his account email, I'll befriend him... and then tear him a new-- well, I'll probably get my ass kicked, but still... fun, right?

Funny SC2 video of the day!

[youtube][/youtube]

I laughed. Out loud.

I would like a second installment. I put the original one on JC's bloggy frontend.

Here's my take on SC2, for what it's worth. I've played two games:

When you finally finish installing it, you are presented with a login screen. Lemme see if I can get it.



Okay, I don't want to be a jerk, but that's fucking unacceptable. "Battle.net Account Name"? No. NO. NO, ASSHOLES. You want my e-mail address. Not my fucking "Battle.net Account Name."

I tried a few different things. It won't let you click on "connect" until it sees a @ and . though. Just fucking put a label there that says "E-mail Address." Fucking Christ. It's 2010 - 2010!!! and fundamental GUI errors are still being made. We should have fucking solved GUIs in like 1999.

Next, it makes you click on two EULAs the very first time you play, which I've never seen before, and I am noting it now. Noted!

Next up? There's a goddamn character limit on how many characters you can choose for your handle in the game. (Not your Battle.net Account Name, of course. That's your e-mail address. This is for the name that shows up for your account when you play SC2 over Battle.net. Not the same thing!)

So I couldn't use IceCreamJonsey. The last two characters wouldn't fit. Annnnnnnnnd here we go:

1) Why can't I have fucking spaces in my name? What DB vendor can't handle spaces? This is DOS 3.1 shit right here with the spaces.

2) Why the 12 character (or so, I'm not re-counting) limit? WHY THE 12 CHARACTER LIMIT? They're storing this shit with Oracle, right? God, this infuriates me. There should be a 255 character limit. Or AT LEAST 20.

3) I finally pick a new name (YehowehPorn) and.... I get a portrait. I try clicking around to change it, because I look like an asshole. I want to upload my pic of Porn from Fallacy of Dawn. Yeah, I can't do it. You can't choose what you look like in SC2. Which doesn't really matter, only it fucking matters because there is no reason to not let people do that.

Whew. Deep breath!

So, I went to play Ben in a quick 1v1 game. The connection was flawless. Zero lag. Zero issues. It was, by far, the finest and smoothest multiplayer experience I've ever had in my life. Absolutely no horseshit. Finding him was fine. I let Battle.net search my Facebook contacts for friends and that was fine. (Blizzard can have my password for FB for all I fucking care; we know there's no chance they are going to lift a picture randomly for a character portrait.) So really, the gameplay experience was top notch, I'm just stunned by the shitty decisions made by stupid assholes before you get to the game.

I assume there's just a bunch of stupid pieces of shit who handle the bad decisions for Battle.net, and they are kept separated from the coders of Battle.net, and CERTAINLY kept far away from the developers of SC2. I am even willing to bet that the latter two groups make fun, openly, of the non-techie fags who shot down character name spaces. I think it goes on at a lot of companies. We don't need these people. They aren't helping. ("Oh, you don't notice the 100 things they did rig-") Right, that's expected.

I wanted to write all this down and never bring the subject up again. I can't even say Battle.net sucks. It doesn't suck! It's fucking awesome. But I'll never understand why video games have to constantly take leaps backwards with the easiest parts of a game to knock out.

I'm having similar personal issues with Mafia 2. Details in another thread.


SC2 question of the day: Is the game worth a 14 year wait? Does the game have a 14 year development feel or did they just play pocket pool for the last ten years and then slap something together in 18 months?


THE
DICKING OFF
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:SC2 question of the day: Is the game worth a 14 year wait? Does the game have a 14 year development feel or did they just play pocket pool for the last ten years and then slap something together in 18 months?

Well, it definitely wasn't the last 18 months, since we were seeing preview videos (which already looked strikingly like the finished product) almost three years ago.

I would say that it is evident that the decision was made a long time ago to make to make a StarCraft that had graphics and interfaces more in line with today's expectations, basically presenting a similar experience, but presenting it way better.

So it feels like they spent a long time making it not look like they spent a long time. People complain about balance, and EULAs, and battle.net, but what you don't hear is anyone complaining about bugs, or saying that it isn't a top-notch version of what it is: StarCraft but better, and the finest RTS ever made.

New installment coming tomorrow!

Sorry, didn't get a chance to the update today. Tomorrow!

Bullshit! Complete bullshit! Starcraft 2 is a 98% game now, Ben!

BONUS TIP, while you wait for the next update:

Do not, under any circumstances, go to the official SC2 forums. It will sap your will to:

1) Live.
2) Play SC2.

In that order.

I'm waiting for the next update. Why don't I make it easy for you, when it comes to posting the next update.

<Are> YES --> POST THE GODDAMN UPDATE
--> NO --> Make the turtle do a 90 degree loop

I want to get better at Starcraft 2. Things that seemed like they would be helpful is this thread, but I'm finding it as useful as a Protoss sapling with a dick in his mouth.

I have no idea why it put the word "are" in between the greater-than and less-than signs. Who's hacking this BBS? Lemme try it again:

<>

Weird.

Update coming soon!

Sorry, didn't get to the update today. Tomorrow, though!!

I started in "Gold League" (there are five leagues in SC2, ranked by skill, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond.)

Yesterday I got knocked down to Silver.

Today I played five straight Bronze league players, and lost each of them decisively.

I...

I have no business trying to teach you how to play this game.

I don't get it.