Kevin's Watch

So a friend sent me a message today and asked if I had Starcraft 2, as he was considering getting it and wanted people to play against.

Now, I bought the game when it first came out... what, five years ago? And I'd played WoW in the past, so I definitely had a Battle.Net account. However, since then, I've changed phones three or four times (speaking of which... I gotta stop doing that. It's expensive) so the authenticator app obviously wasn't going to work, as well as changing my email address (I was using gmail at the time, now I'm on outlook.com, and I deleted my gmail address after not using it for about a year).

After all that, do you know how hard it was for Blizzard to get back in to my account so I could play Starcraft with my friend? Answer: not at all. I took a photo with my phone of my current (new state) and old (old state) ID, I answered two or three questions, and they switched my account to the new email and reset my password for me.

Damn, I wish Comcast had customer service this good. I might consider being a customer of theirs again.

plus starcraft 2 is literally the best game that has ever been created

Nah, I got bored with it in less than a day. But then, my military strategy amounts to a Zerg Rush of Archons: build an unstoppable force, send them to slaughter the enemy, eat lunch. I never got into the three-way strategy that Blizzard imbued the game with, the reacting to a constantly changing battlefield.

Rigel wrote:Nah, I got bored with it in less than a day. But then, my military strategy amounts to a Zerg Rush of Archons: build an unstoppable force, send them to slaughter the enemy, eat lunch. I never got into the three-way strategy that Blizzard imbued the game with, the reacting to a constantly changing battlefield.

Well, I would argue that you've never really played starcraft 2 then, in the same way that someone who picks up a guitar and plucks a few strings doesn't know what it's like to really play a guitar.

Hey Hier.

I'm not into those "base building" type games anyway. Last one I probably enjoyed was Dune.

Rather play Total War.

--A

Well I mean that's fair enough, everyone has their tastes. It's interesting that you say the last one you enjoyed was Dune (I assume you mean Dune 2), since that was the first of this particular style of RTS (the C&C, starcraft, warcraft, age of empires type). While I've always been a fan of these games more than squad based war games such as Total War, for me there is something again that makes starcraft stand out. Starcraft 1 by accident, and starcraft 2 deliberately. And that is the mechanical difficulty. When I made the analogy to playing an instrument, I think that is very apt. I'm not talking about the campaigns though, you can just pick them up and run through them probably on hard difficulty without any trouble. The multiplayer however is one of the most competitive in all of gaming, with many players having racked up literally thousands of matches and still being unable to climb out of the lower leagues.

I'm in diamond league and pushing for master league with about 6000 games played. I play at a speed of about 200 actions/minute, but that still feels far too slow. At this point starcraft is more than a game to me, it's a hobby. I am by no means a pro gamer, but in a less competitive game, I might easily be one of the best. I liked this game right from when I first played it, but it is certainly a much more rewarding experience now. The game is complex enough that even after thousands of games you are still learning new things, and so higher level games take on a depth in the dynamic between the players that doesn't exist at lower levels.

Anyway, any more and I will begin to sound obsessed. That's why I think Starcraft 2 is the greatest game ever created

hierachy wrote: I'm in diamond league and pushing for master league with about 6000 games played. I play at a speed of about 200 actions/minute, but that still feels far too slow.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I never bothered. I'm just not a twitch gamer.

Hell, I enjoy Unreal Tournament, but even THAT seems slow compared to competitive StarCraft.

hierachy wrote:Well I mean that's fair enough, everyone has their tastes. It's interesting that you say the last one you enjoyed was Dune (I assume you mean Dune 2), since that was the first of this particular style of RTS (the C&C, starcraft, warcraft, age of empires type).

Dune II was indeed the classic. Emperor: Battle For Dune wasn't too bad either. (I liked that you didn't just produce a single unit, but a small group of them...the single units of AoE were too unrealistic for me, and overall, that lack of tactical options made things a bit boring to my mind.)

I couldn't ever play anything competitively...too lazy. I don't even play online non-competitively. Single player, offline mode games for me, thanks.

--A