Top 25 Here I Come!

After my last post, I was very excited to post more often and of course, play more often - and over the last week accomplished one of those... you can probably guess which one!

Part of that was due to my desire to do more casting (thanks Brock for the encouragement!) - and so kept waiting for a good game that was short enough that I wouldn't have to break it into 2 parts (due to the YouTube 15 min limit).  Funny, that never happened.

So here's a cast of my most recent game - done in a more "play-by-play commentary" style than "retrospective analysis" style.  I tried casting in the third person, as if I wasn't one of the players.  It was really fun!  My wife told me when I started casting that I should really ham it up - she thinks it's cute when I do that - so here's a bit of ham and me creeping a little more out of my shell!



Listening to the cast afterwards, it was funny to hear how many mistakes I made or times I corrected myself, but was right the first time!

So now my standing is Rank 30 in my division - with only tonight and tomorrow left in the season!

As you can see from the screenshot above, I'll need 80 rank points to beat the current rank 25 player in my division.  With my record (8 wins, 4 losses) and the amount of points I'm getting per win or loss, I figure I need to play 6 games before Tuesday morning.

Of course, the player currently ranked 26 is active and has played a bunch of games recently, so I think he's shooting for the same spot I am!

Do you think I have what it takes to make it into the top 25?

Update 11/1/2011: I updated the video to point to my new YouTube channel.

First Game in Silver League

Two days ago (July 14) was a day of many firsts for this Starcraft dad!

• My son turned 9 months old for the first (and only) time - and is as big as his sister who is almost 2 years and 2 months old!
• In the evening, I started a 30-day workout series - 20-minutes a day with Jillian Michaels! (my wife is doing the same series)
• And to kick off the day - I played my first 1v1 game in Silver league!

It was somewhat of a re-match of my qualifier game (which I lost due to an early Roach attack).

I played on the same map, against the same race (Zerg), and in the same starting position as in my qualifier. My opponent even started with a similar Roach attack. I also found out afterwards that my opponent was once again a Bronze player at the top of his division (last time he was Rank 1? and this time I think he was Rank 4).

But as you can see in this videocast I did the next morning - the result was not the same!

(YouTube has a 15 minute cap in videos for regular accounts, so I had to split it up. BTW, I updated the embedded code so fullscreen is available from the embedded player AND higher resolutions are available when you go fullscreen!)
Update 11/1/2011: I updated the video to point at my new YouTube channel - it no longer has to be split into two videos.

And with that comeback, I advance to rank 63 in my division!

And celebrate my 100th league win!

So my current standing is:
Division Rank 63
30 points
Bonus Pool 1246

After my qualifier back in May, I was:
Division Rank 84
0 points
Bonus Pool 780

Season 2 is Ending?

Yup, you guessed it - the urgent news I heard last night was the impending end of the second season of the Blizzard online ladder.

Before vacuuming our family room last night, I was listening to an episode of StarCast (an SC2 podcast) that was 4 days old and found out to my surprise not only was Season 2 ending, but the leagues and divisions had been locked since July 5th! for the last week! (Guess that's what I get for listening to old podcasts?)

So two months after Season 2 started, I qualified for 1v1, and now, two months after that, I haven't played my first regular ladder game, and the season is already locked!

The lock lasts until the end of Season 2 on Tuesday July 26, during the morning maintenance.

So until then, players can't be promoted or demoted out of their current league or division.  So no matter how I do over the next 12 days, for Season 2, I'll finish in Silver league!

After hearing that podcast, for some reason I thought the season ended July 19 (next Tues) so I decided last night to make an effort to play over the next 5 days and see how high I could get in my division.  Of course now after re-reading the official post (here), I see that I now have 12 days - so I've some more time :-)

How high do you think I can get? Last season I made it to Rank 12 in my Bronze division... (heh, over the course of several months!)

How To Make SC2 Movies

One of my friends asked me what program I used to record SC2 movies. After replying to him, I thought it might be helpful to post this on the blog. So I added a new "page" that describes the process I use. There's a link to the new page at the top of the blog.

Hopefully someone will find it useful :-) I spent some time figuring out what screen capture program I wanted to use (and pay for). I settled on Fraps. Using Movie Maker for my simple needs was also very easy.

I do have a Justin.tv account, and tried using the XSplit program (which is in beta) to create SC2 movies. It seems many people use this program for streaming live games, and it has some cool features like being able to incorporate input from a webcam at the same time!

Unfortunately in my tests on my machine, it performed worse than Fraps and the resulting video file was very low resolution. I think it does more encoding work while recording (which is needed for live streaming), and my computer can't handle it. (speaking of such, maybe I should post my PC specs?)

That's all for right now - don't worry, I plan on posting much more often over the next few days - as I just got some urgent SC2 news today!

A New Season

The first season of the official online ladder (hosted by the developer, Blizzard) ended this last March, and before I realized it (literally), the second season of the official ladder began.

As the first season was wrapping up, I had this idea that it would be cool if the launch of this blog coincided with my start in the second season. Cool idea, huh? (my daughter loves saying "huh?")

Alas, I was so wishy-washy with getting this blog started, that I didn't play my first game until two and half months later - the day after my 32nd birthday. (And yes, at the time I thought it would be cool to also launch the blog right after my birthday...)  It then took me another month to sit down, get over the perfectionist in me, and actually record a commentary of that game!  But it's done!

So for my first blog post, I am happy to announce not only my return to the world of competitive StarCraft 2, but also my entrance into the world of videocasting! (Don't worry, I'm keeping my day job - this is definitely an example of amateur enthusiasm!)

If you click on the video after it starts playing, you can watch it in full 720p on YouTube. This video is also available on my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/gosudad

Oddly enough, despite my complete domination in this first game (and yes, you can read that phrase in two different ways), I was placed in the SILVER league!

This was a huge surprise to me, as my entire career in the first season had been spent in the Bronze league. Not quite sure how the Battle.Net ranking system decided my placement - but there was talk that Blizzard recently fixed a bug in the ranking system that was preventing people from promoting, so perhaps that's what happened here. Nonetheless, I was quite pleased :-)

Update 11/1/2011: I updated the video to link to my new YouTube channel.