From: The Desk of Ji Sung Dear future Starcraft 2 Diamond League Grand Master, You and I both know this… Starcraft 2 is a god damned compe ive E-Sport!
If you have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll be blindly wasting time and effort just trying to keep up with those who do! If you were around during the Starcraft 1 scene when it boomed into existence, you would know that the highest level of players lived and breathed Starcraft. They had knowledge of all the mechanics, dynamics of how to exploit those mechanics and knew just where and when they needed to be employed. Right now, reading this, you probably understand that to do well in Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, you’re going to need to spend endless hours to feel even the slightest bit of progress… (Right?) You think that to get a higher rank you need to give up on your real life. You think you need to play hours on end with no social obligations or job. You think you need to be single and have no family or significant other. You think you need to sell your soul to be good at Starcraft 2! You’re probably wondering if you could get there eventually if you spend 6 to 10 hours a day working your way to the top. If that’s how you feel, you need to know…
Trust me… Starting to win games in Starcraft 2 is like starting a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together. It works but it will take forever if it isn’t done right. I’ve been there and I know that much. What if I told you that you can lead a perfectly normal life while being able to compete, putting up a challenging fight within your league and learning to progress your personal skill. That you can take on anything Starcraft 2 and Heart of the Swarm players can possible throw at you?
Don’t forget to breathe now… I’m about to tell you the story which changed the way I’ve viewed Starcraft as a whole…
I was 15 during the first years of Starcraft 1 and I was never too into it. Reason? I had no eye for strategy, all I knew how to do was to am an army of Carriers and send them to an enemy base. 4v4 games with my friends would quickly turn into a 3v4 as I was knocked out of the fight and forced to WATCH the rest of my team win the game without me which was embarr ing to no end. I wanted to WIN! I NEEDED it.
With clear intent, I knew all I needed to do was practice, practice and practice some more. Or at least that’s what I thought. It cost me a bomb to keep practicing, as I couldn’t afford a computer on my own I resorted to visiting PC Bangs on a daily basis after school.
It was bad. It got expensive as I had to keep paying at an hourly rate to play the game… I felt progress though. I was improving, or so I thought. At the ripe age of 17 I got a job in the local TGI Fridays where I bought my own PC back home. Next up, I bought my own copy of Starcraft. Little did I know that there was a huge difference between playing Starcraft on my very own Battle.Net account when compared to just playing offline in a LAN café. My first game over the Internet, I got demolished. The first and last words said to me before my opponent disconnected were "eg noob l2p" which I later learned meant "Easy game, noob. Learn to play." I can’t even describe what I felt when I found out what those words meant. My friend that explained to me what it meant said to me, "Hey, it’s just a game, play it to have fun". At that point in time, I knew he was playing a different game than I was.
I’ve come a long way since then and I know much more than I did then. I realized that I had limited myself by trying to improve on my own, attempting to solve every problem on my own, and there were resources I hadn’t tapped into yet. But I don’t blame myself either, as much time as I’d spent on Starcraft, no matter how much I practiced before I wouldn’t be able to compete with a single day of playtime today. But I knew my journey wasn’t done. The moment I picked up Starcraft 2, I started consulting the experts in the field and seeing things through their eyes, viewing strategies I could never come up with on my own. It wasn’t just about knowing strategies, it… 
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