TopReplays is hosting a Bug Bash tournament this Saturday. If I don’t have a clan war at the time I will likely participate. DemonCup this week is going to be held on Sunday.

I’m ready for new ladder season!

I will consider myself ‘active’ when my apm goes back up to 170+

In an Asia warm up game for TFL this past weekend, a curious situation developed. It was Human versus Orc on Secret Valley, and I was playing a standard AM/MK two-farm tech caster strategy. At early tier 2, I had just gotten a kill on my opponent’s Blademaster and thought to myself: “great, I’ll just creep this goblin shop and then push”. Paradoxically, in the time it took for me to creep the shop, my opponent crept the green murlocs and yellow gnolls next to his base to level his SH to three. My push failed miserably.

As the astute Warcraft observer knows, the transition of immediate tier 2 strength from Human to Orc has already taken place a long time ago. He also knows that Orc’s tier 2 army is stronger than Human’s. The point of my anecdote is this: when playing standard casters versus Orc, playing ’safely’ by creeping and stretching the game out is neither the ’smartest’ nor ’safest’ play.

Some of my readers may not be familiar with the strategic options when presented with an advantage (I don’t claim to be an expert, of course), but hope this helps.

Over and out.

In many matchups, many situations, it is useful to “bank” gold for a short period before breaking into upkeep. This is when you do not plan to straight up fight your opponent–you could be creeping, or harassing, etc.. It is differentiated from other banking situations in that it’s just for a short period for a little extra gold so that you can quickly produce your army and be ready for an encounter.

Examples:

• Single mine Human versus Elf; buy items, creep a little more, then break into upkeep and fight.
• Elf mirror; awhile back it was popular to stay under 50 for quite awhile.

I ordered Rockband 2 for PS3 and it should be here next week. It even came with a t-shirt from Walmart and I used a giftcard and it was discounted, so that’s like triple win.

Gonna pwn some noobs %)

DemonCup is pretty much finished. More admin functionality should be added but that can be put off until the troublemakers arrive. This project took 15+ hours longer than I wanted to spend. Like most of the stuff I code, by the end I am too burnt out to clean it up so the code is pretty ugly at the moment. The idea is to write really clean and expandable code the first time through but I am not that pro.

TFL/WHL quals. are starting. I do not think my team’s chances of getting in are good but I cannot say that I care anyway.

2009 is either going to be a really big year for me or a big let down. What it is not going to be is a wasted year. Amen!