I just had a match where a few well timed banelings saved the game for me.  It was  a Zerg vs Zerg match where we were next to each other on the map.  I though I was off to a bad start.  My normal build is 13 pool, but with Zerg I tend to 10 pool.  I made a huge mistake and built an evo chamber instead of my pool.  I scouted his base and saw an early expansion so I also expanded quickly.

When the building that I thought was my spawning pool finished, I realized my mistake.  I put down my pool and got drones on gas.  I decided I was going to skip my queen and get a Lair.  I was able to get a quick 8 zerglings from my 2 hatches and rushed them over.  I had bad micro and ended up having to pull back after loosing a few.  I sent them all into the other base, but I didn’t get them grouped first.  Watching the replay, I had mine out slightly before his.

He attacked me with a few roaches and a good deal of zerglings.  Just as I was getting my hydras out.  My initial troops fell to the attack, but I was able to hold it with new troops.  He sent a bunch of zerglings as a second attack and I was able to hold that too.  I went to counter attack but pulled back when I saw 3 mutas fly over head to my base.  My hydras made short work of them.

I had full view of the map the whole game.  I made a 3rd expansion that he almost didn’t know about.  I had both watch towers on the map and I had a zergling set to patrol the rest of the map.  That patrol unit made him cancel one hatch that it discovered and killed 4 other stray drones that were going to expand.  Twice he got a drone close to my 3rd hatch but the patrol zergling picked him off.  I also had an overlord on a cliff next to the front of his natural expansion.  He would gather all his ground troops in my view and he had no clue he was there.

So I know he has mutas someplace but I see him build this huge ground army of zergling.  I am trying to build my hydra zergling to hold it off.  He keeps adding more and more zerglings.  Then I remember banelings.  I toss down the building and it finishes just as his army moves out.  My army was pooling at my natural and I pull it up the ramp when I saw his army move out.  Why he is working my my hatch, I am letting 5 banelings finish morphing.  His mutas attack my main from the worker line and I am there to clear them out.  When his zerglings run up the ramp, my 5 banelings take out 33 zergling.  I clean up the rest of them with little losses and counter attack.

I rush his natural.  My troops run into only a small group of units.  With them occupied, I send a few banelings into the mineral line and clear out most the workers.  I clear out all the units there, and head up the ramp.  I move into the base and he gives the game to me.  He had nothing to hold me with.

Well placed banelings will just melt mass zerglings.

An old friend of mine started playing wow again.  He had a mid 70′s DK that he powered up to 80 last weekend.  So he had little gold and needed to gear up his char.  I logged on and tossed him 5,000G to help him out.  While I was online I posted from my stock of glyphs.  I can see that my inventory is not near as full as it used to be.  So I know the best sellers are no longer getting posted but I posted anyway.

A few days later I logged in for something else and took the time to clear out my mailbox.  My total sales from that one posting (cap of 2, no auto fallback, 4g threshold, 48 hours, Monday evening) was 1,450G.  So glyphs are still a solid market.

I am slowly getting better.  Every once and a while I have a win where I countered everything my opponent did and I eventually won but I watch the replay and find it almost embarrassing.  I had one match last week where I countered everything perfectly.

I was Zerg and he was Terran.  He tried a drop but I spotted it on the way in and was ready at the landing zone.  He quickly turned his ship around.  He tried banshees but I already had a detector looking for it.  Both times he attacked me, I had the correct balance of troops to hold it off.  When he tried to drop 2 thors on a cliff behind my my natural I was able to get sight and mind control one with my infestor.   The MC’d Thor killed the dropship, the raven, and the other Thor.

Although it looked like I was playing a pro game, it took me forever to get the right group for an attack. Sure if he never attacked me my early army could have mounted an offensive.  I had 3 basses to his one.  He did put a Planetary Fortress up on his 2nd and then I picked up a 4th.  At the end, I was finally able to mass lots and lots of troops to break into his main.  He did hold off the first wave but had nothing left for the secondwave.

It felt very sad that it took me so long to get a solid attack even with map control and having 2 more expansions then him the whole game.  I did learn a lot from that game from the replays.  I had no macro game (none of my hatcheries were hot keyed).  my minerals and gas would build up way to high.  I had low worker saturation at every location so having the extra expansions was not all that advantageous.  I was also not collecting gas at all locations.

So how did I win?  If I did that much wrong, he should have walked all over me.  I would bet he made the same types of mistakes.  He took way too long to expand.  He focused too much on gimmicks and didn’t have good group composition.   And I did do things somethings very right.  I scouted the whole game and I played a good micro game.

I love replays.  I use that feature so much.  I can see what my common mistakes are and work on improving them.  My macro game is already improving and I have been on a little winning streak because of it.  I’ll talk about that another time.

My wife is not a fan of Warcraft.  I don’t think its WoW so much as all the time I spent playing it. This is a common issue that my friends face too.  I found for myself that the best way to handle it was to set a schedule and stick to it.  I would take the same 3 nights a week every week to log on early (raid nights).  Other nights, I would wait until everyone else was sleeping.  I would cheat a little and do things a little afk outside that schedule, but for the most part I held to the schedule.

It was important that I set that schedule.  My wife knew what nights I was free and could plan things for those nights.  it could be anything from going out, to fixing a large supper, or just catching up on the DVR. It created that balance with the game where it was not taking up more time than my family.  One thing many guys don’t understand is that time spent close to each other doing your own thing or time spent watching tv together does not count as spending time together.  Yes, technically you are together.  If you know whats good for you, thats not the argument you want to win.

I understood this and was able to get a lot more quality game time in than they did.  I can’t tell you how many times I have been running something with someone and you can hear them over vent arguing about being able to play wow.  Many times that they stay online, they spend it in a bad mood.  You hear some remark like ” she is already mad, so I may as well keep playing”.

I can’t say that I have never had an argument about how much I play games.  Lots of people have that argument. Once I started sticking to a solid schedule, that argument never came up while I was gaming.  I don’t have a Starcraft II schedule yet,  but I don’t think it will take long before I set one up.

I am not sure what to do with this space.  As you can tell my WoW time is very minimal.  All of my game time now is spent in the Starcraft beta.  I could rebrand this blog for my thoughts on Starcraft, but my current visitors are here for my comments on Warcraft.  I do expect a return to WoW at a later date and with that a return to blogging about it.  Having this blog where I just talk about either game would not be that bad.  Kevmar is my tag in both games.  I would consider changing the URL, but I just did that not that long ago.  Part of the reason I put warcraft in the url for this blog was to help with search results.

I guess it is too soon to decide that I am going to blog a lot about starcraft II.  I’m not all that good at it yet.  In the short term if I have something I want to say about it, I will just post it here.  If I end up talking a lot about Starcraft II, I will think of something then.

So just how many workers does it take to produce a Zealot?  I ask questions like this all the time about the games I play.  It helps me look deeper and find connections from one part of a game to another.  The Zealot is a key unit that the Protoss produce a lot of.  To figure out how many gateways a base can support, I need to figure out what it takes for constant unit production.

I built 2 Warpgates, a group of workers, and several Pylons.  I mined exactly 200 minerals (the cost of 2 Zealots) and pulled all the workers off to the side.  I then warped in 2 zealots and added about 10 workers back on minerals.  When the Zealot cooldown was up and I had to wait on minerals, I added another worker to the minerals.  It takes 12 workers on minerals for 2 gates to constantly produce Zealots.

I did this type of test with other units too.  The stalker (125m/50g) takes 10 workers on minerals and 5 workers on gas to constantly produce 2 at a time.  The stalker has a higher cost but also takes longer to spawn.  Thats why you can have fewer of them on minerals.

So looking at these numbers, one base can easily support 2 warpgates at full production.  A 3rd also looks reasonable to keep up.  I’m talking constant production.  You still have to keep up on your food count and invest in tech where needed.  I like to know general numbers like this.  If I want to go 6 gates, I need 2 bases for production.

Void Rays is another unit I looked at.  I can support constant production of Void Rays from 3 Startgates if I have 2 bases collecting gas.  Carriers take 2x as much gas and 2x as much time.  So the same 3 starports can constantly produce Carriers from the same 2 bases.  I test this the same way.  I set up 4 startports and added workers collecting gas on 2 bases.  I was going for 100% production from all 4 but the gas limited me to only 3 of them.  It worked perfectly for 3 ports and now I know.

This is still beta and these figures can change, but tests like this are easy to set up and give a lot of information.

In Part 1 I talked about my rise to GM of a guild and how that burnt me out the first time.

I eventually returned to wow under the RAF program.  I was going to level casually and secretly for a while as I decided to return.  Then I ran into a guild member that was on his alt in the barrens.  I was the same race, class, and name as before.  Was not that hard to miss.

My other friends had taken breaks too but were back at it for WoTLK.  We wanted to recreate what we remembered in the Kara guild.  The guild we were in grew up and became a little more serious.  A good 10 man is what we wanted.  We had a few people that we wanted to raid with and as we tried to pull them, we ended up with the whole guild.  The idea of 10 man only went out the window.

I also ended up as an officer again and like before worked hard to craft out a loot system and supporting mods to go with it.  Before I knew it the GM was taking a break and I was the new GM.  I tried hard not to do too much again.  It didn’t take long for me to feel out who the real GM was.  I had the tittle but I never had control like I did last time.  The feel of the guild was not the same.  We returned the guild back to its previous name and I properly handed GM over to who it needed to go to.

I kept my high ranking officer tittle but slowly worked my way out of that role.  I tried to offer my valued feedback to the GM and other officers, but no longer took any kind of commanding role.  I showed up to raid and could care less about the other stuff.  I started to only log in for raids.  This was working out well for me, but I felt the end was close.  I had a few moments previous to this where I found my self furious over nothing.  But my anger was well contained.

I know in the end it would appear that I was not happy with my guild.  It was more that it was no longer how I remembered it.  My close friends no longer played.  The friends I made within the guild kept me playing much longer than I would have with out them.  Going to another guild was not really an option for me.  It would be raiding with a bunch of strangers with new rules and attitudes.   I also didn’t like the schedules of most of them.  While there were some things I didn’t like, I think all guild have that.  There were other things I did like.

Back to the question that started this wall of text was how glyphs contributed.  At a time I was about to burn out, this pulled me back in.  I like to spend a lot of time gaming even if its just casually.  There was a lot of time I was no longer spending playing the game that I was able to shift into glyphs.  I jumped into inscription big and almost over night I became a voice within the community.  I took the idea of mass glyphs and analysed every aspect that I could.  I added layers and layers of automation.  I then gave KTQ to the community to share with them the same things they shared with me.

The amount of time I put into this was huge.  As I made more and more things quicker and easier, I took the time I freed up and did more with it.  I was able to keep with up for a long time.  I would still log in to my main for raids.  Then one day I stepped away from it all.  Real life happened but thats another wall of text.  I was pulled away from my system for about 2 weeks and ever got back into it.  It was just as I was declaring myself king saying that there was nothing anybody could do to take me out of the market.  It was me trying to go back into that mode again that showed me I was burnt out.  That the results of my actions were fairly pointless.  I walked away from wow without saying good bye or clearing out my mailbox.

Someone posted an interesting question on my last post.

Do you think getting into Glyphs helped keep your interest in WoW – or did it facilitate and accelerate the burnout that left you disinterested? – S.F.

My first response is both.  My burn out was building for a while.  To give you a clear picture, I need to go way back and start from the beginning.

I started playing wow at the same time a few personal friends did.  The game was only 2-3 months old and we leveled together.  We started a few casual guilds and one of them took off at the end of original wow.  We would have a great time in our small group running ZG.  Many of the core had raided in BWL and found it relaxing in our environment.  I played a silent officer role but as relaxed as we were, I didn’t have to do much.

When BC hit our server was opened up to free transfers off to a low pop server.  Our server was home to Elitist Jerks and Goon Squad.  At the time it was over populated with hord, lagged, and had long queues to get on.  The transfer was easy for us.  We did lose a few good players but a few of them that did make the transfer still have ties to this guild.  Leveling on a low pop server was great.  You could just put your head down and quest.  Ganking was a non issue.  Spotting an alliance was rare.  Not only was it low pop, but alliance didn’t exist.

I remember gearing up for kara and the challenge that instance had at the time.  Some of those fights gave us so much trouble but we were able to pull together and figure them out.  I remember a few trash pulls that sent us to the graveyard numerous time.  We had fun as a group.  It wasn’t just the raiding, it was the group of people.  The guild had a lot of great energy at the time.  Recruitment was easy in that environment.  All they had to do was one run and they never left.

We were at that point where we had too many people for only 1 ten man group.  Instead of building just a 2nd team, we made 3.  We took a step back in progression because we did not have the final bosses down yet and we split our team up.  The 3 groups made great progress and all of them ended up clearing it about the same time.  I know a few of the group thought they had the weaker group, but we kept that in check and they showed us what they could do.  We were able to get a lot of people keyed for the next instance.

My silent role as a officer became less silent.  I was a key part of the conversations on managing the guild.  I also had a lot of influence on the loot system and ended up tweaking a mod to fit our needs.  We had several old time members keeping things running smooth.  As we moved into SSC I was transitioned into GM.  I was handed the GM spot because it was one of my friends that had it and he was taking a break.  He trusted that I would do a good job.  I felt like there were a few things I was great at and I know several things that I was not so great at.

I presented myself more as a dictator.  We do what I say.  I kept my official officers to a minimum.  I did have a few unofficial officers in officer chat.  While I presented myself as a dictator, the feedback I pulled from my officers was important.  I did keep too much control to myself.  I tried to handle all drama directly when I could and I coordinated raid spots.  Managing raid spots is a lot of work when done right.  Who sat reserves last time? Who got good loot last time? Who is points leader for the item they want in this raid?  Who is showing up late we need to save room for? Do I need more strong or weak raiders for this?  And when someone thought I sat them unfairly I could list exactly everyone of those considerations I did for them to sit reserves.  People became aware of just how fair I was making the groups and I gained a lot of trust from that.

As we rose to #3 on the server we ran head first into the low pop issue.  We were done with Kara but to get new raiders, we had to gear them up.  When we progressed too slow in spots, people would move up to one of the 2 better guilds.  The quality of players at each tier of content was very staggered.  We were #3 on the server with only 3 bosses in SSC killed.  #1 was clearing BT.  It was a struggle to constantly rebuild the guild over and over.  Recruitment was my weakness as a GM.

Then 1 week before my son was born,  I transfered the guild to another server and I left the game for about 6 months.  I did a poor job of handing the GM over to someone else.  But they were able to pick the pieces up and continue on. They were able to do well without me.

One big hassle of having a blog is the battle with the spammers.   Every blogger knows what this is like.  I expect many bloggers have a much larger problem with it than I do.  At first I would block keywords or ip addresses.  This works when one spammer tries to hit me hard.  But its a constant cat and mouse game.

I do have a more aggressive set of rules that hold comments for approval.  Anything that has any kind of link or web address gets held for me to review.  I still have to filter out the spam but it keeps it off the live page.  This is also why you may see some comments you post show up instantly and others get held for a while.

If a comment feels a little strange to me, I will just delete it.  Some things feel just a little to generic about how they like my blog.  They don’t add anything to the post anyway. No need to keep them.

I do not post my email publicly because of spammers.  If you cannot figure out what my gmail address is, post a comment someplace.  I will see it.  If I think my response will be of use to many people, I will just make a blog post about it.  I did a post about what LUA environment I use because of a reader question.

I would love to just leave my comments open but a few people spoil it for everyone.

I just made an auto attack macro for my mage. I know it sounds crazy. But its a nice little macro.

#showtooltip Frostbolt
/use 13
/use 14
/petattack
/cast !Auto Attack
/cast Frostbolt

My mage is frost and with the glyph, this pet is out all the time. Thats why the petattack command is in there. This should look like a normal mage macro except for the !Auto Attack command. What that adds to the macro is auto targeting. If I do not have a mob selected and I press frostbolt, it will auto target a mob in front of me and start to cast.

This little trick is something I got from my hunter. I tried !shoot first, but that was a failure. I ran up to the mob, popped all my macros, and started to wand the mob to death. I used !Auto Attack and it worked wonderfully. I admit the usefulness of this is small. Your target is already a click or a tab away. And when you in an instance, you are going to target a new mob by hand when you know the current one will die in the next 2 sec. The place I like this is when I am questing.

When questing, I can just face my mob and cast frostbolt. The auto attack selects the mob for me. One less action I have to perform by hand when doing something over and over. Auto Attack sets the character to swing a staff at the mob. Any ability will override it and the auto attack will not get off.  This works very nice for me because I play on a laptop with a touch pad when I play casually.  This greatly reduces the amount of hand movement I do while questing.