Update: Come watch and listen to me bring you the Bisu vs JangBi match this Sunday

Hey guys I'm back again!  sorry for the delay, I've been really busy working on new stuff with GomTV but recently I've freed up a little bit.


There's a lot of different things involving Starcraft, but there's one thing i don't believe is ever talked about enough and that's how to get good at this game.  People talk about broad overarching theories but rarely do we see people spend enough time focusing on the small or simple things that can help you drastically improve your StarCraft game.  The next few blog posts of mine will be centered around secrets and methods that progamers and top non Koreans utilize to get an edge.
I promise you that if you follow my next few blog posts your StarCraft mechanics and overall game understanding will improve by a lot.


There are many areas that i could cover but i believe there is one thing that i must show you first.  A professional baseball player won't just use any old baseball glove and it's impossible for a professional golfer to swing with any random golf club.  The equipment they use is critical to their performance.  That's why I'm going to show you how to make a competitive StarCraft keyboard. 
Yes I'm being serious, a competitive StarCraft keyboard.



Starcraft is a game that requires about 175-350 actions per minute to play at the competitive level.  There are exceptions to this APM rule but the point I'm trying to make is StarCraft is a fast game--actually it's the fastest game ever made.  If you're going to play StarCraft properly you need to have high dexterity combined with the right equipment.  Believe it or not I'm not going to endorse a single "gamer keyboard" that you'd see in the market.  In fact all those keyboards are terrible for StarCraft; absolutely terrible.  The keys are spaced incorrectly, the buttons depress wrong, and often times the keyboard itself is grossly over-sized.  If you ever watch Korean TV or the broadcasts i do at www.gomtv.net you'll see that not a single player uses one of those fancy "gamer" keyboards that i just spoke of.



Ok, first go to wherever you normally buy computer equipment.  look for the cheapest keyboard, the ones in Korea are usually Qsen but other keyboards also work.  What you want is a keyboard that is short on all sides, no lengthy bottom or fancy extra keys on the top.

Open the box and close your eyes and press a few keys rapidly in order, you don't want the keys to depress too easily because you need to hear and feel it when you hit one of your hotkeys during the game. You just want a soft clicking sound, not a hard one, whenever you hit any of the buttons; enough so it's audible but not so much that your fingers get tired when you type with it. The keyboard should look something like this:



Notice that the shift key on the right is longer than the control key.  this is critical if your a Protoss player so make sure the keyboard looks similar to this one before your purchase.  if you want you can buy two keyboards, one black and one white, but this isn't entirely necessary.  Usually these keyboards run about 10 to 15 USD.  Also, make sure this isn't a wireless one.


When you get home grab a pen or knife and dig out the keys you see below.  I'm completely serious here, pop these keys out.  They come off very easily if you just stick a pen in between the small gaps and pry them out.  You can always pop them back into place later on if needed.





The "," key is only necessary to remove if you're a Terran player and the caps lock is really preference but i tend to play better without it (For non Terran players the key that makes Marines "M" is right next to ",").  Some players also remove the f1 keys but that's also preference.  If you bought two keyboards use the black keyboards keys and replace the most common and critical hotkeys your race uses that you find difficult to get to in battle.  For instance replacing the "o" key with a black key so if you MUST glance down at your keyboard for a second you see O right away.  This is really helpful if you need to make an overlord in the midst of a battle or send your tanks into siege mode and your worried you'll hit the wrong key.

 
Coming up soon here I'll tell you how to really start utilizing your keyboard so that you can become a better player and start owning all your friends.  Trust me, there's a lot to this that I'll be showing you that will help you out a ton.  I hope you enjoyed this ^.^  get ready for more helpful posts in the future.  It's my goal to make you a better gamer and I'm sure a lot of this stuff will translate easily into StarCraft 2 so you might as well get started now!

 

--Tasteless

starfeeder.com


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My first blog post: Introducing Tasteless

StarCraft Pro Gamer matches:
The OSL Finals (Best vs July) with English Commentaries
MSL semi-finals Flash vs fOrGG