How to not suck at StarCraft 2

It’s no secret that StarCraft 2 is a more complicated game than the average multiplayer title and that well, if you don’t have a natural freak of nature talent to excel in it you’re going to have to do some real practising. Many of us, unfortunately, don;t know where to begin. Luckily Deviation Gaming, home to some of our local StarCraft 2 talents, has a great development program teaching players how to better their game.

Deviation Gaming is a local clan and gaming community consisting of 105 members competing across game titles such as Dota 2, StarCraft 2, FIFA 13, Battlefield 3, League of Legends, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Call of Duty 4. This community is dedicated to helping eSports grow under the leadership of Robert ‘Logan’ Openshaw. Deviation Gaming not only hosts regular StarCraft 2 cups with their sponsor Tech Games, but is currently running a StarCraft 2 development program.

Seen as some of South Africa’s best StarCraft 2 players, Rowan ‘ScaRy’ Hammond and Magiel ‘enjoy’ De Lange offer training sessions every Tuesday. Both of these players recently competed at the recent StarCraft 2 Invitational. We caught up with Robert ‘Logan’ Openshaw to find out how the training session work and how gamers can get involved.

How exactly can gamers find you in-game to join the sessions?

As much as there is a Deviation Gaming Clan in-game, we also have various non-private groups people can join. Like the group ‘Deviation’ or the channel ‘DvG TheoryCrafting’. They can always add myself as a real ID friend – logan@deviationgaming.com, or Rowan ‘ScaRy’ Hammond – rowhammond@gmail.com, and then we can point them in the right direction.

Who are the players giving the training?

Generally it will be handled by Rowan ‘ScaRy’ Hammond, he is usually partnered with Magiel ‘enjoy’ De Lange but enjoy is on Honeymoon at the moment. At this time we are trying to identify player’s weak points and assist them from there – but there is only so much time so we generally try to do as much as possible.

How often do you do these sessions?

DvG Training Sessions are generally every Tuesday, and we have been slack the last couple of weeks with the release of HotS, but in that time we have been working on how to improve training and how it should be done. So we are at the moment experimenting, but we are trying to move away from players playing each other and then commenting. We are also learning at how we can better develop the training and ScaRy has a good success rate on what he does.

What’s the goal of the development program?

To grow E-Sports and help people be confident to play more.

Where can people reach you or contact you?

They can contact either me, logan@deviationgaming.com or you can contact Rowan ‘ScaRy’ Hamond, rowhammond@gmail.com, either in-game as Real ID friends or you can mail us and we can take it from there.

How do the training sessions work?

Firstly it would help tremendously if players have a microphone and can join us on our TeamSpeak servers as well as some replays of their games. It will be easier to communicate if you can join us on TeamSpeak.  This week was generally replay analysis, taking down some notes and some 1v1 practise. This type of practise is really worthwhile for High Silver players and up, but bronze players can join in so they can start learning the mechanics and basics of the game.

Then ScaRy has a ‘Boot Camp’ 1 week crash course and is really highly recommended. Basically you will get 1 week access to him for 1 hour a day and will be doing in-depth replay analysis, mechanics, taking notes, build perfection, etc. You generally should be able to jump a league or two within a week. We have proven results wherein a matter of weeks two players jumped from Silver to Platinum, I went from Silver to Platinum within 13 Ranked Games over the past Easter Weekend, but I spent a week on Unranked to practise.

So far ScaRy has a very high success rate, but at the end of the day it’s up to the student to play and use the information to improve. Like everything its practise, there is no guarantee that you will jump higher leagues but it is up to the student on how well he will do. “More gg, more Skill”.

Having the community be this proactive in growing eSports is exactly what we need. If you’re doing anything similar and what people to know about it, don’t hesitate to send me the details to yolanda@lazygamer.net.

For more about Deviation Gaming, check out the following links.

Official Website | Facebook | Do Gaming League Clan Page

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Last Updated: April 3, 2013