As I expected, I reached the net café two hours after Harry hung up on me. Stepping into the familiar LAN shop, I was greeted by the usual sight of teenagers and young adults hunched over their respective personal computers, their eyes glued to the screens where bright flashes of lights streaked across the battlefield littered with explosions. Most were playing MOBAs, which wasn't unusual given how super popular that genre was right now. League of Myths was the rage right now, with millions of followers and watchers on Spasm.
It wasn't my kind of game, though. I preferred Real Time Strategy a lot more, and I was always more of a sci-fi guy than fantasy. I refused to go anywhere without my giant robots, to the extent where one reader complained about me "ruining" my fantasy story by adding technology into it. Uh, hello? I wasn't sure what you were expecting, but if you wanted to read a "pure" fantasy story, there were hundreds if not thousands of such stories out there. Obviously I wanted to try something different, and since my protagonist was someone from this modern, hi-tech world who was transported into a medieval fantasy world, why the hell wouldn't he want to make use of his modern knowledge to bring hi-tech weaponry and vehicles for a massive advantage over the relatively primitive residents?
Seriously, readers, stop projecting your own desires into someone else's story and then whining about it being "ruined" if it didn't go the way you wanted it to.
"Hello? Jiu Wei? Are you there?"
I realized that Harry was waving his hand in front of my face. He must have caught sight of me entering the shop and had hurried over to greet me. I bowed my head apologetically.
"Whoops, sorry. I was thinking about some annoying stuff. What's up?"
"Spacecraft, of course! You've been practicing over the last few weeks, right?" Harry rubbed his hands in anticipation. "I saw your name on ladder. You've been steadily climbing the ranks?"
"I guess so. Not as quickly as I would like to, but yeah. I'm currently in Diamond league." Honestly, I wanted to get to Masters as quickly as possible, but evidently I had underestimated the magnitude of the task.
Unlike the young geniuses such as Ray and Clam, who emerged from Europe to be amongst the world's greatest pro gamers, I needed time to get back up to speed. I lacked their talent and intuitive instinct for the game – everything I achieved thus far was through sheer hard work. Practice, practice and countless hours of practice, just to hone my mechanics and perfect my build orders.
There were plenty of people, especially from the older generation, who ridiculed the notion that pro gaming could ever become a legitimate career choice. However, pro gaming wasn't as simple as what those people seemed to think. While they claimed that we were just playing and having fun instead of working hard and making an honest living just like everyone else, the truth was that most of these gaming sessions weren't actually "fun."
Yes, we did love the game, and that was why we wanted to become pro gamers. But one did not simply become a pro gamer just by playing games all day, unlike what these detractors appeared to think. Computer gaming was just like any other craft or sport – to reach the pinnacle, you had to practice over and over and over again. You had to learn to withstand immense psychological pressure that came with the insane expectations. Also, the grueling sessions of practice where you spent hours on hours of doing absolutely nothing but matches of Spacecraft over and over and over again could get very tedious. Let's be serious – gaming was normally something you did as a hobby, which meant you could do it at your own pace, play whenever you want, quit whenever you want, and nobody had any expectations of you.
Pro gamers did not have that luxury. It was just like professional soccer or music. You could claim that the professionals were doing what they love, but to reach that peak of their game, to put on a performance for paying spectators, they had to polish their skills to perfection. And the only way to do that was through countless hours of practice. One did not simply become a pro gamer by playing games. You couldn't just go onto ladder, beat someone, and then log off as and when you wanted to. You had to memorize build orders by heart, you had to keep up with the meta, you had to respond to ever-changing playstyles and tailor your own strategies according to your opponent. And you played in high-pressure environments with equally high stakes – concerning thousands of dollars in the form of prize money. And if you didn't perform, you were kicked out of the team, no questions asked. Only less than a hundred out of millions of gamers worldwide could actually become professional gamers.
It wasn't simply something you became just because you were passionate and love the game. And once you reached there, you couldn't be complacent. You had to fight to maintain your place in the hierarchy. Slip up, lose a bunch of matches, fall into ignominy, and you were kicked out of the team and lose your place in the pro league.
Just like me. I was extremely naïve if I thought I could walk right back into pro gaming after two years of hiatus. The meta had changed drastically and I was left behind. Even after a couple of weeks of nonstop practice, I only made it to Diamond League. At this rate, it was difficult for me to make it back to pro gaming.
The only solution was sheer resilience and raw determination.
Fortunately, that was something I appeared to possess. Harry recognized it too, otherwise he wouldn't have called me over.
"Good timing. I've been looking for a practice partner, and there are very few local gamers who play Terran like you."
I understood Harry's concern. Almost all three of the pro gamers in Team Solid were Psidork players. There was no Terran player in the team except me, and evidently even after I left, there was no one to take up the mantle. Strange.
Well, Psidork was popular because most young players love the spell casting aspect of the game, having migrated over from League of Myths and Defense of the Primordial. They came into Spacecraft with some absurd expectation that it would be like MOBAs, placing emphasis on a single hero character escorted by mobs or creep.
They weren't wrong. One of the things I had learned in my return to the game was that Hailstorm had implemented some new mechanic called the Commander Unit, which was some sort of heroic unit that you controlled. It was supposed to represent you, a personalized avatar that personally took control of units in the battlefield. Apparently it provided benefits such as buffing the army it led (such as increasing their attack speed by a certain percentage, or accelerated their healing, or increased their health by a certain percentage, or increased their damage by a particular percentage). I had yet to use such things because I didn't really believe in it. Furthermore, there was only one Commander Unit for mech because most of their commanders were infantry, such as a Specter spell caster, or a marine officer that buffed the speed or attacks of the infantry units under his command. There was one Commander Unit available – a customized Titan, but it took forever to build, and normally I ended my games before I ever got to that point.
However, the point was that these Commander Units had the ability to turn the tide of a battle, and many gamers – particularly the newer, younger ones – loved them. They were fairly common, but they weren't invincible. While they obviously possessed more health than the regular units that were subordinated to them, just like experimental units, the moment they took too much punishment, they would die. And the death of the Commander Unit meant a loss for the controlling player, which was why they were so risky.
Come to think of it, the Psidork player I played against earlier this afternoon…he was making use of spell casters heavily instead of mechanized Psidork and walkers…was it because he had a spell caster Commander somewhere? I recalled there was one particular High Priest that was surviving more than his fair share of bombardment, who just refused to die despite suffering from immense splash damage from my forces when I invaded his base and wrecked his Stargates. One who wiped out a good number of my Salamanders…
Yeah, like I said, just because you had a Commander, that didn't automatically guarantee your victory. Still, I somehow understood the main reason why my opponent chose the spell caster route. That was because he was locked into it by choosing a spell caster Commander. Obviously such a Commander would buff other spell casters such as regular High Priests, Enlightened and even the Ascended, and also frontline troops such as Disciples and Dragoons. But he would give no benefits to mechanized Psidork robots and walkers or even the Psidork aircraft, which was why he left it until very late to being manufacturing an armada of flying saucers.
Commanders, huh…?
"Okay, let's go." I headed toward one of the available computers. Harry assure me that he would pay for my gaming session – Team Solid members could use the net café computers for free, because they were considered training resources and part of the team's infrastructure. Since Harry was the one who invited me, he was polite enough to take care of my session. I say that, but he didn't have to pay a single cent since it was Team Solid that covered all the expenses.
This wasn't corruption. If a member found a good, competent training partner, they were more than welcome to invite them for practice sessions. Harry was making use of this privilege, that's all.
"Great!" Harry was excited. "It's been a while since I've played against a Terran player!"
A skilled one, he meant. There were plenty of Terran players on ladder, and I had encountered them a lot during my last two weeks of practice. Mirror matches were…interesting, to say the least. I enjoyed them somewhat, but they weren't my favorite matchup. Still, I had a higher win-rate for my Terran versus Terran than my Terran versus Psidork, but it wasn't as high as my Terran versus Demon matchup, where mech was generally considered a more viable strategy because the Demons didn't possess hard counters to mechanical units like the Psidorks' Loyalist walkers or armadas of flying saucers.
That said, it wasn't as if I was particularly more skilled than the other Terran players on ladder. So I knew that Harry was actually using this whole training partner thing as an excuse to help me out. He was aware of my attempts to get back to the game, so to speak, and he was more than happy to assist me by practicing against me. It might hurt his own training a little, but he seemed fine with that. I couldn't help but feel grateful to him.
Launching Spacecraft, I sat back and watched the game take up the full screen. Harry settled down in the booth next to mine and also launched Spacecraft.
"Wait a second, I'll invite you to my party and arrange a custom game."
"Okay. Which map?"
"Eternal Empire. Is that okay with you?"
"Sure." I nodded. I liked Eternal Empire – it was a fairly big map, with lots of chokepoints and defensible positions. A very good map for a mech player like me, where I could siege up my tanks to rain death upon my enemies and easily protect my expansions. I wondered if Harry was deliberately giving me a chance.
Knowing him, he decided to ease me back in the game by allowing me to start with a map that was advantageous for me, but slowly switch to other maps as we continued to practice. I was fine with that. I was aware that Harry wasn't naïve enough to go easy on me forever.
"I hope you have your build orders perfected," Harry remarked as he started the game. I watched the counter and nodded.
"So do I."
Then the match began, and as my workers automatically moved to harvest resources, I moved my mouse to select a single Engineer while the fingers of my left hand flew across the keyboard, making use of shortcuts to issue a sequence of construction tasks. Beside me, Harry was doing the same thing, selecting a Duck to begin warping in psychically charged Pillars to generate a psionic field in which he could warp alien buildings into existence.
I knew that more from experience than actual visual observation. Since we were in separate booths, I couldn't actually see what he was doing. Harry also couldn't see what I was doing either – our booths were designed in such a way to prevent cheating. Not only that, from prior knowledge of visiting the net café, I was aware that every computer here had an anti-hack program and other sorts of cheat prevention software installed. Whether it was to stop stream-sniping, the use of bots (like aimbots or map reveals) and other unscrupulous methods, the net café run by Team Solid had it covered.
Not that Harry needed to cheat to win. Already in the first minute I was facing pressure from his hovering Disciples who began to harass my Engineers despite my marines' best attempts to drive them off. As usual, his micro was good, and he was able to kill two of my marines before his Disciples escaped without any damage, their personal shielding regenerating as they retreated to safety.
A bead of perspiration dripped down my face as I half-smiled in exasperation. Harry certainly wasn't showing any restraint.
This was going to be a tough game.