Alright, I admit I'm indulging in a bit of hyperbole there. Losing is not really awesome, but its good for you. Like broccoli and showering. Winning feels amazing, don't get me wrong. Watching your horde of carefully built up units tearing through an enemy base until you see that 'gg' in the chat before the victory screen pops up engenders a special kind of elation. Sometimes there isn't the 'gg', sometimes there's an angry "f u ck yuou" (misspelling taken verbatim) but that is a separate thing that I will get into later. It will involve some gloating, and I'd like to make myself look as humble and intelligent as I can before I go there.
As great as winning is, its hard to really learn anything from it. Sure, you can watch the replay and notice that you maybe could have crushed your enemy even more if you did this one thing, or made more of that unit, but the real knowledge comes from losing. As a for-instance, take that win I talked about earlier vs. Zerg and the Nydus worms. Earlier that week I lost a match to a Zerg player who completely murdered me with burrowing roaches. The horrible death screams of my poor Zealots still haunt me a bit, but I learned several things from re-watching that match. Some of these things might seem obvious, but I am a noob so lay off. First, it is never too late to get detection. Second, do not panic and try to warp your units in right next to the attacking army, they will just get killed. (I know, I know. Horrible. Panic makes me stupid.) Third, don't marry yourself to your plans. If I'd been a little quicker on the draw I would have realized that he'd spent so much money on roaches that if I'd switched over to Stargate I might have survived. But no, I had gone robo and for the love of god I was GOING ROBO. Those poor Colossi didn't stand a chance. But because of that humiliating loss, when I came up against Nydus worms later my brain immediately went "ground forces / hidden expansion + Stargate * destroy the Spire = winning". I suppose I could make a real-world parallel here about how challenge is the only way to grow as a person and stagnation is analogous to death.
Along those lines, sometimes when I get horribly defeated I message the person after the game to see if they want to play again later. Pretty much everyone I've asked has been amenable to it - which brings me back to the social aspect. You don't have to be nervous about adding people to your friends list - I'm pretty sure most people out there are excited when someone they're playing turns out to be a nice person. And then you can 2v2 with someone you're reasonably sure won't rage quit on you if you're losing. This happened during my first 2v2 match: one of the guys I friended invited me to play 2v2 and even though I'd never done that before and shit be CRAZY when there's 4 people playing we did well, and about 20 minutes in we'd parked outside of their base and were chipping away nicely. But when the balance shifted and it looked like we might win, one of our opponents just ditched his partner. Teamwork apparently was not a thing for this dude. It was a bit sad.
So while losing feels terrible, I try to look at is as an opportunity for improvement. Every time you fall to a play you haven't seen before means a future instance of not falling for it again. You know, once you get over the rage because it really does suck to get killed especially when you feel like you're finally executing your build well. Those are the times you feel like you're never going to get any better, which is not true. And you might feel like it isn't worth trying to build up good habits because there's always going to be someone with faster fingers than you who'll charge up your ramp with like a gajillion Marines and completely obliterate all your well-laid plans. Also not true. Take hotkeys an control groups for example - when you don't know all the keyboard shortcuts your play will be a lot slower than someone who's just using the mouse. Until you learn them all, and then you will be handing that mouse-wielding bastard his own ass, barbecued and served up with some hot sauce. And while it does take a few extra seconds to bind your relevant structures and units to control groups, which may get you killed a few times until you get the hang of it, training yourself to always use them is one of the best things you can do. I was lucky - I discovered how to use control groups while I was playing the campaign and now I cannot imagine trying to play without them. Yes, there will be losing while you learn good habits, but I feel that noobs like myself have the golden opportunity to start learning them now while we don't have any bad habits to try and override.
Why, you may ask, am I being so serious about all this? After all, Starcraft is just a game, and in the whirlwind timeline of gaming where there's always something new coming out its probably close to middle age by now. Like I said earlier, these are all things you can import into real life; not getting angry when things don't go your way, taking the time to learn to do something right instead of fast and possibly sloppy, treating people like human beings with feelilngs, etc. It just so happens that I am drawing these lessons from a game that I happen to really enjoy. Also I am broke and I don't have any other games to play right now. And further, I have to spend a lot of time in front of my computer for work, so there's a lot of Starcraft happening in the calms between server crashes and email problems.
Ok ok, that's enough of that altruistic and pseudo-insightful talk, I said I had some gloating to do and I'm going to do that now. I got cussed out for the first time the other day! Why is that a good thing? Because I hammered a dude so hard he couldn't even spell right, that's why. This was not a replay I watched to find avenues of improvement, this was a replay I watched for the pure evil joy of it. And after I watched it I realized why I made the guy so mad - I inadvertently engaged in some psychological warfare. Things were going well - I'd built up a solid army of Stalkers and Zealots and had attacked his expansion which was defended by turrets, siege tanks, and marines. I had enough money to keep warping units in, but the tanks were causing me some problems until I realized I had a few Phoenixes I'd built for harassment and kind of forgot about. So I brought those suckers in and started lifting tanks off the ground so my army could concentrate on the turrets and marines. Then I thought seeing all those tanks suspended in the air was hilarious so I trained a few more Phoenixes and just kept at it until my opponent verbally flipped me off and exited the game. I imagine there's few things more annoying than having someone levitating all your tanks off the ground. Man, that was funny.
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