Hearthstone Night 2, Sc2! and Team Organization

So tonight was the 2nd night of Hearthstone Season 2, my first time playing Sc2 in a long time and a slow, but important day at work!

Hearthstone Night 2

Today I ranked up to 17 (from 21 last night). I’m playing my Aggroriffic Warlock desc and have only had one loss to a control Warlock. Two board wipes early on is really hard to recover from (First a Coined Hellfire, and then a Shadowflamed Ancient Watcher).

So far the games have been really easy. Many players playing bad decks and no making correct plays. This makes it pretty easy. The last three games have been much harder and I have a feeling that I’m going to hit a wall soon.

Sc2 Again

Due to a reddit thread I’ve decided to play a bit of sc2 and try not to care if I suck at it. The challenge is to play 20 games a week. This is going to be hard to do. Today I played 3 games, won 2 of them and lost the first. The first game I played really really badly in a Zerg vs Terran. Clearly for a first game in months this is to be expected. I ranked into Silver after this game.

The second game was won with the same Zerg vs Zerg strat that I’ve used since the first season when Sc2 was launched. This is from EG.Machine and is basically a simple baneling build. Makes it so that if the opponent can’t counter it (which is harder to do than execute it) I win. It works a lot and is the reason I did ok in the one NE Sc2 League I did ok in.

The third game is the one I’m happy about. I was happy about my spending. The game felt good, and I crushed an attack from the Protoss and forced him to quit out. I’m not back in good form after just 3 games… but this one felt MUCH better than the last two. Hopefully some habbits return pretty quickly, I can learn some current meta builds and I can keep trying to improve over the next few weeks.

Team Organization

My team at work now consists of 3 back end engineers and 1 front end. This is due to us moving into working on more API work and less game site work. All three of the back end engineers have never been on a team like this before so we’ve done a lot of talking over the past few weeks (and a ton today) about how we want to manage it.

I’m most interested in working on my leadership. In order to do this I want to try and pick up any slack in some areas that the other two don’t enjoy and make sure they’re doing what they want. I plan on doing a lot of testing, bug fixing, git checking, vm making and documentation organizing. I think this fits in well with my 2014 work goals as well.

Big things coming that I hope to be a big part of in 2014 and I can’t wait for this team to get rolling. We’re all very excited to dive head first and embrace some of the aspects of Scrum that we haven’t been able to do prior. The biggest thing I want to be able to do is code review EVERY piece of code we write, and also work on one task at a time as a team. This is something my team wasn’t able to do prior to this since the team was working on 4-5 projects at a time with 3-4 people. Now that we have the same set of goals, and less projects we should be able to accomplish a lot!