I’m in Platinum

Yeah! So I redid my placement matches after the big reset and went 5-0. Directly into a  Platinum League. It seems that while I get better all the time, the placement matches still manages to get a lot tougher every time you have to redo them. I wonder if it will be like that at retail too?

Among the 5 games there were none that were simple walkovers. The first game was against another one doing his placement matches. At that point he was 4-0. I felt bad about sending him to gold division. There there were two good silver players followed by two gold players. I even almost lost to a super early reaper rush, but fortunately he fucked it up in the follow up. I still think reapers are totally unfair.

I got to play then new map “Incineration Zone” twice. I really like it even though I anticipate a lot of reaper rushes on this one.

It feels very inspired by Outsider, although it is only a 2-player map and obviously a lot smaller.

I take pride in playing Starcraft is not a casual hobby and yet I have found myself to like the new achievement system. I want to unlock that next reward, get another badge and basically be an achievement whore. Really strange!

Outage

The Europe Battle.net has been pretty screwed for the last week and a half. 2v2 teams are randomly reset or is made to redo placement matches even though the team is still ranked! My 1v1 ranking disappeared after a while. Yesterday instead of a patch, I just became completely locked out.

Now I am reading about patch 9 on the US servers while waiting for something to fix my account. At first I thought they were insane. In patch 8 Protoss really needs a boost against Terrans (primarily due to the f*cked up crazy Reaper). Instead they buffed the Marauder and nerfed the Immortal. Sigh!

Due to the aforementioned issue I was already considering switching to Zerg for awhile. Judging by the feedback from the US servers this seems to be a good idea. The new larva bug, should make this extremely entertaining – for about 2 minutes at least :-(.

3 Replays

I wanted to share a couple of my better replays with readers of my blog. They are all games I’ve won as those where I lose tends to pretty disgusting examples of me failing epicly.

One of them is a Protoss vs Terran on Metalopolis. I fast expand in a haze of confusion and he tries to bunker rush my expansion. It narrowly fails and I counter. I have mixed emotions about the value of bunkers and watching this game should showcase why I have doubts.

The two other games are Protoss mirror matches. In one of them I get pressured a lot early on and he get an expansion up and running way before me. Knowing I am in a lot of trouble I warp in dark templars in his base. Probably my first successful use of that unit which was the core of my Brood War play style.

In the other game you get to see two player stumble around with a huge ball of units. The game is decided in one final game where position and collosi owns more units mixed with immortals. I don’t like Starcraft II’s tendency to be all about having a ball of units and just going for the attack when the position is right. Feels too Warcraft III’ish.

Download the replays here.

We are the Champions

At least until tomorrow. I formed a 2v2 team with TS-Buzz (aka Qvist) this afternoon and we went undefeated through the placement matches. This is quite common and you end up in platinum league. Here it usually gets tough, but not so today. Probably because TS-Buzz is quite good and probably because we both have gotten quite a bit better since we got into the beta. At least we ended up as the top team of our platinum division after 23 games.
Notice the team at the place just below us. A dual Zerg team (which is just as imbalanced as in Brood War). We even played them on Twilight Fortress and lost to mass roaches and mutalisks. You basically have to go all out to counter one of those builds and they then hit you with the other.
Oh well, we were chatting over Skype admiring our  lead position when I suddenly had to refresh the list.
Apparently the bastards had gone on playing and had now overtaken. I really wanted to go to bed with a lead position, but  we both had a cold and were more coughing that talking. It made getting into another game less attractive than just relaxing a bit.
I refreshed the list again and now we were in the lead again.
It seems that I have discovered that staying cool and letting the other players lose their position on the ladder is an equally valid strategy to that of playing!