Time is Up

So I have only about 3 minutes left on my Trial Account which means that I won’t be playing any more games on it. At least not for now.

In the end I managed to get 38 games done in the 7 hours of play time. 10 games I threw on purpose, 5 I really lost and 22 I won. From a confidence building perspective, playing in Bronze is certainly good! I didn’t manage to get out of Bronze, but in the end I was mainly playing people in Silver and even got one match against a Gold player.

I think this has a lot to do with me encountering a lot of other players considered for promotion. I think the match making system prefers people of similar MMR-rating and of the same league. This means that people who are close to being promoted will more likely meet each other and those who do well in those matches should be promoted first.

Another factor is probably that you don’t get promoted before you have leveled out in skill. As long as you still do good even when matched up against higher ranked players.

So what did I learn playing these games? First of all the level in Silver is actually a lot higher than I had imagined. Or I got to play a segment of the Silver league, which is. People have decent macro and at least try to copy builds from higher leagues. I really think that the level of play that I encounter in Diamond is only slightly better than what I have met in Silver.

One difference is that barracks play is a lot more popular compared to mech-builds. Especially in TvT this is the case. There are also Protoss’ going mass carriers. Something I actually lost to once and I think my mistake was to think that I could just ignore it since I obviously was the better player. That kind of hubris will get you killed even in Silver.

I think I’ll end this post with this little gem: In my third game I SCV rushed prezemo and killed 4 of his probes, then I attacked my own in order to not win. He obviously thought that he was pro and I was not.

Download the last replays here (28-38).