The Ladder Lock-Down Makes no Sense!

I cheated the system and deserve no pity. I know that, so that is not my point of this posting. But the recent ladder lock-down makes no sense and I am amazed that Blizzard insists of the madness that we have today. I realize that they are trying to limit competition to small closed systems so move people can have achievable goals, but it would be nice if they made sense to. Removing loses from statistics is just another way of obscuring the problems rather than fixing them.

So I am in gold and heading up. That I got here by losing a lot on purpose is besides the point. I could have been a valid gold level player who recently improved a lot. Assume that I am.

I am about 1500 points away from the top spot in my division and I have a little more than a week to get there in competition with all those ranked about me. That is fine. Normally I would get the first spot as I would be promoted before that. That is fine, but it isn’t like that anymore. Due to the lock-down I am competing with those in my division. I’m clearly the better player ‘cause I am playing platinum and diamond players and winning about half of those games.

Number one in my league is also winning about half his games, but he is just playing gold-level players. Assuming we both mass games from now until season’s end, he will still by ranked above me simply because his opponents are easier than mine. Out wins will give us the same number of points since we have both reached our level – I just haven’t been promoted yet! Result is that the season will end with wildly inaccurate top 10’s in all but master league.

What is the point of that?

Cracking the next Level of Terran vs Zerg

I’ve finally started to get platinum level opponent and that has led to a whole new range of problems. Which is good and exactly what I wanted. I consider myself a macro player and my micro is sub-par. I have been experimenting with different opening vs. Zerg. Early aggression (which I suck at), pure mech play (which is really, really hard, and a mixed build that for a long time has felt really vulnerable to baneling/lings.

But finally I seem to have discovered what everybody else probably already knew. That skipping tanks almost completely and going for a thor/hellion mix to supplement a pure marine army, is fairly efficient in this scenario.

Looking at the screenshots above from a random game of mine, its obvious that the mech portion of the army absorbs most of the damage from the banelings. I probably ought to have my thors in front though. As the hellions are better against the zerglings.

Right now it seems inevitable that I will soon be promoted to platinum myself. If my Terran play is good enough to get me further than that we will have to see.

Oh, and for the record, I am now 82-54 or 82-29 when I remove the 25 games I initially lost on purpose.