Vacation Time and Single Player

Not just from playing Starcraft but from my mundane life too. Tomorrow I’m going away for a little while. Just for some sunshine, exiting food and relaxation and no gaming.

It is still my goal to reach 100 played 1 on 1 games on iccup before the end of the season, but playing 2 on 2 has taken up a lot of time. Also, my computer has become kind of unstable, which also tend to demotivate me a bit. I’ve gotten two loses out of sudden crashes lately and that pisses me of.

I have money reserved for a new computer, but I am awaiting the release of Windows 7 and Starcraft , what ever might come first (and who would have thought that Microsoft could deliver software faster than Blizzard?).

Today’s announcement about the single player campaign: Yawn! Admittedly it looks cool and I may even end up playing it, but compared to my excitement about multiplayer, then this is a long way down the line of my priorities.

I hate when Dustin Browder in one interview talks about how the matchmaking system will work and is very unspecific. Here is a newsflash for you: It most certainly did not work in Warcraft III. In fact, I predict that any game that has no cost associated with creating a new account or resetting your existing account will not work for lower ranked players.

And I know that high ranked Warcraft III players think the current battle.net system is broken too. They play team games an lose just so they can be matched up against newbies in 1 on 1. So in fact you need to punish players for losing on purpose as well!

I’d like to see how they address that :-) Hopefully they will during Blizzcon and I can return to rainy Denmark and read all about.

Playing 2v2s

Due to my extremly bad iccup season, I’ve been playing a lot of 2v2s on battle.net. I feel bad about it, but since I suck, I assume that is one thing that I can be kinda good at.

A 2v2 is something completely different from a 1v1: It is a cheesy rush game and it is a lot more about being coordinated with your ally. When you get in that “we do things in synch”-mode with your ally it is great and when you don’t, you wish you were playing 1v1 and losing on iccup instead.

Games:

Color	Player	Race
W	duel_raptor	Protoss
B	Drummer_RelaX	Terran
Y	TS-Buzz.	Terran
R	FafnerX	Protoss

Download link.

Color	Player	Race
B	hi_hf_gl_ff_GO	Zerg
P	eZ-Dragon	Terran
G	TS-Buzz.	Terran
W	FafnerX	Protoss

Download link.

TS-Buzz. is a regular Starcraft-buddy of mine and we are at about the same level. Our games work out well together. Often I play with another guy called Darkan, and he is slightly worse.

This game is bad. I am annihilated early and now Darkan faces the Orange opponent on his own. Doom seems inevitable, but we talk on Skype and I guide him through the game. At then end I am called n00b and Darkan is praised. We both laughed about it.

Color	Player	Race
R	duel_raptor	Zerg
O	JULEK12	Terran
B	Darkan	Terran
P	FafnerX	Protoss

Download link.

Congratulations Michael!

While my games this season has been horrible, it looks like Michael has had a fair amount of success. He is now a solid D+ and I envy him quite a bit.

At the same time I am struggling to stay in D, occasionally dropping down to D-. It is very frustrating. I wonder if Michael has found the magic recipe for improvement? I know that he picks his games to be Terran vs Zerg on Destination only. One would think that it wouldn't matter that much that the map stays the same. In comparison I only play one map a week, always picking the map-of-the-week that I am the most familiar with.

Last season I overwhelmingly played Zergs and this season has been more mixed with maybe a slight over representation of Protoss. I'm considering going on like I do now until I reach 100 games and then switch to playing like Michael does. One map, one matchup for a ton of games until I get the hang of it.

Victory – eludes me again

So in secrecy I signed up for a tournament hosted by www.sc2pod.com suspecting that mostly casual players would compete. I did – on purpose – not make a big announcement on the blog about it because I know I suck and did not want to jinx it. It was a double elimination tournament where each set was played as a best of 3. A ton of games. Most players were Protoss.

All games were supposed to be done on one Sunday evening, but in the end it simply got to late and the final couple of games were played yesterday. Sunday ended well for me.

Since I got so far in the tournament I didn’t get to see that many of the other games that the they streamed (you have to go to about 2h50m to see any of my games). My impression was that there were quite a lot around my own level and about as many at a level or two below.

So Sunday I won the winner’s bracket and my opponent from the final Khalleb had to play the final of the loser’s bracket. After having won that yesterday we played again and this time around I threw away the games completely. I think my main problem as a player is a lack of consistency and Sunday I played my very best and Monday my very worst.

Replays: Download here.

Improvements

I’d like to report some improvements, but unfortunately I have none. Well, my APM has gone up a notch again but at the cost of some precision I think. Hopefully that will come back.

I played 3 PvZ on iccup tonight and lost them all. Frustrated I logged on to battle.net and met up King[RCG]. He is a danish old-timers. He told me he picked the game up again two days ago, so naturally I challenged him hoping to get an easy kill. He beat me in 10 minutes on Destination – a map he had never seen before.

Sigh! I … suck … so … bad. Why can I not learn?

Map: Andromeda

I really don’t like this map. Not just because I lost three games on it tonight (I suck, I’ve told you so before), but because it is so hard to figure out where to place your buildings.

If you place your buildings around your nexus, dragoons tends to get stuck and it is hard to fit them all on one screen. This makes bookmarking all your gateways on F4 really hard.

I tend to build my buildings in the white area as it is easier to fit gateways to the left and right of a pylon as compared to north and south of one. On the other hand this means that your units have to get past your main on their way out. Not a smart layout.

Placing your gateways in the yellow area seems to be the correct answer, but it requires you to place a pylon about the center of the yellow rectangle pretty early in a game. Probably the first or second pylon depending on whether you fast expand or not.

Against Zerg this seems a bit dangerous as well. You want your buildings in tight so you can defend your base against mutalisk harassment with as few units and canons as possible. Not easy on this map.

Domination

So I play 1-on-1s on iccup and want to win. I rarely do, ‘cause I suck. Sometimes I get in contact with more casual players who are even worse than me and we go 2-on-2 or something similar. Recently I have been playing a lot of games with one guy called Darkan.

He is a 60’ish APM player and he has a lot to learn still. Today we played and won an amazing series of games. The most impressive of them were a 2-on-2 on Python, where we were Protoss and Terran vs two Terrans. During the game I felt that I dominated the game so much and that is a very nice feeling.

I especially like this “perfect psi-storm”. My two templars killed a total of 16 SCVs in 4 storms combined. I like both the drop and the use of the magic box to cast them simultaneously.

When we had almost won, I ran into a huge number of battle cruisers and got of an amazing stasis. That was another nice detail in a long game.

Most of the game I had a supply around 170 and that was almost as much as both of our opponents combined. Amazing.

Replay: Download This!