Teaching Starcraft

This is a hard subject that I have been struggling with for quite a while. I have a handful of friends who are in silver/gold and while I suck at the game, I am still doing a little better than them. They are not new to the game, they just don’t improve that much if at all.

In itself this is not strange. Improvement is rarely gradual. Most often it is in jumps. For instance, my ZvP improved dramatically when I realized that versus a fast expanding Protoss it was safe to do nothing but drone until 6 minutes in the game. From one day to another, my win-rate went from 10% to 35%. Much better.

If you are in silver or low gold you are probably having problems with the following:

• Macro, basically building workers and spending your money
• Basic build orders
• Scouting – not enough
• Scouting – seeing something but unaware of its implications
• Certain categories of cheeses
• Bad engagements

If you have 1000 games behind you and still are in the lower leagues, then you are probably aware of all of the above problems and yet seem unable to step beyond it. So what to do?

Things I have tried:

• Concentrate on one thing at the time (usually macro, build orders or scouting)
• Training certain situation: i.e. how to defend a specific cheese or how to deal with a 4-gate
• How to works toward a late game goal

None of it reliably works. Any ideas?

Heart of the Swarm

I got a beta key last night. Wuhu!

I just played my first game where I random’ed against a zerg and lost. I ended up as Terran and of course I had to see if I could rely on widow mines. They are kinda fun in large numbers, but they probably still take some knowledge to use efficiently.

In the end I lost to ling/ultra and then he switched to swarm hosts for the humiliation effect.

The things I wondered about the most was whether there were any general improvements to battle.net in the beta, but unfortunately no. No shared replay watching, no automatic mini tournaments. Basically just the plain old battle.net. Hopefully they will add that later and the game I just downloaded just tests the multiplayer balance.

Season 8 Status

According to tradition I kinda owe a posting on how Season 8 ended for me. End result was about 150 1v1s plated and a end result as around #15 in my Platinum division (not that you really can compare that to anything).

I think it was a confusing season. Statistics shows that I did slightly better against Terran and Protoss compared to in Season 7 (and slightly worse against Zerg, which is annoying as ZvZ for a long time has been my best match-up).

I still find it extremly hard to beat both Terrans and Protoss as they can be so passive and just roll me over in the late game. In ZvZ I’ve decided to become better at taking my 3rd base, as I’ve run into some limitations to my 2-base muta opening. Not to the extend of it costing me games, but because I can see an opportunity to be even better at this matchup -- I wish I could see similar oppertunites vP and vT.

Total Career Games 3000

Finally:

Still in Platinum though… Will I ever learn?

Streaming Sucky Games

I’ve been playing around with xsplit and twitch settings a lot and finally made my stream work. The key breakthrough as actually been something so simple as to clean out the fan attached directly on my aging HD4870 graphics card. Yeah I suck at cleaning up my computer cabinet too.

In order to celebrate this amazing feat, I’ve redesigned my stream logo.

The channel is located at http://twitch.tv/fafnerx . Go Subscribe if you want to have a cheap laugh at my expense.

Just to show how amazingly bad my play can be, check out this recording where I can’t even select the correct race and end up playing as Protoss.

A Counting Game

For a while I have been counting my win. I don’t care too much about achievements in game, but I am kinda looking forward to my 500th win as Zerg on the 1v1 ladder.  I don’t know why, but I am.

At the moment I am at 298 wins and I’ll probably reach 300 tonight. I also know my velocity, which is around 50 wins a season. That should guarentee the 500th win about 4 seasons.

But there is a catch: I pretty much assume there will be separate ladders for Wings of LIberty and Hearth of the Swarm. And so the question becomes, will we have another 4 seasons before HOTS is released? I don’t really think so, which puts me under some kind of pressure.

If I didn’t suck at the game I could simply improve my win rate. Then I would get there sooner with the same number of games  ;–). I don’t think that will happen though…

Managing Your Temper

I find that not letting wins and loses get to you is one of the most important things you have to accomplish. Not letting the loses get to you is obvious, but the wins can get you too! I think having a plan to each matchups and being able to modify it to match the map you are playing is the trick.

After a couple of loses it is easy to get angry and then you start gambling. I.e. you’ll not play safe enough hoping to get ahead by cutting corners or you’ll over defend all set on not getting wiped out early. Either will cause you more loses.

Winning a lot builds confidence and suddenly you are not playing against an opponent, but just by yourself. And something this opponent does may be totally unexpected and even if you did see it coming, you did nothing to handle it since you were mentally in a whole other game.

The important thing is to treat each game as a new game. Being alert and aware of the signs you see from your opponent as well as sticking to your plan.