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!

Protoss vs Terran

I play Protoss in the Beta. I did about 100 games as random before switching to Protoss. I realized that I just sucked too much to do the random thing. And I win a lot at the moment. Part of the reason is that the beta is full of people who basically don’t know how to play RTS games, but that is only part of the reason.

If you, as Protoss, can get that mix of about 3 immortals and some support units you feel pretty invincible. AiurAdun, who for now play Terran, and I set out to test this yesterday in a series of three games.

His idea was that with early ghosts you could counter the Protoss army. In the end I think he was fairly optimistic about this approach. I’m not so sure. I think the secret to dealing with this lays more in using the marauders to slow down the Protoss army, retreat and get a around of fire in and then repeat. This level of micromanagement is completely absent from gold league and down.

The game that I lost, I did a pretty aggressive zealot opening. That I thought had a good chance of Steppes of War, but apparently not. This has led my to believe that the only feasible opening for Protoss is fast immortals, attack and win.

He Suck at Starcraft II too!

I feel related to this guy here. I don’t think I suck quite as badly, but still I share his pain. Check out his videos. He has 7 up so far.

Promotion

I started out trying to experiment with the new league promotion features. I lost – on purpose – so much that I got placed in a Copper league initially and hope to abuse that in a series of n00b-bashing games. Unfortunately this is not how the system plays out.

I got to play maybe 4 games before the match-making system started pairing me up against people in silver league. At first you think: Ah, I guess this is a side effect of not having a ton of people online to match me up against, but after a while it dawns on you, that maybe the system suspects you cheated in your initial placement matches!

After about 8 games I was exclusively being paired up against Gold and Platinum league players. At this point the race for the top spot in my Copper league started to get interesting. A couple of players in my league had obviously done the same as me expecting to get easy wins and others in the top really struggled with win rates around 50%. At this point I started to see some of my competitors being promoted and I knew it was just a matter of time before my number one position in Copper would be yanked away from me in favor of a lower position in a better league. But what league would it be?

 

This morning I was 13-2 after having joined my league, and I set out to play another game. I had lost only two games and won a few over people placed in platinum, so I guess I thought I was heading for gold league at least. The final game that led to my promotion was a very typical Protoss vs Terran game on Scrap Station. My opponent was in the top tier of his Gold league and rated “favored” before the game began. When the game was done, I got promoted into Bronze league and was deducted 273 points. I guess they think I got all those points too easy, when I was posing as a Copper player? The punishment seems kinda harsh, but maybe that is just me.

The game itself was rather uneventful. He went marines and marauders and tried to spice it up with a little harassment with banshees. I had my defenses up and was already on the fast track to immortals which counters marauders pretty badly. Game over and the promotion was a done deal.

Replay Pack added.