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?

Season 7 Results

Something happened to my ZvT and ZvP in season 7. And not something good. It is kind of embarrassing, but if it wasn’t for my solid ZvZ I would probably be crying.

I blame the new maps that have come with the last couple of seasons. The only one I liked was Korhal Compound and now it seems as if that too has gone from season 8. Nasty.

I guess I really need help in the two other matchups. Unfortunately I don’t know any accomplished platinum level Protoss and Terrans on EU to practice against. It is a bit of problem, but I suppose I have to study some pro-players and make their builds work for me too.

Season 6 Looking Good

I haven’t actually played much so far in season 6, but after getting promoted to platinum, I feel that everything has become much easier. I think this is a misconception and I have just gotten better, but maybe it is too early to tell.

The matchup I feel most confident about is ZvP and that is the one with the lowest win rate. Maybe my improvement in ZvT can be explained by the nerf to ghosts, but it seems to me that I have figured out how to drone harder in the beginning of a ZvT game. This has given me some wins I didn’t get two months ago.

ZvZ is just a mystery. Easier opponents in Platinum compared to Gold. That is the way it feels.

Season 5 Status

This is just a short update of the recently finalized season 5. I ended up playing exactly 100 games (somehow I lost one replay in the process). I had clear impression that I did reasonably well in ZvP, but terribly in the two other matchups. The numbers, however, tells a different story.

Apparently I did okay vs. terran and only really had problems in ZvZ. I guess I had a lot of fairly quick wins vs. terran that I just forgot about and only remembered the long drawn out games that didn’t end so well for me.

Anyways, I played roughly half my games vs. platinum players and the other half vs. gold players. With a 50% win rate I hoped for a promotion to platinum. That I didn’t get in season 5 (it came 5 games into season 6 though).

Back to Basics: I Still Suck at this Game

I suddenly realized that I have been living in a gaming illusion for the last year. When the beta came out, I found myself in Diamond even though I never made it higher than C- on iCCup. I told myself that I was only good and high ranked in comparison to all the new players on battle.net, but despite that the feeling that I belonged in the top was so easy to get used to.

I guess that the two times I have dropped down to Bronze to make my way up was a way of feeling good about my skills. But right now I have a hard time making it higher than platinum. That is embarrassing.

I guess I will have to take some time to recalibrate my expectations. That sounds tough.

Getting Better at It

I’ve been a little inactive lately. Initially due to out vacation to the US, but that is – unfortunately – over now.

I still haven’t quite recovered from the fact that I fell from Diamond to Gold after my switch to Zerg. At some point you realize that you are doing something fundamentally wrong and in my case it seems like it primarily has been by trying to play a macro game as Zerg. Either than cannot be done or I just haven’t figured out how to.

The problems have been greatest against Protoss. In the late game Protoss seems close to impossible to beat even when you have a 200/200 army and 5k in the bank.

My reaction have to try different timing attacks and the earlier the attack, the more successful I have been. It works especially well against Protoss that fast expand behind a wall-in.

I’ve even been going back to the 7RR build although I consider that an all-in kinda opening. You end up with 7 roaches, no speed for the follow-up zerglings and only 16 drones mining. With such an opening you pretty much have to win right there or you are left far behind.

Anyways, the result of my tighter openings have been a massive winning streak and yesterday I got back to platinum. I don’t plan to stay there, but whether that is wishful thinking I don’t yet know.

Multitasking Trainer

I’ve been lazy today and not played any 1v1s. Instead I have tried a couple of attempts at beating the multitasking trainer map. Its annoying to say the least. Especially since I don’t multitask well enough.

Basically the map challenges you to do three mini games at once.

1. You need to keep a probe alive on an island while it is being chased by a zergling.
2. You need to build a transport and pick up a high templar on another island.
3. You need to defend your base against an attack from a Terran base.

And while doing all this you need to spend your minerals and your “macro” energy (in my case on Mules/scan).

In my third attempt I succeeded in completing the map on easy. My APM was 128 on average over the course of the 18 minutes it took me to complete the map. I’m sure that playing this map is a good exercise, but it feels way more stressing than actually playing.

Especially the part of the map where you have to keep your probe alive. It seems that you spend way more time at that, than you would in a real game. Managing your base is fun. Picking up the templar is fun, but keeping a probe from being eaten is not fun. And in a real game I’d let it die in a heartbeat and concentrate on something important.

Still, getting stuff done is a challenge and I suppose it helps you become faster.

Statistics

Sorry for being absent for a while. I’ve been busy and not playing so much, but have have been playing a little. And I have also collected some data about my games and I think is interesting:

OVERALL
TvT Win%: 63,3 (30 games)
TvP Win%: 54,8 (42 games)
TvZ Win%: 54,5 (44 games)

MAPS
Xel'Naga Caverns     Win%: 50,0 (14 games)
The Shattered Temple Win%: 62,5 (16 games)
Metalopolis          Win%: 50,0 (20 games)
Scrap Station        Win%: 63,6 (11 games)
Delta Quadrant       Win%: 52,6 (19 games)
Shakuras Plateau     Win%: 62,5 (16 games)
Slag Pits            Win%: 00,0 (1 games)
Backwater Gulch      Win%: 73,3 (15 games)
Typhon Peaks         Win%: 33,3 (3 games)
Tal'darim Altar LE   Win%: 00,0 (1 games)

MAPS BROKEN DOWN PER RACE
Xel'Naga Caverns     v T - Win%: 33,3   (3 games)
Xel'Naga Caverns     v P - Win%: 100,0  (3 games)
Xel'Naga Caverns     v Z - Win%: 37,5   (8 games)
The Shattered Temple v T - Win%: 100,0  (2 games)
The Shattered Temple v P - Win%: 40,0   (10 games)
The Shattered Temple v Z - Win%: 100,0  (4 games)
Metalopolis          v T - Win%: 50,0   (4 games)
Metalopolis          v P - Win%: 20,0   (5 games)
Metalopolis          v Z - Win%: 63,6   (11 games)
Scrap Station        v T - Win%: 75,0   (4 games)
Scrap Station        v P - Win%: 75,0   (4 games)
Scrap Station        v Z - Win%: 33,3   (3 games)
Delta Quadrant       v T - Win%: 50,0   (6 games)
Delta Quadrant       v P - Win%: 71,4   (7 games)
Delta Quadrant       v Z - Win%: 33,3   (6 games)
Shakuras Plateau     v T - Win%: 60,0   (5 games)
Shakuras Plateau     v P - Win%: 62,5   (8 games)
Shakuras Plateau     v Z - Win%: 66,7   (3 games)
Slag Pits            v Z - Win%: 00,0   (1 games)
Backwater Gulch      v T - Win%: 83,3   (6 games)
Backwater Gulch      v P - Win%: 40,0   (5 games)
Backwater Gulch      v Z - Win%: 100,0  (4 games)
Typhon Peaks         v Z - Win%: 33,3   (3 games)
Tal'darim Altar LE   v Z - Win%: 00,0   (1 games)

I find it a little surprising that Backwater Gulch apparently is my best map, but even more surprising that Shakuras Plateau is one of my good maps. I don’t feel comfortable playing that map.

That Metalopolis and Xel’Naga Caverns are my worst maps is no surprise. That’s pretty much aligned with my gut feeling.

Season II

I really haven’t played since season II started. That is I played my placement match on the very first day and got placed in platinum. I kinda knew that would happen as only the season lock-down kept my smurf account in gold.

A couple of days later I played 3 games in a row and won two of them. The one I lost was basically due to me being stupid.

I’m finding that playing TvT has lost its charm. I’m still winning most of those games, but it feels kinda tough now compared to silver and bronze (I suppose that is only fair). TvZ is dominated by banelings which I find to be a very annoying unit that kinda breaks the game. TvP is still fun although very, very hard to win.

I guess I will eventually play some more game as I‘m very curious as to whether I can make it into diamond as Terran.

I’ve also contemplated what to do with my main account? Should I go down to bronze and reroll as zerg? I’m not so sure I would find it as much fun as what I have been doing with Terran.

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.

Roadblocked

My smurf account was promoted to Gold league and suddenly I hit a bump in the road. This bump coincided with the new 1v1 ladder maps, which has undoubtedly made games more macro intensive and generally played hell with the timing attacks which have served me so well from Bronze to Gold.

To my surprise I’ve suddenly started to lose to Zergs and I suspect that is because Zergs in Gold has perfected most one base plays and I am still not comfortable enough with to Terran to know when a safe expand is possible. I could just do one base plays myself to counter this, but that is sucky in the long term and I won’t be trapped into that.

Anyways, while contemplating what to do against Zerg, I’ve tried to experiment with banshees vs. Protoss. They are fun!

But they are also really hard to get when faced with a determined 4-gate by a competent Protoss. There is definitely some work ahead of me before I start not sucking as Terran.

On and for the record. My stats are 71-49 by now or 71-24 if I take away the 25 loses I took on purpose.

100 Wins and Bonus

So today I finally got my 100th win as Protoss (and incidentally my 100th win on 1v1). It wasn’t that hard.

It really wasn’t that hard as I have met a lot of Zergs recently and my PvZ seems okayish. It also gave me the final points to get above 1400. I am chasing 1500 and have been for a while as I have a competitor, who at the moment is at 1490 and I need to beat that!

But I think that the system used for the ladder is kinda flawed. The system is aiming at matching you up against players of similar skill which should eventually give you a win percentage of 50. That is fine, but if you lose the same amount as you win and then add the bonus pool component on top, then you can easily deduct what your rating should be.

It is your current points plus the bonus pool? In my case I have about 600 points in bonus pool, which should make my score 2000 assuming that I am currently leveled out at 50% win rate (it is slightly higher).

This seems stupid.

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So Close to 100 Casual Wins

Yeah, it is not a lot and I have really debated holding of posting about until the 100th win was achieved. Unfortunately my life has not allowed me to play as much as I would like to.

I’ve realized one thing about playing 1v1 casually: You are simply unable to keep up with current trends in strategies. I’ve probably played less than 20 games since last patch and although the new roach range is not new anymore, it is to me!

So I am facing new challenges against Zerg. Even when I win, it doesn’t feel right anymore. It feels awkward and like bad games now and I haven’t felt the satisfaction of a win well played for a while.

I wish I had a week of vacation I could just spend on playing the game so I could finally improve a little bit.

PvP Adventures

Okay so this is one match-up I do not understand. Yesterday I lost to a guy who build a pylon right next to my nexus and then continued with a gateway. I killed his pylon with probes and yet he just built a new one!

I realize that I should have just built my own gateway. It would have been done before his and the won, but I panicked and used too many of my probes.

Today I had another amazing PvP on lost temple. A guy went fast blink stalkers and kept me in my base for far too long. In the end I won, but mainly because he entered in a few battles he shouldn’t. And the annoying thing is that only after the game was over, did I realize that the only reason he could blink up in my base, must have been because he had an observer there. An observer I should have been able to kill.

Expanding in PvP is something I never seem able to punish other players for doing and something that is suicide if I try it myself. It seems imba, but I guess it can’t be.

Learning Curve

Learning something is never easy. Starcraft least of all. I know because I am constantly trying to improve and I also watch a lot of my friends try to improve. Watching them makes me realize how much I have learned in the past and which have become so natural to me, that I have forgot that it was something that had to be learned.

I remember back in the early days of Starcraft I, I won a lot of games simply because I knew how to a-move, rather than just move my units! Amazing difference.

So I watch a friend play and I realize how much of a difference it makes that you move your screen by double tapping a control group. I.e I double tap 0 to get back to my main nexus (and that in itself is a bad habit from Brood War) and I double tap 1 to get to my main army. I do this all the time and it allows me to be in two places at once to a much larger degree than scrolling by putting the mouse courser at the edge of the screen. At Bronze level you can probably win games by doing this better than your opponent. I think.

Making enough workers is a relative simple improvement in comparison because it does not require you to learn something physical in the same way. And even though it is simpler I still see friends who have major problems making more than 20 workers. How hard can it be?

Both of the above steps is something you don’t learn gradually. One day you pass the invisible boundary between not doing it and then getting it to work and you will take a jump up the ladder as a result.

At my level I am struggling with when not to make units. I know that in some matchups like PvP a secret is that you don’t need that many units before your fourth gate, but how many do you need? And when? I’m sort of stuck at 1000 points in my division and I think I need to “get to that next level” in my PvP in order to break the barrier that will take me 200 points up the ladder.

A stone killer

That is what Starcraft II single player is. I’m about two thirds through and enjoying it far more than I anticipated. The story is a little boring (but that is basically because a video game will never tell a story as well as a good book), but the missions are really varied and do not encourage turtling nearly as much as I feared.The midnight launch event was great as always. I’ve tried to photograph similar events before, but it is really, really difficult. Especially when you are also eager to get your copy and get home to play. I tried nonetheless, but don’t know well this photo conveys 40+ young men waiting in line at a Gamestop shop about 10 minutes walk from my apartment.

I saw about 4 girls and maybe one of them was actually there to pick up a copy for herself. The 3 others clearly weren’t. I, as usual, was the oldest guy around and I was even wearing my 12 years old Starcraft I t-shirt (which is pretty worn down by now). In other words: I took the liberty of geeking totally out this one night.

Right now I’ll concentrate on completing the campaign and then play ladder. It may take a couple of more days.

Lost Confidence

I play a lot of 2v2s with a guy I know as Sklent. That is fine even though I think our cooperation is less than stellar. The games are still fun especially when we are winning.  Rarely do we play 1v1 against each other as it is subtly understood that I would win easy. That misunderstanding was corrected yesterday.

In a series of two games he took me down so badly that it wasn’t even funny. After the games I have been reflecting on why I lost.

One thing is that his Terrans are easily the race that gives me the most trouble, but I doubt that is the whole explanation. Maybe part of it is, that what set me apart from him in Brood War was my superior macro. Due to the way Starcraft II is different from Starcraft: Brood War, I don’t think I get the same out of that advantage :-(.

But I lost a whole series of games to Terrans that day. Either I didn’t get Collosi out in time, in which case Terran infantry tears up a Protoss ground army, or I got them out and then he had like 6+ vikings and it didn’t matter. I’m starting to lose faith in my ability to deal with Terrans in general.

Oh and last, but not least. When a terran lifts his command center on Metalopolis he will land at the high yield expansion when I am at 8 probes. Then he will mine with 5 SCVs at double the income to my 8. I find it absolutely crazy that a Terran can pull off a stunt like that and be ahead right away. And it only gets worse over time.

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!

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!