EPTThe Earth revolved, and upon its surface things of little moment glittered in the minds of men and were forgotten, until the last night fell asunder and the day of Release poured its awful light upon us all.
The attendant wailing and gnashing of teeth was surprisingly minimal, I thought. I mean, it all kind of just... worked, a feat of infrastructure engineering which went almost entirely unremarked.
I skulked around in the practice league for an hour or so until it became clear nobody else in the practice league had any business being there either. Seriously, Blizzard ought to have auto-skipped that stage for accounts associated with the Beta. In one match a Void Ray turned up on the loading screen.
Eventually I located my balls and started my placement matches. Now, prior to release I had resolved to play as random, for all the good reasons like getting a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of the other races and so forth. In the first game I spawned Terran, build a supply depot, and my opponent quit. In the other four games I spawned Zerg, and utterly flattened a succession of clearly inexperienced players. So now I'm stuck in Gold league, and mortified. Playing random was predicated upon the expectation of being placed nice and low to allow my non-existent T and P to catch up to my negligible Z. I caved in and went straight Zerg.
After ten or fifteen games, a subtle pattern started to emerge: although I was playing opponents of varying skill levels absolutely none of them wasn't Protoss. The one time I met Zerg I thought it was an expansion I'd forgotten building and carried on scouting. For a good three hours I was under the impression my bases came with pylons.
Eventually I started to get more varied matchups, whereupon a second, and this time genuinely subtle pattern made itself felt.
In essence, the matchmaking system wants me to win 50% of the time. And that's fine in principle, except I went along with the conventional wisdom that Zerg was obligated to play a passive, reactionary role in the early game - which is something of a lottery until you learn what it is you're supposed to be reacting to and how. My record against T and P opponents with similar mechanical skill, each able to execute their favourite build unmolested, was bound to be correspondingly poor. This isn't a complaint, just an observation. The only problem was, it prompted the matchmaking system to feed me easy bones to keep my win-rate up, which fostered a rather negative perception of my progress: "I can only win against easy opponents." If you're feeling the same way, and you tend to play passively, it might be for a similar reason...
Coming up: The Nydus Worm Turns
