EPTSo I was left to play SC2 all day. This was the first time I ever had the chance to play a lot of SC2 for several hours straight. Before I could only play for about 2-3 hours a day before having to get myself ready for work the next day. Schools around now, so my schedule surprisingly enough looks a lot more flexible...
Playing at home for hours straight seemed impossible for me =_=. I've never been able to Mass game before. My fridge, my bed, the privacy of me room, all of this can distract me from focusing on some hardcore gaming. Soooooo I decidied to drive 1 Hour and 30 minutes out to Kittery, Maine to the PlayOnFun LAN/Gaming/restaurant place. I put down my $25 bucks and played for a nice 7 hours straight, with a water break and dinner (the cheese & bacon potato fries were amazing) to help keep myself healthy.
So here's what I learned about mass gaming VS casual gaming. You basically develop yourself at the same rate regardless of how long you play. But the more you expose yourself to different strategies by playing a multitude of games will help to bring out a slight improvement in your play overtime. I'd imagine though that these slight improvements you make overtime definitely add up. Just looking at my match history today, it'd like a lot like how my history would look throughout the week.
By that I mean, I would have some days where I would go on a horrible losing streak, and then on another day I'd have a great winning streak. Except this all happened in one day, so it was one hell of an emotional roller coaster for an angry guy like me. But in the end, it resulted in creating a very cool nice mental composure as I entered games later into the night. Losing badly, and winning a lot in the same day kinda mellows you out I guess. And by gaining that composure you look over the games you win and lose much better and find better ways to improve your gameplay.
In those 7 Hours I was only able to squeeze in 20 games =_=. I'd imagine Korean Progamers would be playing for another 6 hours which would mean roughly 40 - 60 games a day. That's pretty crazy.
What I want to know is how the SC2 Progamers of today are able to stay on top of their game while being confronted with endless new possible Strats that might get thrown at them, especially IdrA. He may play 12 Hours a day, but maintaining a sick 70%+ w/l ratio is insane. There's so many different builds that the opponent can modify and throw you off to gain the advantage. I'm only hovering around 1050 points right now. When I encounter people in the same rating or higher, they all seem to be one or two steps ahead of the game.
One game I encountered a protoss player doing some very standard straight forward stuff, I also made the right decisions and it brought us into the late-game. As I pushed with a timing attack, I effectively knocked out one of his expos. He countered back with a large number of templars coming out of no where (well partly my fault for not scouting). But on the spot I just didn't know how to react by the surprise, and got stormed to hell.
How will I be able to catch up to these players who always seem to be a step ahead all the time? Is there anyway to improve my critical thinking skills? Should I continue to mass games as I did today, and try to adapt to different unseen BOs on the spot?
I think the answer to those questions would also explain why some players have well over 600 games played, yet still remain in mid diamond (800 - 1400 the new mid-diamond?). Adapting to things seems to be brought up a lot in the analysis of players, so maybe that's one of the key factors that separates pro from semi-pro or semi-pro from amateur. I really want to figure out what these pros have that I don't.
