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Embracing The Suck
I've been having an awful time lately playing Zerg on the ladder. I had worked my way up to #1 in my little gold league, happy as a mutated clam, and all of a sudden whap, I hit what felt like a brick wall. My win rate plummeted literally overnight, losing bunches of seven and eight games in a row, easy.
Does that sound familiar? I bet for some of you it does.
Notice the phrase I used, though: hitting a brick wall. Encountering something external. It might seem innocuous enough to think in those terms, but as I found out it's the first step into a dangerous rabbit-hole.
The second is to ask "What is this brick wall made of?" which engages the infamously trigger-happy pattern-recognition engine we all have whirring inside our heads. The answer it came back with in this case was "Terrans and cheese".
To put this in context, my first hundred and eighty games or so had been overwhelmingly versus Protoss. As I hit the top end of my Gold league I suddenly started encountering a lot of Terran players, and I was getting my ass handed to me on a broad variety of platters. I was also losing a lot to early cheese from all races.
Yep, what I had was a pattern, and patterns demand explanation, right? Clearly the ranks above me were saturated with people who had either cheesed their way into Platinum or were abusing the overwhelming versatility and initiative provided by the Terran tech-tree. Case closed.
Let's just pause and marvel at how negative that mind-set is, how outwardly-focused, and the quick certainty with which it was attained. Twice I almost posted episodes of this blog to vent my frustration (they were funny, too; I'm eloquent when annoyed). I thrashed around for a bit trying different Zerg builds posted on the forums, without any real success.
Then I watched a high-level Zerg vs Terran replay, Dimaga vs TLO, the whole thing from Dimaga's camera view only, and the scales fell from my eyes. I suck.
Obviously it put the recent losses I'd experienced into perspective, but more importantly it put my earlier victories into perspective too. The self-righteous image I had of being a 'proper' player (albeit inexperienced) butting his head against abusive tricks and imbalance was utterly fictitious.
Sure, I never actually set out to cheese anyone, but in practice the things I did only ever worked for the same reason cheese works: my opponents didn't see it coming. My macro beyond 30-ish food was uniformly laughable; I was always either supply blocked because I forgot to make overlords, or larvae-blocked because I'd been too frightened to expand and too distracted to throw down an in-base hatchery, or resource-blocked because I'd misjudged how much army I needed for defence. I never had any creep spread, never had any overlord spread - if I took a watchtower from time to time I was doing well. The reason it felt like "No matter what I do, I lose" is that no matter what I did I did it badly.
Since this realisation, my enjoyment of the game has been rekindled. By focusing inward on the understanding that I suck, I'm able to take positive steps. For instance, I know that between 30-40 food there is a huge weak spot in my play versus T and P, because there are important decisions to be made and I never have the information to make them properly. It's the same around 14 food versus Zerg: since I started sending a scout on 9 I'm able to make an informed decision as to whether to build a queen or make zerglings and a spine crawler to defend a rush - and so on.
I still suck, and I'll continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but at least now I'm taking steps that make a tangible difference.
Thanks for reading.
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I'm a Zerg player too, hovering around the 1400 Diamond realm right now.
I hit the same walls with regularity. Your ability to find fault with yourself, and not in things like balance has inspired me to rage less, and examine my own play more closely.
Kudos. =)
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Always good to see some eyes be opened, congrats at the epiphany and best of luck on your way to platinum and eventually diamond.
Remember that the #1 advice bit for anyone below diamond is not to be tricky with strategies, micro, or hell even scouting... but to polish out your macro. Try just building vs an easy computer player "perfectly" while just A-move the mini map to attack. Could you perfectly manage a base if you only spent time on macro? This might be a little more tricky with zerg as they need to know when the attack is coming to build an ideal amount of units, but you get the idea -- instead of focusing on "getting better" focus on "getting better at X." Sure you might lose a game or two if you practice some aspects of the game at the expense of others, but you'll be a better player for it in the long run.
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In the same boat. Gl dude.
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I love it when people blame them selves for their losses, because 100% of the time they are right, and when they blame cheese/imbalance/what ever outside forces 99% of the time they are wrong.
I have hit the walls like that in my play and when I stopped blaming outside things, and only started blaming my self I noticed the walls that i hit were less frequent, and easier to get past.
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It seems like with zerg it is harder to judge when you play bad. Especially after I've played for awhile, I'll think I'm doing the same thing I've been doing, but when I look back at the replay I realize I've done things, like double built overlords, delayed pool or gas for a few seconds, or just forgot to scout. I get complacent and start doing things by rote instead of reacting to what I'm seeing.
I was watching navi streaming one day and she was getting rolled repeatedly by terran, like 6 or 7 times in a row, and I started getting critical in chat. She had the ability to beat all these guys. Her entire approach to the matchup was utterly, glaring wrong as were her statements on the subject, and it was so easy to see, but she and her other watchers were busy crying up the terran is imba bull.
Whenever I have a 4+ game losing stream, I immediately rewatch the replays while eating and then I force myself to confront the fact that I've become complacent, lazy, and static, and those are the exact things you cannot do as zerg.
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This is how SC 1 hooked me. Once you get outside your comfort zone and accept that you are bad, it only motivates you to get better. Once you do get noticeably better, it feels like you've conquered the tallest mountain. But then since you are at the peak of the mountain, you are able to see another, taller one in the distance. And on and on. That's the true beauty of starcraft, and I'm glad people are experiencing it with this new game as well.
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On October 02 2010 01:08 VonLego wrote:
Remember that the #1 advice bit for anyone below diamond is not to be tricky with strategies, micro, or hell even scouting... but to polish out your macro. Try just building vs an easy computer player "perfectly" while just A-move the mini map to attack. Could you perfectly manage a base if you only spent time on macro? This might be a little more tricky with zerg as they need to know when the attack is coming to build an ideal amount of units, but you get the idea -- instead of focusing on "getting better" focus on "getting better at X." Sure you might lose a game or two if you practice some aspects of the game at the expense of others, but you'll be a better player for it in the long run.
I agree completely. You're right that Zerg is, relatively speaking, more critically dependent upon foreknowledge than Terran or Protoss in the early game. 'Perfect' macro for Zerg is more tightly interwoven with my opponent's decisions. I even blogged to that effect in "Balance vs Stability", suggesting changes that would stabilise certain matchups a little, and I stand by what I said in that post. However...
Balance is not the same as stability. It's perfectly possible for a matchup to be more stable for Terran (in terms of it being harder to make a single decision or mistake that topples you from 'doing fine' into 'instalose', but balanced in favour of Zerg (eg superlative scouting and game-sense exposing an unassailable racial macro/unit advantage). This truth might well lie behind Blizzard's softly softly approach to rebalancing the races. So I need to know what's coming or I'll lose - that might not be a bad thing if figuring out what's coming is easier than beating me when I have that knowledge.
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EPT
