Note that the [DoB] tag stands for "Diamond or Bust," which is what I'm calling this little adventure that could. Entries directly pertaining to the project will have the DoB tag. All for reader convenience!
Well, today I got through 8 1v1 SC2 games, most of them via the practice (unranked) game feature. I would've gotten through more except for a few mitigating factors:
I stayed up until 6am finishing the SCBW single player campaigns
I was really hoping to be able to not work for a couple months to dedicate enough time to DoB, but this might be an offer I can't pass up ... we'll see what happens
I made my mom help me translate some StarCraft related stuff into Korean (secret project!)
My "friends" made me obs a bunch of games (they were enlightening, though)
In the end, I won 1 game fair and square, which was a great feeling. I got my ass kicked in all of the others (except for a dc).
It's a gut-freezing, cement-shoes-in-Lake-Eerie kind of feeling when you look at your base and realize you don't know what to do, particularly early game. What's the tradeoff between building another SCV and stopping to morph your CC into an Orbital Command? How should I lay out my base for maximum efficiency? Is it worth it at all to scout when you wouldn't even know how to respond if you saw a particular build order? The questions merge into this haze that you have to psychically wade through every time you come to a fork in the road of your build order. Every indecisive second is a second that allows your opponent to potentially summon a humiliatingly massive army to mow you down where you think you are safest. It's a spiral of paranoia and anxiety that's very unsettling - guess it'll just take practice to get over it.
Although I have faced a non-insignificant amount of adversity in life, the win-loss ratio has never quite been this bad, and I know it's only going to get worse before it gets any better. At my skill level it's just not possible to keep going while being as much of a sore loser as I usually am. The idea is that, over time, each loss will twist the knife a degree less than the loss before. I hate losing, but I'm banking on the fact that I hate being bad more.
I'm already starting to get shoulder pains lol (going through the whole Terran and Zerg BW campaigns in one weekend probably didn't help). Any recommendations? My posture's good and I have the 90-degree elbow thing going on, so it might just be down to rest, stretches, and ibuprofen.
Next Steps - Finishing all 40-something practice games - Checking out resources on race basics to see if I actually want to play Terran for this whole thing - Being nice to my shoulder - Preparing for BlizzCon (anyone have a floor I can crash on?)
scbw campaigns were terrible for teaching lol. encouraged hardcore turtling XD
by unranked do you mean practice league, because imo that's terrible too and you should just jump straight into losing on actual maps.
but of course the idea of losing your first 20 or so games isn't really repulsive to me, though it might be to you. but you really should just jump straight into it and pretty much grind until your mechanics are diamond level then really start concentrating on the strategy part.
i know people will disagree with me, but from personal experience i can trade games with 1200 diamond players knowing next to nothing about the game except from the 20 or so games i've played in beta just using pure mechanics/multitasking.
10 depot, 12 rax, 13 gas, 15 orbital. Do that every game
Turn your nat CC into an orbital immediately unless it's an emergency and you need to spend all of your money on units. Turn your 3rd/4th/+ into PFs unless they are positioned to be defended with units.
It's really important that you memorize some simple build orders or else you'll waste a lot of time being indecisive about trivial things like this.
Edit: WOW I wrote 9 depot instead of 10 depot before... must be my BW roots fighting for control... xD
I can't remember because I only used the practice league during the beta for a few games, but aren't the games on a slower play speed? That could really mess with your timing and feel for the game once you begin to play ranked matches.
Whoah! keep going, i know you can do it! like has been said earlier i think the quickest way to diamond is to first focus entirely on mechanics over strategy, then when you feel comfortable playing into midgame without floating minerals and constant supplyblocks you can start getting into the strategy part.
get progamer reps to learn the openings for games?
also dont be worried about losing too much. I remember when i started out playing bw i was playing with people wayyyyy better than me, i must have lost at least my first 200 games lol, if not more. As long as you take something meaningful from every game afterwards you'll improve without even realizing it
On October 19 2010 16:36 Nayru wrote: I can't remember because I only used the practice league during the beta for a few games, but aren't the games on a slower play speed? That could really mess with your timing and feel for the game once you begin to play ranked matches.
Timing is not really relevant in practice league anyway, people who play it just don't know the game. It might be a way to learn such things as "what building do I need to get a stalker" but you won't learn how to play since your oponents don't know either. People in practice league do things such as teching to muta off their first 6 drones. How would a question such as "what is the trade off of getting Orbital early" be any relevant in that context?
Timing is not really relevant in practice league anyway, people who play it just don't know the game. It might be a way to learn such things as "what building do I need to get a stalker" but you won't learn how to play since your oponents don't know either. People in practice league do things such as teching to muta off their first 6 drones. How would a question such as "what is the trade off of getting Orbital early" be any relevant in that context?
What I meant was that if you become used to a slower game speed for 20 matches, you might get behind and start panicking when play at the normal speed simply because you are not used to the faster speed. There are the destructible rocks which do provide a sense of security for learners of the game. If a player is completely new and doesn't know where stalkers come from, ya they should play in the practice league. But I'm going to give Peanut some credit and say, she does know where stalkers come from, and I doubt she is losing to 6 pool mutas. So questioning when to build the Orbital Command is relevant.
On shoulder pains: the simplest explanation would be that you're nervous, and thus tensing your muscles, which can't be good for an extended practice session. If this is uncontrollable, try to watch replays every 1-3 games, or otherwise take a break so your muscles can relax.
Think as little as possible in-game. Reserve analysis for when you review games. In-game you are limited by information and pressured by time. In-game decisions need to be made intuitively, by experience or instinct, not by research or theory. Thinking comes into play when your out-of-game analysis supplements your whole experience base.
Make as many bad decisions as possible. Just like a game of Battleship, the more shots you fire in the dark, the more you will narrow down what the viable possibilities are.
Be conscientious of scouting the map (your base, proxy locations, keeping your initial worker alive, all that) once you begin ranked matches. Not only will it arm you against cheese, it will force you to multitask and force you to think about geography and about opponents' possibilities. But again, save this thinking for the postmortem.
9 year old boy with big brown eyes: "Mr. Day9, where do stalkers come from?" Day9: "Well little Jimmy, after a Protoss player builds a Gateway and decides that Zealots aren't quite enough for his army, he or she saves up enough minerals to build a Cybernetics Core and then can bring beautiful Stalkers into the map."
Thanks for the encouragements and tips guys! I think I'll skip the other practice league games and just go right in.
On October 19 2010 15:20 Peanutsc wrote: Although I have faced a non-insignificant amount of adversity in life, the win-loss ratio has never quite been this bad, and I know it's only going to get worse before it gets any better. At my skill level it's just not possible to keep going while being as much of a sore loser as I usually am. The idea is that, over time, each loss will twist the knife a degree less than the loss before. I hate losing, but I'm banking on the fact that I hate being bad more.
As you can see, this game can cut your life into pieces. Is this your last resort?
On October 20 2010 03:39 Peanutsc wrote: So I'm imagining this scenario:
9 year old boy with big brown eyes: "Mr. Day9, where do stalkers come from?" Day9: "Well little Jimmy, after a Protoss player builds a Gateway and decides that Zealots aren't quite enough for his army, he or she saves up enough minerals to build a Cybernetics Core and then can bring beautiful Stalkers into the map."
On October 19 2010 15:20 Peanutsc wrote: Although I have faced a non-insignificant amount of adversity in life, the win-loss ratio has never quite been this bad, and I know it's only going to get worse before it gets any better. At my skill level it's just not possible to keep going while being as much of a sore loser as I usually am. The idea is that, over time, each loss will twist the knife a degree less than the loss before. I hate losing, but I'm banking on the fact that I hate being bad more.
As you can see, this game can cut your life into pieces. Is this your last resort?
On October 19 2010 15:20 Peanutsc wrote: Although I have faced a non-insignificant amount of adversity in life, the win-loss ratio has never quite been this bad, and I know it's only going to get worse before it gets any better. At my skill level it's just not possible to keep going while being as much of a sore loser as I usually am. The idea is that, over time, each loss will twist the knife a degree less than the loss before. I hate losing, but I'm banking on the fact that I hate being bad more.
As you can see, this game can cut your life into pieces. Is this your last resort?
EPT
