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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
Edit: proud, rare member of TL forums in a lower league. :D | ||
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FataLe
New Zealand4517 Posts
Good luck in future games. (Just got moved out of a gold a week ago after a LONG spot at #1, so I know the feeling of am I improving?) | ||
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Sarang
Australia2363 Posts
On November 20 2010 17:25 Lysenko wrote: Too bad I have no way to tell how good or bad the new division is. What do you mean by this, exactly? Isn't checking the points of the players in your division the only real way to see how 'good or bad' your division is? And well done for making gold! From my (admittedly limited) experience in the gold division, it's quite full of cheesers and one base play - just get good at beating that and you should be up in platinum in no time. =) | ||
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Puosu
6992 Posts
What do you mean by this, exactly? Isn't checking the points of the players in your division the only real way to see how 'good or bad' your division is? Excalibur_Z recently found out that divisions aren't always equal to each other, more here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=169830 | ||
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Ryps
Romania2740 Posts
Less grinding, more learning. | ||
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CursOr
United States6335 Posts
There will always be people above you, and always people below you... just make sure you keep it fun and don't sweat becoming the next TLO or something. Congrats on the achievement. | ||
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Snuggles
United States1865 Posts
On November 20 2010 20:44 Drey wrote: Not to sound like a dbag but 500 games and still in gold ? NO! You still sound like a douchebag!! Haha Congrats man, but yeah he's right, I think you can do better than that man. I'm pretty sure that if you carefully look over all your losses and examine higher lvl players you can boost your skill up quite a bit very quickly. Good luck on laddering! | ||
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FenneK
France1231 Posts
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Sufficiency
Canada23833 Posts
And don't feel bad. I recall seeing a player with 600 games and still in Bronze. LOL. | ||
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Servius_Fulvius
United States947 Posts
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
I've certainly made the best effort to learn as much as I can, but I can point to a few reasons that it's been slow going for me: First is that my best and worst games are very, very far apart. When I'm focused, alert, awake, and thinking clearly, I can sometimes beat high Platinum players. I've probably set a record for the widest "sigma" for my MMR ever. Often though: I get distracted. I lose track of my build. (In the worst example of this, at the end of a very long session and after some alcohol, I realized I'd gotten to the 5 minute mark doing nothing but expanding and droning -- no spawning pool! WTF? Had to gg right there.) I continue making units for which my opponent has spent significant time building extremely powerful defenses (for example, pumping out mutas as my primary unit against a Terran with 100 marine balls running around the map with stim) I just do something monumentally stupid, like march my 200/200 army of hydras and lings right into a pile of zealots and six collosi with range. Recently, though, my play has improved a great deal, which came down to a single change that I made after watching the Day[9]/djWheat coaching daily a few weeks back. One of the things that Day[9] hammered on in that session was avoiding looking at the base to macro while scouting or fighting, and while I had some of the right stuff going on in my play sometimes, I found it was extremely difficult, at first, to follow a scout or an army around the map with my camera while continuing to stick to a strict early build order. It just ran against all my habits, because I was always going back to my base to macro. Practicing that skill specifically has helped quite a bit, and I've seen my average unspent minerals dropping dramatically in shorter games. In longer games, I've been thinking more about how to expand early for gas only, which helps enormously with higher-tech builds for Zerg, and mastering the ability not to look at my base while I build units has left me a lot more mental energy available to do things like spread creep and ensure I have vision over large areas of the map. One final thought -- I have a suspicion that it's possible to get a lot farther in the early stages of learning the game with rote practice of top players' exact play styles, because their choices encapsulate lots of experience of their own. On the other hand, taking the approach of thinking through the game on my own, soaking up all the information and analysis from others as I can and making it my own by trying things in my own games, is a much slower process, but might in the very long run lead to a better personal intuition for how the game works. I'm a very analytical guy, and having gone to the same very small technical college that Day[9] and qxc have that focuses on teaching people to think that way, I'm pretty sure that that kind of approach over the very long term is the key to their strength. I don't pretend to have anywhere near that kind of talent for the game, but at the same time I also think I'll be markedly better six months from now, just as I'm enormously better than I was six months ago. Edit: It might be that right after a big jump in the quality of my play is the ideal time to go back and look at some pro replays in great detail, because maybe I'll see stuff I haven't before. I'll certainly spend some time on that. | ||
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yoplate
United States332 Posts
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chocopan
Japan986 Posts
On November 20 2010 20:44 Drey wrote: Not to sound like a dbag but 500 games and still in gold ? If you really want to improve you should watch some pro games and try to copy their moves. Its really easy. Less grinding, more learning. There are a lot of posts like this lately and I love them. So supportive and encouraging. Sigh. Well done tho to the OP. Hope to follow you soon! | ||
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emperorchampion
Canada9496 Posts
You'll be gosu in no time! | ||
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
When it comes to league membership, I think there's a lot more overlap in skill than people think. My experience as a rank 1 silver player was that I could almost always beat low-rank gold players and often beat low-rank platinum players. Meanwhile, sometimes people who were top 10 in their bronze division gave me some trouble. I suspect, also, that it does get harder to get promoted the more games you play unless you rapidly improve in skill at some point. Whether this is an artifact of the skill estimation system or if it's just that playing a lot of games can cause ingrained bad habits, I really have no clue. Maybe some of both. What I do know is that the opponents against whom I'm matched in any league who have more games are more difficult for me to beat. This suggests to me that improving at the game overall is a necessary but maybe not sufficient thing to be promoted. Maybe the system is designed to require much greater consistency in the higher leagues, not just better average performance? | ||
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Ryps
Romania2740 Posts
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
Thing is, looking at pro games only has a certain amount of value when my own performance is most limited by things like continuing to make units and tend to econ while I do other things. The skills on which I'm working are absolutely second nature to all the top players. Also, I look at the people I beat, and see that in many cases they're mimicing the pros by trying to do fancy stuff that only makes a difference at the highest levels. Spending 100 minerals to block my natural with a pylon or 75 to steal my gas when they are queueing up 5 workers at a time and leaving their gateways idle? Bad tradeoff. Anyway, I know there are players out there with zero RTS experience who have gotten better faster than I have, though I'd think it would be difficult to find someone who went straight to Diamond in under 100 games from not knowing anything about the game. However, the people I know in real life for whom Starcraft 2 is their first RTS are all stuck in bronze and terrified to play 1v1, so I can't bring myself to stress too much about the pace of my progress.  | ||
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
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