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Hello TL,
Summary
I'll admit it: since I got into gold league, I've only played 10 ladder 1v1s. That makes a pretty impoverished set of statistics, so I'll just say that I'm now rank 7 in my division.
What the hell have I been doing?
I've been drilling, night and day. I've probably played close to 100 custom games this past week alone, many of which were games against the AI where I got to the 4 minute mark, realized I'd forgotten to make my factory with my first 100 gas, surrendered, and started again. I've practiced 1 rax FE against Terran, early reaper against Protoss, 2-1-1 marine-banshee against Zerg, 2 rax FE against Protoss, 1-1-1 against Zerg, walling in at the top of the ramp, walling in at the bottom of the ramp, blue flame hellion micro, 2 marauder 1 marine 2 scv pushes, banshee micro, scv micro to deal with early harass, and spamming APM at the beginning of games.
Some observations
I realized something strange at the midpoint of all of this: I really like drilling StarCraft.
This is strange for several reasons. First, I played piano for 10 years but still suck at it because I didn't practice. I hated practicing. I would labor through Bach's inventions and scales while actually falling asleep from boredom. I would hate going to my weekly lessons because I knew my teacher would be disappointed at the zero or maybe negative progress I'd made in the 7 days prior. When lesson time came around, I stayed very, very quiet in my room or the car, hoping my mom would forget. I hated piano, she hated yelling at me all the time to practice, and my teachers probably hated my obstinacy. It was a lose-lose-lose situation. Second, in the recent enormous thread in the TL SC2 General forum wondering about the lack of female pro gamers (and, the lack of females in StarCraft generally), one reason that many people posited was that girls don't generally want to play games to have fun when they play games - which means lower tolerance for the repetitive drilling that is necessary to be a high level StarCraft player.
I cannot purport to speak for all of femalekind, but I will note that winning a StarCraft game with good execution and playing a complicated piece on the piano to perfection seem to me to be very similar. They both require a great deal of practice and concentration while sitting in front of keyboards for long periods of time. They are both rather solitary enterprises, even if there's supposedly a human on the other end of the battlenet web out there who is controlling the environment you are reacting to. It seems to me that it is not the act of practicing that is difficult or disliked by people (including girls) - it is the passion for the end results and for the thing you are practicing that determines your preferences.
Back to business
At any rate, I think I'm ready to get back on the ladder for realz and push to platinum. I beat Kaiz (1800 diamond) last night twice in a row TvP, which was very satisfying even if it's his offrace. He says my play is solid now, and I take great pride in that.
There, but for the grace of Blizzard, go I.
A special note
If you'd like to follow someone else who has decided to take the bronze-to-diamond-while-blogging route and has a very interesting story, please check out BabyToss's blog.
It stemmed down from me being used to RPG's and Jedi Academy too much, as well as I realized I'd suck at the game, as it'd be my second RTS. I simply didn't expect the game to awake something I didn't feel since my JKA competitive days: That urge to become a good player. To overcome the challenges the game sets before me. And this is where the story begins, where the obstacles to be met, struggled against and if I am strong enough, overcome.
Shoutout to Temporal and Kaiz.
 
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Wow that's a lot of games lol. I wish I could play that much :\ I don't have the drive to do it though haha. Goodluck getting into Plat very soon :D... actually Blizzard should be resetting the ladder soon I think they said (probably with patch 1.2?) If that's the case then if you do well in placement it could be easier to get into plat! 
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Good to see a post from you again. It seems that it's not only me, who's been drilling SC2 lately. I've been doing the exact thing for last few days. I'm starting official business (aka laddering) from Monday. As my good friend pointed out, I have yet to learn the 'game sense' and proper, correct decision making, which is why I'm losing (according to him) my games most of the time. And while it's good to play against friends, it seems that the only experience lies down in playing random people whose style I don't know at all, so there's no space for any sort of pre-emptive stuff I'd otherwise not do if I played an unknown person. (Ie I know one of my friend loves muta harrassing my mineral line, so I make sure to put some cannons into it, to make it harder... and that's outright bad, to make decisions based on just because I know it. >.< )
Good luck; I'm certainly crossing my fingers for you in your endeavors towards Platinum. I'm going back to drilling my rear end. :-)
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
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Don't underestimate the difference between being forced to do something and wanting to do something. I had a very similar mentality as a kid. Whenever I was told to do something, that became the LAST thing I wanted to do, but I'd do 10x as much work on anything I came up with myself.
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Good luck peanut! Has been nice talking to you 
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I have a single opening. Just one. I do it vs T, vs P, vs Z, and vs R. I have some practice partners who are 2200 to 2400 pts at the moment, and I use this against them with ~50% win ratio. And I'm at well over a 50% win ratio against 1700-1800 pt players (I get matched vs them when I ladder even though I'm less ~500 pts myeslf (I think, I can't remember), with like 1.1k bonus pool lol). My stupidity and general dumb stuff, see this for an example of what I mean, keeps me at a 50% win rate. Although, that loss was soooooo worth it.
It comes down to execution.
A solid, well executed opening can get you into diamond. Easily. And I know that I could be executing it better, because I should be able to snip an extra 5-10 seconds off mybuild (at least, according to the calculator anyways).
Also, I usually use about 40 apm to do this build, plus scout. My apm rises to well over 100 for most of the rest of the game tho..... I don't spam, and this build is definitely doable with low apm, in case that is a factor.
Good luck, and keep grinding at it!
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On December 05 2010 10:26 {88}iNcontroL wrote:
That's what she said.
sarah palin?
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Croatia9527 Posts
So... how deep did you reach?
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Thanks very much to those who gave me actual feedback and took this post seriously - aike, babytoss, zim23, pokebunny, impervious, diggurd ^^.
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On December 05 2010 10:26 {88}iNcontroL wrote:
That's what she said.
thats what Anna said, shes incontrol in bed!
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Going to 4 minutes and restarting after one slip-up?! Wish I had that kind of time...
Oh wait, in 6 days I will!
I personally find it more advantageous to practice macro-cycles in-game to get a feeling of the breadth of strategies used against me, but I've only got about 50 ladder games total (thanks grad school!). In 6 days more AI's will certainly die as I get back into the swing of things. Thank God for BW game senses decreasing the learning curve considerably.
One thing I'm NOT looking forward to are the marine/scv all-ins. I stopped playing a few weeks ago before they got popular, and half my gold games are against cheese anyway, so this should be interesting.
Yay ladder!
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You and BabyToss are keeping me motivated!
Following your progress, so proud!
Maybe I'll make a blog too.
We can be the triangle of improving SC ladies!
edit: opps, I thought I was commenting on BabyToss. You get some love too ;p
edit 2: inspired++ - blog created!
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As much as I enjoyed drilling/grinding/repetitiveness in my power-leveling MMO days, I find drilling the same practices in SC2 to be less than appealing... hence why I played random in the majority of my games on ladder. I've switched to Protoss somewhat recently as my main due to my lack of time to practice all the matchups vs the more skilled bunch of 2k+ diamonds.
Kudos to you for trying to establish solid mechanics... something I see lacking from many 2k+ diamonds still. Keep in mind, drilling up to 4min max may give you a solid early game, but a less than desirable mid and late game.... which truly stress solid mechanics to succeed. As an example, not getting supply blocked is easy when you're pumping 4 marines and a scv every few seconds... but much more taxing on your mechanics when you're pumping 20 supply of units per cycle while expanding.
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Few things, I wish I had that much time. -.- Also I would recommend really just doing a build per match up, at your level, until you really master those three, you can start diversing and learning three more, and then three more. So on. It also depends on how you're feeling. If you want you feel kind of like, you want to play against zerg, and your positions and the zerg is expanding, you may want to go reactor hellion, which is a build you may want to practice. That's actually one of my most used builds, besides siege expand, or mass rines. I think that it's great you're drilling your mechanics until they are truly solid. gl hf hope to play you sometime
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EPT
