EPT“I lost because you had 1 more Medivac than me”
No, you lost because you were making Marines out of 2 Barracks for 15 minutes, didn’t get Combat Shield, wasted cash on early Thor/Banshee and didn’t do anything with them and only tried to expand once you saw my third command centre.
As a new player, it is easy to miss some of the nuances of a new game, and have difficulties analysing your own play and pointing out errors that are actually relevant but I have forgotten just how unwilling a lot of lower level and/or new players are to actually look for these problems and instead blame their loss on the last 30 seconds of every game, usually not even getting that right. It’s pretty jarring as I am used to most people I play against in Street Fighter being well beyond that mentality.
This week has produced more examples of this for me, several games have ended with comments like “Oh well, if only I had built two more medivacs I would have won” when in reality the problem was he built far too many reapers early on (who failed to do much damage) and then didn’t expand even after he saw me taking a gold base.
The best way to enable yourself to improve is to recognize your weaknesses; even if you focus on the wrong thing usually you will not go amiss by practising the basics of whatever game you are playing. The worst thing a new player can do is to purposefully turn their back on all the tools that are available to help, replays especially. Even a cursory glance at a replay can reveal key details, and what a lot of new players do not realise is that even this knowledge can lead to improvement based on the sheer fact that you are aware of it and thinking about it in your next game. You don’t need to sit there for 8 hours a day practising mouse control for 2 weeks until you can say “Ok, now my mouse control is better”. You just need to be aware of it, and aim to improve it as you go. This is something that newer players not only seem to miss, but even once it has been pointed out to them they remain resistant to the idea that improvement must be focused, instead holding the belief that by simply playing more, with no particular aim or goal, that they will eventually get better. Even practising the basic mechanics of a game is not something that should be done without any kind of goal, which brings me to my next point.
How I Shot Web?
This week, Sean “Day[9]” Plott focused his Newbie Tuesday video on how to physically interact with the game to get good results, he detailed a lot of tips for improving your hotkey usage, mouse accuracy and just generally playing the game, something I was very happy to see and absorb. It’s something that gets very often swept under the carpet, not just with StarCraft 2, but with every competitive game the conversation very quickly turns to strategic discussion, at best someone will break down which areas someone should practice but more often than not this gets overlooked.
That’s not to say that people do it on purpose, or that they feel the subject doesn’t matter, but it’s a very difficult subject to actually talk about, a lot of things particularly some of the nuances with keyboard hotkeys, or arcade stick controllers, etc can be very difficult to explain to other people.
It should be a given that Day[9]’s content is incredibly helpful to players of any level, but any new player who is remotely interested in improving at all should watch this one, not only will it help you improve but it opens so many doors, suddenly other advice such as “concentrate on your unit production” or “focus on macro” makes so much more sense, and you have a direction that enables you to improve those things, rather than blindly clicking buttons trying to get faster and faster, or forming bad habits.
Myself, I tend to scroll around with the mouse an awful lot, especially between my main base, and my expansion. Of all the problems I have with my mechanics (they are numerous) I feel that this one needs improving the most. This will be my major goal for the next two weeks, to try and reduce unnecessary scrolling between expansions in particular my main and natural.
Too Little Time
Between Dead Space 2 (which is fantastic, by the way), a Uni deadline being moved forward, and some other unavoidable issues I have not had much of an opportunity to play StarCraft 2 this week. I have been playing for just one month, but with the help of the community on Team Liquid, high quality content from people like Day[9] and the sheer fact that the game is so much fun I have been able to improve much more than I would have ever expected in this short a time. I am not going to be winning any tournaments this side of the year 3000, but climbing my way to the top of Bronze League is not something I expected to be able to do having never played an RTS game before.
With two deadlines looking in the next week, I will not be able to play enough StarCraft 2 to warrant a post, so instead I will return in two weeks with hopefully enough to talk about.
Have an excellent couple of weeks everybody, and don't work too hard!
This Week's Replays:
Metalopolis TvT: A pretty standard TvT, I let my Macro slip quite badly in this one, and ended up just throwing down a huge number of buildings so that I could try and spend my money on units as opposed to keeping it in the bank. If my Macro were at all decent, there is no way that many barracks could be kept in production
Xel'Naga Caverns TvT: My heavy focus on marines and upgrading my core units clashes with a player who produced a wide range of units, and had he expanded more aggressively this game might have gone in his favor due to some mistakes I made.
Xel'Naga Caverns TvT 2: This game raises an interesting question for me, at what point do you guys consider hanging onto a game to be rude/bad sportsmanship/etc? I know that by a certain point, it is considered very rude in Chess not to lay down your king, but quite the opposite in Street Fighter is it considered the pinnacle of rudeness to ever quit the game early. I am curious to know where StarCraft 2 stands on this kind of thing. Personally, I never leave a game if I think there is a chance to pull a win, but attempting to eke out a draw is not something that interests me.
