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I think one of the most frustrating things in life has got to be when you realize your skill level has stopped increasing at something you practice so hard to get better at. This does NOT by any means apply solely to SC2 but at skills in general, whether it be playing an instrument, doing math, playing a sport, etc. It absolutely fucking infuriates me when I play a long day of laddering and get absolutely nowhere in points or standings within my division.
Here's a typical day of ladder for me:
"Sweet, I got the day of school and work so I'm just gonna chill the fuck out today and ladder my ass off."
*Win first two or three games*
"Woot, I'm doing awesome. I just roflstomped some nubs ezpz."
*lose 4 in a row*
"GODDAMMIT MOTHERFUCKING CHEESING PIECE OF SHIT"
*punch wall, play a few more games, win about as many as I lose*
"Well at least I broke even for today. I'll play one more and go watch GSL or something."
*gets all-ined by marine/raven/banshee push*
"SON OF A FUCKING BITCH I HATE THIS SHIT. GOD FOR-FUCKING-BID I TRY TO EXPAND ON CROSS POSITION SHATTERED TEMPLE WHEN THIS ASSWIPE SITS ON ONE BASE AND MAKES A FUCKTON OF UNITS TO LOL AT MY PATHETIC GATEWAY ARMY"
*punch wall again, I don't want to end the day on a loss so I keep playing to get a win*
"..."
*lose again*
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"
That's about how it's been going for me lately. Sometimes I feel like I can just rape everyone's face on ladder, then I get crushed by something I could have stopped and I end up feeling like shit at the end of the day. I've been sitting in upper diamond ever since master league came out and almost all my friends I play with are in master league and I'm just the lowly diamond noob they have to play against every once in a while.
I don't fucking get it. I play more games than almost all of them and they make it to master league no problem. The only reason I even play so much is so I can catch up to my friends. I play them in custom games a ton and I can beat any of them on any given day, but if I'm even lucky enough to matched against a master's player on ladder he's usually some dickwad that all ins me. Seriously, the first master leaguer I ever met on ladder fucking CANNON RUSHED me. WTF?
It blows my fucking mind. I work my ass off to get better and people that are just naturally talented in this game barely play at all and they can rape me like it's nobody's business. It's not like all my friends are 12 year BW pros either, most of them never played any starcraft until SC2 came out.
I think I'm gonna take a break from this game for a while.
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Focus on learning from losses instead of just getting pissed and trying again without reflecting the slightest bit over why you lost  . Your like my friend who is still in bronze after almost 800 games ^^
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Your skill isn't plateauing, and you can't say for sure that these people are "naturally more talented."
You can say they're better, sure, but who knows how much time they've put in.
I went on two small losing streaks today. Around D+/C- level on iCCup. Turns out I lost to 6 different Koreans who are all C.
But not once did I think my skill was plateauing. I lost, just because they're better than me, but I'm still improving.
If you don't think your practice is paying off, practice better.
And you can't judge someone by the number of games they play. I have played a grand total of 0 SC2 matches, but I'm confident that if I eventually switch over, I can make diamond or master's league fairly quickly based on mechanics alone. I don't think I'll need to play that many games for it.
If you're getting extremely frustrated, you can definitely take a break. Everyone has losing streaks, though. It's part of the game. Just suck it up.
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Mindless laddering only goes so far, you're better off playing less games with more thought and goals for improving.
If you get frustrated take a break, occupy your mind with other stuff. At a certain point churning out mass games in a row isn't effecting your immediate skill level anymore. But when you take a day or two off and start over you'll often notice that your play has improved. Your brains are continuously developing and it often takes time to for it to adapt to your needs. When you're new to a game you can improve quickly since you just learn to execute tasks your brain wouldn't have problems with if it already had the required information. After a while though you pretty much know how to play the game, you just need to play faster, smarter and more efficient. For this your brain basically needs to rewire itself to make certain thougtprocesses automatic and decision making faster.
Fighting against this process by trying to bruteforce better play isn't going to help and you'll often just play worse and worse and get more angry. So do something else, watch a stream, think of a build, watch a show, play games for fun etc.
Skill plateau is a bullshit word, so is talent, they're just excuses.
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Yeah, everytime I play someone well above me I only ever get rushed. It makes me ANGRY.
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Australia1833 Posts
I have some strong empathy for the contents of this post. Reminds me of my laddering experience in the past 2 months....
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You're focusing too much on winning. If you think you rape face when you win, when you lose you feel like getting raped back. Take a 5 minute break in between games, it really helps me deal with bad losses.
Don't focus too much on leagues either. Focus more on how you play. Rewatch your replays. Did you play well? Did you do the correct thing? Sometimes I can say that I played great, made great tactical decisions and did not forget my macro. So I'm in the gold league. But that game I played, I was boss.
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I've recently gone through the same thing and what helped me was to take like a full week off of playing and watch high-level players stream solely to learn, not for entertainment. I'd constantly ask myself why they would do something, or try to guess how they would respond to certain situations then analyze why they did what they did. It really helps to see what they see, formulate your own gameplan, then compare to what the pro does. Careful not to fall into the trap of just watching to pass time though, you will end up not getting near the benefit you could have received.
Once I went back to playing, after a few games to get back in the groove, I was winning again at a rate I was happy with. One thing I noticed was that my focus was better this go around, probably because I wasn't fuming from all the losses like I was previously.
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On March 18 2011 18:42 Saechiis wrote:
Mindless laddering only goes so far, you're better off playing less games with more thought and goals for improving.
If you get frustrated take a break, occupy your mind with other stuff. At a certain point churning out mass games in a row isn't effecting your immediate skill level anymore. But when you take a day or two off and start over you'll often notice that your play has improved. Your brains are continuously developing and it often takes time to for it to adapt to your needs. When you're new to a game you can improve quickly since you just learn to execute tasks your brain wouldn't have problems with if it already had the required information. After a while though you pretty much know how to play the game, you just need to play faster, smarter and more efficient. For this your brain basically needs to rewire itself to make certain thougtprocesses automatic and decision making faster.
Fighting against this process by trying to bruteforce better play isn't going to help and you'll often just play worse and worse and get more angry. So do something else, watch a stream, think of a build, watch a show, play games for fun etc.
Skill plateau is a bullshit word, so is talent, they're just excuses.
This is really good advice.
Take a few days off and think about the game. What do you do well? What do you need to do better? What's your greatest weakness, and how can you fix it? In the games you win, what mistake do your opponents usually make? When you eventually play against opponents who won't make that mistake, how will you respond?
There are so many mental exercises that help your game so much more than mass gaming IMO.
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You never really plateau. You should be improving, but you won't really see a benefit until you improve up to a certain point.
Whenever I play fighting games or rhythm games I hit this level where I feel like I can't improve anymore, but I keep playing. If I keep it up, I usually get better and improve my win rate or score or pass songs without really noticing it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that in a competitive game, you're not the only one trying to get better. Others are also improving.
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United Kingdom3685 Posts
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If I'm not mistaken, when weight lifters reach a plateau, they usually bump the weights a bit higher than usual. Perhaps you can try implementing that method into your training regime?
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EPT
