EPTUNO - GOLD LEAGUE, FINALLY!!!!!
That's right, I hit Gold League shortly before the ladder locked up and have now maintained a safe Rank 10 on the EU ladder. My practice is slowly paying off although I have been playing the game (semi) actively for about 7 months and have only improved marginally.
While I wasn't expecting to hit Master League, contend for the top 200 spots of Gransmaster League and be a European progaming force to be reckoned with, I still feel disappointed that after around 1,300 games. (around 700 - 800 of which were on ladder and quite a few of which were me playing offraces) since early december 2010, I have gone from Forever Bronze to reaching the third worst league in the game. Gold)
I can make a very striking observation from this. If hundreds of games, both main and offracing is what it takes for a new RTS player to hit Gold, imagine what it would take to become professional., and I mean on the level of players who have gone from nowhere to GM like Destiny.
DOS - I have changed my race to Protoss.
Self explanatory. I got tired of playing Zerg for a while but I was split on whether to switch to Terran or Protoss. After about 50 - 100 (mainly custom) games as Terran during and before the ladder lock, I decided Terran wasn't for me and that Protoss was more ideal for my sort of gameplay.
This decision also made me hold off a log update for a while.
TRES - The future of these improvement logs
I'm going to be completely blunt here. I don't think I will have the time to actively do these improvement logs in future.
"But why is that?" you ask?
University. That's right. I am studying for a degree at the moment and I am onto my second year. I hear it's going to be significantly harder than the first year which I am sure I didn't exactly ace. Hence, I will have far less time to play, let alone analyse replays.
Besides, I don't think I can learn a lot from playing ladder games say,... 2 - 3 times every couple of days and then analysing each replay for flaws before entering my next game.
CUATRO - Replays.... oh wait.
Yes, I have no replays this time. I might include some in-depth analysis of one soon, but it depends on how much university eats my time.
EDIT:
CINCO - Future analysis
If university doesn't completely gobble up all of my free time much like Pac Man running through a pill-infested maze, then I will continue to do less frequent playing (as much of my "improvement" was just pure laddering or playing with little replay analysis) along with more actual replay analysis. If this is the case then I will do it in the following ways:
- Look for any moments where I get supply blocked.
- Look for any other slip ups in my macro, like moments where I stop making units, stop making workers, don't saturate properly, overspam on workers etc.
- Look carefully at what my opponent is doing to give me a greater idea of his/her destructive capabilities and get an idea of what timings I will be strong, weak etc.
- Look at areas where I balls up my scouting to a ridiculous degree. It's one of my huge weak points in the mid to late game.
- I will stick to one standard build per matchup. My main issue was attempting all kinds of builds both when I was playing Terran and Protoss, i.e. sometimes I'd go Forge Fast Expand, sometimes I'd go 1 rax FE, sometimes I'd attempt a 2 rax conc expanding push etc and just execute it badly.
- Look for areas where I engaged badly, why the engagement was bad and how I can fix it.
The builds I am considering for each matchup:
- PvP - 4 Gate. It's my best PvP build and I find that it can win me a lot of PvP matches.
- PvT - 3 Gate Robo (for observers) Expand, into chargelot, sentry and high templar, or if the opponent is going really Ghost heavy with a lack of Starport units, do a tech switch in the midgame to Colossus.
- PvZ - 3 Gate Expand. I am not so knowledgeaable on Protoss builds.
Everyone's feedback would be appreciated.
