Bronze Part 2: Hell is Other People - Page 13

On March 02 2012 05:19 FookSake wrote:
First off: Kudos to imbecile, Moggles, and Xatalos for humanizing a faceless minority amidst 21 pages of scornful comments.


I mostly just find it insulting (OK - entertaining and insulting).

I am a low Bronze player. (Whew! It feels so good to get that off my chest.)
I'm always a bit bemused by people with experience forgetting what it was like to be inexperienced. Parents forget what it was like to be a teenager and they think their kids are crazy, [poor] teachers do it with their students and think they're stupid. And apparently experienced gamers do it with unskilled gamers and think they're deliberately obtuse. At least human nature is consistent...
It couldn't possibly be that hard stuff is hard, especially when you're provided with (at best) no instruction or (at worst) poor instruction.

*******************************************************************************************************

I can feel a long-winded post coming on, so I'll just limit myself to 3 points:
1) What a Bronze player knows before playing his first ladder game
2) Who Bronze players are
3) What a Bronze player learns from playing in Bronze

1) What a Bronze player knows before playing his first ladder game
They know one thing (at best) - the Campaign. And how do you succeed in campaigns? You turtle, tech up, and make one big push. Let's say they don't take too long finishing the campaign - they have about 12 hours of that play style drilled into their brains, and it was their formative learning experience.
Oh wait, they know one more thing - the mechanics of playing Terran (and very fundamental mechanics of playing Protoss). Where does that leave someone (like me) who wants to play Zerg or Protoss? It leaves them with a steep learning curve. Try learning mid- & late-game tech through trial-and-error in a system where the average game lasts 10 minutes (if you're lucky).
In short, before they even start their placement matches, Bronze players are programmed to fail. Especially when you consider the shark tank that they're thrown into...

2) Who Bronze players are
From what I've seen (which is, granted, only about 50 league games in Bronze), this looks to be the makeup of Bronze league:
---Group A) New/unskilled player wanting to get better (40%): I'd like to think I'm in this group. What these Bronze players have learned (from reading forums & watching Dailies) is that they need to improve their fundamentals. Unfortunately, Battle.net doesn't reward this - this kind of fundamentals training has a long-term payoff, but is very discouraging in the short-term (as it requires a whole lot of losing until they overcome whatever competence plateau they're currently struggling with).
---Group B) New/unskilled player wanting to win/have a good time (40%): This is the group that may or may not have started out in group (a), but has since gone over to the Dark Side. They've learned that Battle.net rewards wins and doesn't especially care how they're gotten, so they resort to gimmicks. They've also learned that most people in Bronze (much of Groups A & C) haven't learned their gimmick & its counter yet. So, like hail balls, people in Group B win & rise to silver, then get smacked back down to bronze by people who have invested in fundamentals. They then gimmick their way to silver, and so on, getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier with each cycle (yay for meteorological metaphors!)
---Group C) Casual gamers (15%): God bless them. Nobody gives them enough credit; they're subsidizing our hobby.
---and apparently there's a Group D: Higher-league trolls (5%): unless they're actively coaching, they're not really helping. (No, 'hard knocks' lessons don't really help Bronze-leaguers. More on that later.) These folks might as well be playing Quake with God mode codes on - whatever floats your boat, I guess.

3) What a Bronze player learns from playing in Bronze
Why, they learn to play like a Bronze player, of course! When a brand new player is first relegated to Bronze, it's a death sentence for skill growth. When all they see is turtling, 6-pools, banshee rushes, reaper harrass, and mass void rays/stalkers, that becomes all that they know. And Battle.net [temporarily] rewards them for joining the pack.

If they wise up and start scouring the internets for advice, it's usually only tangentially helpful. "You can get to platinum by doing nothing other than improving your macro." "All you have to do is improve your late-game." "Yeah, scouting really helps."
Advice like this is applicable, but too general to execute on. And advice that is specific is rarely applicable. Build orders help your early game tremendously, but at 5 minutes you're as lost as you were before you mastered the build order committed to a build order.
This is why real-time mentoring is so important. Unfortunately, it's also rare.

The way people best gain skill in any game (hell, the way we all best learn any life skill) is by playing with & learning from better players. That's why mentor systems are everywhere. But how many Bronze players actually have an IRL/real-time mentor? I sure as hell don't. I have Day[9], a haystack of streams from which to produce a needle that can teach me what I need to learn right now, and my own replays.

You know what else I don't have ? Time. I have 2 hours a night (if I'm lucky) to dedicate to my hobbies. (Incidentally, a 14-hour a week hobby is considered a bit excessive by society at large.) That's two hours in which to:
- ladder
- watch my replays
- analyze my replays for the one or two things to work on
- watch Day[9] Dailies
- watch streams (assuming I've found ones that are useful to a Bronze Zerg player of my skill & knowledge of the metagame... good luck with that one)
- watch tournaments (which take place every weekend, apparently)
- listen to SotG
- research build orders, counters, and mid-/late-game strats (each it's own haystack)
- etc.
And if I don't do all of that (& immediately program it into muscle memory), then I'm somehow accessory to peoples' loss of faith in humanity? At least it's reciprocated, I guess.

*******************************************************************************************************

"But how can you play so much and not learn from your mistakes. These people have played over 100 games - they're not new anymore."
*snort* Seriously, try to remember what it's like to be new at something. Step 1 is learning how to learn; even the ability to watch a replay and deduce what your "1 mistake" was is a hard-won skill. That skill alone would take 50 replay-watches to hone, and we haven't even fixed any mistakes yet!

"Still, if they've played 100 games, how thick do they have to be to keep falling to the same all-ins over and over?"
Let's do some quick math, shall we?
100 games
x 50% win rate (if Battle.net is doing its job)
= 50 losses
-30 games that reach mid- or late-game (when you're lucky enough to be paired with a like-minded Group A-er)
= 20 losses in early game (judging from my experience with all-ins & 'cheese')
/ 9 types early game counters to learn (assuming that, per race, there are only 2 cheeses & 1 common all-in that a Bronze player could reasonably execute. Which, let's be honest, is a laughably low estimate.)
= 2.22.. instances of losing to any one strategy

I ask you, can you honestly say that you'd be able to scout, recognize, prepare, and effectively execute a counter on something that's only happened to you twice?

*******************************************************************************************************

TL;DR - Back the eff off! SC2 is great because it's infinitely challenging, but that means it has a steep learning curve. Why not be a solution instead of contributing to the problem? Skills gaps grow like any other gap (wealth, education, whatever) - when the haves have a choice to share with the have-nots and choose something else instead.