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As mentioned in my first blog entry, I've read Gheed's hilarious article on his descent into Bronze.
I don't really see all the BS that Gheed saw. Perhaps Gheed's perspective is different from mine, perhaps I (or he) suffer from the mental interference that he mentioned. Or perhaps there is something else at work.
In my first season of SC2, the Golds were actually pretty nice to me. As I said, I lost something like 47 games in a row. I went and looked at my match history and it told a different story. So I looked at replays. I had a couple of wins, mostly becaus people left the game at the 2 second mark, or because of some other reason. There were no legitimate wins on my part for quite a while. But the Golds who beat me then offered a piece of advice here and there, like building observers or remembering to expo. And, the most valuable, a link to the TL Wiki.
But even down here in the trash heap, I'm not running into much BM, at least not anymore. During seasons 4 and 5, I got BMed up one side and down the other, but as of 6, I changed division. I don't remember my original division, but now I'm in Overseer Mu.
The following, I want to emphasize, is theorycraft. It has no substantiating evidence other than my own experience and perceptions, which may be warped.
As I understand leagues and ladders, there are 8 bronze leagues under each silver league, and so on up the ladder, until you have only 1 GM league on each server. This math also works out to give the needed space for having all those players out there. It stands to reason that Blizzard would have a place for those players who play well enough (qualitative) to have a decent MMR, but don't play enough (quantitative) to get enough points to escape bronze. These are the people who are good, or practice against the AI (like me) getting good at build orders, openings, and basic strategies, but for whatever reason (ladder anxiety, time constraints) don't play enough. Thus, if they were to get promoted, they would fill one of those less-common slots in a higher league, essentially taking it out of the pool for a more dedicated, but potentially less-skilled, player.
The reason I forward this theory is because of what I'm seeing in Bronze right now. I'm not seeing people who don't know how to box their workers, hit A and click on the ground. I tried a worker rush, just for shits and giggles, and promptly got murdered. By a bronzie. I now get 4 gated, but only on maps like TA. I get hit with builds like the 2 rax pressure that Day9 showed in a daily a month or so ago. I get hit with 3 gate robo, expo, collossus builds, zealot immortal pushes, Stephano's mass roach, two base muta, muta/ling, infestor/ling (icefisher) transitioning into Broodlords. I get hit with six pools, 10 pools, 8 pools, 7 roach pressure, baneling busts, 3 stalker aggression, ThorZain's marine/tank spoon push, 1-1-1s, proxy bunkers, two base 6 gates, etc.
Notice what I'm leaving out: cheese. These players are, from what I can see comparing my replays to the styles of known players, attempting to execute good builds and good build orders, and they are largely succeeding. The way I crush their faces? Basics from Day9. I expand behind my attacks. I wait for something to finish before I attack (a timing push). I try Special Tactics, like warp prism drops of zealots in the back while I hit the front door with stalkers. I try obs + blink stalker harrass. I try double forges for double ups. And I always build pylons, probes, units, and buildings. I the last time I hear "you must construct additional pylons" was last night when I was playing three sheets to the wind in a 2v2 and tried to 4 gate the enemy. While in the middle of my attack, my fingers reflexively hit 4, e to make a probe, and Zeratul kindly informed me of my lack of psi.
What am I driving at? Not all SC2 players are created equal, and bronzies are no exception. I'm not good. I know that. If I were good, I wouldn't be in Bronze. I'd be in a commercial with Machine if I were good. I'd be streaming and getting paid to coach like InControl if I were good.
But (bronze mental interference incoming) I don't think I'm that bad. I played against several silvers, and beat them. I played against a couple of Golds and beat them. I even got some coaching from a Diamond Zerg, who tried to pull a baneling bust on me and I held it. I won that one (custom game) but I honestly think he let me.
My point here, as I said in different words, is that not all bronzies suck that hard. Yeah, I suck, but with a 90% to 95% winrate this season in matches that include the two tiers above me, I can't be that bad.
Some bronzies are actually playing to get better. Some of us are actually trying to be nice on the lader. The worst BM I've ever engaged in was as follows:
I started up a match in Season 4. PvP on Xel'Naga Caverns. Initial converstation as follows:
Me: glhf
Him: No.
Him: This is not fun.
Him: and I don't need luck.
Me: just trying to be nice
Him: I don't need your nice
Him: I need ladder points.
Me. Okay.
After that he starts BMing me and I tuned it out. Can't find the replay right now, either. I'm building away and I see a spot of red blip on the minimap around my ramp. I send three probes, because I think I know what he's doing. He didn't even poke towards the nexus, just hugged the edge of the high ground. Sure enough, it's a pylon. I sic three probes on the pylon and pull two more and micro like a madman trying to sandwich his probe. I get it, he cancels the pylon, and I go back to mining. My Zealot pops out. My core. My stalker. Two gas up and running and here comes a probe up the ramp. I go for it with the stalker and as soon as the probe clears the top of the ramp, the cannon on the low ground starts blasting my stalker. I sic the zealot on the cannon, convert my two new gates that just warped in into warpgates, and warp in a round of stalkers. But he gets a cannon warping in on the high ground and says:
Him: I never lose.
Me: really? Why are you in bronze?
Him: gg wp
Me: srsly
over the next twelve minutes or so, I expand three more times, only to get cannoned to death, finally get established, get some cannons and zealots up, working on stalkers (lost my main) and he runs in with something like 15-20 zealots.
Him: Persistence.
Me: (as he's hacking his way up my ramp): NOW its well played.
And I left. That, folks, is literally the meanest I have been to anyone on ladder. I strive to always glhf, always gg, and always thank my opponent unless he BMs me.
I'll admit, this guy rattled me with an incessant stream of BM throughout the entire match. It was a very unpleasant experience, but I'm too much of a stubborn cuss to give in to that kind of BS. It only makes me want to win more, to shove those words down their throat, to show them how utterly and completely incompetent they are. And then I'll still be nice to them, just to show them how a real human being is supposed to act. Because the Golden Rule works everwhere.
That is far from the worst BM I experienced, but I still mostly run into people who just want to get better. People who are mannered, ask what they did wrong, how I beat them, or offer a bit of advice on how not to get owned by whatever they did that owned. I got stomped by the wierd timing of an 8 pool and the guy offered to play a few customs with me until I could hold it. I don't remember his name, but I thank him a great deal. Kudos, good sir, on good sportsmanship and helping out your fellow bronzie.
So, I ask you, the reader, what do you think? Why is there such a disconnect between what Gheed saw and what I see? Why is it I see so many straight-up games with well mannered people? Why is it Gheed got so much hate?
I would hazard an answer to the last: Gheed was cheesing, or that's the way a bronze player would see it. I dislike cheese and rarely execute it, but I view it as a valid strategy. If it works, and you win, well, you win. Therefore, it is a valid strategy. And Gheed is absolutely correct in his observation that a worker rush is easily defeated by boxing your workers, pressing A, and clicking on the ground. I would be a smidge miffed if someone pulled this on me, but I don't think I would lose to it anymore. Last year, I definitely would have, because I would have been terrified at the attack. Day9 has spoken of early aggression and how it can throw your opponent for a loop, and he's right. I still work on getting comfortable with being aggressive. It's hard for me, as are all-ins, because (ironically) I want so badly to win and claw my way up to a respectable level where I can play this game and make money doing it.
That's it for now, folks. Hopefully, your opinion of us lowly bronzies isn't quite as bad as it was a few minutes ago. And if you've gotten this far, I thank you for putting up with my wall of text. I will see if I can figure out how to add pictures and upload some captures from my replays in the future.
GLHF. I really mean that.
-Loki
 
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Well, being a bronzie myself I have also experienced many a BM players and many well mannered players, you did mention that the leagues were divided in a tree and that meant there are alot of players, Gheed possibly just got unlucky experiencing all this BM and possibly cheese.
GLHF in your future games, Loki, and I hope all BM is smited by your superious good manner and great play :D
-LemoN
Edit: I just realised this post may not be entirely relevant but I hope what, if any, of it that is relevant is helpful 
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90-95% winrate is not bronze, then you are a gold player very soon to be. And all that you said is just well... not true, these builds are not executed fairly well by any standards. All builds executed by plat and lower are horrible from personal experience. Allways several minutes late with half the ammount of units. (whenever i face a plat in custom game or lower i have never ever lost).
I recently played on a friends acc which is silver just to show him how bad silver is (he claimed people to be pretty good), then i won 20 consecutive games doing all sorts of wacky builds and laughing at how bad all the opponents were, my friend was like wtf they arent this bad when i play. Well its beacuse they are that bad but from a low leagues perspective they dont realise it yet.
Im master and good compared to leagues below.
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On April 09 2012 22:36 sertas wrote:
90-95% winrate is not bronze, then you are a gold player very soon to be. And all that you said is just well... not true, these builds are not executed fairly well by any standards. All builds executed by plat and lower are horrible from personal experience. Allways several minutes late with half the ammount of units. (whenever i face a plat in custom game or lower i have never ever lost).
I recently played on a friends acc which is silver just to show him how bad silver is (he claimed people to be pretty good), then i won 20 consecutive games doing all sorts of wacky builds and laughing at how bad all the opponents were, my friend was like wtf they arent this bad when i play. Well its beacuse they are that bad but from a low leagues perspective they dont realise it yet.
Im master and good compared to leagues below.
I would oppose that and say that in Plat and even gold, some players can actually pull builds off very well. Problem is, they can only do it up to a certain point where it becomes too much to handle, so their macro crumbles. Same if they get attacked early, they can do the builds well but only when focused on that, so as soon as they are forced to do something else, the build becomes late and ineffective.
Simply learning and pulling of a build is easy... keeping up with it in the mid-late game and handling crisis, now that's harder to pull off.
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I felt the same way when I was in bronze, I felt that bronze couldn't be that bad because I wasn't that bad. But I realized (after the fact) that it was because I never laddered. That summer I had lots of time to ladder and I got promoted by season's end.
One thing to keep in mind is that bronze has probably the biggest skillgap contained in one league. The skillgap from lowest bronze to top bronze is probably bigger than the gap between top bronze and gold.
Some things about Gheed: First off, his MMR is truly terrible. He has tanked it so much that the players he is facing literally don't know how to a-move, remember? To use his own metaphor, you as a bronze are somewhere just below sea level, while he has tanked his MMR so that he is somewhere in Hell.
And, he is cheesing.(idk if Worker Rushing really counts as a cheese because it should never be viable) Cheese brings out all of the anger from people. In the games where Gheed did the turtling up or played any kind of macro game, the other player didn't rage. They only raged when he worker rushed them. I think that's something to keep in mind.
EDIT: lol this post promoted me to a hydralisk.
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On April 09 2012 22:10 Lokishadow wrote:
These players are, from what I can see comparing my replays to the styles of known players, attempting to execute good builds and good build orders, and they are largely succeeding.
The thing is, your perspective is most likely suffering from lack of game knowledge.
If you post a replay against a Z who is 'playing well' according to your standards, I can guarantee that I can completely pick it apart and show why he is actually completely failing at what he is trying to do. They may be trying to execute something decent, but they are just simply failing.
As a Z I know that it's damn near impossible to lose to someone several leagues below you, and damn near impossible to win against someone who is far above you. You simply decide to pick a slightly more aggressive and safe build, and outmacro them so badly.
I'd certainly agree with your statement that the skill gap is higher in bronze than in any other league (I used to think it was a similar skill gap in masters between low masters and top pro's, but they are now mostly in GM, so). Top bronze certainly have some idea what they are doing while bottom bronze have no idea.
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Great post! If you keep your mmr high enough you'll get out. I busted my add one season writing down my games and learning mechanics and got promoted in a season when I was bronze. I play mid and high gold now and hope to be promoted when the new season hits. One thing I noticed is when I was high bronze everyone seemed pretty decent and mimicked even pro player builds...I felt like I didn't know what the fuss was about, these players were not bad! skip to where Im at nowtop silver, my best friend is only high bronze and when I watch his games im struck in awe at how terrible the play is and how terribly builds are executed. Now this is only ONE league above him. Just some insight. Good luck in your games. Don't give up and have anxiety just remind yourself you can't win all your games. Sorry for typos, written from my phone.
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I still have a low opinion of bronze players.
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Simply mimic-ing the build order doesn't mean much. They don't understand what advantage the build gives (well, except 4 gating I suppose). They can't make use of the extra resources. They don't execute it well enough.
For example, a lot of the bronze I saw doing the basic reactor hellion opening, couldn't handle the multi-tasking and lost them without doing much.
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When you have achieved a certain amount of "skill" or should i say experience, the "random" things that bronze players do tends to look very stupid(?). This is of course very natural since players in the lower league obviously havent learned enough of the game to execute strategies like a GM player.
Like in all leagues there are very nice people and very BM players. The thing is that in lower leagues, cheese tends to happen more often than in the higher leagues (dat 6pool,cannon rush) because it gets you alot of wins. This is taken from my own experience.
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Lokishadow, thanks for your article, but you did get one point wrong. How much/often you play has no effect on your MMR. It does not go down over time if you don't play.
I think the trick to realizing how "good" or not someone is, is by benchmarking. I'm in platinum, and when I'm trying to do builds I always note how many units of every kind a pro had at X time doing the build. I can often get pretty close, but then during the battle I'll forget a warp-in, or get supply blocked, or not use my chrono and then quickly fall behind. Anyway, I guarantee that if you can get builds down to the point where you are close to the pros in number of units, silver and gold shouldn't be too far away. Good luck!
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I get hit with 3 gate robo, expo, collossus builds, zealot immortal pushes, Stephano's mass roach, two base muta, muta/ling, infestor/ling (icefisher) transitioning into Broodlords. I get hit with six pools, 10 pools, 8 pools, 7 roach pressure, baneling busts, 3 stalker aggression, ThorZain's marine/tank spoon push, 1-1-1s, proxy bunkers, two base 6 gates, etc.
I doubt if you've been hit with half of these builds. No one in bronze executes any of these builds well/correctly. If they did, they would not be in bronze. There are no build orders in bronze. There is no cheese.
Just because someone builds a barracks, a factory, and a starport doesn't make it a 1-1-1.
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Thank you for all the feedback! I do realize that I suck. I know this by comparing my composition to that of higher-ranked players going the same build around the same time. I think the comment about a larger gap in skill within the bronze league might be accurate, but I can't say for certain since I'm not out of bronze. Yes, I still run into those players who by some miracle match my MMR and when I hit their front door with a pack of stalkers and two immortals they have 1 rax, 1 fact, a supply depot wall, 1 tank and 10 marines. More and more, I'm running into players who have the same army or a bigger army than mine, one guy even had three bases, 5 rax, 2 fact, and a decently big MMM ball.
I also really like the "hindsight is 20/20" analogy put forth by GlintFox. That is so appropriate, and something I should have thought of. When I had practiced kung fu for six months, I thought I was getting good. At 3 years my teacher had me spar with a guy who was showing as much promise as I and he seemed SO slow and uncoordinated.
Yeah, pressure throws my builds off, but most of the bronzies down here (who don't 4 gate) don't really apply that much pressure. It's why I love playing against better players, they throw things at me that I don't have the experience with which to deal, and that lets me learn new things I didn't even know I was missing.
-Loki
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i used to think i was good at bw - i went about 1000-200 on bnet games - and then i discovered iccup and realized i had no idea what i was doing. i had the builds down but my mechanics were just terrible. i feel like that's probably the same thing with bronze.
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On April 09 2012 22:10 Lokishadow wrote:
As I understand leagues and ladders, there are 8 bronze leagues under each silver league, and so on up the ladder, until you have only 1 GM league on each server.
I just wanted to clear this one part up. The populations of Bronze, Silver, Gold, Plat, and Diamond are roughly the same, with each being slightly less than 20% of the player base. GM is top 200, and master's is roughly top 2-3% IIRC.
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Thank you, LazinCajun. I did not know that. Where did you find it? I read the league and ladder guide sticky, but apparently I misinterpreted it.
-Loki
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It's a long post, so I think you probably just missed it. From the stickied guide:
On February 22 2011 15:13 Excalibur_Z wrote:League PopulationThere are seven leagues, and the population of each is governed by the current active population: ![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/5w92j.jpg) Grandmaster: Top 200 players based upon moving average of MMR (not represented on the chart because its a unique league) Master: Top 2% of active players Diamond: Next 18% of active players Platinum: Next 20% of active players Gold: Next 20% of active players Silver: Next 20% of active players Bronze: Bottom 20% of active players The system dynamically distributes the population of active players across a constant range of MMR values, and league boundaries are fixed in relation to MMR. The boundaries are based on MMR values selected by a prior distribution that will capture these certain percentiles. Furthermore, the league boundaries can be adjusted by Blizzard on the fly in the event that populations need to be normalized.
Sorry if this derailed your blog a bit.
I think early game cheese rubs people the wrong way precisely because they are trying to improve, and they don't feel that learning to hold of a worker rush helps them to improve in a "real" game. I think that perspective is a bit misguided, even though I've fallen into it before.
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On April 10 2012 01:15 Sinensis wrote:Show nested quote +I get hit with 3 gate robo, expo, collossus builds, zealot immortal pushes, Stephano's mass roach, two base muta, muta/ling, infestor/ling (icefisher) transitioning into Broodlords. I get hit with six pools, 10 pools, 8 pools, 7 roach pressure, baneling busts, 3 stalker aggression, ThorZain's marine/tank spoon push, 1-1-1s, proxy bunkers, two base 6 gates, etc. I doubt if you've been hit with half of these builds. No one in bronze executes any of these builds well/correctly. If they did, they would not be in bronze. There are no build orders in bronze. There is no cheese. Just because someone builds a barracks, a factory, and a starport doesn't make it a 1-1-1.
Im far away from bronze. In fact I've never been bronze ever. Still If Nestea saw me attempt his three base muta build he might say much the same thing. It's really all a matter of perspective.
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When you're trying to improve, working hard at it, and someone does something mindless, effortless, like boxing workers and sending them to your base, and you lose for whatever reason, you feel cheated. Your work and effort that you put in was made irrelevant by someone doing something that takes no effort, no work, no real thought, and you feel frustrated-- like you've wasted your time, and you feel like the person doing it is negating, perhaps even making light of your effort and hard work. Hence BM.
He found the most BM in bronze simply because worker rushing works comparatively the most in bronze, i.e. negates the most hard work and effort and causes the most frustration.
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On April 10 2012 03:50 MstrJinbo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 10 2012 01:15 Sinensis wrote:I get hit with 3 gate robo, expo, collossus builds, zealot immortal pushes, Stephano's mass roach, two base muta, muta/ling, infestor/ling (icefisher) transitioning into Broodlords. I get hit with six pools, 10 pools, 8 pools, 7 roach pressure, baneling busts, 3 stalker aggression, ThorZain's marine/tank spoon push, 1-1-1s, proxy bunkers, two base 6 gates, etc. I doubt if you've been hit with half of these builds. No one in bronze executes any of these builds well/correctly. If they did, they would not be in bronze. There are no build orders in bronze. There is no cheese. Just because someone builds a barracks, a factory, and a starport doesn't make it a 1-1-1. Im far away from bronze. In fact I've never been bronze ever. Still If Nestea saw me attempt his three base muta build he might say much the same thing. It's really all a matter of perspective.
And he would probably be right in saying that just like you/me/anyone else would be right in saying that bronze players don't execute their builds correctly.
There are so many little smudges while executing a build order that while performing it it feels alright but when someone knows what it's supposed to look like and takes a step back and looks at it, it looks very messy. This is true for Bronze players, Platinum players, and hell, probably even most Master players. The only difference between them is when they fall off the track. A master player might be able to execute his build against all variations up til the 15:00 minute mark while a bronze has trouble getting it right up to the 6:00 minute mark against an AI. To anyone who disagrees with this, upload a replay of your best game and I guarantee you there will be some obvious mistakes.
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EPT
