EPTBut first I need to tell you the awesome news: even though I suck, I was contacted by a gold player and a masters player, both of whom offered to play games with me and did. If you can't guess the outcomes of those games, then you are in bronze with me. But those matches (only 1 each) and a few comments from them started knocking the nails out of the door I'd nailed shut in my head. And I want other bronze players to pay attention to this:
We really do suck. Really and truly. Almost as much as many higher league players say we do,
How do I know this? That is irrelevant. The question that you need to be asking is why. Why do we suck? Again, that's not enough. We suck because we don't ask why enough. We need to be asking this over and over and over and over and over, like the damned horrible fours just became a contractable disease. Also, instead of asking "how do you know that, Loki? You're just some bronze noobsterific nimnard," we need to be asking "how did (insert pro player name here) know that his opponent was going for build/unit X?" These questions steer us in search of answers that are part of the gigantic equation that is getting good at Starcraft.
The master level player sent me an interesting PM that is also a good read. Note that I have edited out small things (like his user ID on TL) and a couple of images at his request. I'm adding this because I had stated in a previous post that I've seen 5:45 4-gates in bronze. Well, yeah, I've seen them, but they were quite poorly executed. This player couldn't believe that a bronze player could handle a properly executed 4-gate, so he did one on me. It hit my front door a smidge late, around 5:50-6:00. It destroyed me, completely and utterly. Anyway, the master's player is now conducting an experiment: He's seeing how far he can get on the back of the 4-gate. I'm sure this has been done, but he wanted to do it himself. And here's what he sent me:
Bear in mind while reading this that 1) this experiment is NOT about the 4 gate itself, but to see the current state of the ladder, and 2) this is NOT a pro player, the highest he ever claims to have gotten was top 8 masters and matched against a few GMs, and that's on the NA ladder.
QUOTE: (name removed)
So I have yet to see any evidence that anyone, at least from bronze up to gold, can execute or hold a proper 4-gate (or even come remotely close, to be honest...)
Note this isn't an endorsement of 4-gate as a strategy, rather I'm trying to emphasize the importance of mechanics and fundamentals. I know in one of your blog posts you said higher level players were being too vague in using terms like this, but there really isn't a better way to explain it.
Basically, a lot of lower level players dismiss 4-gate because they think 1) it's too simple a build, 2) anyone can do it, and 2) it's easy for an opponent to hold. I've heard this over and over from my friends and from reading forum posts. But none of those things are true, because it's very likely that they can't execute a proper 4-gate themselves, and also that they've never played against someone who can execute a proper 4-gate. On NA, I've never seen anyone below diamond even do a textbook 4-gate build in the correct order, nevermind hitting correct timings, and that remains true after my latest run of games.
But lower level players don't realize this. They dismiss 4-gate and they turn to other fancier builds that they read about or see pro players execute. Now imagine how that looks to a master's player - these lower league players can't even properly execute a 4-gate, which is supposedly the simplest protoss build out there. It's 1 base, 4 buildings, no worries about late game decision-making or any sort of economy management after you cut your probes. If they don't have the raw mechanical ability to execute this, imagine how it looks when they try to do fancier 2 base and 3 base builds? It just looks very off - like they're biting off way more than they can chew. You have to walk before you learn how to run.
Sure, lower league players can learn some new builds and beat other players their level, but they're not improving where it counts - in execution and fundamentals. Everyone in bronze, silver, gold, even plat, plays extremely sloppily, but they don't realize it because other players play just as sloppily as they do. So they don't see how off their timings really are.
Key point: What separates different leagues isn't the strategies or the builds - it's fundamentals and execution. I said this before, but you see the same general strategies in every league, it's a matter of execution. So as a lower level player, it's easy to say "oh, (bronze/silver/gold) isn't that bad, I see people doing (random pro build) all the time". But you have to realize that the players you're playing against are executing those builds very poorly.
Ultimately, you don't jump leagues by learning a new build, you jump leagues by improving how well you execute the build you've been doing. THAT'S why everyone from bronze to plat to master's can do the same strategy, yet they're clearly in different leagues, and it's why master's players always tell people to "improve their mechanics". Lower league players just aren't as able to spot the differences in a plat execution of a build vs a master's execution of a build.
It's why I can 4-gate and win every game I play, up to a certain point, even though it's the simplest and most well-known build out there. If it's so simple, at the very least I should sometimes lose to other people who are also 4-gating, but I don't. The mechanical ceiling for executing a proper 4-gate, while very low compared to fancier builds, is still much, much higher than most people realize. And you won't hit people who've reached that ceiling until you get to Diamond or Master's. So don't be afraid to practice 4-gate because you think by doing it you "won't get better" - there is still so much to learn that you don't yet realize.
Lower league players sometimes just assume that they can execute a 4-gate properly, because it's supposedly so simple. And if their opponent stops it, it's because 4-gate isn't good, not because their own mechanics need work. And proving that wrong was the point of my experiment. So don't fall into that trap! Any given master's player should be able to take any given textbook build - even a simple one like a 4-gate - and win 100% of their games in lower leagues.
END QUOTE.
Combine this with what Gheed says in his LoL/SC2 blog entry, and we start to see something that I only began to realize around the time I posted my last entry: bronzies suck, and we have no idea how much we suck because we have no fucking idea what we're doing. We are completely lost. There are a number of reasons for this, and they can be summed up as Macro, Micro, Mechanics, and Knowlege.
And Knowlege is the biggest hole. We have no fucking clue. Case in point, I had no idea that there was no "close by ground" spawn on Shattered Temple. Is this even true? Apollo stated as much in his Learning Protoss video series. Is this a characteristic of the map? Is it a result of the sheer distance from one spawn point to another, or is it just something that doesn't happen on Shattered? Now I have to go read the wiki entry and see what it says about Shattered.
Well, the wiki says that as of season 4, close spawns were removed. Does this mean we only cross-spawn, or is close-by-air still an option? And why the blue fuck am I focusing so damned hard on Shattered?
I'm focusing on Shattered to illustrate a point. Shattered is one map out of ten in the ladder pool, and I don't even know all it's characteristics. I didn't realize until I watched the Terran tutorials by Apollo this morning that protoss is basically boned against a MMM terran unless he gets splash. This point has been illustrated hundreds of times in hundreds of videos, but I never noticed it, and no one ever pointed it out. Why did no one point it out? Because it should be obvious. Why didn't I see it? Because I suck.
We suck because obvious things like protoss needing splash against terran bio is staring us in the face over and over again, and we don't see it. We don't see it for any of a million reasons. I'm so blinded by the pretty lights and trying to keep making stalkers that I get into monorail mind mode where all I do is warp in stalkers and try to 1A to victory. There's no thought going on behind this ugly mug I call a face. Or, more accurately, there is too much of the wrong kind of thought going on behind my fugly mug. It isn't that I'm not thinking; far from it, in fact. The promblem is that I'm thinking about the wrong things.
Why? Why am I thinking about the wrong things? It's not even that they are the wrong things, it's that I haven't developed a level of proficiency that allows me to do things like Macroing without a serious investment of attention. Two weeks ago I would play ladder and sit and chant "pylons, probes, warp in units, scout" over and over again, just to drill these actions into both my head and my muscle memory.
And that's when the light bulb really started to go on. I still have to think about hitting Shift+7 to put my observer on a hotkey for scouting. I still have to think about what building I'm making next, and I know so little about what the purpose of the various buildings are that I spend too much time thinking about what I'm making. I'm just fucking herp-de-derping towards colossi because that's what every Protoss gets. When to get them and why to get them isn't entering my brain . . . or at least it wasn't.
To a degree, I think this is part of the learning curve. We have to learn those "basics," those mechanics and fundamentals that everyone talks about but never clarifies, before we can begin to truly improve. Having some grasp (any grasp at all, really) of these concepts enables us to escape bronze hell and get into silver hell. But to grasp these, we have to apply ourselves.
And it must seem to the other 80% of people in SC2 that we aren't applying ourselves.
Well, I've got news. I've been applying myself. I'm not going to claim to have any level of skill, and I'm also going to officially retract any statement I made about being able to hold any build at all. My opponents were just derping towards some build they had seen used by their favorite player, and I was just derping towards what I thought was a safe build. The timings are so far off that these can't even be called builds, they're more like the first steps of a child entering toddler stage. I can get up, and get going, but I'm not too sure of what I'm doing or where I'm going.
There. I've said my piece. I ate my crow. And it was nummy. Now I'm going to go practice some more. Maybe this time I'll learn something.
-Loki
. I hope I'm not just a dum dum
But just blindly building 4 gates then just derping around and doing whatever afterwards exposes the fundamental flaw in the thinking, even putting the execution aside.
