EPTSo today I played SC2 (not entirely unusual) and managed to be a little less terrible than normal, and it feels really good, so I thought I'd write a blog on it. First though, a little history of the last time this happened.
So, I've been playing pretty casually since season 1, where I was stuck in Bronze. The important thing to note is that the reason I was in Bronze was because the game was imbalanced, lag sucks, my cat was on fire, my opponents were cheating, SC2 was temporarily wiped from existance so I had to gg out and any other excuse I could come up with at the time. Then I learnt about "Probes and Pylons" and for the first time in my SC life, I was a little less terrible.
It's an odd thing to realise that you're so bad at something the most basic of concepts such as "build an economy first" are revolutionary. Back then all I wanted to do was Nydus Worm, spread Creep, and have infinity Zerglings, and so I lost quite a bit.
Fast forwarding a bit though, with my new found knowledge I quickly shot up to Gold league, not even sticking in Silver for a whole season and that's where I've been for all bit a brief period where the game cruely promoted me to Platinum but 5 ZvZ Ling/Bane 1 base rushes very quickly dropped me to where I've belonged, and been, ever since.
I long ago accepted my mechanics are basically bad, and that's the biggest hole in my play, but I also really want to get to Diamond one day. Well, actually I really want to win GSL one day, but you know, that's maybe a bit too ambitious for someone as naturally cursed at RTS as I am, so I'll settle for Diamond.
So I've been practicing a bit...and was still bad. I did learn that idle larva is really bad though, another one of those "That really should have been obvious..." points. Then I decided to check the Strat forum, you know, that least obvious of places to check for advice in improving your play and stumbled upon Belial88's Guide to Everything ZvP and decided to compare my benchmarks to his. The results were worse than I had expected, which was itself an impressive feat of being terrible.After a bit of practice though, I could reach that level...against the AI on easy. But, today I decided to test it on the ladder. Against my first opponent I scored a crushing defeat, he had no chance from the start it seemed. That might be because he was doing the "hide a cc and pretend I never got in to the game" build but, you know, when you're at my level you have to take the wins when you can!
My macro in the game though was unfortunately poor, as if my practice had meant nothing, despite the fact I knew from the start almost that my opponent was basically doing less than the AI I had practiced against, and I hadn't used that as an excuse to stop trying to practice my macro control.
My 4th game though...I was a little less terrible. For the second time in my SC life, I was a little less terrible than I had been generally, and it felt amazing. I didn't hit the benchmarks in practice, but compared to my pre-practice 8 minute mark of 32 Drones, I was at 54! I even used the gas count of my opponent to judge their build (Thanks #gtl Skype call!) and didn't get scared and build units when I didn't need them, although my scouting of his base could do with some work.
When he moved out with a 110 supply or so of Sentry and Immortal I was taking a 4th, with a macro Hatch up and at 198 supply, and I've never crushed someone so hard before. He immediately left before the fight ended and I was still at 180 supply (I lost a couple of Overlords) and I, for the first time against a real opponent, had performed at a better than Gold level. It might have only been a low Platinum level (opponent was mid ranked Platinum), but it was a little less terrible than before, and that's why I'm writing this blog. Turns out, having stuff is really useful!
I guess the point of this blog is I only played 5 games today, but I won 4 of them and beat both Platinum opponents and I'm feeling pretty good about it because practicing has actually made a clear difference in my play and it's so awesome to see I can improve! Been Gold, essentially since season 3 (or 4...I think 3) and this is the first time since then I've actually seen an improvement in my play.
To wrap this up, I already thanked Belial88 in the guide thread, but I figure another here is required, if you ever see this.
Have a good evening dear reader!
