EPTDuring my time off I played LoL with the same obsession I had played starcraft. LoL is a great game, fresh to me, and at that time not yet soured by bad attitudes and frustration. I did repeat a lot of my same mistakes with LoL, in terms of mentality, that I did with sc2. I think it is nearly unavoidable when you play any game competitively. However, along the way I learned things about RTS and strategy in general that has helped me be better at both games. Its not some magic bullet; I am currently trying to get some of my old skill back and work my way back up to where I used to be. This isn't a rags to riches story of how I took six months off starcraft and now I am crushing my way through master. Currently I am a platinum player with failing mechanics who is somewhat lost in the new metagame. Still, that even being said, I can already notice myself approaching the game differently, even winning in situations where I would have been very likely to lose before. There are things I just didn't know about starcraft that I now know because I played league of legends so much. These lessons I learned I wanted to share with you guys because I think a lot of starcraft players could benefit.
League of legends, for those who don't know, is a team game. There are five players on your team and five on the other team and the outcome of the game is decided not by how two people play, but by how ten people play. In starcraft 2 if you lose you can always blame yourself, or, more often times then not, cheese and racial imbalance (
). In league of legends it may very well be that you played better than anybody else on either team and you still lose the game. It's a frustrating part of the experience, and one you have to quickly come to except. The key to success in league of legends is to understand that your actions don't ultimately decide the outcome of the game, and that if you want to improve (read, not guarantee) the odds of winning you need to play a certain way and focus on certain goals. Starcraft II, believe it or not, is really the same way. I think all of us would like to believe that if we became good enough that we would never lose a game ever again. It stems from this idea (which by the way isn't true) that in our games we are the ultimate masters of our own destiny. To certain extend that is true, if you are better then your opponent you are going to have a much greater chance of winning than if you aren't. The thing most starcraft players forget though is that it isn't a guarantee of victory if you are more skilled, its a much higher chance of victory. If there was some special way to play starcraft such that the entire game came down to skill and luck played no factor at all, then starcraft would be really boring to watch. If you look at the pro players they rarely ever play two games exactly the same. There have been innumerable times in pro tournaments where the less skilled player took games, took sets, took tournaments of more skill players. When Inca made it to the GSL finals it was pretty clear all of that kids lucky stars had perfectly aligned. If Inca had some how beaten Nestea in the finals people wouldn't say Inca was more skilled, and they wouldn't say he was lucky either. They would say Inca played better in those games and that is all there is to it.
When you play starcraft sometimes you lose games even if you are better. That game doesn't mean anything other then you made a mistake, or maybe got a little unlucky. It's not justification to quite starcraft or lead a crusade of racial imblance on the forums (btw, things I have all done before :p ). It means you lost that game. In league of legends if you took it personally every time you lost you would kill yourself; there is just so many things that can go wrong in any one game that may or may not be your fault. If you want to win in league of legends you focus on playing well, the only way to improve is not to look at games as wins or loses but to look at them as "played well" or "didn't play well" and go from there. Much the same way, in starcraft if you find yourself losing to cheese, or dieing in the late game against zerg for the one hundredth time then it doesn't mean anything except maybe you got unlikely, and more probably you made some mistakes along the way. You may play again and lose the same way, and that still doesn't mean that you aren't skilled or even that your opponent has more skills, it means you probably have a gap in your play. Day9 has always said, "your rank on the ladder is not a measure of skill, it's a measure of progress." I don't think that sentence ever really made sense in my mind until very recently. What that means is that you may have 80% of the skill set needed to be a masters player and be stuck in gold league. It doesn't mean you are a masters player and it doesn't mean your don't deserve to be in gold, the point is that if you focus on improving and playing well, not winning, you can eventually close the gap and end up in a better place then you are now.
When I played terran at a diamond level I existed in this sort of paradox where I was a macro focused player who was terrible in most late game matchups. The problem was I had become used to just macoring huge advantages for myself and more or less 1a crushing people in the mid game. I spent more of my time trying to replicate my wins instead of improving upon my losses, so when I played I tried to get to the same place of "I HAVE A LOT MORE STUFF AND NOW I WIN" in every game. When I couldn't do that I would throw my hands up in frustration because, for some reason, I couldn't reconcile a world where people in my league could also macro really well and force me into a late game on even footing. If I had a macro lead in a game and still lost it was the mental equivalent for me, at the time, of shooting a goal and having the ball bounce back and hit me in the face.
In league of legends, the game operates in such as a way that no matter how far behind you get at any point the winning team is one or two huge mistakes away from losing the game. If you get 45 plus minutes into a game of league and at least one of your inhibitor towers is exposed, then the game is up for grabs. If someone can win a team fight in a big way that team can turn around and instantly win, and it doesn't matter how bad they screwed up in the first 44 minutes of the game. Those of us who play starcraft fall into this mental trap of believing that if we get to far behind the game is a guaranteed lose, or that if we get in certain situations in a game there is no way to win (for me, it was three base protoss maxed out with mixed tech). The proper way to play those situations is to focus on playing well and hope to capitalize on an advantage later, but so many of us just mentally shut down because our undoubted skill and prowess in the game can't mandate us a victory. Staying focus, keep your goals in mind, always be ready to play five, ten, twenty more minutes into a game; this is the definition of good strategy and playing well. We forget that so often when we get frustrated.
The last thing I learned from league, and this might be the most valuable, is that a game isn't won or lost because you have a better army, or composition, or more bases, a game is one or lost based upon how well you achieve your goals and objectives. Every strategy should have goals and objectives, a next step in a grand plan that leads you to the end game. A good strategy should always account for your opponent playing really well and forcing you to stay on even footing with them. In LoL the pro players often say that games are "won and lost based on objectives". This is a league concept that doesn't have direct context in starcraft II, but the lesson is really good. If you have 10 bases and your opponent has 2 have you won the game? No you haven't won the game, at least not yet. If you have the perfect death ball composition and your opponent is stuck on low teir units have you won the game? No, there is other stuff you have to do first.
More realistically, if you are terran and TvP and you manage to take a 4th base right as protoss just secured their third, you are up about ten harvesters, even on upgrades even though chrono boost is fucking OP, and you have two starports with reactors and ghost tech complete with map control, have you won the game? No, you haven't one the game yet. If your opponent turtles hardcore and forces a fourth base for them self, and catches up on upgrades, and gets to the late game on even footing with you then your strategy should account, nay it should rely on that happening, and you should play on from there. Your advantages earlier don't matter, its about playing well from exactly where you are at in that moment in that game. I can't tell you how much I struggled with that, I still struggle with that, and is by far the best lesson I have learned from playing LoL.
I understand that many of you don't care for LoL and don't respect it. I have written blogs about that already, the end point being that it's fine and you don't have to in order to get my point. We starcraft players don't lack passion or drive but so many of us do fall into mental traps that are bad for us and counter productive to our success. I managed to step away from starcraft in such a way that I learned lesson I don't think I could have learned on my own while playing the game. My point is that starcraft II games are not all in our control, that we do lose and it doesn't mean anything even if we always lose, and that winning a game of sc2 is not about winning a game of sc2, but about playing well and achieving your goals in game. If you try and think about the game in those terms you are going to get a lot less frustrated and you are going to be better of. Its not about adjusting your attitude or shifting your values or whatever... fuck that who has time to change who they are. Its about understanding the game and your place in it in such a way that you can be easier on yourself if you fail and better understand why you lose and what it means. Anwyay, I have gone on way long enough. I hope some of you could find this helpful. Thanks TL for reading this far, GL and HF everybody.
But I'm glad it worked out that way for you. Mindset is very important when it comes to honing any skill, and your new one is certainly a healthier one.
