EPT
It's important to understand that for the most part, people who play Starcraft or, actually when I think about it, most other games that have a high skill ceiling, are bad at those games. The reason this is important is that the only way to get better seems to be to work out how you suck and how you can do something about it. In fact, it might be worth writing a sentence about why people suck...
As far as I can tell, it starts as "You suck because...". It isn't just "You suck, because that's not going to tell you anything, let alone what you need to do to improve.
Let's use Starcraft as an example.
In Bronze, you suck. This is probably because you have no idea how to play the game, and you probably only build off one base. You probably don't saturate your base, and you probably don't build enough production to even use the poor income that you have.
So the sentence here reads...
"You suck because you aren't building enough stuff."
From what I can tell, getting around this will get you out of bronze. Spend money on workers, and spend the resulting money on anything at all, and chances are you'll be fine. If you're Terran, just build marines. All the marines. If you build constantly, you'll en up with enough stuff to just overrun your opponent. If necessary, have a timing of "attack at 10 minutes". Chances are, if your opponent is in bronze, you'll just flat kill them."
So you struggle and work and spend and BAM, you're in silver. Which means you suck, but you suck less and you suck for different reasons.
In silver, you get the the point where people can beat the "Kill them with marines" thing. Your macro may have improved, but you need to keep working at it, and then making sure that the things that you are build work well together. So marine/tank or MMM or ling/bling or something on that order. You still suck, but working on macro will probably carry the day again. What does that do to the sentence?
"You suck because you aren't building enough stuff, and you need to look at composition."
So you work hard and hopefully you get the promotion screen which tells you that you have ascended to the height of gold.
Congrats, your macro is getting good, but you still suck. That's OK because the reason has changed yet again. At this point, scouting starts to become an issue. You can get the units to the fight, but if your opponent build something that you don't see coming, you're going to suffer and die, so the sentence changes.
"You suck because you sometimes aren't building enough stuff and you need to know basically what your opponent is doing."
The joy of having fixed most of the macro problems now means that you need to know what your opponent's tech path is and hopefully you can have enough stuff in place to beat them down and take all their ladder points.
Which hopefully will land you in Plat!
BY this point, your macro is getting good. It's not perfect, but it's good. You need to polish it off and start focussing on micro. Really good micro can make the difference between a bad engagement and crushing your opponent beneath your sandalled boots. So what does the sentence look like now?
"You suck because you rarely aren't building enough stuff and you need to know basically what your opponent is doing, and need to work on positioning and micro."
Cost effiency is the name of the game, and if you can micro well enough to lose 2 marines to a baneling or blink your stalkers back to well that none of them take any hull damage, then you end up doing so much better. It's also working out how to attack without just amoving into your enemy and how to dodge storms and banelings. Caster use is starting to become useful, as ghosts and infestors and templar are not somethig you can even amove with.
Target firing specific units rather than attacking the mass of enemy. This isn't a bad time to slip on your macro.
But you can sort that, so you can get into diamond.
Then you find out that you still suck, but far less. This doesn't mean that there's less to work on. Macro shoudldn't be an issue anymore, so the sentnce is going to change dramatically. It's now...
"You suck because you don't know when just go kill them, and need to work on your late to end game."
This includes a lot of things from knowing how much damage you've done with attacks, knowing when you're ahead and how to capitalise, knowing when youre behind and how to recover if you are. If you know when to put down your forth and fifth base, hen you can end up with an advantage in the end game and thus be able to remax after engagements a lot faster. This big things herre though, seems to be the game sense, as it's really easy to get to the stage where the commentators would be yelling to just go kill your opponent, because they can see you have twice their supply or something like that.
But then that's the difference that game sense can make. Anyone spectating the game can tell exactly what's going on, because they technically have perfect game vision, being able to see everything on the map. So when a player doesn't know they've won, and allows their opponent to come back from the brink, the spectators know it. So if you can get game sense up to the point that you can tell when you've dealt a fatal blow and just need to finish, or that you've done some damage, ut now's not the time to go all in, you can win games that otherwise would have been a lot closer.
At that point, you're knocking on the doors to master league, and there's nothing to stop you getting in. Your game sense, micro and macro are all good, and you can start polishing everything.
So I guess you don't suck anymore. It's still important to follow the meta and keep up on any balance patches, but at this point you're in a good place and can honsetly say you know what you're doing.
And to think, that makes it sound so simple.
Oh well, back to the grindstone. Need to work on my macro...
