Making peace with your failures

On February 14 2015 21:58 nunez wrote:
through my extensive experience embarassing myself playing zerg on the SC2 ladder, i too have been enlightened, and am in a position to dish out deep insights into the human condition, if i so choose.

On February 15 2015 02:37 radscorpion9 wrote:


You made me laugh out loud for real . All I know is after getting cheesed many times and having no reasonable way to predict it without putting a zergling in the one exact corner of the map where they were proxying something, I realized the game was hopeless for real strategy. I thought maybe it was the case that I just wasn't good enough, but then when I tune into pro gamers playing on stream or in tournaments, I see them getting cheesed all the same. Even in the SC2 global tournament, in the final, SOS beat his opponent (I think three times?) by building a gateway in his opponent's main.

That and I didn't have the 200 apm where people spam things endlessly, so I can't generate enough units as the other guy. So there's an actual ceiling where your strategy doesn't matter but your ability to press buttons fast enough does. Which is exactly what filterSC the former masters player who taught people how to play sc2 on youtube, told everyone. You can get to diamond through pure macro, no strategy. Just make a ton of marines and a-move - you don't even need to tell them how to attack, just click on the minimap where your opponent's base is. He did get to diamond doing precisely that.

So I think that's the value of failure to me, it teaches you that a game is not what you think it is, and you can move on. And I have been happy ever since. On a side note I'm glad other popular streamers like day 9 have moved on from sc2, now I can see content from some other games (mostly hearthstone but thats ok; sure there's luck but there's also a lot of skill as we can see from the regular legendary players with each coming season).

On February 15 2015 07:48 KingAlphard wrote:



If you download replays from IEM or other tournaments you will see that top koreans aren't that insanely fast, they often have about the same EPMs that an average high master/ gm league player can achieve. It was actually a bit underwhelming when I first noticed this.
Multitasking isn't nearly as important as people think in SC2. The difference between an amateur and a top korean is mostly about decision making and micro.

If you're high master+ you can get to diamond by doing literally anything, the fact that you can do it through pure macro doesn't mean anything. You can also get to diamond for the first time by amoving marines, but it will take you much longer than if you played normally.

Obviously it depends a lot on your playstyle. If you watch Innovation, you might not see a lot of strategy. But if you watch sOs, it's a completely different thing. At least, I feel like I use strategy a lot in my ladder games and that allows me to beat players I wouldn't be able to beat in a straight up macro game.

Regarding cheese: it's strategy. You can't say that sc2 has no strategy involved, and then complain that you lose because people surprise you with cheesy strategies and that you can't win every game just because you have better mechanics than your opponents. Naturally, there's some luck involved in these situations. But sometimes a little bit of luck involved isn't that bad. The game would be a bit boring if the stronger player always won.