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On March 28 2012 22:53 Kiichol wrote:
Hell, I miss Bronze League.
The games were so much slower so you could really enjoy them and relax. Try whatever build orders or strategies you wanted.
But now in Masters the APM requirement is massive and any attempt at breaking from the norm in terms of strategy or build order will see you quickly demolished.
So I say to thee Bronze Leaguers, be happy where you are, you get to enjoy the game on a completely different level to all the condescending higher leaguers.
Arrested development does not lead to any meaningful sense of satisfaction though. I see what you're saying but any competitor worth her salt isn't going to be satisfied with bronze league.
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On March 29 2012 04:08 Umpteen wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 02:07 Monkeyballs25 wrote:On March 29 2012 01:51 Zythius wrote:On March 28 2012 23:34 Dranak wrote:On March 28 2012 21:57 Zythius wrote:On March 28 2012 20:09 Umpteen wrote:On March 28 2012 19:37 Zythius wrote:On March 28 2012 19:05 Leargle wrote:
You're satisfied with being in the lower 20% of active players...
I wouldn't be. Never settle, push yourself to improve I LOL'd. We may have some bronze/silver players that are stuck AND are putting in a lot of time, but I still maintain that the big reason is time. Nobody is satisfied with being bronze, but most might have other stuff to do than SC2. It takes time to improve and time to win matches. These are the ONLY two relevant factors to advancing up the leagues. I don't see how this can be 'the big reason'. SC2 is my first competitive RTS and between family, work and other interests I have few opportunities to play. In a really exceptional week I'll get ten games played; often weeks go by with none. I know I would do better if I played more, sure, but games played cannot possibly account for much - if any - of the difference between myself and those who find themselves trapped in bronze. More often than not they describe themselves as more active than I am. Well, I'm talking about getting out of a league. If you played your placement matches well and got placed in platinum I don't care about you - you are not relevant for my argument. I'm thinking about the guys placed in bronze that has to work their way up. You need time to practice your skills and time to win matches after your skills have been improved. How is time not THE factor for advancing up in the leagues? Time played is definitely a factor, but not necessarily that huge of one. When I started playing (with no real competitive RTS experience), I was in bronze. By the end of my first season, I was in silver. Currently I'm in gold. I play at most a couple dozen games a season. The main thing that makes a difference for me is choosing to focus my efforts at improving in a specific area. A couple dozen is 24 games.. I do not believe you advance from bronze to silver to gold if you play that much every season. You would just have to win every single game because you are a good player which happened to be placed in bronze by accident. Its perfectly possible if he improved quickly, and didn't spend long enough in bronze to "solidy" his MMR at that level. But the longer you stay at given MMR, the harder it is to shift it later. Not true. MMR is as strongly affected by each game regardless of how long it has stayed the same.
Are you sure?
here also is a value "sigma" (i.e. standard deviation) that measures how uncertain the system is of your MMR. This is usually high if you have not played many games recently, or if you are on a winning or losing streak. The system does not seem to use sigma for purposes other than to calculate how much it should adjust your MMR after a win or loss (i.e. for Bayesian inference). For example, it uses a moving average of MMR to promote and demote between leagues, instead of MMR and sigma to calculate the probabilities that some league is most appropriate
That atleast seems to indicate that if you're just starting out, you'll have a high sigma and so its easier to raise your MMR past the promotion thresholds compared to someone who's already been playing a lot but stuck in a rut.
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the players who care so much about skill level and what rank they are that they make fun of other players aren't mature enough to be playing video games at all. Rank should matter to you, and no one else. If you care that you are bronze rank, do your best to get better, if you don't care, no one else should either. It's a video game, not a way of life.
Don't get me wrong, I love starcraft. I really do. I watch pro-streams regularly, I keep up with the patches, and I play on and off. However, I am still in bronze league in 1v1 (well, I was last year... haven't played 1v1 yet this year), and it doesn't matter to me. It definitely used to, but I realized that just like with any other video game, I play it for fun, not to impress anyone else. It's tough when you come to a website like TL, where there are so many great players. But just remember, if anyone trashes you for being low rank, it's because their life outside Starcraft is so pathetic that they take it THAT seriously.
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High bronze level is definatly great players, bronze is not what it used to be. I meen i have never been bronze, i went gold after my first placements and almost never played a RTS game before.
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On March 29 2012 05:57 Monkeyballs25 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 04:08 Umpteen wrote:
Not true. MMR is as strongly affected by each game regardless of how long it has stayed the same. Are you sure? Show nested quote +here also is a value "sigma" (i.e. standard deviation) that measures how uncertain the system is of your MMR. This is usually high if you have not played many games recently, or if you are on a winning or losing streak. The system does not seem to use sigma for purposes other than to calculate how much it should adjust your MMR after a win or loss (i.e. for Bayesian inference). For example, it uses a moving average of MMR to promote and demote between leagues, instead of MMR and sigma to calculate the probabilities that some league is most appropriate That atleast seems to indicate that if you're just starting out, you'll have a high sigma and so its easier to raise your MMR past the promotion thresholds compared to someone who's already been playing a lot but stuck in a rut.
While the details are not entirely transparent to anyone outside Blizzard, the sigma mentioned is probably a time-weighted measure of recent stability rather than long-term stability. What this means is that you can have two people who have spent months around the same average MMR, but one of them could have a much larger sigma because his MMR oscillates through a wider range over the short term. So, it probably doesn't matter that you've spent the last 5000 games oscillating around the same center MMR, but the short-term oscillations might affect how rapidly your MMR skews.
This also means that if you have played 5000 games and suddenly start a long winning streak, your sigma will rapidly widen so you can more quickly find your new equilibrium MMR level. It's not constrained by that long history prior to the streak, since the recent variation is what matters.
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On March 29 2012 06:44 Fus wrote:
High bronze level is definatly great players, bronze is not what it used to be. I meen i have never been bronze, i went gold after my first placements and almost never played a RTS game before.
Let's not go crazy. High bronze may have improved, but they're still in the bottom third, or lower, of people playing the game.
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Watch Day9 and grind out ladder games all you want, but slower players with ADD (like myself) won't break out of the lower leagues unless they're willing to sit in single player games - without a computer - and practicing their mouse control, key stroke combos, macro cycles, and learning the basic math behind macro production off of X amount of bases.
Your body will go on auto pilot from there, and you can start then learning more complex things like every race's timings and how to adjust your builds to them and/or create your own strategies and builds (instead of copying from pros, that is).
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People seem to really forget what the OP is trying to say. There is a reason why not everyone who plays basketball is in NBA. There is a reason why not everyone who plays the guitar is in a band that is contracted to a major label. There is a reason why not everyone is a pro gamer. Everyone has skill caps that they can't overcome, because of other factors that are more important for them AND because they understand their limits. Not everyone wants to be what they love to enjoy when its a recreational activity.
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Heh. Here's a little case you guys can use for case studies. I have a friend whose been playing SC2 since it got released. We watch GSL together. He is perma gold league. Why? Here are the reasons:
- He plays while lying on his bed with the keyboard on his belly.
- He has no mouse pad (his bed covers work just fine according to him).
- His monitor is a rather big TV that sits across the entire room from the bed he plays on.
- About 1/3 of the games he plays start off with him lighting up a joint. While he takes a drag, he stops playing with one hand.
- If something distracts him in the house, he won't pause but instead just afks that shit!
Now: His understanding of the game is rather good but because of his habits, he won't progress past Gold league. He is better than all the players in that league but will not because of all the above self-imposed handicaps.
I'm sure you guys haven't thought of this type of player in the leagues but I'm sure there are a lot. These are the types of players who purely play for fun, not advancement.
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On March 29 2012 07:42 EienShinwa wrote:
People seem to really forget what the OP is trying to say. There is a reason why not everyone who plays basketball is in NBA. There is a reason why not everyone who plays the guitar is in a band that is contracted to a major label. There is a reason why not everyone is a pro gamer. Everyone has skill caps that they can't overcome, because of other factors that are more important for them AND because they understand their limits. Not everyone wants to be what they love to enjoy when its a recreational activity.
True this.
Personally, I would never want to be a professional gamer for the same reasons I would never want to be a professional sports player. You build very little practical skills when it comes to real work. Don't get me wrong here, you get plenty of practice with discipline, motivation, persistence etc. Basically, once you are done with these professions, there is very little in terms of a career you can follow with after unless you have already practiced and exceled in skills that are not in the same area (public speaking, programming, testing, etc.). These types of careers also heavily impact your life leaving you with little time to build a real social life (real friends, real family, etc.).
Just no thank you! But I do love watching them play!
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On March 29 2012 05:57 Monkeyballs25 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 04:08 Umpteen wrote:On March 29 2012 02:07 Monkeyballs25 wrote:On March 29 2012 01:51 Zythius wrote:On March 28 2012 23:34 Dranak wrote:On March 28 2012 21:57 Zythius wrote:On March 28 2012 20:09 Umpteen wrote:On March 28 2012 19:37 Zythius wrote:On March 28 2012 19:05 Leargle wrote:
You're satisfied with being in the lower 20% of active players...
I wouldn't be. Never settle, push yourself to improve I LOL'd. We may have some bronze/silver players that are stuck AND are putting in a lot of time, but I still maintain that the big reason is time. Nobody is satisfied with being bronze, but most might have other stuff to do than SC2. It takes time to improve and time to win matches. These are the ONLY two relevant factors to advancing up the leagues. I don't see how this can be 'the big reason'. SC2 is my first competitive RTS and between family, work and other interests I have few opportunities to play. In a really exceptional week I'll get ten games played; often weeks go by with none. I know I would do better if I played more, sure, but games played cannot possibly account for much - if any - of the difference between myself and those who find themselves trapped in bronze. More often than not they describe themselves as more active than I am. Well, I'm talking about getting out of a league. If you played your placement matches well and got placed in platinum I don't care about you - you are not relevant for my argument. I'm thinking about the guys placed in bronze that has to work their way up. You need time to practice your skills and time to win matches after your skills have been improved. How is time not THE factor for advancing up in the leagues? Time played is definitely a factor, but not necessarily that huge of one. When I started playing (with no real competitive RTS experience), I was in bronze. By the end of my first season, I was in silver. Currently I'm in gold. I play at most a couple dozen games a season. The main thing that makes a difference for me is choosing to focus my efforts at improving in a specific area. A couple dozen is 24 games.. I do not believe you advance from bronze to silver to gold if you play that much every season. You would just have to win every single game because you are a good player which happened to be placed in bronze by accident. Its perfectly possible if he improved quickly, and didn't spend long enough in bronze to "solidy" his MMR at that level. But the longer you stay at given MMR, the harder it is to shift it later. Not true. MMR is as strongly affected by each game regardless of how long it has stayed the same. Are you sure? Show nested quote +here also is a value "sigma" (i.e. standard deviation) that measures how uncertain the system is of your MMR. This is usually high if you have not played many games recently, or if you are on a winning or losing streak. The system does not seem to use sigma for purposes other than to calculate how much it should adjust your MMR after a win or loss (i.e. for Bayesian inference). For example, it uses a moving average of MMR to promote and demote between leagues, instead of MMR and sigma to calculate the probabilities that some league is most appropriate That atleast seems to indicate that if you're just starting out, you'll have a high sigma and so its easier to raise your MMR past the promotion thresholds compared to someone who's already been playing a lot but stuck in a rut.
Damn; sorry, totally screwed up there. Yeah: MMR is affected differently based on your current sigma - as you say, uncertainty. What I meant, but totally avoided saying, is that your sigma doesn't crystallise. There's a soft cap on how little an unexpected result can nudge your sigma and thus upon how 'stuck' you can get at a particular MMR. So if you spend twenty games meeting the system's expectations of you, you're a lot more 'stable' than when you've only met its expectations twice. But you're not 100 times as 'stuck' if you stay stable for 2000 games.
Thanks for the correction.
Edit: Or what Lysenko said. I'll just get my coat.
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What bugs me about this statement is not so much that you are bronze. I've been exactly in your shoes; ten months after I bought the game I was still in bronze, still eating shit on a daily basis. I did exactly what you are doing right now, and I've felt the wall of frustration that comes from seeing perfection but falling so far from it.
No, what really bugs me is that you (and other players in this situation) seem to be throwing in the towel.
And this just drives me nuts because that means all of your hard work, all of your dedication and everything you put into being a competitor and trying to improve - your throwing it away. It breaks my heart to see people with such passion for their game and competition to give up because they don't think they have the potential.
Hell, I'll even throw in a story to try and convey this idea. Just this year I finished running for my school after seven years of cross country. In my time running, I've known two runners who had absolutely no ability, but completely indomitable wills. When they first started running, one could only run the mile in twelve minutes, the other couldn't even finish it. There were many other runners who had much more ability and could run faster; indeed they did but often complained or stated that they 'just didn't have the ability'. Most of those runners quit, giving various excuses as to why they didn't want to keep going. But the two slowest runners? The pushed on, endured and became far better than they had ever been. The first runners final mile time was around eight minutes, while the second one managed to finish a race. Sure, they weren't super stars but at the end of the day all most people ask is that you don't quit and you just keep pushing yourself.
Do that, and I think you'll never have to make a topic like this again.
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On March 08 2012 18:36 bigbeau wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2012 18:25 Defacer wrote:
I think that a lot of higher level players (diamond to GM) have a gross misconception of the skill level of players in lower leagues. A gold player now is definitely not the same as a gold player a year ago.
I'm not very good, and stuck in Gold. But since the season 6 maps have come out, I'm absolutely crushing Terran and Protoss with Zerg. I used to lose to a lot of coin-flip builds and all-ins that T and P do at my level, but Cloud Kingdom and Korhal finally gave me a chance to win when I play "the right way".
There's plenty of decent players in the lower leagues that aren't bad, but struggle against cheese, playing for fun or just trying to learn to play 'right'. I'm sorry but this is simply not true, and it is a big reason lower league players remain in those leagues. I'm a low master league player. I don't really play much anymore, but I considered myself pretty bad. My mechanics are bad, my speed is bad, my micro is bad, I just understand what to do. However, against any gold player I could win with any race making any unit that can hit both air and ground. The whole idea of struggling against cheese is a crutch. Struggling against cheese is a sign of a bad player. There's no such thing as playing 'the right way'. The goal is to win, and if you can't beat the other person, you're bad at playing, simple as that.
He could not be more correct. I am in Gold and the idea of Gold being average is a mind trick in itself. Bronze is third place normally, but technically you are the lowest level players are Battle.net. Coming up with builds and losing because you are trying something new or saying that losing to cheese is the reason why lower league players like myself don't move up is simply ludicrous. I lose because I am too slow, my macro slips, I don't scout properly, I miss a timing, I miss micro or miss hotkey a unit, I have my units out of position or I build the wrong unit, I teched incorrectly, I did not attack at the right time, I did not build enough units, and the list goes on. Yes, cheese can win or we can lose because of a new strategy that is not refined, but you think the pros never run into cheese on the ladder? You think they never try new builds? They are incomprehensibly better than we are because they have the mind for this game, they study this game as their profession, they play this game 8-11 hours a day on average, they eat, sleep, and dream StarCraft 2 and to even for a split second fathom that we are even remotely close to being as good as these guys are is saying a kid who shoots hoops after school has a chance against a professional basketball player, not much is holding him back and there is little difference between their skill levels. These guys professionals. We are scrubs for many, many reasons.
There is no misconception whatsoever. If you are a masters player, then more than likely you have earned that position even if it is by perfecting a cheese build. The opponents lost to it continuously, which means that they are obviously not good enough simply because they lost. There is no almost in this game. You win because you are good enough and you lose because you are not.
I have a friend in Bronze and she talks about her macro being good or out micro'ing someone and I just look at her funny. "Good" is a matter of relativity. Lower levels players have the misconception if anyone does. They have no idea how the enormous the skill differential is... You thought the guy in Masters league was good? Professional StarCraft 2 players roll them the most random and unorthodox builds just to have fun(example: CatZ's aggressively obvious proxy hatches). They win these games because of their understanding and pure skill. The gap between Masters and Grand Masters is another skills gap. Tiers above that is semi-professional and several tiers above that is true professional. Lower level players simply cannot understand how much difference there is in in literally every aspect of their play when compared to high level or top tier players. You can watch a player's stream and naively think, "Oh, I can do that..." Seeing and doing are not the same thing and lower level players have to stop thinking that they are good or even decent and realize that skill-wise, they are the bottom feeders.
Without the mentality humbleness and self criticism, you will never get better. Thinking you are good will damn you to mediocrity and leave you disillusioned. Realize that you are where you are because you need improvement. Keep playing and get better.
I keep seeing people making excuses for being in their league. Man up and realize you are in the league because of your inadequacies i.e. lack of skill. Stop thinking it is some sort of external factor beyond your control and that Fate has its thumb on your head preventing you from climbing that mountain of success. You are inadequate. I am inadequate. There are a ton of things I can blame my pure lack of ability on, but what it comes down to is that I did not win. Making excuses will league lock you because you are lying to yourself and just making a facade for comfort. Self deception is a sin, stop doing it and strive. Your negative factors are something to surpass, not things to keep you back. Someone mentioned having ADHD. Try to find a way to focus that energy and your APM will skyrocket, trust me, I know. You could blame a myriad of things, but you are wasting your time and effort comes up with reasons why not instead of reasons why. Your excuses are what is holding you back and those factors are just hurdles that you will have to bypass to succeed.
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This sequence of message doesn't make any sense. Each person is reciting his little rant totally unrelated to the person they quoted...
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Its not true that after pro gaming career you have no career options, because you most likely have all the options to work in the e-sports industry in the other jobs than playing.
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On March 29 2012 10:20 Mongolbonjwa wrote:
Its not true that after pro gaming career you have no career options, because you most likely have all the options to work in the e-sports industry in the other jobs than playing.
There's far fewer coaching and commentator spots compared to competitor spots, in SC2 and indeed all other professional sports. And we're not really at the stage where every GSL/MLG winner will be doing multi-million dollar TV spots for gaming products 10 years after retirement.
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On March 29 2012 08:28 Kraidio wrote:
No, what really bugs me is that you (and other players in this situation) seem to be throwing in the towel.
And this just drives me nuts because that means all of your hard work, all of your dedication and everything you put into being a competitor and trying to improve - your throwing it away. It breaks my heart to see people with such passion for their game and competition to give up because they don't think they have the potential.
That's just bad thinking about "sunk costs" though, only in time instead of money. If someone initially has a goal of say getting to Masters, spends a lot of time trying to achieve it and then after a lot of time spent realises its going to take way more time than they thought, and that the time they'd need is greater than the value they place on being in Masters, the sensible thing to do is to spend that time elsewhere.
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On March 29 2012 06:48 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 06:44 Fus wrote:
High bronze level is definatly great players, bronze is not what it used to be. I meen i have never been bronze, i went gold after my first placements and almost never played a RTS game before. Let's not go crazy. High bronze may have improved, but they're still in the bottom third, or lower, of people playing the game.
Not even the bottom 4th, Bronze is the bottom 20%, the bottom 5th of the playerbase. Now, one could make the case that random players who don't cheese in bronze are better players than cheesers in silver, but that's being a bit meta in ones analysis. Easier to just realize that if you're in bronze, 80% of all SC2 players are better than you.
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On March 29 2012 16:58 Tobberoth wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 06:48 Lysenko wrote:On March 29 2012 06:44 Fus wrote:
High bronze level is definatly great players, bronze is not what it used to be. I meen i have never been bronze, i went gold after my first placements and almost never played a RTS game before. Let's not go crazy. High bronze may have improved, but they're still in the bottom third, or lower, of people playing the game. Not even the bottom 4th, Bronze is the bottom 20%, the bottom 5th of the playerbase.
That's Blizzard's nominal target, but because MMR becomes less accurately tied to percentile the less one plays, bronze makes up as many as 40% or more of the sporadically-active players. The higher leagues are much more regularly spread out, because those players play enough, on average, to keep them so.
You can see this by looking at the league distributions for players active in the last week on sc2ranks.com.
So yeah, 20% is the target, but my "bottom third or less" comment was allowing for the fact that very sporadic play among many bronze players causes it to expand beyond that to some extent.
There's far fewer coaching and commentator spots compared to competitor spots, in SC2 and indeed all other professional sports. And we're not really at the stage where every GSL/MLG winner will be doing multi-million dollar TV spots for gaming products 10 years after retirement.
How did the career prospects of pro players wind up in a thread about people struggling to get out of bronze league?? I'm just curious. 
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On March 29 2012 06:44 Fus wrote:
High bronze level is definatly great players, bronze is not what it used to be. I meen i have never been bronze, i went gold after my first placements and almost never played a RTS game before.
How are bronze players "definitely great players"?
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EPT
