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On April 03 2012 01:08 aggu wrote:
I was gold protoss and changed into T (because there was so few) and started to lose, so I got demoted and then went all the way back to the bottom of bronze to try to learn T from zero. I have now played enough to be at the bronze-silver border. this is what I experienced (not to imply any generalizations):
Low-mid bronze, the concept that SC is about optimization is entirely lacking. A player does 2rax opening but then makes 5 depots in advance, and then at 6:00 starts to produce MM. Production is continuous, but stops when army moves out. There's no sense of optimal BO. Worker production is actually quite decent. Quite many players try to drop or make DTs or things like that, but it isn't working. Some random cheese, but badly done. 1-base play is the norm. I didn't encounter any mass air protoss, which was common back then, and in fact no cannon rush came along. APM is between 10-25.
I have about 10% of smurfs and people who insta-gg'd. These are people who have high APM, they do crazy stuff and still win.
high-bronze, low silver, a dramatic change occurs here. It seems, most players have now learned to do optimal cheese. So you got 6pool, zealot rush, 4gate, proxy rax, proxy bunkers, baneling bust, whatever, one after another. I was first losing because the change was so dramatic, it took time to adjust to the new reality. But these builds are "optimal" in a sense you can see that it has been planned out in advance. Some high silver players have played many games, can be like 2000 (and have always been in bronze-silver). These players play for win, not for just fooling around, and they have discovered at least one efficient way to achieve that. If this were my first time in bronze I would probably do 3rax in every game. I think it isn't necessary easy to get out of this phase because if you counter cheese with cheese, its coinflip, and if you try to defend and go for macro game, you really need to scout and cope with so many different cheese strats.
It is often said that you get into higher leagues by better macro. Looking my production graphs, I massively outproduce my opponents but still manage lose, mainly due to cheese and because I sometimes a-move my army into banelings or toss deathballs which isn't working for T, and because I haven't really learned to control T efficiently in engagements.
Actually, the 'macro better' theory predicts that the outcome of the game is predicted by supply differential or by spending differential. I will perhaps check this from my games but I have a feeling that it isn't so when I play T, amount of spending/supply/workers correlates only weakly with winning. But maybe I'm wrong.
If I play customs against diamond or plat players, what I see is that these players generally know what's the proper response to what I am doing, so they just do that and win fast. This is something I don't see in bronze-silver-gold. But if it goes for macro game, my macro is not super inferior.
The advice "macro better" assumes that you survive cheese, which is why tactics such as 3rax are recommended, pretty much no scouting is needed and you should be safe anyway, and the advantage of having better macro can kick in. The first 5 minutes of the game, amazing macro and horrible macro is still too close to win the game, it's later on when the opponent simply can't keep up and starts making mistakes that your advantage kicks in. When I played terran in high silver on a smurf, I noticed that going for an early allin simply wasn't effective enough, many silver players like to play cheesy or 1basey, so you can't finish them that easily all the time by simply allining, your supply advantage is too small. Instead, macroing hard off barracks while spending spare minerals into bases made it easy, since they couldn't break a defense of M&M, and once I had 2-3 bases and a ton of rax, I could just flood units until they died since they couldn't keep up even if they also took 3 bases, once you killed their army, your next attack would be more or less uncontested.
As for surviving cheesy play as terran:
6pool is stopped by the wall going up fast enough.
cannon rush is easily scouted by a worker scout, same with mass-rax and proxy plays.
4 gate, DT etc is easily scouted with scan, and shouldn't matter anyway if your macro is good since you should assume a bronze 4gater will be delayed (since if he did a stellar 4gate, that should be enough to get him out of bronze).
roach/ling allins simply aren't good enough against a strong bio ball.
If a bronze player goes for something harassy like cloaked banshees or phoenixes, you can generally just a-move into their base, they are spending all of their APM on their harass and probably don't have any follow up planned, if you can stay alive and deny them getting way ahead, they will lose the longer the game goes on.
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I dont think there's characteristics as to list what "bronze" player is. As a mid-high diamond player, I do analyze a few of my friends bronze replays to give him pointers, and its nothing that they specfically do that makes them deficient in their play but a combination of small things which really add up.
Some games I'll have guys who's really on top of their worker production, but fails to make units for a while.
If they make a lot of units, they'll just not make workers, completely disregard keyupgrades (seige mode, ling speed, warpgate upgrade)...Sometimes, they'll do everything well, they keep up worker production, make units, get their key upgrades, push out and then start panicking and do absolutely nothing while that attack is in play...Some people dont expand at all..and persist on one base 15 minutes into the game...It's just a combination of things...
I highly disagree to a post said earlier on that mid-gold has grasped the concept of 2 base play, plat has 3 base played, and diaonds are 3 bases while being able to play a good long macro game. and I can attest to this becasue I'm a player who wins ladder games off cheese and have has a severe defieicny to win games that exceeds 3 bases unless the opponent randomly decides to suicide to me. I think the difference inbetween the levels in terms of cheesy pay is for lower levels, they flat out cannot execute it efficiently using the available resources (ie...5 supply depots before making a marine). For higher-low levels. they'll execute it more efficiently however, they'll be deficient in the fact that they make it blantantly obvious (ie make tons of zerglings for the entire world to see 6 minutes in) , expose it to proper scouting.
Low high levels (plat/diamond), are extremely efficient, denies scouting, and knows the variables on whether to execute it or not (for example...you wouldnt ever want to try to all-in 2baneling bust a terran anticipating it and with seige tanks and able to transition from it..while high levels (masters), cheesys are deceptive/tricky/micro intensive and there able to transition to it on the off chance there's a high chance of it not working.
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The advice "macro better" assumes that you survive cheese, which is why tactics such as 3rax are recommended, pretty much no scouting is needed and you should be safe anyway, and the advantage of having better macro can kick in.
Actually 3rax has a timing window where the 2 reactors are being added where it can get stomped pretty hard by stuff like a 3rax all-in, proxy 2rax, early 4gate, bane bust, etc.
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On April 03 2012 05:56 danl9rm wrote:
I have the strongest urge to get demoted to bronze and just check the place out for myself.
Aside from the fact that doing so is a violation of the rules, it's probably not worth the hassle anyway. You wouldn't come away feeling like you'd had a satisfying learning experience doing so.
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On April 03 2012 07:18 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On April 03 2012 05:56 danl9rm wrote:
I have the strongest urge to get demoted to bronze and just check the place out for myself. Aside from the fact that doing so is a violation of the rules, it's probably not worth the hassle anyway. You wouldn't come away feeling like you'd had a satisfying learning experience doing so.
From the way bronzies talk, I feel like half the players I meet in bronze will be master smurfs.
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On April 03 2012 07:33 PeanutsNJam wrote:
From the way bronzies talk, I feel like half the players I meet in bronze will be master smurfs.
My suspicion is that a bronze player sees a HUGE difference between better and worse bronze players, while to someone from a higher league, they'd all seem the same.
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Nobody is forever bronze.
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On April 03 2012 07:50 -Switch- wrote:
Nobody is forever bronze.
I know a guy with about 4k games straight up who is still in bronze, so I challenge that statement by defining 4k games as forever.
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Tbh my opinion is if you are that bad at the game (and taking it seriously) then you should just stop playing it all together, spend time doing something you are better at, instead of giving yourself a lot of frustration due to losses. Everybody got something they are absolutely terrible at but spending a lot of time doing excatly that is incredibly stupid
So if you can not get out of bronze despite actually playing the game each day then i dont think this game is for you.
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On April 03 2012 08:00 blackwolf wrote:Tbh my opinion is if you are that bad at the game (and taking it seriously) then you should just stop playing it all together, spend time doing something you are better at, instead of giving yourself a lot of frustration due to losses. Everybody got something they are absolutely terrible at but spending a lot of time doing excatly that is incredibly stupid So if you can not get out of bronze despite actually playing the game each day then i dont think this game is for you.
If people are having fun, then it isn't a problem.
I'd say very few people are "forever bronze" in the sense that they are making a consistent effort to improve their play and still can't get out of bronze after several months. For many people however, this game isn't something that's taken very seriously. You might have people who have never played RTS before, who play 2 games a week and spend more time watching streams. Who play a handful of team games here and there for fun. I don't think they should be looked down upon just because they're shit at this game. They've just got different priorities.
Personally I picked up SC2 with very little RTS experience. I placed into bronze and set about learning wtf to do. It was a slow process but I managed to climb into silver, gold then sat in plat for ages. Now I'm clawing at the bottom of diamond. I can look back at bronze league and go "god I was so awful", but the fact is I just didn't know any better. How do I stop this, how do I react to that, what's a good build order for PvT? Making units while I move my attack out? Timing attacks? Wtf is all this shit.
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On April 03 2012 08:00 blackwolf wrote:
Tbh my opinion is if you are that bad at the game (and taking it seriously) then you should just stop playing it all together, spend time doing something you are better at, instead of giving yourself a lot of frustration due to losses.
Even most people in bronze league win half their games.
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On April 03 2012 07:44 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On April 03 2012 07:33 PeanutsNJam wrote:
From the way bronzies talk, I feel like half the players I meet in bronze will be master smurfs. My suspicion is that a bronze player sees a HUGE difference between better and worse bronze players, while to someone from a higher league, they'd all seem the same.
I did meet a self- admitted smurf, if you tell me how I'll try to post the replay.
But I will say I agree with you as I have also been called a smurf lol "stupid pro go back to ur league" post a game where I mistakenly made something like 30-40 zealots when I wanted stalker & colossus so I a-moved him, prolly thought all those zealots were built on purpose to say "I can beat you with just zealots!" rather than because mr. ALaKaSLaM can't macro period.
For now I don't know how to share replays, someone wanna pm me? I probably won't see inthread replies.
Btw Lysenko thank you for your contributions here. Much better than mine in general!
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On April 03 2012 01:08 aggu wrote:
I was gold protoss and changed into T (because there was so few) and started to lose, so I got demoted and then went all the way back to the bottom of bronze to try to learn T from zero. I have now played enough to be at the bronze-silver border. this is what I experienced (not to imply any generalizations):
Low-mid bronze, the concept that SC is about optimization is entirely lacking. A player does 2rax opening but then makes 5 depots in advance, and then at 6:00 starts to produce MM. Production is continuous, but stops when army moves out. There's no sense of optimal BO. Worker production is actually quite decent. Quite many players try to drop or make DTs or things like that, but it isn't working. Some random cheese, but badly done. 1-base play is the norm. I didn't encounter any mass air protoss, which was common back then, and in fact no cannon rush came along. APM is between 10-25.
I have about 10% of smurfs and people who insta-gg'd. These are people who have high APM, they do crazy stuff and still win.
high-bronze, low silver, a dramatic change occurs here. It seems, most players have now learned to do optimal cheese. So you got 6pool, zealot rush, 4gate, proxy rax, proxy bunkers, baneling bust, whatever, one after another. I was first losing because the change was so dramatic, it took time to adjust to the new reality. But these builds are "optimal" in a sense you can see that it has been planned out in advance. Some high silver players have played many games, can be like 2000 (and have always been in bronze-silver). These players play for win, not for just fooling around, and they have discovered at least one efficient way to achieve that. If this were my first time in bronze I would probably do 3rax in every game. I think it isn't necessary easy to get out of this phase because if you counter cheese with cheese, its coinflip, and if you try to defend and go for macro game, you really need to scout and cope with so many different cheese strats.
It is often said that you get into higher leagues by better macro. Looking my production graphs, I massively outproduce my opponents but still manage lose, mainly due to cheese and because I sometimes a-move my army into banelings or toss deathballs which isn't working for T, and because I haven't really learned to control T efficiently in engagements.
Actually, the 'macro better' theory predicts that the outcome of the game is predicted by supply differential or by spending differential. I will perhaps check this from my games but I have a feeling that it isn't so when I play T, amount of spending/supply/workers correlates only weakly with winning. But maybe I'm wrong.
If I play customs against diamond or plat players, what I see is that these players generally know what's the proper response to what I am doing, so they just do that and win fast. This is something I don't see in bronze-silver-gold. But if it goes for macro game, my macro is not super inferior.
You see, I disagree here with your statement about the 'macro better' theory. I am a mid-diamond protoss, and when I got a second account to play zerg on, I had to go through the process of playing my placement matches. I decided to quit them to experience the way bronze actually is after reading Gheed's blogs. (Note that I started my starcraft career in bronze but through hard work clawed my way out through practice. However, when I was in bronze I thought that I was better than I actually was, a concept that was very wrong for reasons I'll elaborate on later, and that I deserved gold at least, which means that my perception of bronze was flawed, different from the point of view of a higher level player.)
Anyway, I tanked to bronze and on my way up I experienced a variety of playstyles, from cheese to straight up macro. Whenever I played a macro vs macro game, I won without any problems, as would be expected from someone with diamond mechanics playing someone in bronze. I wanted to test the theory of getting high up by only macro by not scouting the opponent at all except for at 9 supply to ensure I wasn't being 6pooled, proxy 2gated, or 2raxed. But whenever I experienced any hyper-aggressive mid-game allins, at least what I think were mid-game allins, they were so badly executed most of the time that despite my lack of scouting I would still hold them off.
My knowledge of zerg was rather limited so I didn't know any build orders and had no grasp of advanced zerg mechanics, so I really only relied on macro and knowledge of what zerg unit counters what. Through this method of just playing macro, I got to low platinum. It was at this point that I hit a wall with my mechanics and actually had to start learning build orders to be competitive. Now I'm high plat, but that's not really relevant anymore.
Point is, macro really is key. I think your problem is as you said, if you just a-move marines into collossus and banelings, you can have GM macro and still lose. At this point, you may be asking 'But doesn't this just prove that you can't just macro to win?'. As I mentioned above, GM macro won't save your marines from speed banelings. You also need to know what unit to macro given the situation. Mix in a few tanks with those marines, and even if you don't micro those marines against a ling/bling comp you will still have enough at home to hold off a counter. Also, no offense intended, but gold mechanics when transferred to a new race you don't have experience with won't give you all that much of an advantage over low silver players, since they still need a lot of work.
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On April 03 2012 08:53 PolskaGora wrote:
Anyway, I tanked to bronze and on my way up I experienced a variety of playstyles, from cheese to straight up macro. Whenever I played a macro vs macro game, I won without any problems, as would be expected from someone with diamond mechanics playing someone in bronze. I wanted to test the theory of getting high up by only macro by not scouting the opponent at all except for at 9 supply to ensure I wasn't being 6pooled, proxy 2gated, or 2raxed. But whenever I experienced any hyper-aggressive mid-game allins, at least what I think were mid-game allins, they were so badly executed most of the time that despite my lack of scouting I would still hold them off.
My knowledge of zerg was rather limited so I didn't know any build orders and had no grasp of advanced zerg mechanics, so I really only relied on macro and knowledge of what zerg unit counters what. Through this method of just playing macro, I got to low platinum. It was at this point that I hit a wall with my mechanics and actually had to start learning build orders to be competitive. Now I'm high plat, but that's not really relevant anymore.
Point is, macro really is key. I think your problem is as you said, if you just a-move marines into collossus and banelings, you can have GM macro and still lose. At this point, you may be asking 'But doesn't this just prove that you can't just macro to win?'. As I mentioned above, GM macro won't save your marines from speed banelings. You also need to know what unit to macro given the situation. Mix in a few tanks with those marines, and even if you don't micro those marines against a ling/bling comp you will still have enough at home to hold off a counter. Also, no offense intended, but gold mechanics when transferred to a new race you don't have experience with won't give you all that much of an advantage over low silver players, since they still need a lot of work.
Yes I probably agree. But when a good player like you goes to bronze to prove that macro is important, it's not totally reliable. To me, the 'macro better' theory means just macro with other variables controlled: suppose we have an AI doing perfect macro and a-moving occasionally; according to the 'macro better' it would get into plat without problems. But would it? None of this is to claim that bronzies are good or that I am good (on the contrary, I am exactly where I should be).
I have worked my way up from the totally lowest levels to the very high in my job, and misperceptions exists on both sides. So at the lower level, you always think you must be better than you really are. I did that too. But at the higher level, where you can see so clearly what is essential, its fallacious too because it hides so much knowledge you aren't consciously aware anymore.
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On April 03 2012 08:00 blackwolf wrote:Tbh my opinion is if you are that bad at the game (and taking it seriously) then you should just stop playing it all together, spend time doing something you are better at, instead of giving yourself a lot of frustration due to losses. Everybody got something they are absolutely terrible at but spending a lot of time doing excatly that is incredibly stupid So if you can not get out of bronze despite actually playing the game each day then i dont think this game is for you.
Well this goes against everything this thread is about. My whole point is that I love the game even though I play a great deal and stay in bronze. Furthermore, as a community, this is the attitude that will hinder the growth of esports. If our attitude is that you have to be in X league or higher in order to have a reason to play... well, that's bad.
In my opinion, if we have a lot of people watching who don't even play the game... that would be great!
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On April 03 2012 08:24 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On April 03 2012 08:00 blackwolf wrote:
Tbh my opinion is if you are that bad at the game (and taking it seriously) then you should just stop playing it all together, spend time doing something you are better at, instead of giving yourself a lot of frustration due to losses. Even most people in bronze league win half their games.
This is true. I've had a record as high as 78% which I held for over a month.
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On April 02 2012 14:21 Zariel wrote:
Your pretty much a bronze leaguer if you have zero sense of the game. You might think you do, but you don't. I have friends that play 2-5 hours a day and are still rank 1 bronze league.
Essentially, they don't play to win. Instead they play to see their 200/200 void ray army kill the enemy or die trying.
The difference in 'macro' between a bronze player than the rest of the leagues is that bronze players tend to 'zone out' to fights and like to think for like 10 seconds on 'where should i place this gateway'
This is very not true. As I have said many times in this thread, early and mid game aggression are perfectly normal in my experience, and many of my games will not make it past the 13 minute mark.
(For those who questioned whether a bronze player uses the same definition of "early", I mean around 6 minutes or earlier; (warpgate has finished, ling pokes have occurred, etc.etc.)
Edit: I was referring to the "Instead they play to see their 200/200 void ray army kill the enemy or die trying" bit.
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EPT
