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On March 09 2012 09:28 jinorazi wrote:
if you're not zerg, do you build workers non stop?
this is a fundamental problem for a lot of players. screw build orders, dont stop making workers, work your builds around the money you have while able to constantly make workers while not queuing more than 1, 2.
once you're able to do this, move on to learning builds, analyze replays, whatever.
i do wonder about the difference between those who play 3 hours a day and is in silver and those who player 3 hours a week and in master. excluding past rts experience.
This.
Also, I think the difference is usually past rts experience. Fundamentals are much more important in sub-master than strategy is, and fundamentals are hard to learn overnight. You can go all the way to masters without even thinking about strategy, but just building workers and a basic unit from one base. Apart from past rts experience the primary explanation is probably a mix of mouse accuracy and speed from other games and often a willingness to mimic pro play. Saying "LoL so many useless clicks he makes" is the first mistake.
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On March 09 2012 13:21 courtpanda wrote:
im a diamond player whos sandbagged an account to bronze.
if you know a single build order, you can win 90% of your games there. composition doesnt matter, as long as you spend all your money, you will win most of your games. composition barely matters, other than ground/air and super hard counters (i.e. marines v tanks)
It's true for diamonds too. MKP easily and repeatedly beat them with 2rax on stream.
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On March 09 2012 10:47 Befree wrote:I don't know why anyone would have a problem with a bronze player just enjoying themselves at their level. It's just all for fun so whatever you have fun with should be fine  . I think people are being a little tough on lower level players in this thread. It's not just a matter of deciding to macro, or deciding to start using a build. You can't just simplify it down to acting like you can improve just by choice, and players are only not succeeding because they chose not do a few easy things. There are players in Bronze who are fully aware of all the standard builds, there are players in diamond who seem to be clueless even to the idea of standard builds. It is not just that simple. What you'll find when you watch games varying across leagues is that people win and lose based on the speed and accuracy of reactions, preparation for what the enemy can do, and remembering goals and necessary things they have to do as the game progresses. These are not things you can just choose to do, or not do. Reaction time, memory, concentration, multi-tasking, and a lot of other things are just easier for certain people, and harder for others. They can be overcome of course, but you have to be understanding that improving from bronze to master may be a lot more difficult for someone else than you. It may seem easy to you to fool around in a master league game and still win, but it is not for others. Be happy with whatever skills you have, and be understanding that others may not have them. They just probably have skills in other things which may not be as directly applicable to this particular video game.
I can give a personal example. I am a deadly sniper for my dad's ranch- killing rabbits at 100+ yards- (very still, steady hands- maybe you can see my point already) and I am in bronze, although I will say I rarely play and rarely get the chance even. Haven't played for two seasons.
Edit: I use a scope of course. A football field is long, so are agricultural croprows and vineyards.
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I started in october in bronze and am now in platinum, so i have fairly recent knowledge of what bronze league is actually like. while there i lost a lot of games, most of which were to cheese. knowing how to stop a cannon rush and scouting it out properly, and defeating it are two very separate things.
I fell like i managed to leave bronze league when i managed to learn three things, the first was how to play macro slightly better than my opponents, the second was to hold all of the cheese that occurs before the proper game starts (eg 6poool, cannon rush, proxy 2rax) and the third was to not get annoyed and tilt whenever i did lose to something silly, like banshee/DT.
Over-analysing any play below gold/plat is very easy. at gold level i started feeling like i needed set good build orders, and predictions/guesses i made about my opponents started to be right more often than not, whereas at bronze/silver, i would see a zealot heavy protoss army and ask myself "where is all his gas" and it would turn out to be him forgetting to take his second vespene while doing a tech build.
Talking to my friend who was diamond toss in season 2 before he switched to zerg, he feels that my protoss play now is not very far behind what his was back when he played toss, showing there has been a large amount of skill inflation over the last year.
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I did 12 rax 14 cc and bronze NA opponent did a marine scv all in w 2 proxy rax on shakuras.
Lets just say I have more rines and scvs when he attacked. I scouted it after my cc completed.
Bronze is much easier than bronzies make it out to be. I m not even masters.
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Being a mid master I sometimes miss my bronze games; Was epic non-sense shit :D I developed a great BC rush that would just crush zergs who had only queens at 12:00
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On March 09 2012 11:13 Striker.superfreunde wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2012 10:47 Befree wrote:
Reaction time, memory, concentration, multi-tasking, and a lot of other things are just easier for certain people, and harder for others. They can be overcome of course, but you have to be understanding that improving from bronze to master may be a lot more difficult for someone else than you. It may seem easy to you to fool around in a master league game and still win, but it is not for others.
I don't think it's easier for some people than for others. It's more a factor of time investment, i believe.
There's absolutely iron-clad research evidence that people vary widely in their abilities in those areas.
I know that I, for example, have great memory, good concentration, and very strong analytical problem solving skills (exhibited by earning a physics degree and working at a highly technical job) but great difficulty shifting cognitive focus rapidly, which definitely puts me way behind many other SC2 players with the same time put into the game. In fact, my problem solving skills are probably aided by that unwavering focus, but it sure doesn't help when I'm trying to manage multiple things at once in Starcraft.
(Interestingly, when I was in elementary school I used to get horribly frustrated that I was slower than the rest of my classmates at basic arithmetic. Now, I'm faster at mental arithmetic than most of the people I know, but it's all because studying something numeric forced me to memorize a million various tricks so that I could keep up with the people who were just faster. That took a TON of practice, and I still have my slow moments.)
One of my practice partners, also gold league, has a similar academic background to me and is flat-out brilliant, but also falls apart on the multitasking and fast reaction time requirements of SC2. We have extremely close to a 50/50 win/loss record between us, but many of our individual games are completely one-sided because one of us or the other screws up at something essential in the multitasking arena.
Practice does help. I mean, I started in the dregs of copper league in beta and after making platinum last season I'm back in gold again, so there's at least a general, slow upward trend. However, I probably have 1000 hours playing the game, and I know many people who put in that kind of time get a lot farther with it.
So yeah, bottom line is that no matter what kind of cognitive task you choose, there's a lot of variation.
Here's one other thing: I remember taking the ASVAB in high school, which is the vocational test issued to new military recruits to determine for what professions they might be qualified. One of my worst areas was called "coding speed," a section of the test which consisted entirely of large blocks of the letters O with some of the letter C mixed in. The task was to indicate how many Cs there were in each block.
I blasted past the rest of the test to an extent that I was getting continuous phone calls from military recruiters, who were usually disappointed to hear that I was graduating from high school at 15, and thus not able to sign up for whatever they were after.
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Blazinghand
United States25552 Posts
On March 09 2012 17:05 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2012 11:13 Striker.superfreunde wrote:On March 09 2012 10:47 Befree wrote:
Reaction time, memory, concentration, multi-tasking, and a lot of other things are just easier for certain people, and harder for others. They can be overcome of course, but you have to be understanding that improving from bronze to master may be a lot more difficult for someone else than you. It may seem easy to you to fool around in a master league game and still win, but it is not for others.
I don't think it's easier for some people than for others. It's more a factor of time investment, i believe. There's absolutely iron-clad research evidence that people vary widely in their abilities in those areas. I know that I, for example, have great memory, good concentration, and very strong analytical problem solving skills (exhibited by earning a physics degree and working at a highly technical job) but great difficulty shifting cognitive focus rapidly, which definitely puts me way behind many other SC2 players with the same time put into the game. In fact, my problem solving skills are probably aided by that unwavering focus, but it sure doesn't help when I'm trying to manage multiple things at once in Starcraft. (Interestingly, when I was in elementary school I used to get horribly frustrated that I was slower than the rest of my classmates at basic arithmetic. Now, I'm faster at mental arithmetic than most of the people I know, but it's all because studying something numeric forced me to memorize a million various tricks so that I could keep up with the people who were just faster. That took a TON of practice, and I still have my slow moments.) One of my practice partners, also gold league, has a similar academic background to me and is flat-out brilliant, but also falls apart on the multitasking and fast reaction time requirements of SC2. We have extremely close to a 50/50 win/loss record between us, but many of our individual games are completely one-sided because one of us or the other screws up at something essential in the multitasking arena. Practice does help. I mean, I started in the dregs of copper league in beta and after making platinum last season I'm back in gold again, so there's at least a general, slow upward trend. However, I probably have 1000 hours playing the game, and I know many people who put in that kind of time get a lot farther with it. So yeah, bottom line is that no matter what kind of cognitive task you choose, there's a lot of variation. Here's one other thing: I remember taking the ASVAB in high school, which is the vocational test issued to new military recruits to determine for what professions they might be qualified. One of my worst areas was called "coding speed," a section of the test which consisted entirely of large blocks of the letters O with some of the letter C mixed in. The task was to indicate how many Cs there were in each block. I blasted past the rest of the test to an extent that I was getting continuous phone calls from military recruiters, who were usually disappointed to hear that I was graduating from high school at 15, and thus not able to sign up for whatever they were after.
I agree. I'm keenly aware of my shortcomings as a player, and I know that some stuff is just inherently more difficult or easier for me than they are for other people. I am clumsy and undextrous, so I have to use a lower-DPI mouse in order to achieve the same precision as other players-- I have to be very careful, for example, to click "PM" instead of "logout" on the TL webpage when I want to go to my inbox, and if I do it too quickly I'll logout. I'm unable to easily reach across multiple keys on the keyboard, so I rebound all my hotkeys and control groups to bring them close enough for me to reach without my left hand "getting lost". Even so, I still have disadvantages in these areas. Certain aspects of mechanics (related to timing and rhythm) come to me immediately, and other kinds of mechanics (selection, spacial awareness, and targeting) are very difficult, relative to what my practice partners experience.
People think, learn, and move differently, and will master (or not master) part or all of the game at a faster or slower rate.
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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'.
This is very true everyone was worse back then but it has come to a plateau point now probably. But someone who is Mid-Masters right now could probably have easily been GM Season 1,2
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On March 09 2012 17:20 Blazinghand wrote:
I have to be very careful, for example, to click "PM" instead of "logout" on the TL webpage when I want to go to my inbox, and if I do it too quickly I'll logout.
People think, learn, and move differently, and will master (or not master) part or all of the game at a faster or slower rate.
I'm left-handed but learned using the mouse with the right-hand since young age. I can't switch, but I felt for long I was behind in my mouse-control because of it.
I practiced hard to train it. I played this game everyday:
http://notdoppler.com/files/lessquick.swf
A few times a day, for a month.
I was awful at this game, I couldn't beat it. But at the end of the month I hit it with zero mistakes 3 runs in a row. Their is a harder variant of the game with a smaller window and a higher punishment for failing. I managed to beat that one as well.
Just very important that you keep track of your improvements. Use a spreadsheet, see in a graph how you're gradually improving. I would make close to 100 fails before I could beat at first and made it happen to perfection.
Train all the time in game! In early game, do this training:
leftclick "cc/hatch/nexus" then leftclick a mineral. after clicking a mineral you click on the mainbuilding again, then the seond mineral patch, back, 3rd patch, back etc.. I extremely often misclicked at the beginning of my practice. Today I rarely miss a click, only when I try it too fast. But already I can do this extremely fast now.
I tried practicing a worker split, I just couldn't do it. After my training, I have no more trouble with it.
If you've mastered the game I linked, continue with this one:
http://aim400kg.ru/en/
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Try and improve your weaknesses, you can most certainly get it at a better level if you put your mind too it. Also invest in good equipment. Get a Goliathus mousemat, buy a gamer mouse, this will help immensely.
This training is useful in all your computer work.
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On March 09 2012 15:37 Kingy604 wrote:
I started in october in bronze and am now in platinum, so i have fairly recent knowledge of what bronze league is actually like. while there i lost a lot of games, most of which were to cheese. knowing how to stop a cannon rush and scouting it out properly, and defeating it are two very separate things.
I fell like i managed to leave bronze league when i managed to learn three things, the first was how to play macro slightly better than my opponents, the second was to hold all of the cheese that occurs before the proper game starts (eg 6poool, cannon rush, proxy 2rax) and the third was to not get annoyed and tilt whenever i did lose to something silly, like banshee/DT.
Over-analysing any play below gold/plat is very easy. at gold level i started feeling like i needed set good build orders, and predictions/guesses i made about my opponents started to be right more often than not, whereas at bronze/silver, i would see a zealot heavy protoss army and ask myself "where is all his gas" and it would turn out to be him forgetting to take his second vespene while doing a tech build.
Talking to my friend who was diamond toss in season 2 before he switched to zerg, he feels that my protoss play now is not very far behind what his was back when he played toss, showing there has been a large amount of skill inflation over the last year.
I don't see rushes very often at all.
Most games end up to be macro games, 3 bases, mid map aggression, dealing with drops in bases at the same time, etc.
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United Kingdom20294 Posts
On March 09 2012 13:47 freakhill wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2012 13:21 courtpanda wrote:
im a diamond player whos sandbagged an account to bronze.
if you know a single build order, you can win 90% of your games there. composition doesnt matter, as long as you spend all your money, you will win most of your games. composition barely matters, other than ground/air and super hard counters (i.e. marines v tanks) It's true for diamonds too. MKP easily and repeatedly beat them with 2rax on stream.
Also following up with this, im >90% winrate with pvp 4gate and pvz blink stalker all ins @ mid dia when i choose to do them.
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So any of the people saying bronze league has increased in skill mind sharing some replays?
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There will always be a bronze league because it is by definition the lower percentage of the whole gaming group.
Even if all players increase in skill, there will always be people who are not so skilled
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On March 11 2012 04:00 Odal wrote:
So any of the people saying bronze league has increased in skill mind sharing some replays?
To avoid any potential bias issues, I'll just select two games at random from my replay folder. I have no idea if they'll confirm or deny the "lower leagues have gotten better".
http://drop.sc/129481 is a silver ZvT from October 2010. Not sure which season that is, but its pretty old
http://drop.sc/129484 is a silver TvZ from about 2 weeks ago.
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On March 11 2012 04:00 Odal wrote:
So any of the people saying bronze league has increased in skill mind sharing some replays?
Smurf. That applies pretty generally only to bronze. I either completely ahnilate or get destroyed, one guy finally told me to wait after gg and said he was a diamond Zerg postgame (I gg'd too fast) I think this is largely the problem you did not forsee. Rank 1 bronze smurf. I am 60 something, although as mentioned above I never play. Yet I was rank 13 right before that game. I think smurf destroys bronze MMR, that's where you get bronze to gold-plat stories, once you break through it kind of becomes smooth sailing. Smurfs tend not to be gracious though and give you the win, like my example guy tried to do. Just did this today, will send anyone a couple replays if they want.
Most smurfs are made to vent, right? So they want their win. My example was offracing though.
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On March 09 2012 09:51 CursedFeanor wrote:
The same way you wouldn't ask someone with a 80 IQ to get a Ph.D., it's entirely possible for some people to simply not have the mental (or possibly physical) capacities to reach beyond a certain league. If it's your case, then it's certainly better to just be content about your position and enjoy playing at this level. There are always "below average" players, otherwise there wouldn't be "above average" players. The problem is more often than not that some people fail to realize they're part of the former.
I don't think its an intelligence capacity. I'm a Physics major and work for the aerospace/defense industry.
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On March 08 2012 19:50 Inori wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2012 17:53 Adamgm wrote:
Most didn't seem to think it possible that someone play 2+ hours a day, watch Day9, follow the pro scene, review my own games, etc. and remain in bronze league; why, I don't know. I find it very hard to believe. My girlfriend was never a gamer type. She didn't play anything even remotely related to RTS before. She plays sc2 like 1 hour every 2-3 days (started about 3 weeks ago), I showed her some basics like hotkeys and where to look for BOs, then she's completely on her own. She's now already top25 bronze and beating silver players constantly. If she did even half of what you described she'd be out of bronze already by now. If she's able to do it, then how can somebody actually into gaming/sc not able to do it is beyond my understanding. You're probably doing something very very wrong.
Well, I've had higher level players mentor me, and I watch streams, tournaments, etc. A LOT. I guess it's possible but.. yeah, I don't know what to tell you.
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On March 08 2012 20:37 zefreak wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2012 20:12 Nallen wrote:
If I was to try and say why I still suck so bad I would put it down to knowing what to do, but not doing it. Stupid right? But it doesn't seem to be changing. I have a decent inject method, I set the hotkeys for it...I just don't use it. I know I have to keep my money low but I still suddenly have 2k/1k at 40 supply every game. Knowing and doing are very different things. Accepting that I probably will never master the doing regardless of how much I know sucks, but it's the case. It's because you are not practicing the correct way. If you have to constantly remember what to do you will never get better. This is why learning a build or just practicing macro is so important. You need to do everything exactly the same a bunch of games in a row so that macro basics such as keeping up on supply, constant production, expanding etc are not decisions to be made in game but just steps to be made in a overall game plan. Trust me, you will NEVER get good without using a build order, preferably one similar to this http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=315507The only reason I keep posting this link is because it helped me so much, and nothing sucks more than being stuck in bronze never getting better.
I do this!
I have a few different builds written out on paper that I have spent several weeks on, back when I was playing with the intent of getting out of bronze. These were a 4 gate variation, 3 gate robo and FFE.
When I watch my replays, my money is pretty low until I hit 3 bases and the army sizes grow. This seems fairly typical from what I see in higher leagues though.
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On March 08 2012 22:55 xxgeffxx wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2012 17:53 Adamgm wrote:
So, thought I might try here.. any bronze players who consider themselves relatively hardcore and still have pretty great games in bronze? I was about to write a guide as to how you can get promoted, as I thought that was what your last sentence(which was a little confusing) was but then I realized it was not what you wanted.
Well, I spent a good year playing pretty hardcore, with guidance from diamond players (mostly). It's not like I don't want to improve anymore; I still play with the intent of learning.. but enough time has gone by that I'm aware of, and comfortable with the idea that I'm not going anywhere, that's all.
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EPT
