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On June 23 2012 18:26 Egyptian_Head wrote: Have there more than 2 hots battle reports yet? More importantly is there a tvp one yet? Give it a bit of time, I guarantee there will be a TvP one.
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It seems like the more I play the worse I get. I'm working hard to improve, practicing builds, taking notes, watching replays of others and myself. I was playing and beating low masters and now I can barely hold my own vs low diamonds. I seem to get worse and worse and I don't get why? Has anybody else gone through something like this? And I don't mean in one day of tilting. I mean over the past couple weeks its been like this. Before that I haven't played the game consistently since it game out due to life preventing me from playing. Now that I can play I'm having a horrible time.
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What player has made most money in prize money so far? (SC2)
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On June 25 2012 06:52 ManTrain wrote: What player has made most money in prize money so far? (SC2) http://sc2earnings.com/
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On June 25 2012 05:45 Kassokilleri2ff wrote: It seems like the more I play the worse I get. I'm working hard to improve, practicing builds, taking notes, watching replays of others and myself. I was playing and beating low masters and now I can barely hold my own vs low diamonds. I seem to get worse and worse and I don't get why? Has anybody else gone through something like this? And I don't mean in one day of tilting. I mean over the past couple weeks its been like this. Before that I haven't played the game consistently since it game out due to life preventing me from playing. Now that I can play I'm having a horrible time.
A lot of the following you may already be doing. But it's all I can think of offhand.
1. You're distracted in your personal life. Even if you are pretty good at keeping your head in the game, even trivial concerns can mess with your head. For example, you may feel that more free time is good, but it could be that just the change in your schedule is causing you subtle stress. Solution - try to make a regular schedule and stick to it, wake up at regular times, eat at regular times, exercise at regular times, take breaks at regular times. Over time, sticking to the schedule should really help. Also, try to eat healthy and have some hot food every day that isn't a Hot Pocket. I mean, I eat those things myself, but they WILL mess you up after a while. (At least I feel messed up, whee! No, just kidding) Regular aerobic exercise is important. If your body is suffering, your mind will slow down, and your game will suffer.
2. You're working too hard at SC2. Working on the same thing forces your brain into repetitive patterns. Once you get used to repetition, your response time gets cut. Imagine if you're supposed to press a button every time you see a flashing light. The first 20 times the light flashes, your responses will be OK. If the light suddenly doesn't flash at the usual time, you may catch yourself. But 400 flashes in, if you've been pressing the button really regularly and quickly, and suddenly the light skips a beat, odds are you'll have hit that button. Solution - take a break, then get back to it. "Having a horrible time"? Hm. Definitely break time.
3. You're mindgaming yourself. Suppose you just watched a bunch of MarineKing replays. Before you studied timings and had more understanding of the game, you couldn't at all deal with someone like MarineKing. You would just push, timing, aggro, whatever, because that's all you knew. No structure.
But now you have a better idea of what you're doing, so you become - not afraid, but "cautious". Or you try to adopt MarineKing's style and fail. Or both. Either way, you lose more.
If you're playing better (i.e. thinking about MarineKing), why would you lose more?
Say you're trying to defend against MarineKing in your head. You know his style so well. But you know you can't handle him. So you play defensively. But defense isn't how you win. It's just how you lose more slowly. Before, you were pushing, you were testing, you had opportunities to win. Even if you're a bit more passive now than you were before you started study, that small difference in passivity makes a BIG dfiference in terms of winning.
Or say you're trying to attack like MarineKing, play like MarineKing, scout like MarineKing. But little things add up. Suppose MarineKing's micro lets him lose 2 marines, where you lose 8. Suppose MarineKing keeps 4 Marines at the ramp between his main and natural to deal with zergling runthrough, but you need 6, because you don't have his skill level. Suppose MarineKing only builds 1 bunker where you need 2. Just those few small differences means a difference of 500 minerals already. That's 10 Marines, a whole attack force. This also easily happens if you're trying to emulate a pro, but don't quite have the same skills to match.
Then, there's little changes players sometimes make to try to improve on MarineKing. Oh, it sounds silly, I know. Or maybe you could say players don't understand the importance of some moves? Anyways, sometimes I watch replays in which there's a crucial Xel'Naga tower at a crucial juncture, and a player just simply doesn't even try to take control of it. True, MarineKing's minimap awareness may mean he just sees things comings and runs the Marine away, keeping his investment, while a player without the same awareness might just lose the marine. But it isn't a good solution to just not use the Xel'Naga at all to try to preserve resources. Nor is it a good solution to lose a marine. Proper information is an essential part of pro player style - in this case, a player just has to do what they CAN do, hopefully practicing to increase minimap awareness.
Solution - play a few games intentionally "wrong" in which you don't try to copy anyone, and you don't try to keep your mind on all the possibilities. Aggro/scout as much as possible and for the entire game keep an eye on the minimap. (Try looking MOSTLY at the minimap and looking up at the screen as little as possible.) By this I don't mean "possible" like your normal game. At every moment, you should either be attacking or running away from things that are actively chasing your army. Preferably, you should be making constant multiprong attacks and retreats for the entire game.
The goal isn't to win. The goal is to break your mentality of adhering to pro styles by immersing yourself in an extremely active game, while also practicing the multifront aggro/scout micro and minimap awareness that you need. After a few games of this constant aggro style, you may have lost a lot of games, but you'll have a better handle of what your strengths really are and where you need to improve, especially when you watch the replay. If you're really doing badly on damage inflicted / casualties taken then you know what to practice. If you end up with 2K banked minerals, likewise. If you discover your tech is really fricking awful at X time - and so on and so forth. Do a few games like this before watching any replays.
You will find that it is really horribly hard to do this, and I don't mean this condescendingly. It's easy to attack every so often, lose your units, or even attack and lose a chunk of units. But attacking and retreating constantly means that you absolutely cannot lose a chunk of units on an attack. You MUST keep units alive or you won't have enough units to press in again. You absolutely have to minimize losses, and be extremely active, which is something that characterizes real master play. Even then, it isn't just a question of keeping alive. You have to attack too, and inflict damage, run back and forth. Super micro practice is best when done with constant in-game multiprong attacks, not in something like Starcraft Master.
After you've done a few games in super aggro style, wait a day, play one more game like that, then switch to super passive for a couple games. You can defend and you can scout as much as you like, and you can attack AFTER you repel a major push (of course if you don't repel a major push you're dead.) But generally stay at home and macro macro macro. Wait for them to attack. As before, scout as much as you can, but no "reconnaisance in force", and always always keep an eye on the minimap.
This is to push the limits of your defensive and defensive scouting games, while again increasing the incredibly important minimap awareness. It's also to increase your - hm, what to call it - breakability? Even once you manage to maintain constant aggression, that sort of training is only really most useful if your opponent is very good at multitasking defense. So even with aggro training, you can get into a routine of always knowing what's happening - even though you're looking all around, you're always the one with the initiative and setting the pace of the game with excellent scouting.
Defensive orientation means you're happily puttering around building workers or whatever, monitoring defensive type scouting game - when you're blindsided by a vicious attack. You're not setting the pace now. Plus there's a break in the routine that's been going on for the past 10-12 minutes (perhaps). So your defense is less effective, and maybe your macro game slips.
That is for the most part you're just doing boring routine sort of practice until the time your opponent's attack hits, then your real practice begins.
Practice whichever you feel helps you more. Defensive tends to be better for players that haven't studied timings &c. Aggro is much better for players that haven't developed super micro multitasking. But in any event, keep an eye on that minimap at all times!
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When i 11/11 rax cheese i win 9 times of 10, yet when i try to macro after a 11/11 opening and fall back on an expansion I keep getting outmacroed even tho i make a bunker and 1-2 CC's into OC's behind my pressure (in TvZ i try to deny 15hatching and in protoss i try to snipe a third at minute 11.... what am i doing wrong?
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Bosnia-Herzegovina261 Posts
That was a great read, I'd like to add something from my own experience.
I used to play WoW a lot, and was quite frankly very good at it (I was playing a Disc Priest for those that wonder, yes, arenas). But after I've been playing it a lot, and by a lot, I mean invest around 50 hours of gametime in several days. My mind went numb. I was doing everything reactively, not even having a thought process, and what do you know, same thing happened in Starcraft 2. I was playing game after game after game, and it got repetitive, boring, I was testing out some builds that I came up with and were rather failing, just to break the mono-play.
What I found out, how to prevent from having this "braindead" style in Starcraft 2, and in overall gaming is to have a side activity, it does not matter if you don't really like to do it as much as Starcraft 2.
If I find myself brain-numb, I just go and do push-ups (I'm a lazy person in general and not a body-builder by any means), but just to get the blood flowing. Physical practice (don't overcommit yourself, if you're exhausted, you're in no shape to do anything other than sleep and drool) is very important, it breaks the numbness, increased blood flow, as with being in the same position for a couple of hours really wears your body down.
Next stop, let's say you really cannot be arsed to do anything of physical strain, you just want to lay back and fuck around. Play some other video game! For example, I went back to WoW after playing Starcraft 2 for nearly a month, and only Starcraft 2, and what do you know, friends that I've been playing with are asking "dude, do you have a second account or something? you're playing way better now". It proved my point of just letting something settle down and then coming back at it, of course, WoW got boring after a couple of hours. The other day, I've had it with Starcraft 2, I spent 2 hours just losing to some cheesers or being generally bad, not spotting that drop coming, not dropping spines at my outer expansions etc. I said to myself "hey, you know what? I am going to play Age of Empires 2 again". I loaded it and tried to do some Starcraft 2 moves in it, it failed miserably, but it was fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It does not have to be a MMORPG, play Max Payne 3, Max Payne 2, Baldur's Gate 2, whatever floats your boat, just give yourself a break from Starcraft.
If you don't feel like doing either of those things, here's another suggestion, read! I do not mean go on teamliquid and read stuff, lay down on your bed/sit in your chair and read a book. Want a suggestion? Read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", there's a classic book for you, it's really awesome. It creates different chemical reactions in your brain rather than repeating that boring early-game as, let's say, Zerg, where you just go "oh, a Terran, ok 15 Hatch, ok 16 pool, ok 3:20 gas, ok scout out, ok what's he doing, ok imma build this, ok ovie sack, ok get defenses and get to lategame asap". That's boring, read a book, read a poem, read an essay, read something for your school/college.
Let's say you do not want to do none of these things and want to do something related to Starcraft 2. Perfect! Anyone can commentate a game, make your own amusement. Get two of your friends to play against each other, you just spectate and commentate in your room, just have a blast, you'll see things they WON'T see and that's how YOU can improve as well, as you're instantly going to think "wait a minute, am I doing the same mistake this guy is doing?". Of course, you can always look up commentators on youtube and just sit back and enjoy the show.
Also, I used to be a guitar player (just mediocre, nothing special), and every now and then, I pick my guitar up and just start playing songs that I still remember (I'm a metalhead, so I get sweaty every time I try to play a Slayer, Sepultura, Morbid Angel or Death song), it helps you let off the heat. Also, I've learned that the warm-up cycle I did for playing the guitar can also be used for warming up my hands/fingers while playing Starcraft. Just have a side-activity.
I hope it helped.
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Hey, all! I'm sorry if this has already been asked/proposed, but are there any existing Liquid Rising desktops or plans to make one? I really like the style of the release poster and was hoping to rep it on my computer!
Thanks!
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So, I need you guys to help me. I have my sc2 NA, but when i try to login it says that i have to make a starter sc2, but for Eu, i can't login in the na, I think the client is Eu, how can i fix this?
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uh whatever happened with the spades thing? he left his team and i thought TL was going to release a statement or something...
not trying to fuel flames, just wondering.
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So, just a random thought...
Reduce (slightly) the queen build time. Queens can only be built from a Spawning Pool.
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I feel like i'm getting better, it feels good. Today I beat TempO and I'm finally in Diamond, and I beat my masters Z friend yesterday and PvZ used to be my best matchup. Feels good .
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Switched to Zerg from Toss. Still only Bronze, but actually winning a bunch more. I feel I can actually macro as zerg. (albeit badly)
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Protoss is pretty favorable for Bronze but beware, the gold-platinum range of zergs will be an issue of pressure for you. They've learned enough that they know making 90 drones in 10 minutes is fucking SWEET but they don't yet know how to read aggression properly. I reccommend nothing but 2 base 4 gate pressure w/ a robo added on as you're pushing to deal with their predictable roaches.
But before that point I'd recommend +2 attack blink stalkers off 2 base every PvZ. (I screw around as random in the platinum range on EU)
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On June 25 2012 22:20 Adellund wrote: When i 11/11 rax cheese i win 9 times of 10, yet when i try to macro after a 11/11 opening and fall back on an expansion I keep getting outmacroed even tho i make a bunker and 1-2 CC's into OC's behind my pressure (in TvZ i try to deny 15hatching and in protoss i try to snipe a third at minute 11.... what am i doing wrong? don't go 11/11 rax and you are already hallway there :=)
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Can't wait until Sunday, the first day of July, as the June win rates will be out. As of right now liquipedia states in GSL and GSTL TvZ is 17-24 (41.46%), with more matches to be played before the end of the month.
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Why is it that everyone puts so much stock into GSTL win rates?
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On June 26 2012 11:59 Probe1 wrote: Why is it that everyone puts so much stock into GSTL win rates? Because more data is more data.
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