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Hi everyone,
I have just started playing SC2. I had experience with SC1 and watched a few online tutorials, so I'm probably better than the average person whose played 40 games. But I am certainly not good!
Okay so I am getting a bit bored of online SC as I am finding that 3/4 of the time I get flogged, and 1/4 of the time I win easily. In my games I can only think of two where the tide ebbed and flowed, and it was a fun close game.
I was wondering if this was because of my inexperience? Or is this generally how StarCraft2 is?
If this is to do with my inexperience, how long do you need to play it for before you start getting close games?
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I had that feeling when they reworked the ladder a couple years ago but also I think it s the game that is like that. Sometimes games are actually quite close but a mistake ios made and one player gets completely stomped in the following minute. There is less come back potential than in SC1 and the battles tend to be shorter too so may be the feeling s a bit subjective.
Aside from that the MMR tdoes take a while but i guess 40games should be good. It s harder in the lower leagues too because everybody has some sort of critical weakness (micro/macro/build order/ engagement you name it) and what ends up looking like a stomp is just your particular weakness doesnt fit the opponent's (if that s makes sense).
Example: you have decent macro and can make 20marines quickly but you have horrible micro/army movement and your enemy just kills that with 4 banelings.
Try to fix your mistakes, or ask for help here, with replays and you ll find close games.
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40 games (assuming they were all with the same race in the same mode (i.e Ranked or Unranked)) should be more than enough considering provisional MMR only lasts 25 games.
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Canada8988 Posts
First, I know this will sound stupid, but go check your win-loss ratio, 50-50 usually fell like losing all the time.
As for the game not beeing close, I think of it can come from not really knowing why you won or loss or your position in the game, so it seems like the other guy is so much better then you, when in fact it was quite close. The games are also generally faster then in BW, so it can feel like you won or lost in the final 5 second it take for 8 marines to clean a mineral lines, but generaly it's the consequence of an accumulation of small adventage.
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Cool thanks everyone. That is around 40 games counting unranked that I had to play to get ranked. Yes I probably am 50-50 but there have been a lot of drop outs. (Trying to lower their ranking?) And I don't care about losing if I feel like at a stage I was in it.
Also I am on an Australian timezone so perhaps drawing from a smaller pool of people.
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If you're playing team games it is a known issue that has not had a proper response from blizzard. We tried setting up a post about it on blizzard forums but there are so many idiots on there that nothing is really taken seriously there.
If you're playing 1v1s then you just need to play more and more games on ranked. Unranked has a wider range of people you will play.
here is that blizz thread:
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/20760817577?page=1
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Kyo - yes, about 1/4 of my games are 3v3 with two friends of mine. One is gold, I can sort of pull my weight (i.e. not as good as him but I will mine around the same) and one of us is very very new. I watched a replay of our one win and texted him "dude, do you know how to use the shift key? and did you know you can hotkey buildings as well as units?" haha.
Anyway yes we were getting flogged by diamond players etc. but whatever it was fun for us mates to play.
But I am generally finding the same issue in 1v1 which is why I'm getting a bit 'over it' but it is heartening to hear that more games should make for a better experience.
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I think on lower skill levels (like mine) it's often a problem of buildorders. Some accidentally hit timing or a not expected unit combo can throw a amateur off very easily. This results in getting smashed or smashing the opponent not because of skill but because of the unability of amateurs to adjust to the opponent's strategy. At the same time amateurs aren't good at finding the balance between greediness and being safe. So being greedy often results in either getting punished really hard or in overflowing the opponent because he didn't do anything against your macro play - and vice versa.
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No significant background from SC1, but played competitively few other, slower and more forgiving RTS games. From my personal limited experience first ~30 games were actually very fun, and much more relaxed than the games I'm getting now (~150). I was getting stomped by really good players few times while MMR was still setting in, but with more equal opponents, games were pretty diverse and engaging.
From watching and crawling through SC2 ladder so far, I see specific pattern, which is kinda fun breaking part for me, but at the same time it's not a generally bad thing in itself. To pinpoint, it looks like this for me:
Bronze-Gold: non-standardized build orders, lots of improvisation, generally poor micro/macro game, often blob on blob fighting with minimal to no harassment, etc, etc.
Late Gold-Diamond: cheese and rush tactics all the way through, literally no macro game at all, more comprehensive build orders (with messed up timing), better general micro/poor or no macro, overall gameplay is brutally static, only few possible strategies are expected of your opponent.
Late Diamond-Grandmaster: truly high level play with big emphasis on macro, crazy APM reaching ~500, extremely strict timing based builds, lots of variety, unexpected and skillful techniques displayed by players. Almost impossible to comprehend and play on that level - bliss to watch and participate I bet.
So, I'm stuck in Plat skill level, and won't be able to get out for a while... if ever, and same cheese/rush builds getting really tiresome... Terran either goes MMM or Mech all-in, sometimes HQ/Bunker cheese. Zerg - Banelings or Hydras, sometimes Spine/Spore crawler cheese. Protoss - constant Stalker rush, sometimes Photon cheese. Nothing ever changes, you try to go early exp, enemy scouts it and you got rush you have no possibility to defend against, so pretty much locked in same early game over and over again...
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The higher up in skill you go, the more resilient and hard to kill both players get. At lower levels, as others have said, one attack can often just wreck you. The higher up you go, the more likely it is that your opponent has scouted your attack coming and prepared a defense - so whether you win or lose, you're not just waltzing in and killing everything.
At my level (Masters 3) I basically have three types of games.
Outright stomps are pretty rare on both sides. Those are the games I imagine you're talking about. Usually only in off-peak hours when I play someone ~500 MMR higher or lower than me.
Then there's the game where one side just outclasses the other. In general, there's several skirmishes and battles, but the superior player always comes out on top, and eventually gains a game-winning edge. It's not a stomp, but the ebb and flow isn't really there either.
Then there's the third type of game, which is what you're looking for, where both sides are dealing damage to each other, or the defender is sometimes taking damage and sometimes fending attacks off, and the game goes back and forth for some time before someone wins.
The third type definitely does happen reasonably frequently, but you'll also have the second type (and even the first) a fair bit, especially if you play at off-peak hours. The less players are playing at the same time as you, the more likely you'll get a lopsided match. Two Masters players of similar skill will rarely catch each other completely by surprise, but a Masters 1 player can stomp me into the dirt.
So, to answer your question - is it inexperience, or is it just how SC2 is played? A little of Column A, a little of Column B. Mostly A.
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you get close games when you, and your oponent is skilled enough to do and defends attacks.
Sadly most of the lader up to ~5kMMR, is ablet to place 3 buildings on time, and execute only one attack, so its either cheese/allin -> win/loose .
So just learn mechanics, and how to get 2 base economy fast, then allin from 2 base(or have 3-d as backup(if u zerg 3-d is always needed, but 44-48 drones is enough)).
With this style you will get to masters fast enough, and with some proper mechanics and skills to defend early agression/cheeses (because all diamond is basically plats who cheese) and there you will have some decent games
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On January 26 2018 20:16 WayTeh_ wrote:
you get close games when you, and your oponent is skilled enough to do and defends attacks.
Sadly most of the lader up to ~5kMMR, is ablet to place 3 buildings on time, and execute only one attack, so its either cheese/allin -> win/loose .
So just learn mechanics, and how to get 2 base economy fast, then allin from 2 base(or have 3-d as backup(if u zerg 3-d is always needed, but 44-48 drones is enough)).
With this style you will get to masters fast enough, and with some proper mechanics and skills to defend early agression/cheeses (because all diamond is basically plats who cheese) and there you will have some decent games
Yeah, solid advice. Do you really have to push this kind of bullshit on new players?
In case it is not obvious, this is an absolutely insanely stupid description of the ladder. You get people playing all kinds of styles at all kinds of levels. You also shouldn't expect to "get masters fast enough", there are thousands of people playing the game for years that are still not masters simply because it is hard as hell to have enough mechanics (despite some people feeling the urgent need to flaunt their skill by telling everyone how easy it is).
Just play, do what you like the best, do not try to rank up at all costs and enjoy the ladder. It is a great environment, where you can find games quickly and most of them are really well balanced in 1v1. Yeah, sometimes you may feel that they rolled you over or that they were too easy, but if you look at the replay, you will often see that your skill was indeed similar, but some mistake somewhere snowballed out of control and once the positions were uneven, there was really nothing the losing player could do. That is the inherent nature of SC2, it is not a very forgiving game.
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As a long time diamond player, I'm really surprised by what seems to be the dominant opinion expressed here about my level of play. And I strongly disagree. Diamond isn't "just cheese" like Sundr and WayTeh_ seems to indicate. There are macro games and "back and forth" games like Salivanth describes. Maybe a bit less often than in Masters because our defenses are less crisp, but then again so are the attacks, so it kinda evens out ? I don't know, I play in diamond and it's macro games more often than not !
The thing is, sometimes people can be really passive and focused on their macro, so little to no harrass happens. But that just means that you're free to crank up the aggression yourself !
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I am/was (half a year ago) Diamond 3. The way I play is a timing, maybe in higher skill games, you would call my build an all-in. However, in lower levels it isn't an all-in, since your opponents and you make enough mistakes, so that you are from dead when your attack falls flat. At diamond, even plat, I encounter mostly macro games.
You can play any style you want and climb the ladder up to a very high level. Only at the highest levels build orders become really that important. As long as you macro properly, micro well, I believe any build order is viable. I'm sure I have seen streamers only doing bullshit builds on grandmaster and still win easily. Build order does boost your skill, but it is not really a limitation:
Further explanation:
I would say a build order maybe gives me a +200MMR buff against a random build order.
But whether I am Bronze, Silver, Gold or Masters depends on my macro, micro, decision making.
I have very very few times since my time in gold encountered a "build-order-loss". The thing is, what would be a build order loss at higher lvls isn't one in lower lvls, as you can mostly salvage any situations, by macroing, microing properly as both players will make a lot of mistakes.
To answer the original post:
Personally, I feel like, it gets better starting from gold. Also depends on personal play style. And the 50% loss makes one feel a bit more miserable than it actually is as other people also said. But I do have very good experience with matchmaking at all skill levels up to diamond. At least for me it holds true, that if I play well, I win 90% of my games, if I play bad I lose almost every game. Of course, this doesn't hold true when I win/lose 5 games in a row and are matched to a much better/worse player, but this should be obvious.
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To chime in with my 2 cents, close games come from two players constantly changing their course of action depending on the other player's actions. So once you start beating players that don't do that (i.e. don't scout) by doing that (i.e. scouting) you'll start getting closer games. Think that gold as some people have mentioned is reasonable, though I in diamond still play plenty of people who don't scout/don't know how to scout
You should probably focus on getting your macro mechanics nailed (check your minerals and your supply count frequently, build units, expand in a timely fashion), then once you're comfortable with this you'll probably be in plat-ish, then learn how to scout and how to play aggressively (deny information, gain information with low cost) and you'll be in mid-high diamond, at which point this "ebb and flow" you're looking for will come much more naturally.
Back and forth games are just a lot more rare when players just build units and have to hope that they built comparable armies, so you'll have to get to a skill level where that stops to consistently get "good games." It's all what you enjoy though, and the sc subreddit occasionally gets silver and gold players linking games they found "really exciting" and "really close" so it's definitely possible at lower levels too 
glhf!
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On January 26 2018 17:10 Sundr wrote:
No significant background from SC1, but played competitively few other, slower and more forgiving RTS games. From my personal limited experience first ~30 games were actually very fun, and much more relaxed than the games I'm getting now (~150). I was getting stomped by really good players few times while MMR was still setting in, but with more equal opponents, games were pretty diverse and engaging.
From watching and crawling through SC2 ladder so far, I see specific pattern, which is kinda fun breaking part for me, but at the same time it's not a generally bad thing in itself. To pinpoint, it looks like this for me:
Bronze-Gold: non-standardized build orders, lots of improvisation, generally poor micro/macro game, often blob on blob fighting with minimal to no harassment, etc, etc.
Late Gold-Diamond: cheese and rush tactics all the way through, literally no macro game at all, more comprehensive build orders (with messed up timing), better general micro/poor or no macro, overall gameplay is brutally static, only few possible strategies are expected of your opponent.
Late Diamond-Grandmaster: truly high level play with big emphasis on macro, crazy APM reaching ~500, extremely strict timing based builds, lots of variety, unexpected and skillful techniques displayed by players. Almost impossible to comprehend and play on that level - bliss to watch and participate I bet.
So, I'm stuck in Plat skill level, and won't be able to get out for a while... if ever, and same cheese/rush builds getting really tiresome... Terran either goes MMM or Mech all-in, sometimes HQ/Bunker cheese. Zerg - Banelings or Hydras, sometimes Spine/Spore crawler cheese. Protoss - constant Stalker rush, sometimes Photon cheese. Nothing ever changes, you try to go early exp, enemy scouts it and you got rush you have no possibility to defend against, so pretty much locked in same early game over and over again...
This sounds one of those typical "I can't out of XYZ Rank because all everyone knows how to do is cheese and rush me at my rank". Everybody below my rank is a noob. Everybody above my rank is a god. Everybody else in my rank has no idea of how to macro. Once I get out of Plat, when everybody stops cheesing and rushing me, I can play a proper macro game as intended.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the higher the rank you go, the better the cheeses and rushes timing attacks are, and the better the cheesers responses are to your responses. Learning to respond to cheese and rushes timing attacks is part of the game no matter the rank you are. You also can't complain that your games are brutally static when it seems that your playstyle appears to be sitting in your base macroing up. Also the higher up you are the less viable strats there are as the less viable ones will be punished hard. You are just imagining that the rank that you hit your plateau in is the rank with the most cheesers and the least amount of diverse startegy.
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On January 26 2018 13:10 discomute wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have just started playing SC2. I had experience with SC1 and watched a few online tutorials, so I'm probably better than the average person whose played 40 games. But I am certainly not good!
Okay so I am getting a bit bored of online SC as I am finding that 3/4 of the time I get flogged, and 1/4 of the time I win easily. In my games I can only think of two where the tide ebbed and flowed, and it was a fun close game.
I was wondering if this was because of my inexperience? Or is this generally how StarCraft2 is?
If this is to do with my inexperience, how long do you need to play it for before you start getting close games?
It's just your inexperience and likely your MMR hasn't balanced out yet. When you play enough games you'll inevitably get to a point where your MMR is where you belong and you'll be winning 50% of the time. There'll be phases where you win more than you lose and it'll test you with stronger opponents to see if you're ready to rank up. Likewise there'll be phases where you lose more than you win and it'll give you weaker opponents.
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On January 26 2018 13:10 discomute wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have just started playing SC2. I had experience with SC1 and watched a few online tutorials, so I'm probably better than the average person whose played 40 games. But I am certainly not good!
Okay so I am getting a bit bored of online SC as I am finding that 3/4 of the time I get flogged, and 1/4 of the time I win easily. In my games I can only think of two where the tide ebbed and flowed, and it was a fun close game.
I was wondering if this was because of my inexperience? Or is this generally how StarCraft2 is?
If this is to do with my inexperience, how long do you need to play it for before you start getting close games?
So don't worry about it, this won't last too much longer, the system will eventually bring you where you belong.
If this bothers you too much or lasts longer than you'd like you can just instantly leave your games to lower your MMR until you're playing mostly people that you feel equally matched with.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
It won't happen as often as you would like. Once the system recognize you properly by my estimation it's about 70 % of the time. Less if you're in a cheesing pool of players/time-day (you meet players who want up really fast). I'm currently playing with Zerg and I'm mostly playing close games somewhere between plat2-gold1(I play only unranked and leave all mirrors).
Just a note - since the population decline in HotS(or end of the WoL) they actually changed the algorithm to have a wider range of players you meet. Back in WoL I had plenty of equal games(I dare to say 90 % of my games were in that category), but we had many more players to play with.
I dare to say that if I in unranked can have plenty of equal games - it takes just the time. When I started playing Terran(gold something) I had to lose 30 games in a row to have at least chance(my Protoss is Diamond something and the MMR was taken from my Protoss)
TL, DR - if you want really equal games, go for ranked and play around 50 games in it. Don't leave any MU/map you don't like as it will affect the chance of you getting a fair game, ban maps if you have to, learn to play against everyone.
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Starcraft 2 can feel very one sided when some matchups/builds are very Rock Paper Scissors and if you are on the bad end of that the game feels awful and unfair. This gets better with scouting and more knowledge and experience. The games will start to get closer and feel more back and forth as your depth of strategy grows and allows for you to know what you can and cannot get away with.
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EPT
