my chinese is pretty pathetic so i somehow accidentally put myself in practice league TTwTT. it took me a few minutes before i figured out how to get out of it but then i had to play 3 bronze leaguers in a row for placements. Go 5-0 and placed into platinum. I could probably have placed into diamond if I hadn't accidentally selected practice league but hindsight is 20/20.
i've played 20 games on the server so far
the first thing i noticed is that i have bad lag. like, atrocibad, horribad lag. i'm playing from california and i've got at least 500 ms of delay. my tracert to tw.logon.battle.net goes up to around 300-400 ms. when i played from taiwan to the NA server a few months back it seemed a lot smoother, though i didn't actually check the numbers then. i'm moving into a new apartment in august so i'm hoping for a better ISP.
players and strategies on TW seem to be more or less the same as my experience on NA. i was kind of surprised that players in bronze league actually attempted "real" build orders, though to be fair i haven't played any low leaguers since placement matches in retail. there are also a lot of non-TW players on this server; all my losses were to brand new accounts with less than 10 games played. right now i've mostly been stuck playing diamond players though i guess 20 games isn't enough to reach masters.
here's a battle report of a ladder game i played against a gm on TW
+ Show Spoiler +
matchup is tvp xelnaga, my opponent protoss (gargamelex) on the bottom left and me as the terran in the top right. i open with a 13gas intending to go banshees, because i wanted to get quick wins to raise my mmr. protoss opens double gas but ends up going 4gate.
the good ol' 4gate into council into robo into nexus build. my banshee flies in but his obs is almost already done.
a mere 3 kills before being driven off, but it's okay, the protoss doesn't like making probes. i get 4raxes and an ebay for quick upgrades.
my second banshee comes in for some sick (!!!) harass, but i completely forget that i have a second banshee, so it's not a lot of damage.
being quite down on worker count (i've killed a total of 7 workers now) my opponent decides it's time to deal some punishment with his impressive chargelot army
i bring the full force of my massive 272 apm to walk my army right past his
kiting's not easy in half a second of lag TTwTT
i'm left with 9 stalkers vs 7 marines and 3 marauders + 2 medivacs
awwwww yeahhh 1-1 terran bio
he's down on econ and i've taken my gold third, so he tries to kill my PF before it can finish
terrannnnnnnn
the good ol' 4gate into council into robo into nexus build. my banshee flies in but his obs is almost already done.
a mere 3 kills before being driven off, but it's okay, the protoss doesn't like making probes. i get 4raxes and an ebay for quick upgrades.
my second banshee comes in for some sick (!!!) harass, but i completely forget that i have a second banshee, so it's not a lot of damage.
being quite down on worker count (i've killed a total of 7 workers now) my opponent decides it's time to deal some punishment with his impressive chargelot army
i bring the full force of my massive 272 apm to walk my army right past his
kiting's not easy in half a second of lag TTwTT
i'm left with 9 stalkers vs 7 marines and 3 marauders + 2 medivacs
awwwww yeahhh 1-1 terran bio
he's down on econ and i've taken my gold third, so he tries to kill my PF before it can finish
terrannnnnnnn
i checked my opponent after the match and i was like "hahahahahahaha are you serious." i guess the problem with a small server population is that you end up with some pretty terrible people in GM. i think it'll be pretty funny when the server merge happens and a good chunk of GMs end up in platinum, but i'm looking quite forward to getting owned on KR when the 19th rolls around.