EPTI originally brought this on myself by drinking and starcrafting too frequently.
The result is I would go 0-5 on drunk days and 5-0 on sober days.
I largely resolved this first issue by creating a second drunk single player account, which allowed me to rise from Silver to Platinum in my sober account. I was still quite dissatisfied by the pace of that rise.
While in Silver I had a 20 game win streak vs Terrans at one point. It was SO boring.
I could basically do a 3 Gate expo and nearly a-move the Terran's ramp to win.
(I usually put zealots in front and use stalkers to focus fire units outside the bunker, but you get the point)
My "plan" was just to do damage in case of Banshee play and scout that it was coming by noticing a pure marine defense, but I shockingly found I was beating all sorts of Marauder and Siege Tank builds as well. I went back to revue drunk losses and I would lose because I did stuff like forget to put probes on gas, so Warp was massively delayed which delayed my first push and then low and behold there was a cloaked banshee rush and my obs was late.
Also, drinking seems to affect PvZ on non FFE maps more. Even on FFE maps I end up with holes in my walls, or the nexus blocked or whatever.
Anyway my win percentage got up to 70% on SC2 gears for a one month period and I was finally promoted to Gold. Then after about 65% for another month and I was in platinum.
I am an example of someone who does better vs higher leagues because I currently have a diamond win percentage over 70%, but my bronze win % somehow is under 50. I cannot explain that, except that I lost to a lot of 6 pools.
Since using the drunk/sober account strategy that has largely fixed my single player woes.
I think I am mostly where I am should be.
Multiplayer remains massively FUBARed.
First of all I am ranked Platinum on most teams and in most leagues.
1v1 I am a high platinum, but in multi-player I should be much better.
There are a group of about 6 of us that play on Fridays. That is actually 15 permutations of 4 assuming we always have 4, but some days it is 3 and there are 20 more permutations of those for 35 permutations of teams that we have. As you can imagine we do not get that many games with any set of players.
Of my buddies that I play with we have 3 diamonds and 3 platinums based on their highest rank in any league at any time. Currently I believe we have 2 4v4 diamonds and 0 1v1 diamonds.
Of this group I am the best by a fairly large margin. I destroy everyone in 1v1 and we cannot even play 2v2s or 3v3s on days that we have 5 or 6 of us because whichever team I am on just rolls to victory.
This was all hysterical back when I was in Silver and we had several 1v1 diamonds. While I have thrown bnet a bone mentioning sobriety, I should also mention that my friends would also drink on Fridays so not sure how a drunk Silver was beating drunk diamonds.
It has been speculated by some that I simply hold my liquor the best and it is that rather than actual starcraft talent that has led me to victory on drunken Fridays. No one has suggested I drink the least, because it is most likely the opposite that is the case.
Regardless we began to suspect that bnet hates us. One Friday we were playing and had a new 3v3 that we had never played before. This should have been a strong group for us since we had 2 diamonds and me.
Usually we get matched against Masters/Diamonds players, yet are put in the platinum league.
We do not understand how this works. I should mention that my buddies consist of some of the best FPS players in the world. One was ranked #7 in Counterstrike.
In my other circles of friends I am considered an excellent FPSer, but I just suck compared to these guys. Their skills do not quite extent to RTS though.
While we are not great individually, we have been friends since the early 90s and have great teamwork, partly from our FPSing. The result is together we can play effectively against those who are much better than us.
Anyway, so this day we win our first match, then lose to a team of 3 masters, then beat a team with one master and then lose the next two games all of which had at least one Master's player.
We went 2-3 in placement, which is bad for us, but then again 4 of the teams had Master's players. Usually we can go 5-0 or 4-1, but then we usually do not face a Master's player in placement more than once or twice and never 3 at once.
Anyway, we are put in silver, which slightly offends us. Okay, we were raging!
At least we will get to pwn some silver newbs before getting promoted. So the next game we are playing our hearts out, but these guys are good. They are microing their injured stalkers back, which suggests at least gold league. They are splitting their marines, so maybe platinum. Some A-hole toss has a sentry at every ramp and seems to have godly FF usage. Who are these guys? We finally lose and check their rankings. THREE MASTERS. WTF?!?!
Now we are 0-1 in Silver because of this. I asked one of them how this could happen and he said they were doing their placement matches. These was an extreme example, but this sort of stuff happens all the time. We do not know how it is that Bnet will play us against Masters and Diamonds for months on end and we will have roughly a 50% win percentage and we stay in platinum in all permutations. Our suspicion is that while we are active overall, each of the 35 permutations of 3 or 4 is relatively inactive and promotion is partly connected to activity.
It seems this most affects platinum to diamond since even when placement puts us in gold, we get promoted to platinum very fast.
This past weekend we only had 2 at first. We played a 1v1 but that was not close. Then we owned a few folks in 2v2 winning placement plus some and get put back in Platz. Finally we decided to do some 4v4 with random teammates.
We keep owning everyone except for two games where bnet boots me.
We lost one other game when all my teammates (including my buddy) went hatch first and I was relegated to grabbing an exposed natural, which I could never hold. The result is I never really got off more than one base, and without my macro on which we so heavily rely we lost.
Now in those games I got booted we suspect that bnet was the issue and not our internet.
Basically this house is owned by a professional networking guy and in one of the games no fewer than 5 people lagged out at various times. We are pretty sure bnet or at least one server was having some issues. Also it happened 2 games in a row and then was fine after that.
It could have been something unique to my computer because I was the only one to actually get booted. This has me slightly worried.
Anyway, ignoring that game we are on like a 6-1 streak and suddenly it happens. My platinum buddy who is much worse than me gets promoted.
Now here is what is weird:
#1) I have won every game I played without him this season. (This was only 1 game)
#2) He has not played without me this season.
#3) He somehow has more points than me, even though I won every game he won and I never lost without him.
#4) Right before he passed me in points he was #1 in platinum while I was #40 with a few more points.
So we went back and checked our match history and during these wins he would always get more points. This is not a bonus pool issue. Basically he would get 26 for a win. I would get 20 for the same win.
As far as in game stats go, other than the 2 games I got booted, which we lost, I had a higher score in every single game including a few times that I doubled him.
We figure, that perhaps I had some months-old history that was dragging me down so I was slightly behind and that I was on the cusp of promotion myself.
We keep playing and finish the night with 6 more straight wins.
Somewhere in there another Diamond buddy joins us so we are doing 3 of us + 1 random.
No promotion for me.
My buddies continue to get more points for wins than I do.
I had high score of all 8 players in last 6 games.
My average SQ during the last 6 games is 96 which is in theory higher than everyone on NA or EU bnet. The only game where my unspent resources crept over 1K was when I had 1002 and a resource collection rate of 2300. I was on 7 bases (only 4 mining) when the game ended.
My buddy averaged 17 SQ over the same time period.
What gives?
Part of what is going on is the drops. I was 12-3 according to bnet that night, but it felt like 12-1 because of the 2 drops. Also, my score was probably pretty low in the drops, although looking at SQ it seems that I get credit for resources collected, but unspent resources goes to 0.
For that reason my SQs were insane because I would have stuff like 1100 collection rate and 120 unspent resources. Still I would have low score.
In previous nights we were playing on 3v3 and 4v4 teams and I was significantly drunk.
I had been drinking last Friday too, but I macro at around 75ish SQ when significantly drunk. When getting SQs over 100 it means I am sober or at least very close to sober.
So here is my theory:
First of all I have some degree of asberger's/autism. I am mostly highly functioning, but there were a few times in my life that this was particularly bad. Mostly it delayed reading till 4th grade for me. Part of this is the ability to block out all "distractions" when working on something.
Unfortunately my subconscious seems to do labeling of what is a distraction and in starcraft opponent's probes doing weird things that should key me into a cannon rush and "workers under attack" can also fall under distraction. I am very prone to getting cannon rushed and I am slow to respond or just don't respond to muta harass.
The upside is that my hyper focus allows me to have near pro level macro.
My buddy is well aware of all of my deficiencies and does stuff like use ovies to scout for cannons and micro my workers away when I get muta harassed. He also calls my attention to relevant stuff that my subconscious had labeled as "distraction."
There is no question that I become a MUCH better player when I play with my buddy.
I have a better chance of winning with him than with generic diamonds.
In that sense he is a diamond or better.
Furthermore my buddy rarely plays without me.
So here is the information bnet has.
I am okay when playing without Buddy.
Buddy is totally unknown when playing without me.
Buddy and I together are awesome.
From just that information it does seem reasonable to draw the conclusion that I am a solid platinum player and my buddy is a diamond or better.
There may also be some circular reasoning going on. I believe the reason that my buddies get more points for wins is because bnet thinks I am bad. Because I am bad and my buddies are good when I win it is not impressive, since even a lowly platinum can win with my teammates.
Meanwhile when my teammates win it is more impressive because they have done so while having to drag a lowly platinum (me) to victory.
The result is they keep outpacing me in points and the cycle just continues.
As a computer programmer I have some sympathy for bnet's conclusions, but I am still raging at being stuck in platinum.
I may start to focus on 1v1, where I think the system is a little better.
