Bronze Part 4: A Legendary League

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Gheed

United States972 Posts

April 13 2012 06:58 GMT

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Bronze Part 4: A Legendary League

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Part I: Descent to LoL

Recently, I started playing League of Legends. Casual, killing esports, rabble, rabble, rabble, I know.

Nope, nothing to see here. Definitely no esports.

While starting to play and level up my LoL account, I often found myself thinking back to the bronze league. As someone who is not yet level 30, I am not in the direct LoL equivalent of bronze, but it still inspired some comparisons. I'm not yet eligible to descend into the fabled depths of Elo Hell, but I have had the opportunity to ponder a number of things which I believe have furthered my understanding of bronzies. My games are filled with anything from average players to newbies to smurfs to children to Brazilians to people for whom any description other than pants-on-head retarded would prove inadequate. Thus, the demographics are at least superficially similar to those of the bronze league.

To begin with, some background. The first time I played DotA was sometime around 2003, when Eul created the map for Reign of Chaos. I remember there were only like 12 heroes at the time, and one of them used the model of Malfurion from the campaign. He had a teleport and a death coil spell to either heal allies or harm enemies. Most importantly for me, nobody ever picked him. So I would always freely choose him and teleport around the map ganking people foolish enough to try to lane with low health. Imagine how bad some MOBA players are now and then amplify that with a new, imbalanced map that nobody really knew how to play yet. It was not a pretty picture.

I played the game quite a bit for a time, but only as a diversion from the ladder, like any other custom map. For me, DotA was no different than Cube TD or Murder in the Mansion; it was just something to do. I had no idea just how popular it would become. By the time Frozen Throne was released and the map fell under new management, I had lost interest. Years later, when I later considered playing again, the game had already developed to the point where if you were new, you were promptly told to get the fuck out. So, I did.

For 9 years then, there has been this new genre of game growing up completely outside of my purview. When my friend began playing LoL and described it to me as "like DotA," my initial reaction was, "why the fuck would you want to play that?" His response was something along the lines of "I dunno, fuck you bro." Having been thoroughly trounced by his counterargument, I agreed to play with him. I still remembered the basics of a MOBA from my ancient DotA experience: lanes, items, levels, creeps, etc. Of course I didn't know any of the heroes, or champions as they were apparently called, so when I spied a furry looking raccoon guy in the game lobby, I asked what he was. My friend informed me, "Oh, that's Teemo. He's gay."

And apparently Canadian.

Sold. I immediately clicked on him. I didn't know about locking in my choice yet, so my decision lacked the abrupt finality I had envisioned it having. After hearing this adorable Captain Teemo fellow tell me he was on duty, though, I knew I could choose no other character.

"So, what does he do?" I asked, function far less important than form. My friend sighed and explained, "he runs around really fast and shoots poison darts at people and puts exploding mushrooms on the ground." Fucking. Awesome. I had made the right choice.

I don't remember much about the game, other than me asking "what does this guy do?" every 30 seconds and the feelings of glee elicited by the enemies running over my mushrooms. A few games later, I continued my trend of playing characters who look as harmless as possible and bought Annie, herself also a certain sort of adorable (although less so when described to me as "she summons a big fucking bear that rapes you").

So I had been sucked in. The game turned out to be fun. The cuteness was just too much.

Resistance… failing… Must… buy… skins…

They're like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. I know they were engineered specifically for children and stupid people to have something cute and furry to look at during the film. I know I'm being manipulated, but goddamn it do I love me some Ewoks. I can't help it.

The LoL community though… Well, let's just say that they are less than cute. And not uncute in a Jar Jar Binks kind of way, where you just want to strangle him with his stupid fucking tongue, either. They are uncute in an Anakin Skywalker kind of way, where even though he seems to be a perfectly normal, attractive young man, you later discover that he's actually a retard. And evil. Luckily I had someone to explain things to me ("Come here, I'm going to show you how to leash blue" versus "LEASH BLUE FKING NUB"). At first, I would play only when my friend was available, making sure to do a quick bot game each day to both level up and get some idea of what each champion did. Later, I started solo queuing for normal games, and that's where I am now.

There's still a ton of shit I don't know about LoL. Hell, I still don't even know what some of the champions do.

All I know about this fucker is that he likes to kill all my allies. Repeatedly.

So I won't claim to be any type of expert, but that's largely the point. In Starcraft 2, I'm simply bad. I've seen examples of high level play. I know generally what to do, I just suck at doing it. In LoL, I barely know what to do and I suck at doing it. This puts me, I feel, in a position similar to that of the bronze leaguers.

Part II: Poorly supported arguments

Considering my suckiness in LoL, I've come up with a general hypothesis about why some people in SC2 remain in the bronze league. I will mention here, once, that when I say "bronze league" I mean the terrible league that exists today. And, to some extent, the silver players who barely qualify as better than their inferiors in bronze. I am fully aware that there will always be players in bronze due to how the ladder works. As bronze exists now, though, it is so horrible that no group of people with operational appendages and cerebral cortices should be in it. Just go take a look at some silver replays and see how clueless they are and think to yourself just how bad someone has to be to be worse than those players. Pretty bad.

I will begin by quoting Sun Tzu, because that's what all the cool (read: pretentious) kids do when writing about computer strategy games.

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

Admittedly, it's a pretty generic aphorism. I could have easily prefaced an article about the importance of warding in LoL or scouting in SC2 with the same quote. But, here we go, all aboard the cliché train.

Bronze players know neither themselves nor their enemies. They are therefore incapable of winning except against someone equally ill-informed, that is, other bronzies. The biggest issue bronzies have is that they just don't know how to play. Now, that sounds really fucking obvious, but it's important to be as broad as possible with regards to the bronze league. It's not specific things that they need to learn. They don't need to learn timings or build orders. They don't need to know how to shift queue commands or how to hotkey armies. They just need to, in the broadest possible of terms, know what to do. They need a goal, a direction, a game plan, some idea, however vague, of where they want the game to progress and what results they want their actions to produce.

Too many bronzies feel like they're just going along for the ride, that the things happening in the game are totally beyond their control. I think this is why they so vehemently loathe cheese, despite how poorly executed bronze level cheese is. They feel like something was done to them, like some RNG deity cast a die for them and they lost the game because of a bad roll, not because of bad decisions on their part. But Starcraft isn't some crappy JRPG where you just mash buttons to progress a linear storyline.

Starcraft also has less belts and zippers.

Players can shape the game with the decisions they make, with one stipulation: they need to know why they are making those decisions—they need to know themselves.

What I perceive to be bronze players' largest problem is that they act without introspection. Or any sort of thinking at all, really. They appear to be simply doing things just for the sake of doing them. Often, this goes unpunished because the opponents they play are similarly bad, so they continue to do the things which keep them in bronze in the first place. One of the most aggravating things when trying to teach someone is asking them the question, "why did you do that?" and having them respond, "I don't know." If decisions are made without reasons behind them, improvement will never happen; it cannot happen.

One blatant error I see LoL players worse than even myself make is just walking across the map for no specific reason, getting killed, and then repeating that error throughout the entirety of the game. A veteran LoL player will simply scoff and instruct a new player to buy wards, but I think it's simpler than even that. They're not thinking about what they're doing; they don't have an objective in mind other than a basal "well, I guess I'm going to go over there now."

I know there's a Blitzcrank on the other team, but what are the odds he's going to be in this bush?

So not only do they not know why they are doing what they are doing, they are also not considering why it's not working. What they gain from their mistakes is not the question "How could I have foreseen that the enemies would be there?" but instead the statement "Oh, I guess the enemies were there." It's declarative, not interrogative. It doesn't open any doors for further consideration; it closes them.

There is no consideration beyond acknowledging that the event happened. It is perceived as mere happenstance, some sort of random occurrence from which no meaning could be derived. There is no self-reflection, and so no attempt to fix the error. Indeed, if there was no goal behind the action, it could hardly even be classified as an error in the first place. It actually would be mere chance. If they thought to themselves, "Hm, I would like to kill this tower, but I'm alone, all the wards have expired, and I see no enemies on the map," then they would probably die a lot less than if they thought "Hm, I guess I'll just sit here and autoattack this tower."

It seems to me, from my noobish standpoint, that the biggest skill to be gained in LoL is having an idea of what you can do, what your enemies can do, and with that information deciding what is the correct course of action to take. Simply having an idea of what to do is far more important than any lesson in farming or smart casting. For example, I played a game where a player picked Leona and then, without saying anything, ran to the top lane presumably intending to solo it. I said, in the typical style of LoL chat, "Leona top?" to which she replied "so?" I explained then, "well if you lane with a partner, you would have someone else to attack them when you stun them." Agreeing with my argument, she ran to the bottom to join our Vayne and the pair scored first blood shortly thereafter. Clearly, the Leona player had not given any consideration to her actions. She was simply heading to the top lane because she felt like going there.

I would say LoL is a fairly easy game to understand the basics of. It's… structured. The game can't possibly progress in a manner that's all too unforseen. Each team gets the same buildings and 5 champions. Sure, one team could invade the enemy jungle or something, but at the core, each team is still left with only their champions to maneuver and they have to mold the game around the objectives already present on the map. It's not like Starcraft where after the first 6 workers anything could happen. Starcraft 2 is a more complicated and open-ended game, so how can we translate this principal of knowing what to do to our beloved bronze league?

"Beloved" might not be the appropriate word.

One SC2 example might be someone who, just because they felt like attacking, runs into a line of siege tanks and loses all their units. If they were attacking "just because," they are not in a position to learn anything from their mistake. On the other hand, if someone takes a group of Marauders and attempts to stim into a tank line in order to break it and advance their position into an opponent's third base, then that's something that can be improved upon. Even if it fails just as badly as the person who did it for no reason, the person who understands the impetus behind their actions is in a much better position to progress as a player. Like the proverb I tritely quoted, he didn't rightly know his enemy (the strength of the siege line) or himself (the strength of the Marauders), so he lost. Perhaps next time, with greater knowledge, he will attempt a different approach or refine his current one.

However, as I said earlier, bronze players need not work on a specific thing to improve. In fact, since everything they do is so subpar, they would be ill-advised to work on a single aspect of their play. There are obviously thousands of little micro-moments, like the siege line example, that occur in every game of Starcraft which all add up to the sum total of experience that, given an adequate level of consideration, leads to a more knowledgeable, better player. How does someone get out of bronze, though? How does someone improve everything?

Assuming they don't have this access to this guy.

Some people have argued that bronze players need only macro better to get out of bronze. Others have argued that bronzies should pick a single, standard build for each matchup and practice it to get out of bronze. Some have taken a different approach and suggested that a player cheese or one-base their way out of bronze and then figure out how to play more normally once they reach the plateau whereupon their build stops working.

All of these ideas revolve around macro, build orders, and repetition. But they all overlook one important point: bronze players don't know what the fuck they're doing. That is, ultimately, why they are bronze to begin with. For these special people, we have to start at something more basic than macro, more broad than build orders.

Of course, it has been proven that it is possible to get out of bronze by not scouting at all, making a shitton of tier 1 units, and moving out. It's been done.

With queens.

And I find any argument that the leagues have "improved" to the point where someone could not do it again unconvincing. My objection to the "just macro" idea is not that it's wrong advice, but that it's incomplete advice. After a player has been introduced to the concepts of macro and still finds himself stuck in bronze, I feel as if telling him to macro harder isn't going to improve his situation.

Simply put, many players' macro will not improve at a fast enough pace that they can reliably win games by "only macroing." They'll lose to other things, like cheese or odd timings, especially if they're zerg. Their scouting will fall behind as they spend 90% of the time staring at their queens' energy levels. They won't learn how to position their army. They won't get a feel for which army compositions work and which don't. The players who have gone from bronze to diamond by massing stalkers or marines were already diamond league or higher level players. Sure, if a bronze player were to miraculously improve his macro and only his macro, he might get out of bronze league. But that's a very unrealistic scenario. Macro doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I think people have the wrong idea about macro. One might compare macro with last hitting and denying in the MOBA genre, although obviously not denying in LoL. They're both mechanical tasks meant to both give players something to do and to increase the difficulty of the game. They're both obviously very important to each game. Timing last hits is a skill. Timing injects is a skill. The difference is that macro is the overall efficiency of every economic action in the game. It is not a mere series of button presses one must master. You can screw up last hitting and the game goes on. If you stopped macroing though, the game would grind to a screeching halt.

Macro is much more than a simple skill, and not the brainless, rote activity some people seem to think it is. It's not some arbitrary barrier players have to overcome to be able to play the game. Macro is the game. This is Starcraft, not chess. Having to partition a segment of your thoughts and actions toward building units and structures is part of the strategy of the game. How you divide your attention is as much a strategic choice as it is a mechanical one. Macro is, I would argue, more of a state of mind than a physical labor. You scout your opponents build, you shift your own build. You engage in a battle, you have to produce more units to resupply your army. A player with good macro has a feel for what actions they need to take and when. They get into a rhythm. Compare a stream of a progamer rapidly switching between their buildings units to keep tabs on everything versus a bronze player who gets supply blocked and throws down 8 pylons at a time. Macro is so interlinked with every other portion of the game it's almost silly to separate it from anything else. Even if a player did nothing but 4gate, having the correct build order and warping in the right units falls within the realm of macro. It's so broad as to almost be meaningless.

So telling a bronze player to "macro better," is pretty much just telling him to "play better," which is not very helpful. It would be like coaching a track team, sitting on the sidelines, and then telling them to just "run faster." It's such bland advice that it fails to actually be advice. It's a slightly nicer way to say "learn to play," nothing more. Higher league players could look at a bronze replay and see that he has 1500 minerals at 10 minutes into the game and say "hey you should have spent those, if you had 30 more marines you would have won." A bronze player would likely not disagree, and indeed they have objectively the worst macro of all players, on top of all their other problems.

Where does this leave my argument, then? On one hand, macroing better will get someone out of bronze, this has been proven. On the other hand, I still don't think it's very good advice. How do I reconcile this? Well, as I said, I think it's incomplete advice. I think a better suggestion would be to tell someone to "think better." Imagine if instead of watching a week old replay and then summarily telling a bronzie that he needs to build more things, if you could sit behind him and watch him play. Imagine then, pausing the game at random points and asking him "what are you thinking right now?" Maybe he would say "I wanted to expand." You could then point out, "Well you haven't scouted his army in 8 minutes, you have no map vision, you have no idea if he's going to attack you, and you are floating 1500 minerals which could have been units you could use to defend your expansion."

I've never paid for coaching, and I rarely watch when a streamer streams a coaching session with a low level player. But when I have, they don't just sit there and tell him to macro better, even though every single player on the planet could be macroing better. Macro is obviously emphasized, especially if unit production or income dips to a dangerously low point, but it's generally more about teaching the bronze player what to be thinking and when. It's something along the lines of, you need to think about how to scout the enemy army, you need to think about how you're going to expand, you need to think about how you're going to defend if he drops you. I don't think 2 hours of a pro-gamer shouting "macro better, stupid," on Skype would be worth 80 bucks.

Well, maybe if he was the one doing the shouting.

This isn't exactly groundbreaking shit I've come up with, but I see so many people trying to give advice to bronze players and I just don't think they're at the level where they could actually incorporate any of that advice into their play. The line to progress from bronze to silver is so fucking low that anyone who finds themselves unable to cross it is clearly in need of some form of remediation that a one-line post on a forum just cannot offer.

They need to be taught how to think, not how to play. Again with the League analogy, as I'm learning the game I often feel like I just don't quite know what to do. I find myself at a loss for where I should be moving or what objectives we should be taking. Even if I have someone on the team to tell me what to do, I'm not always sure on the reasons behind the instructions. So, in my position where I am struggling not with the basics but the more abstract, a guide like this one is vastly more useful than the somewhat tongue-in-cheek guide here. The latter simply tells me what to do while the former tells me what I should be thinking. Is the advice about how to ward wrong? Of course not, but I can buy wards all fucking day and it isn't going to do shit if nobody knows what to do with the vision they get. "Buy wards" is the LoL equivalent of "macro better," and is about as helpful.

Part III: Shitting on players worse than me

What started this line of thinking is not just LoL, but a game I played against a low silver player. I say "low" because I was matched up against him while I was worker rushing, which tends to put me around the border between bronze and silver.

Number one, aww, yeah.

As is more common in silver than in bronze, this fellow knew how to attack move and easily defeated my worker rush. After the game he, clearly amused by my antics, messaged me and asked about it. I explained that I was portrait farming and that at that level 50% of the people, for various reasons, lost to the rush, although nobody ever should. After a few more questions, he asked if I wanted to play a real game. It would later turn out that he didn't quite understand that I was not actually a bronze level player.

We entered a custom game, a PvP on Shattered Temple. I spawned to the left of the map and he to the bottom. Right away, my opponent displayed a slight bit of ignorance: he scouted close positions. I suppose I can't fault him for that, because nowhere that I'm aware of does it actually tell players that those positions are impossible. When my probe entered his base early, though, he knew I must have been close by air to arrive so quickly and sent his scouting probe there without wasting time checking the upper position. That does show some capacity for critical thinking.

What ensued shows something else. The rest of the match displayed either no thinking at all, or thinking so ass-backwards that I can't even begin to piece together how this game played out the way it did. I went for gas first with the intention of early dark templar. He went for the standard gate/gas build, but he was so distracted by my scouting probe that he not only sent 2 probes to chase it, but delayed both intended structures substantially. I stole his gas before leaving his base and, rather than 4 gating, which most low level protosses seem to do, he decided to kill my assimilator with a zealot and 3 probes.

Maybe he was trying to mind game me?

I was confused, naturally. I was even more confused when he attempted to invade my base with a squad of 3 zealots. What did he want that gas so badly for if he was just going to chrono out a bunch of zealots? I'm not sure what he expected to accomplish with the assault, but a sentry easily thwarted it. Achieving nothing, he retreated to the Xel'naga tower and idled there with his army for the rest of the game.

Meanwhile, I had built a Twilight Council after my first gateway and a Dark Shrine was under way. After watching him fumble with his probes, I reasoned I could quickly end the game. I assumed that because he had spent so much money on zealots, delayed his structures for so long, and was in the silver league, that he would not have a robo nearly quickly enough to counter the dark templars.

He continued rallying more units to safeguard the tower that didn't grant him vision of anything. Especially DTs.

You'd think Xel'naga technology would be able to detect the things they themselves created.

He left a sentry at home to defend, but, lacking pro-gamer quality reflexes, it proved futile against the 3 DTs nearing his base. He had sent it down the ramp and out of his base to meet his buddies at the tower just as I entered, anyway. When I approached his mineral line, I was more than a little surprised. Despite having no scouting information at all, he had seemingly blind countered my DTs. Sort of. He had made a forge and constructed a cannon on the edge of his mineral line. Surprised, my first DT arrived, was surrounded by probes, and died to the cannon fire. My second DT killed the pylon powering his initial gateway and cyber core, located next to the ramp. My third ran to the middle and chased his army, which lacked the detection needed to do anything about it.

He attempted to attack my base, but with a composition consisting of 6 zealots and one stalker attacking up a ramp against someone with sentries, it did about as much damage as you would expect it to do. Meanwhile, the portions of his base that lacked cannon coverage were being picked apart by the DTs. While he desperately tried to rebuild his base, I morphed my remaining DTs into an archon, attack moved with the rest of my army, and won the game. He left after giving a "fml."

So, big deal. I beat a silver player with a DT rush, so what? Well, I didn't think much of the game at first, either. But when I reviewed the replay, I noticed something strange, something I had not noticed while playing. Something in the corner of his base. Something which had no business being there.

Some… thing.

He had, for reasons unknown, built a pylon and a cannon on the edge of his base. Why? Was he expecting a warp prism? If so, how did he expect that this emplacement would help at all? Was he expecting a phoenix opening? What did he think one off-kilter cannon going to do against phoenixes? The strangeness of this cannon was what made me look over the replay in more detail.

It was when I looked closer that I really noticed the extremely zealot heavy composition, the mineral line oversaturated by a dozen probes, the random cannons, the useless tower camping that put his entire army out of position, the general lack of any idea as to what he should be doing. After taking it all in, I realized that we were playing two completely different games. Despite 350 league wins, 700 assumed total games, more than I have even played if you discount all the worker rushes, this guy was on a completely different level. Why?

It wasn't physical. Hell, he had 20 more APM than I did, 60 to 40. It wasn't mental, either, he spoke to me with clarity and literacy. It wasn't his ability to macro. We had roughly the same amount of unspent resources and I was floating tons of minerals which could have been zealots to support an archon/zealot push.

So what is it? Why is this guy massing zealots in PvP and building cannons in his base randomly? Well, he doesn’t know what the fuck he's doing. That's all there is to it. He doesn't know how to play. Yet if he were to come to the forums and ask "how do I get out of silver," he'd get a bunch of mouth-breathers parroting that he should "macro better." Nobody can honestly say to themselves that his problem is macro. His problem is that he's clueless. What would help him is showing him how a standard game is played, what sorts of things he can do to steer a game in that direction, and a list of things he should scout for and react to.

Like these guys.

So after playing the silver guy and remembering just how atrocious bronze and silver players are, I decided to just do random shit and see how the opponents reacted. Both for fun and for material. The first game I was going to try to just mass gateway units off of one base against a terran player, but he surprisingly expanded to 3 bases and made a giant mech army. Turns out he was a gold player. My MMR had, after a successful worker rushing spree, poked too far up. Needless to say, the skill differential between myself and a gold level player is not so great that I could win by doing something so bad. The next game I attempted to go 4 command centers before barracks to prove my longstanding point that bronze players are painfully unaggressive, but the guy 4gated and killed me, which would have been embarrassing if his profile had not revealed him to be a platinum level smurf, like myself.

Rebuked twice now, I queued again and finally I met an actual bronze opponent. In between these games I met a fan of the blogs. We chatted while I played my game. Actually, I should say I chatted in lieu of playing my game. As I answered his questions and conversed, I stopped playing entirely. My minerals built up to the 1300 mark as I sat idly with only 2 marines to guard the otherwise empty base.

I vote we frag this commander.

When my conversation reached a momentary lull, I decided to use the extra minerals to plant down a pair of command centers. But again, I began chatting. My minerals peaked up to 1000 once more, along with the gas I had yet to utilize. Not worrying too much about the result of the game, I lackadaisically produced a few marines.

Meanwhile, my opponent was 3 raxing me. He had, suffice it to say, quite the army advantage.

A chickenshit outfit, indeed.

Somehow, despite attack moving with 5 times the number of units I had, he managed to fail. I think half his marines got stuck on the bottom of the ramp and spent their time in battle shooting a supply depot. I had begun frantically constructing various buildings with my massive amount of unspent money. By the time his second wave of units came, I had finished my construction, but he overpowered my few marines and charged into my base. Luckily, he neither attempted to camp my production or kill my workers. So, with the aid of a few SCVs and some newly-trained marines, I repelled his assault. By the time he attacked the third time, I had managed to make a medivac and 2 hellions to go along with the pile of marines. I roasted his expeditionary force, marched across the map, and killed him.

Like the last player, we had roughly the same APM. This was not his first ladder match, either. He had been bronze since season 1. He said "glhf" and "gg," so he was obviously familiar with Starcraft custom, maybe even aware of the Starcraft scene. He didn't scout close positions, so he was in possession of knowledge that I've found even some platinum players lack. He was clearly not a new player. Finally, we must assume he is of roughly equal intelligence to myself. I am neither a genius nor am I convinced that everyone in the bronze league is a retard, even if they act like one. If I were to operate under the assumption that everyone in bronze has a double-digit IQ, then it would be pretty foolish on my part to try to draw conclusions from the behavior of a group of actual idiots. They would simply be idiots, and there would be nothing to write about. Except, perhaps, about how idiotic they are.

Some may argue that this game is an example of a player with poor micro, poor macro or plain poor mechanics and not poor thinking. I disagree. Consider why he was doing the 3 rax. Was he expanding behind it? No. Was he teching behind it? No. Was he pulling SCVs and all-inning? No. So why was he 3 raxing? Because he was 3 raxing. And there ends the thought process. That's it. His only idea was some vague notion that if he made marines and attacked, he might win. So while he did indeed macro his marines up poorly and moved them with almost nonexistent micro, he most importantly had no idea what they were supposed to do in the first place.

The deadly rush.

This is the "cheese," that bronze players have to combat. This is what they believe is keeping them down. This, the failed 7 minute 3 rax rush against the guy who was letting his minerals repeatedly rise past the 1k mark. Let it now be said that there is no cheese in bronze. Because, frankly, what they do doesn't count. It's just too poorly conceived to be described as cheese.

In fact, actual cheese could be considered the best example of what I've been describing, that is, knowing what to do. When you 6 pool someone, you know precisely (if you aren't a bronzie) what you intend to accomplish with the strategy, that is, early damage. On the other hand, a bronze player 6 pools because they are afraid of getting attacked. If you cannon rush someone it's because you intend to end the game in a very specific manner. A bronze player cannon rushes because they get a wild hair up their ass and think it might be a good idea to build cannons somewhere in the approximate vicinity of the enemy base. Bronze "cheese" and real cheese are two entirely different animals because they come from two entirely different points of view. Therefore, bronze players attempting to cheese is perhaps the greatest example of them, more than anything, not knowing what the hell they're doing.

No way he'll ever find this.

Continuing with the theme of cheese, I'll go into a game I played on my platinum level account. It's not the highest level play, but it was a simple match that I think showed both myself and my enemy displaying a fundamentally better understanding of the game than a bronze player. What it doesn't show is particularly flawless macro or exceptional micro. Just basic decision making ability.

It was a PvZ on Antiga Shipyard, a map I have rarely seen in a real game because I have it thumbed down for worker rushing purposes. I spawned in the lower left position and my opponent in the lower right. This player decided to open up with a 7 pool, which is debatably cheesy. At any rate, it's an aggressive opening that necessitates a proper response. I had been going for a standard FFE, or at least my shaky imitation of one.

Fortunately for me, my probe scouted his shenanigans early. I responded as I had seen players much better than I am respond and built a pylon in my mineral line. After constructing a cannon, I built the rest of my buildings around the mineral line to protect myself.

It's not often that I play Sim City against an opponent who has more than a command center floating in the corner.

Behind all this, my opponent had taken his natural, thrown down a preemptive roach warren and was droning up heavily. I decided to 4 gate him, because I was unsure how exactly to proceed economically and figured I could hit a timing before he had adequate defenses.

My opponent utilized his now mostly useless zerglings in a most unbronze-like fashion. Rather than placing them at the pointless watch tower, he sat them in front of my base and periodically checked into my natural. With them, he caught a probe attempting to sneak out and construct a proxy pylon. While he was distracted, though I had sent out a second probe and built a pylon in his third. Aware of this possibility, he checked it shortly thereafter with some of his initial roaches.

It's more dramatic to play without health bars. And with the delete key taped down

His forces were now divided 3 ways: a third of them up a ramp, a third of them in his base, and a third of them waiting to be hatched. After my victory at the third, I marched into his natural and continued attacking. Unfortunately, I miscontrolled and did not land the rage-inducing, ramp-blocking forcefield before my sentry was killed by roaches.

Zerg players know.

Still, I had a large advantage from the skirmish at the ramp and I used my zealots to act as a makeshift forcefield while my stalkers shot down the roaches. After his hatchery in his natural died we exchanged GGs and he left.

That game wasn't amazingly entertaining, nor was it an incredible display of skill on my part. But for it to have even happened in the first place, it required both me and my opponent to have a basic understanding of the game. I knew how to react to a 7 pool while FFEing. He knew how to react if I scouted him. He knew if I didn't take an expand, I was probably either 4 gating or doing some other kind of one base strategy, so he made a bunch of roaches after he droned. He knew how important it was for me to get a proxy pylon, so we did a little back and forth as I tried to get one up.

Even though we both made mistakes, we were both making decisions based on the knowledge presented to us in game, and the knowledge we had from previous games. I didn't just sit in my base and make a bunch of units like a bronzie. I would have obviously lost if my 4 gate didn't hit at roughly the time it had.

We didn't have amazing mechanics. I had about 50 APM, he had about 70. Neither of us had superb macro or build orders. I fucked up and mined from an extra geyser I didn't need and so I had a bunch of extra gas. He had 800 minerals at one point that could have been spine crawlers. Our micro was pretty minimal. He focus fired with his roaches, I just made sure my zealots were in front of my stalkers and let everything attack move. Despite having a ton of gas, I never thought to make a bunch of sentries for whatever reason.

So were we that much mechanically better than a bronze or a silver player? Not really. I doubt a high masters player could tell the difference between me and a silver leaguer from that individual game. Yet my opponent or I would probably win 9/10 times against a bronzie because instead of doing whatever comes to mind, we have some understanding, albeit miniscule when compared to a pro-gamer, of how the game works.

The moral of the story is as follows: don't listen when a bronze player tells you he knows how to play, because he doesn't. That's why he's in bronze. It's not that he can't physically click as fast as other people. It's not that he doesn't have as much time to practice as other people. It's not even really because his mechanics are that much worse than other people's. He's bronze because he's thinking, and therefore playing, poorly. As soon as he pulls his head out of his ass and realizes what he's doing wrong, he'll be surprised how quickly he finds himself in gold.

Part IV: Boring crap

This was my going to be my "I play LoL now" blog, and end with a bit about me transitioning into maybe even writing about my League experiences. I had even written out my adieu to the bronze league ahead of time. But as this nears the 7,000 word mark, I find that there's still a ton of shit about the bronze league sitting in replays and strung along various word documents that I have yet to tell. But, frankly, I don't feel like doing it right now. It seems that there is no end to the stupid things that, by almost escaping description, demand themselves be described. I will leave them tucked away for another day.

Regarding LoL, since I started writing this, I have reached level 30 and transitioned into playing normal draft mode games. After I grind out a bunch of games to not only practice and improve, but to create at least basic rune pages for each role and unlock a greater variety of champions, I shall venture forth into ranked games. I don't believe Elo hell exists, but then again I didn't think worker rushing would actually work, either. And we all know how that turned out.

As to the release date of the next blog, well, Diablo III comes out in a month. Whether or not it sucks complete ass, a very real, if depressing possibility, will determine when I get bored enough to write more.

Part V: Bonus pictures

+ Show Spoiler +

Read the in-game chat bubbles bottom to top because I was too lazy to spend extra time cobbling them together in MSPaint this time.

Maybe he meant to type in "dominator."
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I'm sorry to have offended you so. You're clearly a reasonable person worthy of respect and dignity.
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Well, we had a meeting and we decided…
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Strangely, this was the one guy who didn't lift off his CC.
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One wonders how he found his way into ladder game in the first place.
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Firstly, how the fuck is what he's saying possible? Secondly, irony.
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Losing to a worker rush isn't normal.
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When he's not behind county bars for drinking a bit...
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I'm kind of a dick sometimes. OK, a lot of the time.
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Pretty sure we still don't need this guy.
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Wait, what?
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Yeah, I could lift off my command center, but that's like, so… conformist, man.
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When I say "attack move" do they think I mean "move" like a fighting game character or a breakdancer has "moves?"
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That was indeed everything I had.
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Hey buddy, I don't come down to your job and tell you how to mop the floors, now do I?
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Post-purchase rationalization.
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How do these two demographics overlap?
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zOula...

United States898 Posts

April 13 2012 07:26 GMT

Gheed strikes again!

Steveling

Greece10806 Posts

April 13 2012 07:39 GMT

That was so long. Like really long.

SiPa

Germany129 Posts

April 13 2012 07:53 GMT

The LoL part was boring to read, so I skipped most of it.
SC2 part was awesome as usual. keep on going :D

Grovbolle

Denmark3804 Posts

April 13 2012 07:57 GMT

Can't wait to read this, bookmarked for when I have time.

Gheed, you are a genius

FuRong

New Zealand3089 Posts

April 13 2012 08:11 GMT

Every time I think I'm gonna get some work done, I login to TL and there's a Gheed blog sitting there waiting for me.

Narcind

Sweden2489 Posts

April 13 2012 08:57 GMT

5/5, again

Zealously

East Gorteau22261 Posts

April 13 2012 10:06 GMT

5/5

MisterD

Germany1338 Posts

April 13 2012 10:06 GMT

On April 13 2012 15:58 Gheed wrote:
As to the release date of the next blog, well, Diablo III comes out in a month. Whether or not it sucks complete ass, a very real, if depressing possibility, will determine when I get bored enough to write more.

truth has been spoken. At least now i know, that, if diablo fails, not only bad things will come from it.

maybe you should embed a demo video of you doing exactly nothing but "press a, click ground" to beat a worker rushing opponent in one of your blogs. repeated at least 15 times in the same video, containing nothing else. Maybe, if they actually _see_ what they have to do, they will understand it better than when they only read it, written in words they'd have to think about to understand. x)

how

United States538 Posts

April 13 2012 10:34 GMT

#10

I love your work, and while I don't care if you start playing LoL, just don't stop playing starcraft!!

Sayle

United Kingdom3685 Posts

April 13 2012 10:37 GMT

#11

I'd pay $80 for some Gheed coaching. 5/5

klibrt

United States533 Posts

April 13 2012 10:43 GMT

#12

I've read all your blogs about worker rushing and bronze. 5/5 lol
God... I still can't understand the fact that bronze people just can't ... think?...

felisconcolori

United States6168 Posts

April 13 2012 10:59 GMT

#13

I have to say... I was in bronze when you started this. I'm in silver now. And while I am the object of your study, and you are none too gentle in your depictions, you still are hilarious and write fantastically.

Also, I think you are exactly right - it's not that lower league players can't mechanically grind out build orders or keep their minerals low (although that is certainly a factor) as much as we just don't know what to do, why we do it, or when to do it. Take the 3rax - Why am I running over and attacking at 7 minutes? I'm certain there's a timing involved - but exactly what it is, I couldn't tell you. Disrupt the smooth and orderly flow of the build somehow, and you can knock the whole execution to hell - because we may not know how to properly react and keep going or how to transition out of the opening build order - again, because we don't know what to choose or why we should choose it.

Also, I think it would be hilarious if you (Gheed) could get with Day[9] to discuss your findings. They are most amusing, and contain a lot of really good insight.
5/5

HwangjaeTerran

Finland5967 Posts

April 13 2012 11:18 GMT

#14

I guess the screenname DoppelBlock felt like doing this:
+ Show Spoiler +

To music:
+ Show Spoiler +

You are the white whale, Gheed. He is the Mariner.

In the end Barney and Friends saved him from committing the terrible crime of BM.
Barney and Mastodon

kerpal

United Kingdom2695 Posts

April 13 2012 11:23 GMT

#15

wonderful as ever

ShaLLoW[baY]

Canada12499 Posts

April 13 2012 12:19 GMT

#16

I totally started playing LoL as well about two weeks ago, never since BW has a game had me this hooked.

OmniEulogy

Canada6590 Posts

April 13 2012 13:22 GMT

#17

rofl 5/5 <3 Gheed

Clazziquai10

Singapore1949 Posts

April 13 2012 14:00 GMT

#18

Haha Gheed I thought your previous blog would be your last. Apparently I was wrong.

AWESOME 5/5!

Hulavuta

United States1252 Posts

April 13 2012 14:35 GMT

#19

Wow, Gheed. I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you are doing.

I've been working with several bronze players trying to help them improve and it's very frustrating just like this. Whenever they do something stupid, I ask them why they do it and they say "i dunno i felt like it." But now I realize...the best thing to do is just to tell them to think about their actions more. It's so much better than just "macro better"

Gheed, I'm going to spread your words as much as possible. Hopefully I can make a bronze or two change their minds.

FireSA

Australia555 Posts

April 13 2012 15:09 GMT

#20

Wow having only just read and posted in reply to part 3, it gives me much pleasure finding this. I haven't even read it yet, and yet I know I will enjoy it tremendously. Keep up the good work

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Bronze Part 4: A Legendary League

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