EPTOver the time I've played Starcraft 2, especially around the start of new seasons, I would see posts on Reddit about how people have finally made it to Masters. Some of these people would write out their epic tale of how they came from Bronze beginnings and fought their way through the leagues and eventually managed to reach the dream. Masters league.
I also wanted to make this post, with a little extra, to really show people that Bronze to Master isn't just a myth it can be done and people do make it. You don't have to be naturally talented or have any RTS history. I played MMOs; Starwars Galaxies + World of Warcraft for most of my gaming life. I look back on this regretfully now that I have discovered SC2 and wish I had played broodwar and SC2 at beta. I didn't but I have still made it to Masters. In about 1800 games.
Now this post is probably only marginally more acceptable than just posted a link to my promotion alert but I hope at least some people find some inspiration from this and head on to achieve their goals too.
The beginning:
I can't remember exactly how I was suddenly turned on to Starcraft 2. I know whatever sparked this curiosity led me to the Day9 Daily. This was about late June/July 2011. I would just lay on my bed watching Mr. Plott's enthusiasm and love for the game with awe and this very quickly bled through the VoDs and into me. I remember watching State of the Game (I'd heard of Idra and Day9 so I looked for episodes with them in) and Inside the game episode 1...
Unfortunately I have very few replays saved from this era or even through to about plat league. So I can't show much from this time. I began saving ALL replays on the 13th of December 2011 until this very day. I can however use sc2ranks.com to provide a graph that looks at my points/world rank throughout the journey though.:
sc2ranks graph
Here you can see I was originally placed into Silver league. I won 2/5 of my games after playing about 10 games in the preplacement matches thing? I forget what its called. I was using my bronze interpretation of Spanishiwas Ice fisher build. It consisted of me building only queens. I remember reading his build and his wording being vague, to my bronze mind, and I thought it meant Dont. Stop. Building. Queens. After being placed into silver I promptly lost 15 or so games in one sitting. I was demoted.
In August 2011 I received a coaching session from Apollo. He taught me how to 14/14 (and went through the basics of zerg and everything I need to learn) and I used this against all 3 races until at least Gold league but I think I used it into Platinum too. I found it very hard to find resources to learn how to play the game and have mostly learnt everything I know from playing Ladder games. For this reason my Late game is still fairly poor.
Later on, where I was promoted to Diamond I played on a second account. This was around the time blizzard had played around with their matchmaking system, making the people you could face much broader. I felt like this had allowed me to get an unearned promotion and so played this second account up to Diamond to make sure I was actually eligible to play in this league.
Second account sc2ranks graph
When I reached Platinum league, EG began streaming their team practice sessions. I realised that this kind of practice would help me too so I found a team. I joined eXe and am still a part of them. Having more people to surround myself with SC2 talk (as none of my friends in real life played for long before realising this game takes commitment to progress in and that they didn't have the same passion.) eXe forum website
And here are some more graphs showing the progression of my APM, injects, etc. from Plat-Freshly promoted Masters:
These are all from SC2Gears a replay analyser!
APM link
Games played/Month
for about 9 days in July I played 20+ games every day causing it to be my most productive month by far.
Inject time
All matchups
Promotion!
Thanks for reading and I hope you found some of this interesting and can see that with practice and commitment you too can make it to masters.
