Two seasons ago, I started laddering on a regular basis. I set out with a goal in mind, work my way up through the ranks while working on my mechanics, my league target then was gold and around a week or so ago, I hit that target. I still remember the match that got me promoted, oddly it was against a bronze league Zerg on Frost who's only response to my Skytoss build was mass hydra. No corrupters, just hydras as far as the eye could see which melted rather quickly to my 3-3-3 VR/Tempest/Phoenix/Accidental Carrier/Zealot/Stalker composition.
Once I hit the score screen, it hit me. The "You've Been Promoted!" screen, I was surprised to see that pop up. I didn't feel like a gold leaguer, I felt like a silver leaguer who had just crushed some poor hapless bronze who's MMR was apparently either similar to mine or Blizzard broke something again, one of the two.
Now I've spent a week or two in Gold I felt it was time to reflect upon my promotion and my goals in ladder going forward. Honestly I don't feel like I should've been promoted given my recent form. My winrates have plummeted and I'm really struggling across the board. My PvP especially has gone down the shitter mainly because apparently gold league PvP is cheese or be cheesed or something and given I consider myself a more macro orientated player who's not good with early aggression I die a lot to the ever so common proxy 2 gate. It frustrates me seeing people cheese in PvP at this level when I see silver leaguers and even bronze leaguers try to macro and not end the game in 10 minutes.
PvZ for me is really not that much different although now I can see where I need to improve a lot more when I lose, I sit back, open up the replay and pick myself apart. There's only been 1 game where I've wanted to strangle the guy I was playing for going mass speedling into muta cloud which I consider dumb and near impossible to counter
PvT is a mixed bag, there are moments I revert back to my old BM self whenever I get rolled by the usual marine/marauder/medivac stim a-move + t when I have my deathball, but after a while I adapted and mixed storm in as quite a few Terran seem to just clump their army up and don't micro too well, I still have a few games where the deathball does absolutely nothing but melt to bio even with storm + collossus which pisses me off a lot. Another thing I've learnt to hate is Ravens, those seeker missiles are dumb, 3 ravens with seeker missiles proceeded to decimate my 3-3 deathball so the 1-1 bio army could mop up what was left.
Raven OP whine aside, I want to be back in silver, I didn't roll everyone in there, hell my overall winrate wasn't even above 50% when I did get promoted and now it's leaning dangerously close towards 40% but with 20 days to go in the season there isn't anything I can do about it other than toughen up and stick through it and hope for the best. I'm not going to aim for Plat or Diamond yet, I'm just not ready, for now I think I'll settle on stabilising in gold, get my win rates to around 50% across the board, not get tilted as much and expand my build order knowledge while calming the fuck down when I die to cheese/Terran bio. As well as rekindling my love for PvP (if that's possible given the current state of gold league PvP )
Now to wrap things up with a picture of my PvP bonjwaness (lol) so one day I can look back on this and call myself a scrub!