I've never taken the time to go through SC2's arbitrary ladder system, but I've played quite a fair share of games - at least, enough to know where I stand. Personally, I'd rank myself in the high platinum, low diamond-ish range. As for my partner, a solid platinum. But together, we play like a couple of bronzes. In real life, we're practically best friends, but you'd never know it, because on battle.net, our teamwork is completely out of sync.
Is it frustrating? A little bit. Sometimes I cry a bit to myself after losing a game, knowing how I could completely destroy both of the opponents in a 1v1. But we stay 2v2 partners despite our consistent losses because we love playing with each other. We love experimenting with things like sharing control of units, flooding the map with 200/200 zerglings, or 2gating games, just to see how much anger we can evoke from the opponents.
Because at the end of the day, it's really, just a game. You play to have fun. Yes, as with all things, sometimes you may be frustrated or angry, or want to rage quit, but there really should be no excuse for the bm (especially since there has been so much of it on battle.net lately). Simply put, don't play a game if you want to be a douchebag. Play if you want to have fun.
But enough of the banter. Here's the story.
My 2v2 partner -let's call him George- and I met purely because of Starcraft. I've been playing it practically all my life, but never really knew of anyone else who did, so I kept it to myself. Then just a year ago, I met a friend who told me he was a SC player. I almost fell off my seat. I didn't realize anyone else even knew about the game, much less played it(Keep in mind, this was before all the SC2 hype). And through this friend, I met more and more people who shared an enthusiasm for gaming. It was like I had discovered a hidden network of amazing nerd friends. I finally had friends to talk to about my enhancement shaman with or complain to about my terribly low APM. I swear, I had a mini nerdgasm.
But I digress. Back to "George". We always knew of each other, but were never really friends. I played against him once in Starcraft1, but never again until SC2 came out. It started off as us just playing together every so often, just because we always saw each other online. And then we realized we had a class together and everyday, our conversations would be about starcraft. Why? Because that was the only thing we knew of each other. Besides us sharing a common interest in starcraft, we were complete strangers.
But eventually we got out of our pure geek phase and to sum it all up, he's pretty much one of my best guy friends now... Sorry to be anticlimactic, hehe. So... yea, it may be just a game, but god damn, it's an amazing game. Without it, I would have never gotten as close as I am to him right now.
So why did I put you through the torture of reading all of that? =P Partially because I wanted to introduce myself to you fellow TL-ers (Hi!), but mostly because I wanted to be able to share this with you guys...
One day in class, he starts doodling intently on a piece of paper. 15 minutes later, he gives me this.
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Despite how it looks on the picture, it's actually pretty small. Roughly about 3x3 inches in size. But nevertheless, I replied with a high-pitched "AWWWWWWWW" and a huge smile. I still have the drawing (somewhere) in my notebook right now. How do I return the favor? With this. It's incomplete, but you get the jist of it.
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The moral of the story? If you do something nice for a girl, she'll return the favor 10fold. If you learn anything from this tediously long blog post, let it be that (=
EDIT: My 2v2 partner saw this post and was a bit angry that I didn't give his name credit. His name is actually Raymond. RAYMOND. There, stop complaining, ya ungrateful fool ^^