Congratulations, Yoyoduck!

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

3 rax: it's impossible to stop.

It's unpossible!

Today was a day of cheese.
Normally I don't see much cheese any more, but I had a guy six pool me, which destroyed one of the two gates I threw down to wall off, but didn't stop me from beating it back, and a guy cannon rush me on Steppes of War. I beat both of them, but it makes me wonder, why are cheesers in silver and I'm in bronze, beating them down?

Of course, only the 6 pooler was in silver. The cannon rusher was amateur hour all the way, an early bronze.

But still. 6 pool is easy to beat. I mean, the first thing I did was learn to recognize a six pool, and defend against it.

Are there really people who die to a 6 pool in silver and gold?

I'm 20 games up, which means it's time for the matchmaking system to match me against high golds, watch me lose 10 games, and match me against low bronze again, since this seems to be the cycle.

Any golds/plats out there who would like to play practice games with me? I need terran/protoss players more than zerg, but I could use higher level zerg players to build mutalisk mobs for me to die to. Protoss and Terran I die to pretty much everything, so I need a lot of training there.

Something happened today.
Something no one cares about but me.
Something no one will notice.
I got promoted to silver.

Still winning, so I must be doing something right, though my last win could have easily turned into a loss had my opponent A) pushed, or B) built something to kill my zealots, rather than more stalkers, sentries, and immortals.

I've been experimenting with 1 base zealot void ray builds, but I did a fast expand this game, and was behind in unit count for about half the game. But all he built was stalkers and sentries, so I upgraded to chargelot, and stomped him.

Yay, the system is finally starting to wise up! For those who don't know, this guy has played 800 games and has so many points that he's already #1 in his Silver division!

By the way, I still have trouble with 6-pool when it's on a 4-player map and I don't scout it early :/

It's a Christmas miracle!

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1k KGS

Am I at 800 games already? I really should slow down.

I didn't even notice that I had taken #1 already. See me trying not to worry about rank.

Pix or it didn't happen!

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19/02/2011: this grumpy person takes a voluntary holiday from L19.

My thoughts on the ranking system, after promotion.

I was recently promoted from the top 500 of bronze, straight to the top 2000 of silver. They left me enough points that I was placed at rank 2 of my silver division, and the games I've played since have shown a higher quality of build and macro than bronze, but not so much higher that I could tell when they slipped bronze players in on me.

So, Ideally, what a ranking system would look like is:

Skill 0-100 Bronze
Skill 100-200 Silver
skill 200-300 Gold
skill 300-400 plat
Skill 500-XXX Diamond.

I think it actually looks more like this...

Skill 0-200 Bronze
Skill 50-250 silver
skill 100-300 gold
skill 200-400 plat
skill 300-XXX Diamond.

I think there's some broad overlap, and I think that through an error of skill calculation, or just because of this overlap, the top 1-2% of the divisions are actually wildly misranked.

I mean, really, going from 100th percentile bronze to 99th percentile silver is /gratifying/, I will give you that, but it hints that the system is broadly and systemically broken.

Then again, maybe they just weren't planning for a total noob to play 800 games and not get all that much better. I may be breaking the curve just by quantity over quality. I play 5-10 games a day, on work days. I sometimes play upwards of 20-25 on days off. You'd think with this much play that I'd be vastly improving, but I still struggle with a lot of things.

Mostly, I struggle with nerves. I know what I need to do, and doing it is, generally speaking, not a huge issue. But when I'm startled, or see something I didn't plan for, or get attacked, I get nervous. I get doubly nervous when I'm playing a terran because they have so many options for beating me, each of which requires a different build. 3 rax.. I don't know what to build to beat that, since nothing I do works. Sometimes I get lucky and can rush out a collosus before they get down to attack me. Banshee harass, I need 3-4 gate robo to hold it off to start, transitioning into phoenixes to end it longer term. Thor Rush: I don't know how to beat this due to the SCVs being impossible to kill. Immortal/collosi with a mix of stalkers and zs sometimes have some success, if the thors don't have barage cannons to take out the heavy hitters. If they do, wave goodbye to my base.

I try to stay calm, and not panic, but depending on my nerves, my plans often fall apart under harassment.

I guess that's why, after 800 games, I'm just chobo at everything.

Some goals for the new year:
Don't Panic
Enjoy Cheaper Observers
Make More Probes
Play for fun

I feel the same way. So far, the best thing I've found to calm down is NOT to do breathing exercises or whatever, but to engage in the game and just consciously return to the basic question, "What is the current game situation (The eternal go questions actually apply: 1. Am I weak? 2. Is he weak? 3. Where is the largest point?), and what move do I want to make as a result?" No matter the match-up, basic scenarios tend to re-emerge, e.g. They've got more units and I've got better tech; or They've got static D that is making it difficult to scout them; etc. Then I can simply confidently do whatever I've decided is a good response to that situation, and if it's a new situation then I decide after the game what I want to try for next time.Try 3-Gate Robo, it works surprisingly well. Just make Immortals (the bane of Marauders), and don't tech to Colossi until after you've got two bases up and running.Yeah, Banshees still terrify me, along with Mutalisks and speedlings. That said, get Blink! It's such a good upgrade for the price, and it will be good in any fight, not just for killing Banshees.Yeah, I haven't had much success against that either, but the patch will make it easier for us, since we should be able to a-move our Zealots to kill the SCVs. I think the basic strategy is that you want enough Immortals and Stalkers that you can just focus the Thor and damage it faster than they can repair. You don't actually need all that many units to be able to do that, but if they rush it really fast, it can be hard to deal with.

Arghhhhhhhhhh PvT is driving me insane. I still can't believe I make this 20-kyu mistake.

My PvZ's been getting better, but I'm still working on how to handle aggressive ling pressure on Blistering Sands. Once the rocks are out it becomes quite annoying. I watched HuK's stream where he went 3-gate forge to expansion which was interesting but his opponent didn't put that much pressure on him with lings.

PvP is just dumb. It's nothing but a 4-gate derpfest. A good, aggressive 4-gate will absolutely wreck any robo or FE build, and will only really fail to either a K4G (another all-in) or very good 1-2 CB'd gate aggression from what I've seen. It's pretty sad to hear people beginning to call it standard when it's just such a lame build. Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong about this though (which is the point of this post) - if anyone has any pro-level replay (current patch) where an aggressive 4-gate (specifications: 1 gas, gates built at 24, 16 on minerals, 1 zealot + 6 stalker push in < 6 min.) gets taken out by a robo build (e.g: 3-gate robo) or, even better, to someone who expands and still manages to defend the push, that'd be great. Of course, if Time is still lurking here and would offer insight on it that'd be great too .

I'm so not qualified to comment on any of this. I will say some maps, especially maps with destructable back doors, seem to favour ling agression more than other, more air oriented maps. It's gotten to where I really prefer things like metalopolis and lost temple, because at least then I know what the zerg are going to try. Securing burning sands makes me cry, against zerg or terrans.

As for PVP..
I am still only playing gold players, so all my ideas are probably wrong, but I've had some good success with a 2 Warp, Stargate, TC chargelot/VR build. But, my opponents generally wait until about 8 minutes to attack, so maybe that gives me more time, and at my level, micro isn't so great, so the 2 void rays I can have by 8 minutes really clean up.

Build order is something like..
9pylon
12gate
16p
16->when gate finishes->Cyber
16->zealot
21 Gate
as cyber finishes, stalker, and research gateway
24ish, gas
26ish, pylon, stargate
zealots, workers, pylons, and a void ray as money makes available, void ray should be affordable just as the stargate finishes if I haven't overstacked my nexus.
as the void ray is building, drop the twilight council, and start researching charge, chrono boosting it repeatedly. When the void ray finishes, push another out with CB. Chargelots kill stalkers, Void rays kill immortals and zealots. Weak against airforce builds, so I like to run a chargelot out ahead to see if they've been spying on me and I need to build stalkers. Once the second void ray is out, I usually drop some money on expanding to 2 base while making my push.

Pushing early to chargelot should take out early stalker agression, and VRs eat gateway units for breakfast. At my level, it's giving me some surprising success, but I don't know how well it would hold up against platinum and diamond play. I met a clever silver who had gone hard into blink stalkers who ran me around the map a little, but, if I'm careful not to let the stalkers stand on a cliff and shoot at the void rays, it goes ok even against blinkies.

I'm not terribly fond of this build because it's a fairly blind build. No observers means that if they go early robo, they can scout and go really hard into stalker zealot mix, or pop out some phoenix, and try to out airforce me. I've once been surprised by a dark templar back door drop too, since they scouted my lack of robo.

But, against most 4 gaters, at my level, it has cleaned up, so it's what I've been focusing on.

Funnily, the Liquidpedia claims that PVP is all about the collosus.

I really think the best counter for protoss is to be playing terran.

Oops!

Also taking this time to say I've never casted an EMP. lol! For serious!

I have used a nuke in TvT to break a tank line. He unseiged and retreated, then I rushed in, and then.... The nuke landed on me! Ahahahaha fail!

Fun Triva: FrozenArbiter is a former go player

But unfortunately the current Jinro[4d] on KGS isn't him. Would have been really impressed with a player being top at SC2 and 4d in go.

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Sanity is for the weak.

On a winning streak, again. I'm worried, though.. it feels more like I'm winning because my opponents suck (bad macro, slow builds, predictable unit choice) than because I am doing anything right.

How many of your wins do you just accept that your opponent is going to make a huge glaring mistake and you're going to roll them?

Granted, 500 games ago, my game was so full of errors I couldn't have punished those mistakes, but I'd rather have a game that is back and forth, edge of my seat, with a desperate push to win, than the methodical destructions I've been handing out today.

On second thought, no, never mind, keep pairing me with the golds who can't build anything but zerglings and roaches.

I like the boost to my rank.

Maybe I'll make gold soon.

One day I decided to just start going for ghosts in TvP even though I wasn't comfortable with it. I have a half dozen games or so where our two armies meet, I'm maybe 15 food behind out of 80 something, and I have a single ghost with 75 energy and lots of marine maurader with stim, and I just end up steam rolling the protoss army. Like it's not even a close battle.

EMP is just soooo good. It's easily on par with psionic storm in my mind. Zerg doesn't really have any stomp spells like that, which makes me sad :'(

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1k KGS

Used it for the first time just awhile ago! o/

I'm golden.

Weird to be losing games again. Have to remind myself that it's allowed.

Awesome, the karmic Starcraft Gods have clearly come to their senses! Congrats Platinum just round the corner now

I take a trip for a week, and the world is turned on its head. Congratulations! Maybe I should try bullying you into practicing with me again. =D

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].