Would love to play, but don't think I'm any better than I was.

Amusingly, just as I was promoted, my illness (A sinus infection/cough) had a fun little resurgence that left me rather loopy. I ended up playing anyway, and losing a lot, so we'll see if I can recover any of that lost ground any time soon.

Trying not to worry about rank. The games are at least fun, even when I'm losing, though I was startled by the amount of cheese in the upper golds. All cannon rushes and the like. On the first day of my illness/losing streak, I was cheesed 4 times in a row by 4 different players. 2 cannon rushers, a zealot rush, and a 6 pool. All of them were gold or platinum, 3 of them beat me silly. I guess that's the difference between gold cheese and bronze cheese. Gold cheese works.

For my love of statistics and rating systems I made this table comparing SC2 leagues to KGS and USCF (US Chess) ratings.


I took the histogram of KGS and UCSF ratings from here: http://senseis.xmp.net/?RatingHistogramComparisons And applied it to the assumed 20% split of leagues in SC2.

A couple observations: The vast range of skills that the Bronze and Diamond leagues are put into perspective here. Low diamond starting at 1k? Imaging a 1k vs 9d in even match? (lawl) Same thing for Bronze, 30k to 11k is quite a stretch.

Also regarding the difficulty of CSamuri's experience, I can see how it would be hard for a rating system to determine the difference between an 11kyu (high Bronze) and a 7kyu (low Gold) for a game like SC2. For a perfect information game like Go this a 4 stone difference at that level is easy to detect, but SC2 has a much larger randomness/luck factor. Especially in lower leagues where players can easily be blind countering each other randomly. So for SC2 the equivalent skill difference is much harder to measure/rate.

If I felt like I was low gold I could understand it, however, as I play I've come to believe I'm not. I'm mid to high gold at least, so it's more like the difference between 5/4k and 11k. Even if what has happened is that the lower ranks add a certain amount of randomness, the system is slightly broken.

However, I do have an explanation for the problem.

Reviewing my games, I'm highly susceptible to early game pressure by protoss and terrans. Rush builds (Friekin zealot rushes) can make my best builds look pokey and slow. I invest heavily in economy, and, for a great while, early expanded every game. It taught me a bit of a lesson about balance, though, so it improved my game overall.

Rush games, that is, builds that are all or nothing rushes like zealot rush builds or agressive 4 gate, or the like, tend to be executed a lot at lower skill levels. The players lack the capability to play longer games, so they try to rush and win on the first push every time.

So, when playing more temperate players, who are content to try to match me build for build, I fare well, but when playing highly agressive players, who try to overwhelm me early, I fare poorly.

Which puts me in the odd position of winning against golds, and losing against bronzies.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that you don't see high level rushers. I've had quite a bit of cheese and rushes, particularly from terrans, but at gold, you still see a lot more solid build, solid play.

I had to learn to beat the rush, learn to scout and build a defense and macro up under fire, before I could get out of bronze, even though my play was better than most bronze.

My play is better now than it was a few weeks ago, and I hope to keep improving, but I think I'm about where I belong, squarely in gold. My points/ladder position are rediculous, another broken signal of player skill, but I guess that's to be expected for 800 games. I'm looking forward to that 500 1v1 wins as protoss acheivement, which should come around any day now..

That's what I meant by blind counters. The people who rush you were blind countering your style because it wasn't balanced. This sort of thing increases randomness of results. And some other guy is bunkering up every game and going to carriers and beating the guy doing the 1-base allin.

Hey guys, Usagi here.

I've decided to stop playing Go for a while to focus on my Starcraft II. Actually you may have guessed something like this since I haven't been on KGS playing KIL or my Alpha league games this month.

So I decided to try my hand at casting. My first attempt is somewhat rough but my second (which I can't upload to youtube since it contains copyrighted music -- anyone know an alternate source?) and third (especially my third) are where I finally fix the audio problems and try my hand at overlays and such. For my fourth and fifth I will be working using a teleprompter but I haven't had time to edit the raw footage yet. Anyways check out usagistarcraft live cast #3! Feedback welcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWf9SpdcDLU

don't forget to select HD - you can watch it in 720p ^^

-

This made my brain explode.

http://www.gomtv.net/2011gslsponsors1/vod/60080

Yeah, the first game was probably the most suspenseful SC2 game I've seen yet, really brought out the "S" in RTS. I'm sure Nada's kicking himself in the foot for g1 and especially g3.

I accidentally spoiled myself on that link. I had meant to watch those games tonight. =/ I did really enjoy the Idra versus Jinro series. Good stuff. However, most importantly,

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

Proper link: http://www.gomtv.net/2011gslsponsors1/vod/60080

Where have you been for my tournies?

ETA: I watched your video, here is a cool trick you could use: Several times you shift-clicked one SCV to build several buildings in a row. It's better to box select a bunch of SCVs on the mineral line, and then give the build commands. The AI will pick different SCVs to build each one all in parallel.

Idra vs Jinro was pretty wild.
MK vs NaDa was one of the most insane series in GSL history.
Definitely the best single day in GSL4 so far.

I decided to try something interesting with a standard 1 gate FE to 5 gate build in a PvT against a 2525 M. The map was Delta Quadrants, and for those unfamiliar with this map you have a nat that's close to you and protected...the problem is that it's blocked by a rock that you have to destroy before settling...or do you? I decide, as ugly as it was, to try and execute the build regardless and plant a Nexus next to the rock instead. I didn't want to expand to the nat below the ramp because it is wide open and harder to protect.

It was hard to judge from the income tab on whether or not this is feasible because of MULEs and the difference in worker counts for both sides. My intuition says this isn't feasible, but at the same time I didn't notice a different in production of army and probes off 5 (and later 7) gates in this scenario. It has me wondering whether or not the rock really does *block* the nat...

Anyways, the replay is here: http://sc2.replaycraft.com/game/22320/1 ... -Dwoggurd/ - I botched the build a bit, but yeah...thoughts?

I suspect that it lowers the income from the nat by a certain % based on the extra worker travel time, but you can also offset that by just pumping out more workers (it basically takes longer for the nat to be fully saturated). If the extra income early is worth it vs. waiting to bust down the rocks, it might be feasible. Probably requires some hard numbers from testing...

_________________
1k KGS

Building your nexus away has two main impacts:

1. Reduces immediate income right after you build your nexus. A corollary of this is that it takes much longer for your new nexus to pay for yourself and increases the timing window where you are vulnerable.

2. Increases the amount of workers you need to saturate it, and consequently the time needed to saturate it.

Based upon this I would say that it is generally bad unless you are getting that nexus for a specific purpose of wanting extra gas income and minerals are unimportant. I've been playing with the 1 gate -> fast expo build of yours quite a bit since I got crushed by you in that last tourny, and my observations are that minerals are stretched quite thin trying to get up defenses against all the possible threats during that timing - banshees, mass 3/4 rax pushes, teching in time not to fall behind in mid game...etc. The map itself seems to me to encourage a faster THIRD base as opposed to a quick 2nd base followed by massing and teching. So probably you could get 3 gates, do some pressure, then expo with the understanding that your 3rd is easier to take and hence you can turtle a bit more?

I see...makes sense. I think I'll try it out a few more times though, just to get a feel for how much difference it really makes.
Indeed, which is why I usually execute the build on larger maps in cross positions (not to say I haven't tried (and more often than not failed)) as I feel it narrows the vulnerable timing window considerably to make the build strong.
Yeah I agree; I've been working on 3 gate expanding, mostly from watching Liquid`Tyler's stream who seems to be fond of it in PvT and PvZ, but still trying to get the timings down and making sure to be flexible when I scout something that requires a change.

Thanks for the feedback!

This also seems like an interesting idea: if you need a third hatch (especially as zerg with gas-heavy lair units, you can take a rocked expansion, and just put the hatch by the gasses if they're together. Might or might not be worth it, but it's interesting.

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

And you get the convenience of having more larvae spawn . Now that I've thought about it, it seems Protoss is the worst race to try this expansion-by-the-rock idea. It's cheaper for Zerg to do this (by 100 minerals) and there's the extra larvae benefit, whereas for Terran they can destroy the rock later and lift off the CC to adjust. The only side benefit for Protoss is more chrono-boosts.

I could argue the cost (losing a drone is always sad), but I'll definitely consider this option any time I need a macro hatch and haven't taken the rocked expo. If I'm getting the hatch ANYWAYS, it may as well go to bonus-usage, and I can always plant a proper expo hatch later. Thanks for the suggestion! (And from a terran perspective, you can consider the bonus of 'free' supply/mules/scans in addition to the gasses.

Remember, though! I'm in bronze! =D My theorycraft is questionable.

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

Oops, yeah I forgot about the drone loss. Every blue moon when I play Zerg, because I play so much Protoss I still end up shift-queueing a drone to the mineral line after commanding it to morph into a building, giving the drone a sliver of hope that it will resurrect from the creep and go back to mining .

Hey, if an enemy/ally unit HAPPENS to enter the area the building would be right before the building goes up, said drone gets to mine once more!

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