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Thoughts and Progress! 17/8/2012
 

Hi everyone!

This will be the first installment of many as I track my progress for the next few months. As most of you will know I have recently joined Exile 5 with the rest of Team Mastermind in order to form their sc2 division. This is actually a great bonus for me as I’ve been working on trying to make a sponsored team for quite some time now! While I am still very excited about now being able to go to events such as ACL, I am also worried about how I am going to improve so that I can perform at a competitive level. That partly brings about why I intend to do these blogs, just writing them will hopefully allow me to approach this game from a professional manner and look at things logically!

Currently I’m quite happy with my improvement, after putting my reps into SC2gears I’ve seen around a 40-50 apm increase (one of the areas I wanted to work on) since the start of the season along with a large improvement in my winloss recently. That being said I still have some very key areas I need to improve which I’m going to go over now. Also while looking at my stats I noticed something interesting which I will cover later!

Current aims for improvement:

PvT: I honestly have no idea how to play this matchup and never really have. My scouting is actually quite good, I can differentiate between the different builds and I rarely get caught off guard. My issue is that I have no idea how to react to what I scout or even how I am meant to micro certain situations/what units to actually get. While I know PvT is rather obvious i.e get 3-3, HT’s and Colo I struggle greatly in actually getting there, constantly dying in the mid game to large bio armies. My biggest issue currently is figuring out what the terran wants to do with his bio army in the midgame, as some terrans prefer to drop and harass while taking a third. While others just try to brute force their way up the ramp with 0 finesse and basically abuse marine/marauder/medivac when I don’t have splash (effectively shown by bomber recently). My way of working on making sure I can defend both possibilities is to get blink by 11 mins and splitting my army to cover the main drop drops and the front from bio. While this sounds stupidly obvious its not something I’ve ever given a great deal of thought to. What I want to achieve is to survive this period of the game more often, at the moment I think I’m at around 30% through the midgame against bio with most of my wins overall in the matchup coming from terrans who like 1-1-1 or 2base+ variants of this (basically mech lol). I plan on doing this by making sure I have enough production available (6 gates+robo) and a good colo bay timing (still figuring this out) so that I can take/defend a third and transition into the lategame. I’ll basically be making up the build as I go and learning what I need to do when to hold, I feel this will be better for me as I will have a style that is distinctly mine and I will know my reactions. I feel this is preferable Instead of copying the latest GSL protoss who comes up with something that clearly looks good but I know none of the information/decision making behind it.

Force fields: I feel that my force fields can be very sloppy at times. I tend to wait until the units are close enough that I can trap them, instead of trying to forcefield small parts in. While this sounds very minor it makes an incredible difference to the amount of units that I let in and is basically looking at the situation from a different perspective. Instead of “I’m going to try and trap/kill as many units as I can while still keeping the majority of my units alive”. I’m now looking at the situation like this “lets aim to forcefield them out completely while just cutting out the front layer.” Basically I want to lose 0 units while catching a very small part of theirs. Watching Grubby recently at IEM has “inspired” me to forcefield better as he flipped situations that I thought were unwinnable for him completely around.

Winrates for current season on SEA/NA:

PvP: 53-28 65%
PvZ: 52-22 70%
PvT: 28-32 47%

As you can clearly see PvT is the weakspot there, but here comes the interesting bit

Games streamed: 46, 20-26. 43% winloss

Games offstream: 169, 113-56 67% winloss

A >20% winrate difference between streaming or not seems absurd to me. While this is a little out of context since the people laddering may have been weaker/stronger during different times I feel that this is not the case. Watching my reps from streaming/not streaming it was very obvious to me that I play far better off stream. Whether this is due to getting distracted talking/music/random stuff or just from framerate drops (there have been a few) is something I need to find out and fix. What I intend to do in the time being however is stream myself laddering basically for fun, instead of for practice and to be competitive. I also tend to rage and talk about balance a bit too much, which lets face it, isn’t really all that enjoyable to listen to (unless its Spook then its ******* gold). Hopefully looking at it from a different mindset will improve that!

I will update at the end of the current season (2 weeks) with my thoughts and goals for next season. Thank you for reading and if you have any feedback/criticism I would love to hear it!