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My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

Most of you here won't know me because I'm not really an active poster on this site, but I do check here everyday and read a lot of the stuff here because this is such a great community ♥♥♥

Anyway I'm a high gold Zerg who's had a lot of struggle and fear in ladder. This blog is just how I've over come my fear of ladder because I know/hope that other people out there are intimidated by the ladder like me.

When I first got the game I didn't go into ladder straight away, I told myself I would first beat a very hard AI 10/10 times before placing because I didn't want to place bronze. I was so naive... So after a week of lurking team liquid and devouring day9 daily's and various vods I was ready to play the AI. I beat the AI 10/10 games and was really happy I thought I'd place gold and maybe silver if I didn't play well. So grinning form ear to ear I clicked the find match button and every time I clicked that button my smile began to fade until I got to the last match... I was up against another zerg and I was depressed after having lost 4 out of 4 games so far so I did what any noob would do in this situation, 6 pool. I ended up winning the game, but it didn't feel like a win. I placed bronze and all my expectations were crushed. I told myself I'd keep laddering and laddering so I did and after 11 more games I was at win/loss of 1/15. I sucked and I was in bronze.

I stopped playing starcraft altogether. I continued to watch day9, go to team liquid and watch tournaments like GSL. After a month and a half I finally got the courage to ladder again so I did and I surprisingly won. I played again and I won then again, again and again. I was on a 5 win streak and I was so happy then I got crushed again and booted down to an 8 loss streak. I didn't stop playing starcraft this time, I stopped laddering for months. I played custom games before getting bored of it all and I wanted to get back into 1v1's so I came to this site to get practice partners and coaching. I met people here like derpy, zergtastic (SatuSPR) and many others who have helped me a lot I watched all these players progress and improve at an incredible rate and to be honest I was getting frustrated because in all this time I was still bronze. I started to wonder why it was that I was still bronze and I came to the conclusion that I cared about my status not my skill. It was the ladder lock time period before season 2. So what I did from here was what drastically improved my game play. I just laddered and laddered and laddered. When my placement came around I was matched even vs a zerg, it was like my last placement match I got when I first started the game. I got nervous and I lost confident in myself, but quickly overcame this because I said to myself I've been doing well in ladder because I want to improve. So I just played it out and won, I didn't place silver, but I was now being matched vs silver players and eventually I got promoted to silver after around 15 games. I was so happy I wasn't forever bronze anymore.

May be continued...


If you guys like what I've written and want to hear more then please tell me I didn't post the rest because I'm not sure you guys may like what I've written :\

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

Mmm I started out the same way as you did, watching lots of dailies and Husky casts on youtube even before I got my game. After I got the game, I did not play any team games as previously in War3, i played mostly team games which did nothing for my mechanics or tactics wise... 6 months into the game and I worked my way up from Bronze. Sure I had lots of loss streaks along the way but I didn't let it get me down and I hope you will be like that too! Diamond beckons, work your way towards that target!

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

If you can try and keep your current replays, when you hit diamond/masters (if you are dedicated hehe) you'll wanna watch them. Good motivation I think.
Sadly I lost all of mine T_T ('husky' one base roach all day every day!)

No harm in posting more

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

i liked your story/message and also the username DrunkPanda is awesome :P

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

Thanks for the feedback guys and thanks for the advice ZergGirl I'll do that

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

Cool story and congrats for having been rewarded for your efforts. I remember when I got promoted the first time, from bronze to silver, I was sooo happy too. ;-)

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

Keep it up mate. Ladder fear really stops progression, and once you've overcome that you can only start to get better and better.

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

These kinda writeups are always nice to read, but try to paragraph better next time, especially that 2nd long paragraph - my eyes just glazed over them :S

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

Kudos to you for overcoming your fear of laddering and realizing that you should focus on improving as a player, rather than which logo sit beside your name!

The way I see it, the more losses you endure; the more experience you will have obtained and lessons will be learned therefore you'll become a stronger player and promotion and all that other good jazz should fall into place. GL&HF.

Re: My Experience on Ladder and Growth as a Player.
 

I played very well in beta, but only got SC2 a year after actual release. RL stuff, yall know how it is. I'm no RTS noob, neither I'm completely clueless in sc2, but I still got placed in bronze.

There is nothing bad about being in low league. There is so much more you can do to improve, which is awesome. Sometimes I wish I was gold or plat, it would be sooo much easier

It is much better than being up in diamond for 2 moths, like me, and bashing my head in the wall over my own replays, because I still make stupid and obvious mistakes. This feeling that you know the build, you read your opp build, you perfectly know what to do and how to do it, you don't slip on macro, but are not perfect yet enrages so bad, you want to uninstall sc2 and never come back to it.

It's a point when you stop losing to all-ins and cheese, know all possible and impossible timings, can even tell # of workers your opp has without scouting, but still can't beat them. Because you make a ton of little mistakes. Your core goes up 2 seconds late, you chrono wrong warpgate, you focus wrong unit, you split army badly in response to incoming drop, you miscalculate your army power.

Misplaced forcefields start to lose you games, supply block at 140 supply loses you game, bad observer placement loses you game. Details and little things annoy much more than general mismanagement of forces, trust me )

Gl on your huge journey of improvement.