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In this blog I'm just going to go over what i got out of Season 4, and how much I've improved since the very start of the season.

I came back at the start of season 4 after a month break where I said "I'd never play again" after I lost embarrassing games at a Cydus tournament in Melbourne, after a month's break, I don't know what it was, but I just wanted to play to improve, and not really care so much, but only worry about learning, and getting better at the game. Throughout the whole season I have been playing A LOT. A lot to my standard anyway, despite coming into the season late, I still managed to finish the season with 1000 games played. (Though I did do a lot of that towards the end of the season, which I'll explain about in a bit).

At the start, I played to get better. Learning new strategies, playing 100% standard to make my macro play a lot better. I was just happy to be playing again, and having the motivation to play again after having a massive break from Starcraft. I was just playing at a good pace, because at the time, I never really did the whole 30-40-50 games in a day sort of thing, it was usually around 20 on the days that I did actually play.

Towards the middle of the season is when I started noticing I was getting better. I actually used Pezz as a benchmark for points, and worked my way up towards him, but thinking I would never catch up. Eventually I started catching up. One day I'd be ahead, then I'd wake up, and he would be 100 points ahead, and I'd catch up, until I got pretty close to getting into GM, I remember the day I saw my mmr go up above that promotion line, I was spamming games like crazy and cheesing every single one, hoping that next win would be a promotion. On that day I had played something stupid like 45 games by 3:00pm or something. I was going to sleep at like 9pm, and waking up at 5 just to play, because I liked playing really early in the morning a lot for some reason. Then I'm not sure why, but I just started playing like absolute shit, and I fell down pretty hard, but I wasn't too phased to be honest, I know that if I keep practicing the way I am now I'll get it next season easy. After the whole trying to push to GM thing, and that not working, it was a week out before ACL, so I decided I better stop doing gimmicky crap to get ladder wins and start practicing properly again.

ACL was great, meeting people I hadn't met before, and being able to compete in the open bracket was good fun, and getting to play on stage twice was great. Results wise, I don't think I did any better than I expected really. I expected to make groups, unless I got 2 players in my group with me like Jazbas + Glade, I didn't really achieve much more though, which would have been good. I played some pretty disappointing games in my group also. My mindset after ACL was that I have so long before the next one, since I'm not going to ACL Sydney, open bracket or not, that I have time to just practice and actually get good at this game for the next 6 months. Being told we were being replaced by the Xeria players at ACL was a bit of a dick move. Especially when our contract had like a month left, but what do contracts mean in Australian E-sports anyway. We were all pretty keen to leave after our contract had ended, so no biggie.
At this stage I'm over caring for teams after that whole ordeal. my aim is just to try and get as good as possible, and then when I do get picked up by a team, I can feel like I really do deserve it, for all the hard work I'll be putting in over the next few months.



As a player, I've noticed I'm always playing really well, or playing pretty shit. It doesn't feel like there is a middle of the road, and obviously the massive swings in MMR over my MMRstats for the whole season kind of shows this. This shows most of my games over the season, some aren't in there because I didn't have sc2gears open while playing sometimes. But judging from where I started, I'd say I've improved on average pretty well, when you look at the gradual MMR increase over the whole season., hopefully I can continue this into next season, so I can get pushed up above that line again!



So to finish Season 4, I have myself a clean 1000 games, which I'm pretty proud of, and I'm pretty keen to play a LOT more than that next season, with the bet I have with Mightykiwi. Most games played over the whole season pays the other $20, I'm pretty sure I've got this for sure
I ended up with exactly 1000 in a pretty strange way. I have had this friday/saturday/sunday/monday completely commitment free, so I had this brilliant idea, working out that the ladder would change to season 5 at 3AM Tuesday morning, but I was wrong.



On my original time, I thought I had to play around 45 games a day, and I was good, until it got to last night and I realised that after playing all day, the ladder was going to swap seasons at 5pm on Monday, and I had about 50 games to play if I wanted to reach my goal, so I decided to pull an allnighter, and this is the result - http://imgur.com/a/o3P4z
Almost 24 hours of constant sc2, and like 90 games played. i realise now that this probably wouldn't even help anything at all, since I was so ridiculously tired by the end, and you can see that by the losses where it's just me trying to cheese, but failing miserably, but I just really wanted to get that 1000.

So to conclude, I'd have to say it's been a successful ladder season for myself, and hopefully next season I can step up my game and make it into GM, and produce some better tournament results. Thanks for reading!