Welcome to 6 Pool! I am a Zerg player on NA and I wanted a repository for my thoughts and resources on StarCraft, particularly StarcCraft II.

I played the original StarCraft quite a lot, but not much Brood War

I enjoyed WoL and HotS and played them some.  I don't want to say I was casual because I actually really stressed about ladder game and tried to improve.  But I was trying to get better at a game; I wasn't on a personal journey of mastery.

Now I'm back in LotV, and my disposition has changed.  I've started to see the huge amount of work that will be required for me to even approach being the best player I can be, and I'm interested in doing that over a period of years.  I'm willing to face failures to improve.

I came in right before 2017 Season 3 started. I have 32 games played this season, and my win rate has climbed to 70% over the last 14 games.  I started in Gold 2, and just got promoted to Plat 2.  I feel like Diamond is in reach.

My ZvZ is really strong right now.  My ZvP is a bit aimless but I'm still winning most of the time.  My ZvT I feel lost but I'm still winning about 50%.  I could probably coast to Plat 1 on my current play.  I think when I'm at my best I'm clearly stronger than the opponents at this level, but at the same time sometimes I fail to execute at the level I'm capable of.  Consistency matters.

The biggest obstacle for me is limited play time.  I have a toddler and an infant, as well as a slow DSL connection that is shared by 4 other geeks.  Sometimes I have to GG because the baby woke up, sometimes I get disconnected because someone started an update, and lots of days I don't play at all.

I'm 43, but I naturally focus on mechanics and my 100-ish eAPM is higher than nearly every opponent I've faced at this level (average of 65 eAPM) so I don't think my speed will be a liability anytime soon.  It was weird to realize that.  I've always though of myself as a lower APM player who wins through sheer efficiency and decision making, but I started spreadsheeting my games and it isn't true.  I'm 50% faster than they are and it's an edge I won't keep as I climb to higher leagues.

Maybe one day I can reach Masters. That sounds like trying to get to the Moon right now so I'm just going to focus on the next step.  But at the same time, I'm not telling myself I can't.  I think if I actually try maybe I can.  I don't know where my ceiling will be.

Let's find out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adrenal for your keyrate

Image
Someone posted that they'd found a way to dramatically increase their keyrate in Linux, and that brought me to wonder if it can be done in Windows.  Turns out it can. I found this discussion on Stack Overflow , which provided sourcecode and also linked to the executable on GitHub. The program is called keyrate, and you just open up a command prompt and type keyrate followed by 2 numbers, like this: keyrate 150 20 This sets a delay of 150ms before beginning to repeat, and a delay of 20ms between repeats. I set mine to 150 and 10 and I rather like it. You can see the result below: Holding down 'D' is also valid. It appears that setting a repeat delay shorter than 10 has no effect.  1 or 2 or 5 are not noticeably faster than 10 even though they should be very obviously faster, so there is perhaps a floor on what Windows will allow.  Your directory in the command prompt needs to have access to the file location, either by path or by changing the current dire...
Read more

Inject Methods

"Injects" refers to using a queen's Spawn Larva spells on hatcheries to increase larva production.  This is a fundamental Zerg mechanic and it forms the foundation of the macro cycle for a Zerg player.  It is normal to be injecting 3-5 hatcheries and during the early and mid-game it is important to perform this task every 30 seconds without much delay.  A number of different methods have been developed by players to streamline this task and those methods will be the main focus of this post. The question of how to perform an inject sequence is really the sum of 3 different questions: How do I select my queens to inject? How do I issue the Spawn Larva command? How do I manage my camera location during this process to facilitate selecting the hatcheries? Each inject method must answer these 3 questions, and for the most part the answers to each part can be mixed and matched among methods.  This guide will be broken into 3 sections: The three questions ...
Read more

Larva Usage Factor, or Why You Might Be Macroing Wrong

Image
Introduction In the 101 post on Larva Economy  we looked at larva production and spending larva with some round numbers. In this post we will take a harder look and use more exact numbers.  I started writing this as part of the 101 series on production-income matching, and then I fell down a Nydus Wurm and when I came back up it was clearly not 101 material anymore.  I also want to note for anyone who doesn't know that Ctrl-Mousescroll or Ctrl +/- will change the zoom level on most browsers so you can see the graphs better. The big punchlines if you don't want to read all of this are: Stacking injects is really important if your queen is building up energy. It is better to spend your larva separately from your inject cycle but it is okay to do it all in one shot while you are learning. If both are available to be done, it is better to spend larva first and then inject. The zerg macro cycle is really more complicated than 30 second cycles.  It tak...
Read more