Another day of games another day of getting stomped.

Really Blizzard Really…. giving me Terran so many games in one evening, what have I ever done to offend you so!, well enough with the silliness.

Playing random really give you a good idea of what races you are good at and what races you are NOT I should probably run some statistics on my winrate’s while playing random. Because it is kinda interesting to see how things work out. I would guess my winrate with toss is decently high, with Terran quite low and with Zerg around average.

I feel like I have just had a double losing streak, first meeting decently high ranked ppl compared to myself diamonds and high plats, then I had my terran streak vs high plats and now I am meeting mid plats, if I get a streak with other races now I will probably demolish. I could imagine my MMR swinging quite a lot while playing random just because of the random nature of it.

Now its soon weekend and I won’t be able to play there and than I will most likely play a lot Monday until midnight and then its D3 time!

Soooo much cheese…

Ok so i am used to some extent of cheese / allins but last night where insane. I think I had around maybe 1-2 straight up games out of 12'ish games the rest where terribly annoying cheeses / allins. I am talking everything from proxy gates, hatch in your main, cannon rushes, thor hellion, mass blue flame hellions, 4 gates. You name it they did it.

I Don’t usually have any issues with allins because I usually do som “decent” scouting not really timed out or anything but I am usually pretty good at getting a read, but one of the things I down prioritize when I haven’t played for a while is scouting, putting all my focus towards macro / micro and just trying not to fuck up too bad in general.

When you just keep going up against allins that really punishes you quite harshly.

So I guess the point being, you just can’t neglect scouting at this level at the very least check the fucking natural expansion jesus how terribad can I be...

A little update

Hi since i havn't updated the blog for a while I thought I should do a short update.

So I will just go though some of the games i have been playing as of late.

Dota2 Beta: Got the beta a few weeks ago and have been playing it a little bit I am not that into it compared to the original it lacks quite a few things to be fun to play for me. So I will most likely not end up buying this game, i would actually prefere playing LoL at this point, I am looking forward to Blizzard dota really looks like they are going to take a diffrent approach. than the standard moba game.

Forca motorsport 4: decently fun allthough i can't play driving games like u are suposed to. I like arcade drivers way more so i end up using the other cars as my breaks in this game as well but that is unfortunently not what you arer suposed to. I don't really like the controls while turning either it feels very much like either you turn very hard or dont turn at all. It feels like the game really si suposed to be played with a specefic controler which i am not willing to invest in.

Trials evolution: This game is Really fun and challanging and really frustraiting at times. this is probally the game i enjoy playing the most at the moment.

Tera Online Beta: I played the open beta for a little bit up to around lvl 10. It really proved to my self how unintrested I am in MMO's the only thing i really enjoyed about that game was the art style.

Starcraft 2: Well i'm offc still palying sc2. Right now i am playing in platinum as random in the same leauge / Division as Fafner he is in front of me right now. But i will offc make sure to be in front at the end of the Season!

10 Games in one evening.

I Almost never get to play that amounth of games in an evening but had the opputunity and thought why the hell not.

One of the issues with changing race is the amounth of games i have lpayed with the race is kind of low especially 1 on 1 so probally just have to play alot to get a feel for the timings and what to look outfor especially in regards to droning, like i said in an earlier post i tend to end up with a tone of drones and then just die. and i guess the best way to prevent that is just to get alot of experience with when, what and how to scout and adebt accordingly and alot of games should end up helping with that.

Well back to the 10 games

out of the 10 games 6/10 where ZvZ i tend to play quite agresively with a semi allin tactic that you can adabt from i did this strategy and it worked quite well and got 6/6 wins in ZvZ

ZvT is a horrible Matchup for me I don't really feel confident in teching to tier 3 even though i should and actually have the money for it due to my macro falling apart,
3/10 of the gamesl ast night where ZvT and I lost the first 2
the games i lost felt like i should have won but didn't.

In my last ZvT i meet a fellow dane where i managed to hold off his blue-flame hellions (he could have done huge damage had he been a little more brave) but after that he keept extreamly pasive trying to take bases i did a semi stephano'esc build with infestor ligngs into ultraliscs and did a large number of zerglings run bys into his 3'rd /natural / main and it worked out btter than it should have and at the final battle i demolished him.

ZvP i only meet 1/10 and well he did a 2 base "allin" taht i so should have been able to hold off with my 3 base but at some point i managed to lose my third aand he could safely expand behind it and everything slowly feell apart from there.

all in all i won 7/10 games which is pretty decent but it was mostly due to my ZvZ

Changing race… again.

Well I felt like I wanted a change and I always enjoyed playing zerg so yeah swapped playing to zerg again, and the usual issues arise, I have no timings down at all and I get some ridicules losses.
A few examples:

1: A Terran tries to bunker rush me builds 2 bnkers and 4-5 marines come I manage to pick off the majority of the lings before they could enter one of the bunkers the other bunker did not finish and completely shut it down could without taking any drone losses or even building to many lings.
Then I drone up HARD and as I a teching for infestors 2 drop ships comes in drops 16 marines and I die.

2: A Protoss does a stanrd 6 gate 1-1 timing and I have absolutely nothing but 1 hand full of lings I even think I did a decent job of having lings around the map but he must have had a probe out somewhere on the map, and I got wasted.

3: A Terran does fast 2 factory 1 reactor play and I shut it down cold and I assume he expands after it, needless to say he did not and at around the 9-10 min mark 4-5 tanks marines and the hellions comes rolling in and im not at all ready for it just gotten my third up preparing for going into mutas. Again only having 2-3 spines and 2 queens and 1-2 handfull of lings.

Most of my losses really end up in silly stuff where im like ohh god had I only scouted better I wouldent have had any troubles what so ever.
I guess that’s the huge thing with Zerg and I feel like I actually jut need to play a lot to figure things out, I think my macro is decent (Except for overlord production I really need some kind of way to remember to build them.

Hklan conclusion,

I where at a lan last weekend and it was as always quite fun I ended up in what I would describe as the worst group in the group stage but still diden’t manage to get though ended up getting 8 and 6 pooled and my responses to it where all wrong (at least I figured out how to handle it afterwards!

Anyways getting 3’rd place in my group meant I ended up in the B Tournament, in the quarter finals of the B Tournament I ended up playing a guy called Euph and I took those games 2-0 without any real problems.

The semifinals where BO5 and I meet the Guy: Snovski he was in probably the toughest group and Ia master player so I ended up getting demolished 3-0. did some timings but it all ended really bad. he went on to take 1'st place in a 4-0 final.

In the 3’rd-4’th Place match I ended playing errorTayler a Diamond protoss player as I am a protoss player it would be a BO7 PvP and really I coulden’t be bothered with that so decided to Change race to Z so we had ZvP.


(playing the 3'rd/4'th Place match)

I Ended up getting behind 0-2 and felt like this would be a quick 4-0 loss. But I managed to get back into the game and with some crazy mind games / all’ins / other stuff from both of us it ended up being 3-3 and we were ready for the final game.

It was set on Tal’darim alter and it pretty much started out as a standrd game Zerg fast expand vs Forge fastexpand, I ended up going for an ninja expansion in another starting location rather than destroying the rocks / taking the 4’th as my 3’rd and it ended working out pretty well. My opponent prepared for an 2 base zerg all'in and while I secured my 3’rd I send in a nydus worm to his main and while a bunch of lings went for his mineral line I tried pushing his expansion, but the expansion were locked down pretty tight, my lings however got quite a few probe kills, but more importantly it gave me time to drone up at my third and get an economical advantage i went for raoches with burrow as i dident see an robotic facility adn infestors as well this completely smashed his army that hit a few minutes later.
After that attack where demolished i had complete map control i took down his third adn teched for broods to close out the game and i won 3'rd with a 4-3 win!

i Ended up winningthe Razer "sc2" Mouse nothing big but always fun to win something.

Sc2 - Lan Tournament

I Am going to A Sc2 Lan tournament this weekend and i think it is going to be quite fun (those kind of things usually are), I don't have any expectation of doing good both since i haven't played alot and the other competetors are really mostly high master so that is going to be a bit trouble some trying to compete with them.

I Might (if the internet conn alllows it try to stream some, but lets see.

I Am looking forward to seeing everyone and have some fun and hopefully learn a thing or 3.

3 Things i am aweful at

Without really looking at my games I have figured out a few things I am really aweful at in sc2. Some of these overlap between races but I am going to write about it in the form of the race i am "worst" at it with.

1: Late game Zerg transitions!
Oh how I can macro up with zerg, get a huge econ / defend most pushes but when I get to ~4 bases my tech don’t keep up at all! I get to Broodlords/ultras and high upgrades waaaaaaaaaaay to late and this is probably the biggest reason I am losing my Zerg games.

2: Terran Macro!
People tend to talk about Zerg macro being the hardest, this is absolutely not the case for me my Terran macro is terrible, I can’t keep SCV production up I can’t keep producing units in a steady flow either not producing or queuing like crazy I forget mules and supply depotes I forget to rally workers back after constructing a new strukture and I can never seem to get the correct number of Production buildings.

3: Need Additional Pylons!
Everytime I hear this message I die a little inside why can’t I remember to make freaking pylons and it’s not just late game it can be the 3’rd or 4’th pylon of the game where I am at 26/26 ohh yeah don’t I need a pylon that is just terrible.
Alright now how to actually fix all these basic flaws...

Playing again

Well after a period where i didn’t play as much as i would like i started again (begining with dropping a league or two to ease me back into it without demotivating me completely while also being able to have some fun (the game becomes slightly less fun as the skill level rises since there is alot less stuff you can get away with doing at higher levels.

After ~30 ish fun games in Silver with everything from mothership rushes to the most lame cheese to planetary fortress rushes ive started playing a bit more “normal again” and I am now in top gold but still playing random this off course means I tend to win all my toss games (unless I get completely cheesed I still have a hard time countering some 1 base allins) and then I lose a lot of games as Terran, Zerg is still pretty high winrates but I think those winrates will drop as well as I get closer to my “correct” skill level although I have no idea where my actual skill level is as random I would guess somewhere in the middle of platinum with my terran pulling me down.

But for now I enjoy fooling around with random not playing to seriously just having some fun.

Diamond... what?

Ok i have been quite inactive playing sc2 lately i have been playing some but not really doing that well, the ladder reset and i played a game, well rather i quit a game i wanted to see if me and Fafner could get in the same division as taht might spark some competetive athemosphere between us, who would reach the highest possision in the leauge?!, so we both join a game, do a count down and quit at the same time, only to find out that i got into diamond and left poor Fafner behind in Plat :-(

I dont quite know how i ended up in diamond sure i ended in top plat last season but it wasent like i was beating or meeting diamonds all the time mostly meet top plats

i guess i will have to fight for lower spots this season at least its only 2 month long :)

Also nice new ladder pool actually don't think i will veto any maps :)

What happend since my last update

Well I just wanted to post a brief update about whats been going on since my last update, and I’ll try to do it whitout getting to specefik otherwise it would probally end up being a wall of text.

1: Got into platinum after my placement match as the kickoff of season 2

2: Changed race back to protoss after a really bad losing strea as zerg

3: Got my stream up and running pretty smoothly www.justin.tv/aiuradun

3½: Made some introes and other fun stuff for the tournament in #4

4: Hosted and casted a tournament with the guys from kingscup.eu a Danish site that have weekly tours

5: Made a twitter account around a million years after everyone else!, you should be able to find me wwith my nickname AiurAdun

6: Updated my blog a little with some more different stuff like recent comment newest tweets, and all that kind of good jazz as Day[9] would have put it.

7: Tried playing a little LoL(Leauge of legends) in short( I like it more then HoN, but still prefere DOTA mostly due to the fackt that I know DOTA and how stats etc work, but I might play a bid more LoL because it was quite enjoyable.

8: And of course played some Starcraft 2 Last I checked I was rank 5 in my league and rank 1 on fafner’s ladder list (www.teamladder.dk)

The little gold that could

Well the season is over and i ended up in 7’th place in my Gold leauge which was enough for my goal of top 8. (still had loads of unspent bonus points.

After the reset I played my first few games and in the placement match got promoted to platinum league, which is not completely unexpected since I mostly played against platniums and a few diamonds at the end of Season 1.

It’s really hard to keep playing a race when you know you play so much better with another race, I really can’t imagine how Morrow must have felt and how many times he must have thought screw this I’m going back to Terran, at least I keep thinking screw Zerg lets go back to Protoss where I actually don’t suck that hard.

But I’m not ready to give up yet all though some losses really makes me crunch my toes(can you actually say that in English?)

End of season - Last week

Well the end of the season 1 is coming up sio I played a bid more just to get a league up before the lock, so now I am in gold,

I feel like I am getting more of a handle of playing zerg all though I still have quite a few issues especially with macro, and when to build units, but my grasp of when t drone and when to build units have gotten a lot better.
Currently I am playing against platinum players and meet a few diamonds; right now I would say my ZvsZ is my weakest MU.

After the promotion I am missing a few 100 points from reaching the top 8 to get the best possible end season rank :-) and I really won’t be able to accept not being in the top 8 so I’m attempting to reach that in this last week I need around 300 points for top 8 if they don’t play at all but they probably will so I will probably need quite a few points extra, but I am confident I will make it, and most likely get into plat or diamond with my first placement game in season 2 all though I don’t feel like my zerg is at diamond level at all yet.

Zerg is difficult

Well this is not new, nor surprising to me, but still i just wanted to point the obvious out.

1: Keeping up spawn lava, its way harder than throwing down mules or chrono boosting, because it's so detrimental to your play, and it’s harder to remember and do especially under pressure.

2: The choice between drones and units is again extremely critical to your play, and the worst part of it is that its extremely hard to know what is the right choice, especially in the lower leagues where you can't really count on anything.

These 2 things alone are giving me loads of grief not even mentioning forgetting overlords. damn the games I’ve lost where 2 x lava spawns just burst into 5 lava at each hatch and seeing the Terran move out just to see you are food cappet. Omg worst feeling ever!!... :-)

Even with some absolutely lame losses i'm still improving and i am at the top of my silver division playing vs goldies so i'm expecting to get promoted to gold quite soon.

Playing Zerg at a noob level

Hi there, well aftri reached a stable plateau of meeting Gold players and while finding random fun I also found it a bid to unstable and unsuited for training purposes.

So I decided to try out a Race and to become better at it.
I ended up chosing Zerg and well I already suck less then avg. with Protoss, and Fafner is doing his Terran thing so I thought I might as well go with Zerg.
Also I thought it might be fun to share my hopefully progress with everyone else I made I fpvod, unfortunately I did it in Danish but I might go ahead and do the next ones in English all though my English somewhat sucks and I tend to forget words and that kind of good stuff :), but well then the speaking would accompany the game play very well.

Well here are the playlist:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A14ACDA61F99AA2D
I Started out playing the game, then watching the replay straight after commenting on how much I sucked

Raising back up in 1 on 1

Now I’ve started meeting mostly golds at least meet golds in the last 3-4 matches so I am on my way even though I am still ranked as bronze.

While playing random my game Is swinging tremendously and I am losing some really silly games due to not getting all the MU’s an even if I get the MU the level of play is so unpredictable that you don’t really know what you can expect, also you see a lot of 1 base all-ins.

So I guess I need to Expect the unexpected and perhaps play a bit less aggressively with getting expands up / ignoring building defense
Also I am thinking about putting up a stream just for Fafner to watch my suckage 

Doing the FFA!

Well while i have begun to win my 1 on 1’s again I thought I wanted a bid of a different game experience, so I started playing some FFA’s(Free for all’s)
Well 1 thing is for sure it’s different, and its random, and you might as well forget everything you know about timings because ppl do the most crazy things.
I must confess I do find it to be rather fun, ppl go all in something with absolutely no defense, or they go massive defense with an expansion and just mass a semi high tier unit.

The first thing is possible due to ppl not scouting a lot except for the initial who is where an who seems to be a decent player scout after this it’s both too expensive and impossible to keep an eye / scout everyone. Also if you are to “active” on the map ppl are going to see you as a threat and you will be more likely to be attacked.
I Had 1 game 1 going for a DT rush ( The timing where Waaaaay before you would normally see dt’s due to absolutely no defense another guy went fast banshees again with no defense and they both showed up at my base 1 with the dt’s in my main and the banshees at my expo Outch.

Another Game this time on the map Metro I spawned close pos with a Diamond level 1 on 1 terran with me spawning as terran as well.
W mined out both outr mains our naturals he mined out the gold, and we fought over the middle expansion between us pushing siege tanks Thors Vikings for vision and a few bio units for support it was a pretty epic battle and drained all our resources, in the meantime on the other half of the map a platinum 1 on 1 player shared sides with a bronze 1 on 1 player, this ended up in a complete dominant position of the platinum player who could pretty safely take the rest of the map without too much troubles due to our hectic battle at the other end of the map and he could there by secure his win.

Well those 2 games I lost but I did manage to win a few games, I will probably play this a bid more in the future to find out what the best way to handle these games are.

Starting from scratch

Well I had a bid of a rough time starting out with 1 on 1 in sc again, and with the undying feeling that i where going to be demoted i kinda didn’t feel like playing.
After a while I decided what the hell if I am going to get demoted anyway it’s time for a “fresh” start I Chose to go down in ranks to start over to get the fun back and to not be to intimidated to play due to losses, So basically I started losing un purpose, either leaving or just do some completely awful stuff I ended up winning some of those and getting some of the achievements while doing it.

It took around ~60 losses but now I’ve hit rock bottom/Bronze) or close to it and after playing a few games in bronze for the last few achievements I’ve decided to start moving up, going to play random and see how far I can make it, when I don’t feel I will get higher as random I am probably going to switch to Protoss again and see if I can actually make it back into diamond however I doubt it the skill level really seem to have improved quite a lot since I left, but let’s see.

Is this somehow lame / bad sportsmanship / bad mannered? yeah I guess it kind of is, but then again if that is what it takes to start having a little bit of fun and to get the will to play, then I will gladly be a lamer :-)

Why some people don’t improve.

I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately, why some people don’t really seem to improve that much, last night I played with a few friends bronze leaguers, we usually just play some 3 vs 3 team games, I played ~500 ladder games most of them team games. The friends I played with last night however had ~1100 games played each, all of them team games.

Even though they have gotten better then they where the first few games I played with them before I went on my vacation they are still what I would call a low bronze level player in 1 on 1 comparison at least, it boggles my mind why they haven’t improved more than they has, I’m quite sure if you would just take a look at one of the 2 players mechanics and just taught him for like a day he would improve sooooo much.

I guess Quality > quantity especially with the very basics.

Sundance

Even though he is one of the main people getting sc2 into a more professional venue in the vest, for anyone who don’t know who “Sundance“ is, he is running the company that is making the MLG events, and that’s cool and all, especially if you want to see pro gaming in the vest and I do, I would love to have gaming at the state we have seen it in Korea the last many years.

But after listening to some different State of the game episodes and having heard him talk, I’m really not found of that guy at all, first of all he doesn’t know anything about the game at all, and secondly he doesn’t really seem to care to much about the community, I’m not exactly sure why I don’t like him, I guess it’s more of the way he talk to people.

The only thing you can hope for is that he has some guys working for him that actually know what they are doing because he just sounds a bid to much like “money” to me.