Control: Some Obnoxious Person

I, Dalton Lewis, lost to someone at Starcraft 2 today. I don’t care if I win or lose every game, but I want to get better at strategy gaming. I am in two platinum leagues and a gold league in the game and can’t seem to get higher. Thinking about the tactics and strategies in between games would help — I would do much better if I recorded what worked and what didn’t when playing zerg against a battlecruiser rush. Today I played zerg against said rush, and I built a ton of corrupters, which is the counter to battlecruisers. I started to win. I killed battlecruiser after battlecruiser and I was barely winning. Then — bam. One more appeared. I knew — I could handle one more. I began to build more drones and better buildings at my fourth base. A few moments later I looked back and my main base to see that four battlecrusiers had killed all my corrupters and destroy all my tech structures. I gave up after a failed all-in with infestors and roaches that went poorly.

That’s not the game against the obnoxious person, though. I played protoss gold and won with a cannon rush — a cheap, quick way to win. The protoss race has cannons that can protect a base and not move. Someone figured out that they could put those cannons near the opponent’s base at the beginning of the game. That would, unless countered, win a game very quickly. I did this — I don’t usually but did it this time. The person I defeated started to whisper me after the game.

“Is that all this is?” he asked. “People who have played 10k games and early rushes?” I didn’t mind that very much, but what he said next really pissed me off. “I suppose that you should congratulate yourself for 7000 games and still being a gold player.”

Wow. That hurt. First of all I’m a platinum player, and secondly, I am mentally ill and took a couple of years off. Second gold and platinum players are pretty good. Third I don’t memorize build orders or optimize my builds. Fourth it’s a game — it’s supposed to be fun. Still this person was mean to me, and that pissed me off a lot.

Am I an idiot, falling into the low middle and not succeeding at anything? I don’t feel like that. I try to improve at strategy gaming. I think about the consequences of my moves and try to plan a turn or two ahead. I win more games than I lose at Starcraft 2 and beat a lot of players in Warhammer 40k who aren’t the best players in the country.

I need to just persist and believe that I am not, in fact, an idiot. Every once in a while someone shows up and insults and demeans us. We just have to ignore it and move on. That’s what I’m going to do — ignore him and move on. I won’t worry about it anymore.

Thanks, and take care, friends.