A Way to Think About Ladder

Whether you're a casual player, a competitive amateur, a budding pro, or even a GSL competitor, the ladder constitutes a large percentage of your Starcraft 2 games. If you play Starcraft 2 just to mess around with friends and have a good time, with no real interest in properly improving your game, feel free to stop reading now, as this article will be primarily geared towards people who play on ladder with an aim to get better.

The majority of Starcraft 2 players don't have teams, and therefore do not have an abundance of practice partners willing to grind out games with them, so ladder is the best option to play against large numbers of random opponents. The purpose of this article will be to suggest a new way of looking at ladder that I feel will maximise improvement and minimize ladder anxiety.

This may not be anything particularly groundbreaking, but I feel that this approach to ladder could be a good thing for any players hoping to improve their game, especially in a rapidly growing eSports scene. I am suggesting an approach to ladder where you evaluate yourself purely on your mechanics.

Mechanical play, for those who may be wondering, refers to a player's ability to properly manage his macro-oriented responsibilities (resource management, supply timings, teching, expanding, and keeping on top of production), while also keeping on top of in-game decision making (army positioning, executing and dealing with drop play, etc.).

Mechanical play doesn't necessarily have to mean standard play, it is purely based on your ability to keep on top of everything you should be doing. Having said that however, standard play is standard for a reason, namely that when executed by a player with proper mechanics, standard play yields a relatively higher chance of staying alive than non-standard play.

EG.IdrA, a player known for his mechanical skill and strength in standard play

Mechanics can be likened to the fundamental skills an athlete needs to develop. I myself come from a background in basketball. I played quite competitively in varsity high school athletics and even considered making a career out of it. I was always pretty athletic and was able to get away with making bad decisions and having less-than-ideal fundamental skills for that reason, until my coach stopped me in my junior year and explained to me the proper value of fundamental skills.

We were shooting around one day after practice, and I was playing a one-on-one game with another member of the team while our coach watched, and I did a fade-away jump shot (for those that don't know basketball, it's when the player with the ball jumps away from the hoop while making a shot, in an attempt to create more distance between himself and the defender).

The fade-away has been greatly popularized by very successful NBA players like Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan before him, just to name two, and most players nowadays take for granted that it should be in the arsenal of anybody worth his salt. Coach stopped me after I did my fade-away and told me that if he ever saw me do it in a game I'd be benched. I asked him why, and he told me that the odds of you making a fade-away jump shot are so low relative to an open player making a standard jump shot that you'd be better off trying to draw a foul or passing it to somebody else. I asked him what to do in a situation where I was unable to dribble and had a defender tight on me, and he smiled and said "On a good team, you shouldn't be in that position."

Starcraft 2, like basketball, or soccer, or any other sport (or eSport), is all about the cumulative results of little decisions aimed at optimizing your play. In basketball this is having the basic ability to dribble well while having awareness of people around you, of being able to make an open jump shot, of being able to throw a strong pass on target.

In Starcraft 2, this is being able to manage your resources, making sure you're always on top of unit production while maintaining a powerful economy, having awareness of what your opponent is going to do and how you can respond, etc. In other words, competitive basketball can only really be played when a player has a solid grasp over the fundamental skills necessary. Starcraft 2, also, can only be really played at a competitive level after a player makes a conscious effort to work on his or her mechanical skill.

In Starcraft 2, as in any other competitive sport, there is no end to your pursuit of becoming a better player.

Players like Idra and Ret, or Dongraegu and Bomber, have made their reputations on being mechanical geniuses. They essentially play at the peak of the Starcraft 2 competitive scene by focusing purely on their mechanical skill to eek out edges over other pros. Some readers may recall Destiny's mass-queen experiment about a year back, when he relied on mass queens to get all the way to platinum league on the North American server.

The point Destiny was trying to make with his mass-queen streak was that strategy really did not matter until at least platinum league, that proper mechanical skill could allow you to beat any opponent regardless of how bad your composition may be (back then, mass queens was actually terrible). Destiny got to platinum league with pure queens, but the experiment doesn't end there. In diamond, masters, and even grandmasters and the professional level, mechanical skill makes all the difference when two players with a similar understanding of the metagame and standard play are pitted against each other.

I play zerg at the high masters level, and I frequently lose to my friend who plays at the grandmaster level, even when he offraces as terran, usually for no reason other than I was outmacroed. In other words, he wrecks me because he has better mechanics.

To carry this analogy further, my fade-away jump shot, in Starcraft 2 terms, is what I like to call a gimmick. Gimmicky play is something that works only under very situational circumstances, and is not reliable enough to serve as an alternative to developing proper basic skills (or, mechanics). In Starcraft 2 this may be neural parasiting a mothership, doing baneling drops, maybe tank dropping the old high ground by the natural on Lost Temple, or a warp-prism colossus drop, maybe trying to nuke an army.

All these different maneuvers are similar in that they can potentially be game changing, but only under very special and particular circumstances. Relying on any of these actions to win you a game won't get you very far at all, just like a basketball player who relies solely on a fade-away jump shot and has poor fundamental skills won't succeed in the competitive scene.

By now the reader may have guessed at my point: that mechanics should be the top priority for anybody wanting to improve. I believe that once a player understands the importance of his mechanics, and why to improve them, ladder should simply become a training ground for improving basic skills.

I used to practice basketball by playing pickup games at random courts around my city. A pickup game is essentially a game that you play with total strangers, usually 3 on 3 in Asia. They are the basketball equivalent of ladder in Starcraft 2. The random element means that sometimes you play against people who do really dumb things because they don't understand how the game operates, but it works every once in a while (just like chronic cannon rushers often win games whilst having little to no idea of how the game is played), but they don't have enough fundamental skill to win consistently.

I often also found myself matched against people who were much better than me fundamentally, and the roles were reversed. I, being the athletic young player I was, was often able to beat them quite a bit, but then I got tired, and they didn't because they were playing good, solid, fundamental basketball, which allows a player to win consistently with a very efficient energy output, producing optimal results.

Ladder is really no different. Sometimes you find yourself matched with people who cheese you without remorse, and those games are terrible to lose because you know that you probably have better mechanical skill than they do. Sometimes you find yourself playing opponents who are far better than you in the mechanical sense, and you just get out-played. Either way, you shouldn't beat yourself up over it. After having that talk with my coach I began to approach pickup games with the mentality that I was only there to develop my fundamental skills against a wide variety of opponents. I approach ladder with the same mind-set.

“I am always in a good mood when I play, I don’t have feelings and think about imbalance and stuff. I don’t go into games as a loser.” - Stephano

If you approach ladder with the mentality that you're only there to work on mechanics, a number of good things happen. Firstly you force yourself to play standard games, where you really do need to eke out an advantage against an opponent of similar skill by just having better mechanical skill. Secondly, you don't feel the same ladder anxiety when you treat it not as a competitive one-on-one experience, but more as a mirror through which you can study the flaws in your own gameplay and the improvements yet to be made.

On ladder, you're really playing against yourself, nobody else. It is not competitive play, going on a losing streak does not mean you're a terrible player, or that everyone is better than you. Oftentimes a player (myself included) hits terrible losing streaks by going on tilt, then trying to end games fast because they do not feel confident in their ability to play a macro game, and failing all-ins and cheeses. This snowballs into a downward spiral that can make a competitive player want to just quit the game.

If you play every game standard, with an aim to playing the most solid mechanical game you possibly can, you'll find yourself getting much better very quickly. Winning or losing on ladder has no correlation with how good you are as a player. Only your skill corresponds to that, and to improve your skill and make yourself a better player, you need to play mechanically.

Ladder anxiety is minimized with this approach as well. You distance yourself from your opponent, make it purely about yourself, as if you were trying to beat your personal record for a long-distance run. You're not trying to be a better player than your opponent, you're trying to be a better player than you were one game ago. Losing means nothing if you played the best game possible, it just means he was better. If you play a decent game and lose to a timing that catches you offguard, but play a better game afterward and you hold off that timing, but you end up losing in a protracted macro-game to a player who is simply better than you, you have nothing to feel bad about, because you've gotten better.

As a zerg player, mechanical play really depends on being able to power your economy in the safe phases of the game, and to mass produce units when necessary, while keeping on top of the standard resource management, teching, spreading creep, overlord production and spreading, as well as larva injects.

DRG, a Zerg player described by Artosis as "a mechanical genius"

As a terran player, mechanical play consists of a player's ability to simultaneously develop a strong army and economy while teching up and controlling different zones in the map. When it comes to "macro-beast" terrans, few players are able to match Taeja's formidable mechanical prowess

As a protoss player, mechanical play consists of an understanding of how to properly allocate your chronoboost energy with your long-term game plan in mind, while maximizing probe and army production and the appropriate upgrades behind it. Few players can keep up with PartinG's amazing mechanical protoss play

If you find yourself able to stay on top of all of the responsibilities your race demands of you to the best of your ability, and make mechanical play your number one priority against the wide range of diverse opponents you'll face on ladder, you'll find yourself becoming a better gamer, win or lose. Getting cheesed doesn't matter to someone focused only on mechanics because it is a neutral entity.

Getting six-pooled by zergs or cannon rushed by protosses or 2-port cloaked banshee'd by terrans really says nothing about your skill except that your opponent is deciding to play a game that minimizes the requirement for mechanics. It can be frustrating to be repeatedly cheesed if you're looking to improve your game, but in reality cheese isn't that frequent, and when it does happen to you just shrug and move on. Don't rely on gimmicks, feel free to use them if the situation demands it, but don't ever try to force situations where gimmicky play is the only solution.

Just as a professional basketball player doesn't force himself into a spot where he's totally covered by the defense and his only option is to take a sub-optimal shot, a competitive Starcraft 2 player should not force a game where the win is dependent on the outcome of a single play in a single engagement. No, aim rather to make your games about fundamental mechanics and develop yourself as a player in that regard instead.

One last note, on the topic of self-improvement in ladder, is that I find it far more helpful to watch replays of games that I win, rather than games that I lose. Nearly every game I lose, I can tell myself why I lost within 30 seconds of typing "gg" either before or after. Maybe I droned at the wrong time when I knew an all-in was coming, maybe I had a terrible engagement, or maybe I just got outplayed.

By contrast, if I win a game, I feel good but I really have no idea as to how I could have played better. I watch replays of games where I play my best because it can give me a boost in confidence, but much more importantly, I notice big flaws in my play that I wouldn't notice in the games that I lost. If I'm trying to improve myself as a player, it seems logical that I should look to correcting the mistakes I make in games that I think I've played to the best of my abilities instead of trying to remedy the flaws I find in games that I feel I played sloppily.

Always watch the replays of the games where you think you've played your best, take a pen and paper to them, tally up the times you got supply-blocked, make note of when you were floating too many resources, or when you didn't tech as fast as you could have, and make a conscious effort to improve those factors in your future games.

Well that about does it for my blog about how I think people should view the ladder. As I said, this isn't meant to be a revolutionary new way to approach Starcraft 2. This is simply how I prioritize my responsibilities personally as I try to become a better player, and how I try to view the ladder to align with said priorities. I haven't talked to many people about this topic, so I'm eager to hear what others think. Perhaps this is a much more common approach than I thought, though I suspect not. I feel like people understand the importance of mechanical play, but don't apply it necessarily to their mental approach to ladder.

If my suspicions are correct, then I hope that this approach works for you, and if I'm wrong and the majority of my readers already share a similar approach, then I can always fall back on Winston Smith's assertion from Nineteen-Eighty-Four that the best books tell us what we already know. Either way, happy laddering! :)