It looks like I’m going to end up writing a lot of SC2 posts but I don’t want to spam up my /writing/ category, so I’ve created a fresh one for this purpose. I went round to Ben’s yesterday afternoon to get coached in SC2; he persuaded me to skip the remaining twenty-five matches of the practice league (iirc I won 13 or more of the ones I did) then he helped me through my placement matches by refining my four gate, touching up minor things all over the place and helping me win my first macro game, since I really don’t have a clue about anything beyond an easy beginner opening like the four gate.

Somehow I got placed straight into gold league, but I fully expect to drop down. Somehow, too, I’ve been winning matches—once it stopped matching me with platinum league players—and I’m actually rising in my division to within the top 25, despite not even having won ten matches to get the first Protoss avatar. I’ve got lucky to find myself continually matched against Protoss, so I’m four gating and so long as they don’t destroy my proxy pylon (which keeps happening) I seem to be winning. I imagine I’ll face some proper builds soon enough that’ll stop this, and so I’ll drop down to silver or at least lower gold where I belong.

Been watching some MLG today and asking Ben a continual stream of questions about utterly basic stuff; really do seem to be getting into this.

Am going to try to care as little as possible about my ladder ranking because I don’t want to stop using real matches to test things.