My decision-making was arguably getting worse! The replays were clear – I wasn’t silently getting better. I kept losing for the same dumb reasons, reasons that I was well-aware of, reasons that I would often passively *think* about as I made crucial, game-ending mistakes. I watched my own replays to see what I could fix, and I noticed that the same mistakes came up again and again. Maybe I was getting better, but it was just hard to tell?
Many good players will tell you that improvement slows way down once you start reaching higher MMRs. Was I just better at the game? The last time I did a big grind, I peaked around 5.1k MMR. What made this grind different from all the previous ones? Around the same time I was also getting excited about distance running (I wrote about this a few weeks back), so I had a convenient excuse to cut my grind short and focus more on running.īut I never stopped thinking about it. That didn’t hold true this time around, a fact I found quite demotivating. Maybe that means something as small as moving from Gold to Platinum – it’s not a question of where I end up, just a question of it being higher than where I was before. That’s not to imply that I’m the best player in the world at whatever I try my hand at rather, it’s simply to say that I’ve always been able to improve my performance. I’ve been grinding RTS games for more than fifteen years, and I’ve never attempted to get better and not succeeded. I watched pro-level streams, I reviewed my replays to identify my mistakes, and I stuck with a consistent daily practice schedule. I played hundreds of games, sticking with the program for a solid sixty days. The Problemīack in November I kicked off yet another StarCraft ladder grind. So, I celebrate how far I’ve gotten, end my grind and move back to co-op or team games.Įach time I’ve done this, I’ve gotten significantly better at StarCraft II. After about ninety days, my wrists start to feel sore on a daily basis, and I find it difficult to continue. Typically this involves a combination of practicing build orders, watching streams of professional players, studying tournaments, and, of course, playing plenty of ladder. The way this goes is that I’ll start out with some kind of goal – say, one or two league tiers of improvement – and patiently work towards that goal over the course of sixty to ninety days. Over the years of playing StarCraft II, I’ve gone through several spurts of dedicated ladder grinds. Today I’ll be writing about a time I dedicated a hundred hours to doggedly improving at StarCraft II, only to find myself playing noticeably worse by the end.
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