Probicus Parley
A Starcraft 2 Daily

004

Today I want to point out the benefits of communicating during 1v1 matches in which you are clearly outclassed. For every two or three players who ignore you or start thrusting their e-peens wildly, one is going to give you some awfully sound advice. My main point: When a player owns you in a particularly intriguing way, don’t just gg and watch the replay, actually talk to them.

I’ll highlight two personal examples to show you what I mean.

I had thought for a while that watching pro replays was only beneficial to advanced players – that at my level you should just learn from experience. This just isn’t true, but it seemed reasonable enough. I was winning most of my matches and my losses were usually close. I must have been doing something right. It was on those rare occasions where a fellow Bronze or Silver league player would ruthlessly crush me without cheesing that I started to think “these guys obviously didn’t place well, how are they so good already?”

So I started to ask, and sometimes I’d get a serious insightful answer. I found out about Day[9]’s tutorials and some of the other resources I’ve used not through scouring endless forum posts, but by being directed to them by better players in-game.

If you ask for information on forums you’re going to end up with a ton of different links to sort through. If you ask for it from individual players who you know from experience are using the kinds of techniques you want to copy, you’ll end up with a few specific, tested, relevant sources.

And you might fair better than that. When I switched from Terran to Toss as my 1v1 race I took an immediate liking to massing zealots while teching up to void rays. This worked consistently for about four games, and then I lost horrifically to a guy who took the exact same approach. I asked him what I did wrong, and he actually invited me to a 2v2 party. Over the course of the next five games (which lead to my only Platinum placement to date), I learned more about playing Protoss quickly and defending the rush and expanding effectively than I could have ever hoped for.

There are a lot of simple things in Starcraft 2 that you can easily overlook – things that general guides aren’t going to tell you and you might not notice in replays. For example, I had no idea that chrono boost could be used on a Nexus. It’s not a secret, just a false assumption on my part. Because I asked a guy in a 1v1 what I did wrong, I had a second set of eyes to catch stupid mistakes like this and point them out to me.

I’m not advocating zealot to void ray as the best Toss technique, and have had better success since by choosing between void rays and stalkers once I have a feel for what the other guy’s doing. Especially against Terran, building two visible stargates and not using them can trick him into massing a bunch of useless vikings. Of course, I’m not advocating that either, I’m just saying that:

Lots of players are ready and willing to help you. If you ask for advice when your base is burning away beyond repair, you just might get it.