Gheed Profile Blog Joined September 2010 United States 962 Posts Last Edited: 2012-04-13 14:54:19 #1

Banner by CreatorGX



Bronze Part 3: Casually Cruel



+ Show Spoiler [Previous Blogs (Read First!)] +

Part 1:

Part 2:

Nuts and Bolts:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:



Bronze

Part 1:

Part 2: Worker RushPart 1: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=271453 Part 2: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=271998 Nuts and Bolts: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=272765 Part 3: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=281817 Part 4: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=283221 Part 5: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=286351 Part 6: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=304674 BronzePart 1: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=308882 Part 2: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=313577



Anyone who has ever played fetch with a dog will understand the following truth. If you pretend to throw the ball, but instead quickly hide it behind your back, the dog will faithfully run after the ball you did not actually throw, look for it, and then return, confused. You may repeat this process once or twice before the dog either figures out your trick or gets tired of your shit and goes to the corner to lick himself. After observing my pet and considering his small, but definitive display of intelligence, I came to a startling conclusion: Spaniels are smarter than bronzies. And more flexible.





Cuter, too.



When presented with the same situation over and over, bronzies do not adapt, yet a dog will. How did it come to be that my canine companion is a more levelheaded fellow than the frothing mongrels that inhabit the lowest tier of Starcraft 2?





I'm not familiar with that breed.



Do bronze players lack object permanence? Is that why they lift off their Command Centers with such startling frequency? Do they think that I, too, share their affliction and will forget that there was another person in the game with me? Could this explain why they often do not retaliate in the slightest? Do they periodically forget that they have workers, or are playing a game at all? Are they amnesiacs? Narcoleptics? Other experiments for other days, perhaps, because this entry has one primary focus: knowledge versus skill. As the maxim tells us, knowledge is power, and Starcraft is largely a game of knowledge.



Before we delve into the world of bronze, I would like to take a moment to discuss another game, a game that is almost universally agreed to be skilless. I am talking, of course, about the World of Warcraft. Specifically, WoW's PvE. As an on-again, off-again WoW player, I could have very easily written this blog series about the incredibly awful players I found in the game's dungeons and raids. No WoW community is as desirable to be a part of as TL is for Starcraft, though. Please bear with me if you've never played WoW; I hope you won't be too lost.



I had, for a time, begun taking screenshots of every male Blood Elf Hunter I found wearing strength gear, but eventually the frequency at which I found them rapidly became more depressing than interesting.





Just because you can wear mail doesn't mean… oh, fuck it. can



Later, I decided to take DPS parses for the boss segments of my random heroic groups, marking down each player's race and class, to determine if Blood Elves really were the worst players in the game (trust me, they are). None of my projects ever came to fruition beyond a few screenshots and a large amount of mental anguish, though. The point of them would have been to document a group people who, similar to bronzies, are irrationally terrible at something that nobody should be so bad at. WoW PvE, for the happily uninitiated, is mechanically very easy. You are hard-capped on the number of actions you can take by a global cooldown on the majority of your abilities. So, assuming you hit a button an average of every 1 second (and most classes don't), the maximum possible effective APM you could have is 60. Sure, there is some movement, but it's generally nothing more complicated than running into or out of a circle, stuff 7-year-olds have been managing to do in Mario games for decades. Moreover, everyone has access to





Hell yeah I'm da bomb.



The biggest challenge to any raid is herding all the nerds to attack the correct target and to stand in the right spot. Websites like Learn to Raid or Tankspot freely give out strategies for every encounter in simple terms that anyone can understand. So nobody should be taken off guard by the fights after seeing them in person once or twice. Everything after that is simple, rote, mechanical button presses. For example, as a Feral cat Druid, the biggest part of my personal rotation was… nothing—literally doing nothing. To play my class, I had to just sit there and auto-attack while waiting for enough energy to regenerate to allow the usage an ability. The only skill involved was knowing what button to press when the opportunity to press one came around. Not only is that not terribly difficult to do manually, there are



So how do people fail at hitting a series of keys for 5 minute stretches? Well, like bronzies, they don't want to learn, and that's all it really takes. Just a bit of time to learn. There has long been a battle in WoW between so-called "casuals" and "elitists." But, the truth is, "casual" players are just bad players who use their "real lives" as an excuse for performing poorly. They are unwilling to spend time learning what to do and then when nobody wants to play with them they cry foul. Anybody, from adults to children, can learn how to be successful in WoW. Playing WoW correctly and playing it incorrectly uses up the same amount of time and effort after those initial couple of hours invested in learning. The only "elitism" in WoW is players declining to play with people who refuse to put forth a reasonable amount of effort to learn. The knowledge they need to gain is readily available and enthusiastically given by anyone in-game; nobody wants their fellow players to be bad. WoW players are more than happy to toss a link to a help site like Elitist Jerks. Although it might not always be the simplest advice…





More man-hours have gone into marksmanship hunters than into autism research. Admittedly, there may be some overlap.



It's generally good enough advice. I remember vividly the first time I ever got my hunter into a raid. It was several months after Burning Crusade was released. I was geared mostly in dungeon set 3 blues and a few heroic purples. We had been clearing through Karazahn and having a nice time of it. A crossbow dropped for me and I got a couple other armor pieces. I was enjoying myself and things were proceeding rather smoothly, but after a few wipes to the final boss, a player left the group. We needed another DPS, so someone invited a hunter friend who was decked out in full tier 5 and, to be nice to me, didn't need any items. I remember being in awe of his Arcanite Steam-Pistol and gigantic Tauren tier 5 shoulder pads, which dwarfed my pitiful blue Troll ones. Knowing he was far more geared than any of us, he arrogantly said something to the effect of, "this should be no problem now that I'm here," and bragged about "carrying us." Fulfilling his own prophecy, we indeed downed the boss.



The problem? I did nearly twice as much damage as the guy 2 tiers above me in gear. Why? Because I had looked up how to play my class whereas he had not. I learned how spec (41/20/0), how to gear (cap hit and stack AP), which pet had the highest damage (Ravager), and, most importantly, how to make and use a Steady Shot macro. If you weren't around for BC, a Hunter could basically put all of his critical abilities into an in-game macro, bind it to a key, and then mash that key brainlessly for the entire raid and do respectable damage. The arrogant tier 5 hunter, however, randomly cast Arcane and Aimed shots, erratically weaved in between Aspect of the Hawk and Viper, and generally didn't know what the fuck he was doing. As a Hunter in those days, you were rarely required to do anything but DPS, so your job was pretty much just to stand there and act like a turret to dish out as much damage as possible. So I, the guy in mostly blues, contributed more to the raid than the guy in complete shiny epics who was touting his greatness to us. Not because I was more skilled (again, I was mashing a single button) but because I was more knowledgeable. The reason we defeated the boss was because of our continued practice and a little luck, not because of his underwhelming contribution. But to the braggart Hunter, he was the man. Like a bronzie, he either didn't want to learn or erroneously thought he had nothing left to learn.





SAPERE AUDE SAPERE AUDE



How can we visualize a bronze player's level of knowledge? In WoW, it's not only very easy to point out gaps in player information, but to fill them. Standing in fire? Listen to DBM and strafe left when it makes a noise. Not capped on hit? Go reforge some of that crit into hit. Trouble keeping up with your Retribution rotation? Try using CLCRet. For every flaw there is some piece of information or some utility that can remedy it.



Starcraft is a great deal more complicated. Even if you could point out a specific flaw, there is not a downloadable addon to fix it. Well, not legal ones, anyway. How do we separate a bronze player's skill from their knowledge, then? How can we see if they are learning? If you look at a bronze player's normal game, it's a mishmash of poor macro, low micro, no scouting, and random decisions. You couldn't look at a bronzie's ZvT and tell him to "scout more," because even if he scouted, he wouldn't know what he was looking at or what to do about it if he did. There are so many things wrong at the low level that it's impossible to identify a single thing to improve. It's like looking at a head-on collision between two trains and labeling each bolt failure. It's not the bolts that are important, it's the fact that it's a fucking train wreck. This is why rather than give specific help, people advise simply to "macro better," because at the low levels knowing how to do basic things is more important than knowing more obtuse things like strategy.



To separate knowledge and skill then, one would need to strip away all the aspects of a normal game. Eliminate the need for macro and micro. Get rid of the need for scouting. Then, find a way to do it repeatedly. And, after thinking about it, that is precisely what I have been unwittingly doing. I have been testing knowledge, not skill. This is why I found it so difficult to come up with something other than worker rushing to do against bronze leaguers. Anything more complicated became a matter of me pitting my skills, even if handicapped, against the skills of a bronzie. Nothing could be gained from that other than the fact that I'm better than them, which isn't particularly unexpected or interesting. Therefore, the strategies I have been executing are designed to fail if someone knows how to counter them. Anyone who knows how to attack move will beat my worker rushing. Anyone who knows how to make a siege weapon will beat my Planetary Fortress massing. I am not 4-gating them to test if they have sufficient skills to defeat it; I am worker rushing them to test if they know how to defeat it. Regardless of how good or bad they are in the other aspects of the game, any player with the requisite knowledge will score an easy win from me. By that same token, any player who continually loses to such a tactic must not be learning.



Before testing their level of knowledge, we must first examine where that knowledge comes from. WoW lacks any useful in-game information, so all of it comes from external tutorial videos, written guides, and downloadable addons. Where does knowledge come from in Starcraft? A couple of places: the in-game tutorials (





I don't think that counts.



While I did not quiz every opponent if they knew about Team Liquid, a surprising number of people proved to be aware of it. In fact, since this series has gotten some more exposure, I have been recognized on the ladder several times, both by the bronzies themselves and the visitors to bronze alike. Further, a large portion of the players who have been outraged at my experiments have self-identified as bronze. Therefore, those people clearly have the tools available for them to learn. Maybe those are the ones who I'm not defeating. Am I only beating the players who don't know about TL?





If the answer is "yeah," then why does this picture exist?



I'm not so sure. While conducting a postgame survey is out of the question, they certainly seem to be aware of Starcraft terminology that would otherwise be unknown to them if not for Starcraft websites. If they weren't aware of the outside Starcraft world, then why would they say "glhf" and "gg?" How would they know how to call something cheesy or imba? How would they know to use bronze as an insult if they had never strayed outside of the game itself? Maybe there exists a good amount of silent, confused bronzies, but how do we explain the loud ones who clearly have the knowhow to locate and use the utilities to learn and yet do not?





Maybe we could blame dubstep? It certainly doesn't seem to be doing IdrA any good, either.



Some have argued that bronzies do not want to learn, that they only want to play "for fun." I find this hard to believe. I need write little to respond to such a silly hypothesis. It is only necessary to ask the straightforward question: if they play for fun, why do they get so angry? Like this fellow, who greeted me with a phrase that indicates he is not only aware of basic Starcraft etiquette, but expects his opponent to understand it, as well. Things went south when the workers flooded into his base. He responded to the rush by not responding at all, as is somewhat typical in bronze. Then, he loaded into his CC and flew around, but there are no islands on Korhal Compound so he quickly found himself in a losing situation. Whenever my opponent insults me in a manner more conducive to conversation than "ur a fag," I try to ask them why they feel that way. Perhaps it could be seen as goading, but I genuinely do hope that one day I will receive an enlightening answer. I want to know what's going on inside the head of a person who loses to a worker rush and then rages about it. This was about as close I have gotten.





But… esports!



It has always struck me as curious that people assume that someone who worker rushes or cheeses must have no life. Who spends more time playing: the person whose games last an average of 8 minutes or the person who macros to an average of 30 minutes? On a game-to-game basis, the cheeser is definitely committing less time. You really can't divine anything about a player's lifestyle from their playstyle, though. Further, calling someone a virgin for playing the exact same video game as you are seems a little illogical, no? Yet these are the insults that get flung around incessantly with no hint that the insulters notice the irony of disparaging someone for partaking in the same activity as they are. Sometimes, I pose a series of other possible explanations for the bronzies to consider.





Hey, maybe she's into that sort of thing.



As always, I questioned why my opponent stayed in the game after it was clear not only that he had lost, but that he was not enjoying himself. It was obviously to spite me, but why would someone who only wants to enjoy a nice game of Starcraft stay in a game they have admitted to disliking being in just to spite someone? He didn't respond though, because he was busy reaching around to his internet cable. He must have pulled it out and quickly plugged it back in, because for the first time in the game he began lagging. He then said, while presumably bearing a shiteating grin:





Really. You don't say.



These "networking errors" continued for a few minutes. He would lag for 10 seconds and then stop. Then, just before finally lagging out fully he yelled:





If you say it 3 times in front of a mirror in a dark room, an idiot will appear.



No one can honestly believe that this person plays "for fun." I don't care what he claims, people playing games for fun don't go apeshit when someone beats them. Further, how long can someone play a game and use the fact that they are playing for fun as an excuse for their ignorance? 100 games? 200?





Incoherent post-game messages after ignoring your opponent. For fun.



While there may very well be people who genuinely play for fun, that doesn't mean that improving and learning isn't fun, too. People who watch Jersey Shore do so for fun, but don't you think that they would be better off watching the National Geographic Channel? "For fun" is a cop out that only grants someone so much leeway and they pretty much abandon any of it when they get mad at someone for trying to achieve victory in a game where the stated objective is to win.



We must remember that a ladder game is not a friendly practice match; it's an outlet for competition. Just because it's easier to hit "Find Match" than it is to find a friend to play a custom game with doesn't mean that one should expect everyone in ladder games to play like that friend. People enter to win. This is why the lack of even the most basal knowledge combined with the most venomous hatred in bronze astounds me. It's not like I'm shitting on a little girl's make-believe tea party, a purely noncompetitive, for fun event where any attempts to derail it would be undoubtedly dickish. I'm playing a competitive video game. To be angry at me is like playing hockey and getting pissed that the goalie stopped your shot. What exactly are their expectations when they queue up for a match? If it's to have fun on their terms, then they probably should have picked a single-player game.





Since over time I've more or less established that a sizeable portion of bronzies do not have the knowledge required to beat a worker rush, the next logical step is to see what happens after they have encountered it once. Are they capable of acquiring knowledge on their own? Or is their lack of knowledge the result of an inability to learn rather than simple ignorance? Before I began telling them outright how to defeat my strategy at the start of the game, I would rush them normally and then ask them afterwards why they made the decisions they did.



This particular incident began normally. I arrived into my opponent's base with workers and he immediately shit his pants and lifted off his CC. Rather than attacking, he ran around and circles and let most of his SCVs die. Most interestingly, though, he had a 99% completed supply depot. His last desperate act was to send his final SCV, probes at his heel, to finish it. I found that odd, and inquired thusly.





Kind of refutes the "play for fun" hypothesis, huh?



After he departed, I queued again, not thinking much of the encounter. However, on the loading screen I noticed we had been matched up again. I had not told him how to beat my strategy yet, so this was an opportunity to see his emerging thought process. How would he try to defeat me this time? Showing more steely bowel resolve than in the last game, he attacked me straightaway. Unfortunately, he focus fired a single worker and I was able to micro it away while the SCVs futilely gave chase. He left showing hopeful signs of contemplation.





Some of these games need definitely need to be made into gifs.



In one game he had gone from a complete trouser soiling disaster to having a sort of an idea. It wasn't enough to win, but it showed some positive growth. I searched for another game and once again found my incidental protégé. To my surprise, he told me at the outset to try my rush again. As I had intended to do it anyway, I obliged, and this bout he almost beat me. Instead of chasing me around for long periods of time, he quickly adjusted his focus when I microed the targeted probe away. It was still not quite efficient enough, though, and I ended up defeating his 11 SCVs with 2 probes remaining. Feeling generous and happy to see someone who didn't call me a faggot, I decided to explain to him how to beat worker rushes in the future.





I never thought that a bronzie's problem would be over-thinking something. It's generally the opposite.



This incident proved that bronze players are capable of adapting, albeit slowly and not always correctly. Still, it was more than I had expected. I checked my impromptu student's battle.net profile and it showed he was still in the bronze league almost 2 months later, but maybe one day he will be able to climb out on his own. Certainly he seemed a more rational fellow than the average bronzie, although truthfully, that's not saying a whole lot.



To the point of not adapting correctly, I have another interesting case. I rushed a guy and won per the usual ways. He left the game and I thought nothing much of it. Completely standard. But, when I encountered him again, he had devised the most bizarre countermeasure to my rush. He had, it seemed, attempted to block his ramp with his Command Center.





2000 games later and I'm still amazed by the shit I see.



This was far more retarded than I felt should be allowed to exist, in bronze or anywhere else, so after the game I had a little chat with him. I explained how to attack move, and invited him into a custom game to see if he could beat me, having just been given the required information to do so. Strangely, once in game, he did not begin mining minerals. Instead, he took his workers and ran them to the smoke clouds in the back of his Metalopolis base. When I arrived, baffled, he ambushed me from the fog like some kind of idiot ninja.





I think you may have misunderstood something.



He had completely missed the point of the training exercise. I'm not quite sure how he came to the conclusion that he needed to trick me, or how that it would in any way simulate a real game scenario, but whatever. I decided not to press the issue. Upon reviewing the replay, it turned out that he won only because I had begun typing when his surprise ambush came. It was merely a case then of him attack moving with equal forces 5 seconds before mine did. He had indeed attack moved, though, and that was really the only point. Small victories. In a real game, he would hopefully have been producing workers like normal. At any rate, he left happily and hopefully a little more knowledgeable.



The whole ordeal was very weird. It was like watching a tribe who has no knowledge of numerals attempt to describe how many of something there is. Lacking basic sense, he had to go so far out of his way to concoct a scheme using methods that I would never have fathomed. Bronze is truly a world apart.





Many, many times have I rushed people 2 or 3 times in a row successfully. Given the regularity of such occurrences, it seems undeniable that they are incapable of learning even the most basic maneuvers without direct, detailed assistance. And that only applies to those willing to even attempt to learn in the first place. The final piece to this puzzle is the question, "can they retain knowledge?" Certainly they have all somehow not only figured out that a CC can lift off, but they also remember to do so at every possible opportunity. Even when they don't annoyingly float it to the corner they still lift it up, as if by some instinctual response. Could they assimilate something even more basic than CC lifting into their Starcraft skill set?



In my previous entry, I included a screenshot where I worker rushed a





People who play on low settings are missing out.



Or, perhaps he had never really listened to them in the first place. An astute observer will notice this guy lacks the "z" at the end of his name. Both replays link to the same battle.net profile, though, so it appears he used his name change at some point. This is undeniable proof that they do not learn.



I don't know how much more clearly I can explain attack moving, the simplest of game mechanics. If they can't learn how to do even that with explicit instructions as to both how and when to do it, how are they ever going to learn how to play? Well, it appears that they can't, which is why they can be "stuck" in bronze for hundreds and hundreds of games with no sign of improvement. They aren't actually learning anything from those games. They're just… in them, thinking God-knows-what. Or, more likely, not thinking at all. The games just sort of happen around them and they never stop and take a moment to consider how they came to be. It's like they believe that bronze is some kind of happenstance, that it doesn't mean anything, that it is no reflection on their abilities. So they trudge on, obliviously taking their shittiness to logic-defying heights all the while never acknowledging or even grasping that they are shitty in the first place.





The final chapter of my current quest to understand how a bronze player learns came in the form of a chance visit from Uromacef. If you don't remember, he was one of the few people who not only learned how to attack move from my warning, but was nice about it. He whispered me to ask about something, I don't really remember what, but eventually the topic shifted to him improving at SC2. I asked him if he knew about Team Liquid or Day9. He informed me that not only did he know about Day9, but was avidly watching the dailies, even going so far as to mention "Newbie Tuesday." It mystifies me that anyone who is using such a resource could still be in bronze. What are they gaining from those lessons—or, more to the point, not gaining? Surely the "probes and pylons" spiel should be enough catapult anyone out of bronze, right?





It's on a t-shirt, for fuck's sake. How much simpler does it need to be?



He then went on to tell me that he thought his macro was "fine," and asked about other problems. This is an issue that seems to plague bronze leaguers. Nothing they do is "fine." Nothing anybody does is "fine" until they reach the pinnacle of the master league. I can't tell you how many bronze players I've seen lament that they "spend all their resources" or "hit every inject" and cannot fathom why they are still bronze. It is, of course, because they aren't actually doing those things. I'm not sure how such a large segment of the SC2 population suffers from the same shared delusion of competency when literally every statistic, in game and out, is telling them otherwise. It's a major problem in their development. They can't learn how to do something if they think they already know how to do it.



Eventually, Uromacef and I found our way into a custom game. I picked Protoss against his Zerg on Metalopolis. I proceeded to play the worst game of Starcraft I have ever played. No, more than that—the worst thing I have ever done. Worse than papers written hours before classes. Worse than my singing in the shower. Worse than that time I ran over a homeless guy and kept driving. After six months of worker rushing, concepts like building units and structures are tenebrous at best. I got supply blocked at every single pylon. I forgot to put probes on gas. I had the worst excuse for a build order imaginable. Everything felt sluggish and awful, like I was numb with sleep, just then awakening from some horrible nightmare where I had spent half a year worker rushing bronze leaguers.



Anyway, it didn't matter. My bronze friend did nothing but sit in his base and make some Zerglings. By the 5 minute mark, he had banked up 800 minerals. Finally, he remembered to expand and also constructed 2 Evolution Chambers, which eventually were used to upgrade melee and ranged attacks. He never did anything, though. He just sat there and made some more Zerglings and eventually hydras. In time, I started watching him with an observer, wondering when I should move out and kill him. At any given point I would have had enough stuff to do it, but I felt like I should see how the game would progress. I had been sitting on two bases, clumsily making some gateway units and Colossi. Eventually I moved out and rolled over him. I didn't micro or anything, I just a-moved. I made Sentries, but I didn't even bother Force Fielding or using Guardian Shield. He GG'd, a sight almost completely foreign to me at this point, and left the game.





What is it with bronze leaguers and hydras?



After the game, he asked me how to defeat the little bit of drone harassment I had done. He blamed his poor showing on the fact that my worker harass "screwed up his timings," which bronze players are physiologically incapable of having. Hell, I didn't have a timing, either; I had an anti-timing. I invested in 2 forges and upgrades, but I moved out before they were done because I got bored and tired of waiting. Not that it made the slightest difference, of course.





I'm beginning to think Day9 is not for bronze leaguers.



I played him again, but the only noticeable difference in his play was that when I showed up with a probe, he chased it off with a single drone like I had suggested he do. Of course, he ended up chasing it all over the map and finally back to my zealot who then killed it, but one thing at a time. This game I simply made 4 gates. I didn't 4 gate rush him, I just made 4 gates off one base and warped in things for a while. He went for the same bizarre ling/hydra/upgrade build he had gone for in the previous game. He didn't scout, he didn't move out, he once again opted to not do anything. At another randomly selected time I sent my army out, attack moved, and won.



At this point I thought I had identified his problem. Well, a few problems. OK, a lot of problems. Everything he did was basically a problem. Straining to find anything helpful to say, I first told him he absolutely needed to scout. In neither of his games did he make any attempt whatsoever to look beyond his base. He had no idea whether I was massing void rays, DT rushing, or AFK. He didn't even know where my base was. Secondly, I told him to make Roaches because he didn't have the macro required to keep up with the Larva Injects necessary to make Zerglings in useful amounts.



We went into one final game. I didn't feel like this was benefiting either of us, but what the hell. Maybe he would do something interesting. He didn't. This time, he made roaches as suggested, but just like the previous games he didn't do anything with his units. He didn't scout. He didn't take a watchtower. He didn't even move them after they were rallied a short distance off creep. The only thing he did before I attacked him was kill a nearby Mengsk statue. The only time he had moved out of his base was when his drone chased my scouting probe around the map because I had forgotten to tell him to not do that in between the games. I had specifically told him that if he saw a Robotics Bay he should make a spire and some corruptors, but it never got that far.





Wall offs: the bronzie's arch nemesis.



The most painful part of watching a bronze player play is the crippling, overwhelming idleness. I saw it in Warcraft 3, too, which was even more bizarre because WC3 has creeps to kill. For whatever reason, bronzies just don't do anything. They don't scout. They don't harass. They don't "poke" or "shark." They don't expand. They don't make any fucking sense. They just sit there in the general area of their base waiting for something. They aren't even macroing well during this time period, either, despite their protestations to the contrary. I don't expect multi pronged harass while never missing injects, but dear God, do something! Take a watch tower, send a ling to scout, spread some creep, anything. People in bronze are so inactive that they're almost not playing the game at all. I don't know how this could possibly be an enjoyable pasttime for them. I cannot understand why someone so disinterested in moving their units around the map would play an RTS and not a TBS or other genre of game entirely. No matter how hard I try, no matter how long I spend down here, I just don't understand these people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? Why are they here?



It's almost maddening trying to come up with solid pieces of advice for people so bad. Everything they do is so unnatural, so counterintuitive that I'm not sure anyone can actually teach them. Clearly even Day9's continued efforts have failed. If even Uromacef, who in all respects appears to be a nice, literate fellow, struggles to learn even the most basic ideas, what hope do the raging masses of the bronze league have? I fear they have none, for there is something innate in their character that holds them back and prevents their growth as Starcraft players. It's not that they are casual. It's not that they are bad. It's that they are bafflingly, unexplainably dense.



+ Show Spoiler [Bonus Pictures] +



I have many leather-bound books… and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.





I was just curious.





Get on my level.





Well then you weren't really tabbed out, now were you?





Certainly not sex tips.





And I thought we had some nice camaraderie going, too.





He floated to the corner and BMed, so I coated the map in creep and built the sickest drone maze.





Well, it's the only race that has queens.





I'm just trying to broaden my cultural horizons.





How can a person so clueless be so assertive?





Is this what it's like to teach high school?





Fair enough.





Not the hero we need right now.





Poor Billy.





Standard.





Guess I'd have to go with bear.





Hey, you asked.





Worse than I thought, too.





I say we make every Tuesday worker rush day. Shake up the bronze meta-game.





I don't know, but something about this guy's story doesn't add up.





Was that a ladder game or an Abbott and Costello routine?





Since you're probably reading this, ♥.

This will be my last entry for awhile, so here are a bunch of bonus pictures to tide you over.I have many leather-bound books… and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.I was just curious.Get on my level.Well then you weren't really tabbed out, now were you?Certainly not sex tips.And I thought we had some nice camaraderie going, too.He floated to the corner and BMed, so I coated the map in creep and built the sickest drone maze.Well, it's the only race that has queens.I'm just trying to broaden my cultural horizons.How can a person so clueless be so assertive?Is this what it's like to teach high school?Fair enough.Not the hero we need right now.Poor Billy.Standard.Guess I'd have to go with bear.Hey, you asked.Worse than I thought, too.I say we make every Tuesday worker rush day. Shake up the bronze meta-game.I don't know, but something about this guy's story doesn't add up.Was that a ladder game or an Abbott and Costello routine?Since you're probably reading this, ♥.



Part 4:



Anyone who has ever played fetch with a dog will understand the following truth. If you pretend to throw the ball, but instead quickly hide it behind your back, the dog will faithfully run after the ball you did not actually throw, look for it, and then return, confused. You may repeat this process once or twice before the dog either figures out your trick or gets tired of your shit and goes to the corner to lick himself. After observing my pet and considering his small, but definitive display of intelligence, I came to a startling conclusion: Spaniels are smarter than bronzies. And more flexible.When presented with the same situation over and over, bronzies do not adapt, yet a dog will. How did it come to be that my canine companion is a more levelheaded fellow than the frothing mongrels that inhabit the lowest tier of Starcraft 2?Do bronze players lack object permanence? Is that why they lift off their Command Centers with such startling frequency? Do they think that I, too, share their affliction and will forget that there was another person in the game with me? Could this explain why they often do not retaliate in the slightest? Do they periodically forget that they have workers, or are playing a game at all? Are they amnesiacs? Narcoleptics? Other experiments for other days, perhaps, because this entry has one primary focus: knowledge versus skill. As the maxim tells us, knowledge is power, and Starcraft is largely a game of knowledge.Before we delve into the world of bronze, I would like to take a moment to discuss another game, a game that is almost universally agreed to be skilless. I am talking, of course, about the World of Warcraft. Specifically, WoW's PvE. As an on-again, off-again WoW player, I could have very easily written this blog series about the incredibly awful players I found in the game's dungeons and raids. No WoW community is as desirable to be a part of as TL is for Starcraft, though. Please bear with me if you've never played WoW; I hope you won't be too lost.I had, for a time, begun taking screenshots of every male Blood Elf Hunter I found wearing strength gear, but eventually the frequency at which I found them rapidly became more depressing than interesting.Later, I decided to take DPS parses for the boss segments of my random heroic groups, marking down each player's race and class, to determine if Blood Elves really were the worst players in the game (trust me, they are). None of my projects ever came to fruition beyond a few screenshots and a large amount of mental anguish, though. The point of them would have been to document a group people who, similar to bronzies, are irrationally terrible at something that nobody should be so bad at. WoW PvE, for the happily uninitiated, is mechanically very easy. You are hard-capped on the number of actions you can take by a global cooldown on the majority of your abilities. So, assuming you hit a button an average of every 1 second (and most classes don't), the maximum possible effective APM you could have is 60. Sure, there is some movement, but it's generally nothing more complicated than running into or out of a circle, stuff 7-year-olds have been managing to do in Mario games for decades. Moreover, everyone has access to addons to tell them when they are standing in fire. Yes, many WoW players lack the situational awareness to know even when their own characters are engulfed in flames.The biggest challenge to any raid is herding all the nerds to attack the correct target and to stand in the right spot. Websites like Learn to Raid or Tankspot freely give out strategies for every encounter in simple terms that anyone can understand. So nobody should be taken off guard by the fights after seeing them in person once or twice. Everything after that is simple, rote, mechanical button presses. For example, as a Feral cat Druid, the biggest part of my personal rotation was… nothing—literally doing nothing. To play my class, I had to just sit there and auto-attack while waiting for enough energy to regenerate to allow the usage an ability. The only skill involved was knowing what button to press when the opportunity to press one came around. Not only is that not terribly difficult to do manually, there are addons that show you graphically what button to press. With the right tools, every fight is basically a prolonged Quick Time Event that you don't necessarily lose if you mess up. Imagine if in Starcraft 2 all you had to do was micro a single Sentry. That would be more challenging than being cat Druid is.So how do people fail at hitting a series of keys for 5 minute stretches? Well, like bronzies, they don't want to learn, and that's all it really takes. Just a bit of time to learn. There has long been a battle in WoW between so-called "casuals" and "elitists." But, the truth is, "casual" players are just bad players who use their "real lives" as an excuse for performing poorly. They are unwilling to spend time learning what to do and then when nobody wants to play with them they cry foul. Anybody, from adults to children, can learn how to be successful in WoW. Playing WoW correctly and playing it incorrectly uses up the same amount of time and effort after those initial couple of hours invested in learning. The only "elitism" in WoW is players declining to play with people who refuse to put forth a reasonable amount of effort to learn. The knowledge they need to gain is readily available and enthusiastically given by anyone in-game; nobody wants their fellow players to be bad. WoW players are more than happy to toss a link to a help site like Elitist Jerks. Although it might not always be the simplest advice…It's generally good enough advice. I remember vividly the first time I ever got my hunter into a raid. It was several months after Burning Crusade was released. I was geared mostly in dungeon set 3 blues and a few heroic purples. We had been clearing through Karazahn and having a nice time of it. A crossbow dropped for me and I got a couple other armor pieces. I was enjoying myself and things were proceeding rather smoothly, but after a few wipes to the final boss, a player left the group. We needed another DPS, so someone invited a hunter friend who was decked out in full tier 5 and, to be nice to me, didn't need any items. I remember being in awe of his Arcanite Steam-Pistol and gigantic Tauren tier 5 shoulder pads, which dwarfed my pitiful blue Troll ones. Knowing he was far more geared than any of us, he arrogantly said something to the effect of, "this should be no problem now that I'm here," and bragged about "carrying us." Fulfilling his own prophecy, we indeed downed the boss.The problem? I did nearly twice as much damage as the guy 2 tiers above me in gear. Why? Because I had looked up how to play my class whereas he had not. I learned how spec (41/20/0), how to gear (cap hit and stack AP), which pet had the highest damage (Ravager), and, most importantly, how to make and use a Steady Shot macro. If you weren't around for BC, a Hunter could basically put all of his critical abilities into an in-game macro, bind it to a key, and then mash that key brainlessly for the entire raid and do respectable damage. The arrogant tier 5 hunter, however, randomly cast Arcane and Aimed shots, erratically weaved in between Aspect of the Hawk and Viper, and generally didn't know what the fuck he was doing. As a Hunter in those days, you were rarely required to do anything but DPS, so your job was pretty much just to stand there and act like a turret to dish out as much damage as possible. So I, the guy in mostly blues, contributed more to the raid than the guy in complete shiny epics who was touting his greatness to us. Not because I was more skilled (again, I was mashing a single button) but because I was more knowledgeable. The reason we defeated the boss was because of our continued practice and a little luck, not because of his underwhelming contribution. But to the braggart Hunter, he was the man. Like a bronzie, he either didn't want to learn or erroneously thought he had nothing left to learn.How can we visualize a bronze player's level of knowledge? In WoW, it's not only very easy to point out gaps in player information, but to fill them. Standing in fire? Listen to DBM and strafe left when it makes a noise. Not capped on hit? Go reforge some of that crit into hit. Trouble keeping up with your Retribution rotation? Try using CLCRet. For every flaw there is some piece of information or some utility that can remedy it.Starcraft is a great deal more complicated. Even if you could point out a specific flaw, there is not a downloadable addon to fix it. Well, not legal ones, anyway. How do we separate a bronze player's skill from their knowledge, then? How can we see if they are? If you look at a bronze player's normal game, it's a mishmash of poor macro, low micro, no scouting, and random decisions. You couldn't look at a bronzie's ZvT and tell him to "scout more," because even if he scouted, he wouldn't know what he was looking at or what to do about it if he did. There are so many things wrong at the low level that it's impossible to identify a single thing to improve. It's like looking at a head-on collision between two trains and labeling each bolt failure. It's not the bolts that are important, it's the fact that it's a fucking train wreck. This is why rather than give specific help, people advise simply to "macro better," because at the low levels knowing how to do basic things is more important than knowing more obtuse things like strategy.To separate knowledge and skill then, one would need to strip away all the aspects of a normal game. Eliminate the need for macro and micro. Get rid of the need for scouting. Then, find a way to do it repeatedly. And, after thinking about it, that is precisely what I have been unwittingly doing. I have been testing knowledge, not skill. This is why I found it so difficult to come up with something other than worker rushing to do against bronze leaguers. Anything more complicated became a matter of me pitting my skills, even if handicapped, against the skills of a bronzie. Nothing could be gained from that other than the fact that I'm better than them, which isn't particularly unexpected or interesting. Therefore, the strategies I have been executing are designed to fail if someone knows how to counter them. Anyone who knows how to attack move will beat my worker rushing. Anyone who knows how to make a siege weapon will beat my Planetary Fortress massing. I am not 4-gating them to test if they haveto defeat it; I am worker rushing them to test if theyto defeat it. Regardless of how good or bad they are in the other aspects of the game, any player with the requisite knowledge will score an easy win from me. By that same token, any player who continually loses to such a tactic must not be learning.Before testing their level of knowledge, we must first examine where that knowledge comes from. WoW lacks any useful in-game information, so all of it comes from external tutorial videos, written guides, and downloadable addons. Where does knowledge come from in Starcraft? A couple of places: the in-game tutorials ( which do, in fact, tell people how to attack move ), YouTube guides, and websites like TL. Unlike WoW, a player is not likely to teach another player how to play or direct them to a place where they can learn for themselves. Not that anyone ever asks. So, the question is: are bronze players aware of the greater Starcraft "scene?" Have they been given the same opportunities to learn as we have?While I did not quiz every opponent if they knew about Team Liquid, a surprising number of people proved to be aware of it. In fact, since this series has gotten some more exposure, I have been recognized on the ladder several times, both by the bronzies themselves and the visitors to bronze alike. Further, a large portion of the players who have been outraged at my experiments have self-identified as bronze. Therefore, those people clearly have the tools available for them to learn. Maybe those are the ones who I'm not defeating. Am I only beating the players who don't know about TL?I'm not so sure. While conducting a postgame survey is out of the question, they certainly seem to be aware of Starcraft terminology that would otherwise be unknown to them if not for Starcraft websites. If they weren't aware of the outside Starcraft world, then why would they say "glhf" and "gg?" How would they know how to call something cheesy or imba? How would they know to use bronze as an insult if they had never strayed outside of the game itself? Maybe there exists a good amount of silent, confused bronzies, but how do we explain the loud ones who clearly have the knowhow to locate and use the utilities to learn and yet do not?Some have argued that bronzies do not want to learn, that they only want to play "for fun." I find this hard to believe. I need write little to respond to such a silly hypothesis. It is only necessary to ask the straightforward question: if they play for fun, why do they get so angry? Like this fellow, who greeted me with a phrase that indicates he is not only aware of basic Starcraft etiquette, but expects his opponent to understand it, as well. Things went south when the workers flooded into his base. He responded to the rush by not responding at all, as is somewhat typical in bronze. Then, he loaded into his CC and flew around, but there are no islands on Korhal Compound so he quickly found himself in a losing situation. Whenever my opponent insults me in a manner more conducive to conversation than "ur a fag," I try to ask them why they feel that way. Perhaps it could be seen as goading, but I genuinely do hope that one day I will receive an enlightening answer. I want to know what's going on inside the head of a person who loses to a worker rush and then rages about it. This was about as close I have gotten.It has always struck me as curious that people assume that someone who worker rushes or cheeses must have no life. Who spends more time playing: the person whose games last an average of 8 minutes or the person who macros to an average of 30 minutes? On a game-to-game basis, the cheeser is definitely committing less time. You really can't divine anything about a player's lifestyle from their playstyle, though. Further, calling someone a virgin for playing the exact same video game as you are seems a little illogical, no? Yet these are the insults that get flung around incessantly with no hint that the insulters notice the irony of disparaging someone for partaking in the same activity as they are. Sometimes, I pose a series of other possible explanations for the bronzies to consider.As always, I questioned why my opponent stayed in the game after it was clear not only that he had lost, but that he was not enjoying himself. It was obviously to spite me, but why would someone who only wants to enjoy a nice game of Starcraft stay in a game they have admitted to disliking being in just to spite someone? He didn't respond though, because he was busy reaching around to his internet cable. He must have pulled it out and quickly plugged it back in, because for the first time in the game he began lagging. He then said, while presumably bearing a shiteating grin:These "networking errors" continued for a few minutes. He would lag for 10 seconds and then stop. Then, just before finally lagging out fully he yelled:No one can honestly believe that this person plays "for fun." I don't care what he claims, people playing games for fun don't go apeshit when someone beats them. Further, how long can someone play a game and use the fact that they are playing for fun as an excuse for their ignorance? 100 games? 200? Well, this guy has played at least 1600. Maybe even more, because someone who nerdrages this intensely at a worker rush almost certainly has more losses than wins.While there may very well be people who genuinely play for fun, that doesn't mean that improving and learning isn't fun, too. People who watchdo so for fun, but don't you think that they would be better off watching the National Geographic Channel? "For fun" is a cop out that only grants someone so much leeway and they pretty much abandon any of it when they get mad at someone for trying to achieve victory in a game where the stated objective is to win.We must remember that a ladder game is not a friendly practice match; it's an outlet for competition. Just because it's easier to hit "Find Match" than it is to find a friend to play a custom game with doesn't mean that one should expect everyone in ladder games to play like that friend. People enter to win. This is why the lack of even the most basal knowledge combined with the most venomous hatred in bronze astounds me. It's not like I'm shitting on a little girl's make-believe tea party, a purely noncompetitive, for fun event where any attempts to derail it would be undoubtedly dickish. I'm playing a competitive video game. To be angry at me is like playing hockey and getting pissed that the goalie stopped your shot. What exactly are their expectations when they queue up for a match? If it's to have fun onterms, then they probably should have picked a single-player game.Since over time I've more or less established that a sizeable portion of bronzies do not have the knowledge required to beat a worker rush, the next logical step is to see what happens after they have encountered it once. Are they capable of acquiring knowledge on their own? Or is their lack of knowledge the result of an inability to learn rather than simple ignorance? Before I began telling them outright how to defeat my strategy at the start of the game, I would rush them normally and then ask them afterwards why they made the decisions they did.This particular incident began normally. I arrived into my opponent's base with workers and he immediately shit his pants and lifted off his CC. Rather than attacking, he ran around and circles and let most of his SCVs die. Most interestingly, though, he had a 99% completed supply depot. His last desperate act was to send his final SCV, probes at his heel, to finish it. I found that odd, and inquired thusly.After he departed, I queued again, not thinking much of the encounter. However, on the loading screen I noticed we had been matched up again. I had not told him how to beat my strategy yet, so this was an opportunity to see his emerging thought process. How would he try to defeat me this time? Showing more steely bowel resolve than in the last game, he attacked me straightaway. Unfortunately, he focus fired a single worker and I was able to micro it away while the SCVs futilely gave chase. He left showing hopeful signs of contemplation.In one game he had gone from a complete trouser soiling disaster to having a sort of an idea. It wasn't enough to win, but it showed some positive growth. I searched for another game and once again found my incidental protégé. To my surprise, he told me at the outset to try my rush again. As I had intended to do it anyway, I obliged, and this bout he almost beat me. Instead of chasing me around for long periods of time, he quickly adjusted his focus when I microed the targeted probe away. It was still not quite efficient enough, though, and I ended up defeating his 11 SCVs with 2 probes remaining. Feeling generous and happy to see someone who didn't call me a faggot, I decided to explain to him how to beat worker rushes in the future.This incident proved that bronze players are capable of adapting, albeit slowly and not always correctly. Still, it was more than I had expected. I checked my impromptu student's battle.net profile and it showed he was still in the bronze league almost 2 months later, but maybe one day he will be able to climb out on his own. Certainly he seemed a more rational fellow than the average bronzie, although truthfully, that's not saying a whole lot.To the point of not adapting correctly, I have another interesting case. I rushed a guy and won per the usual ways. He left the game and I thought nothing much of it. Completely standard. But, when I encountered him again, he had devised the most bizarre countermeasure to my rush. He had, it seemed, attempted to block his ramp with his Command Center.This was far more retarded than I felt should be allowed to exist, in bronze or anywhere else, so after the game I had a little chat with him. I explained how to attack move, and invited him into a custom game to see if he could beat me, having just been given the required information to do so. Strangely, once in game, he did not begin mining minerals. Instead, he took his workers and ran them to the smoke clouds in the back of his Metalopolis base. When I arrived, baffled, he ambushed me from the fog like some kind of idiot ninja.He had completely missed the point of the training exercise. I'm not quite sure how he came to the conclusion that he needed to trick me, or how that it would in any way simulate a real game scenario, but whatever. I decided not to press the issue. Upon reviewing the replay, it turned out that he won only because I had begun typing when his surprise ambush came. It was merely a case then of him attack moving with equal forces 5 seconds before mine did. He had indeed attack moved, though, and that was really the only point. Small victories. In a real game, he would hopefully have been producing workers like normal. At any rate, he left happily and hopefully a little more knowledgeable.The whole ordeal was very weird. It was like watching a tribe who has no knowledge of numerals attempt to describe how many of something there is. Lacking basic sense, he had to go so far out of his way to concoct a scheme using methods that I would never have fathomed. Bronze is truly a world apart.Many, many times have I rushed people 2 or 3 times in a row successfully. Given the regularity of such occurrences, it seems undeniable that they are incapable of learning even the most basic maneuvers without direct, detailed assistance. And that only applies to those willing to even attempt to learn in the first place. The final piece to this puzzle is the question, "can they retain knowledge?" Certainly they have all somehow not only figured out that a CC can lift off, but they also remember to do so at every possible opportunity. Even when they don't annoyingly float it to the corner they still lift it up, as if by some instinctual response. Could they assimilate something even more basic than CC lifting into their Starcraft skill set?In my previous entry, I included a screenshot where I worker rushed a player who was purportedly a "competitive" bronze leaguer. He was, at the time, jockeying against me for position on the ladder. Sadly, he lost to my rush, but seemed pleasant enough about the ordeal. After explaining how to defeat my attack, he responded with "aiight," which I could only assume meant he understood and would follow my recommendation in the future. How wrong I was. I found him on the ladder several days later, and, to my great sadness, he had forgotten all about my instructions.Or, perhaps he had never really listened to them in the first place. An astute observer will notice this guy lacks the "z" at the end of his name. Both replays link to the same battle.net profile, though, so it appears he used his name change at some point. This is undeniable proof that they do not learn.I don't know how much more clearly I can explain attack moving, the simplest of game mechanics. If they can't learn how to do even that with explicit instructions as to both how and when to do it, how are they ever going to learn how to play? Well, it appears that they can't, which is why they can be "stuck" in bronze for hundreds and hundreds of games with no sign of improvement. They aren't actually learning anything from those games. They're just… in them, thinking God-knows-what. Or, more likely, not thinking at all. The games just sort of happen around them and they never stop and take a moment to consider how they came to be. It's like they believe that bronze is some kind of happenstance, that it doesn't mean anything, that it is no reflection on their abilities. So they trudge on, obliviously taking their shittiness to logic-defying heights all the while never acknowledging or even grasping that they are shitty in the first place.The final chapter of my current quest to understand how a bronze player learns came in the form of a chance visit from Uromacef. If you don't remember, he was one of the few people who not only learned how to attack move from my warning, but was nice about it. He whispered me to ask about something, I don't really remember what, but eventually the topic shifted to him improving at SC2. I asked him if he knew about Team Liquid or Day9. He informed me that not only did he know about Day9, but was avidly watching the dailies, even going so far as to mention "Newbie Tuesday." It mystifies me that anyone who is using such a resource could still be in bronze. What are they gaining from those lessons—or, more to the point, not gaining? Surely the "probes and pylons" spiel should be enough catapult anyone out of bronze, right?He then went on to tell me that he thought his macro was "fine," and asked about other problems. This is an issue that seems to plague bronze leaguers. Nothing they do is "fine." Nothing anybody does is "fine" until they reach the pinnacle of the master league. I can't tell you how many bronze players I've seen lament that they "spend all their resources" or "hit every inject" and cannot fathom why they are still bronze. It is, of course, because they aren't actually doing those things. I'm not sure how such a large segment of the SC2 population suffers from the same shared delusion of competency when literally every statistic, in game and out, is telling them otherwise. It's a major problem in their development. They can't learn how to do something if they think they already know how to do it.Eventually, Uromacef and I found our way into a custom game. I picked Protoss against his Zerg on Metalopolis. I proceeded to play the worst game of Starcraft I have ever played. No, more than that—the worst thing I have ever done. Worse than papers written hours before classes. Worse than my singing in the shower. Worse than that time I ran over a homeless guy and kept driving. After six months of worker rushing, concepts like building units and structures are tenebrous at best. I got supply blocked at every single pylon. I forgot to put probes on gas. I had the worst excuse for a build order imaginable. Everything felt sluggish and awful, like I was numb with sleep, just then awakening from some horrible nightmare where I had spent half a year worker rushing bronze leaguers.Anyway, it didn't matter. My bronze friend did nothing but sit in his base and make some Zerglings. By the 5 minute mark, he had banked up 800 minerals. Finally, he remembered to expand and also constructed 2 Evolution Chambers, which eventually were used to upgrade melee and ranged attacks. He neveranything, though. He just sat there and made some more Zerglings and eventually hydras. In time, I started watching him with an observer, wondering when I should move out and kill him. At any given point I would have had enough stuff to do it, but I felt like I should see how the game would progress. I had been sitting on two bases, clumsily making some gateway units and Colossi. Eventually I moved out and rolled over him. I didn't micro or anything, I just a-moved. I made Sentries, but I didn't even bother Force Fielding or using Guardian Shield. He GG'd, a sight almost completely foreign to me at this point, and left the game.After the game, he asked me how to defeat the little bit of drone harassment I had done. He blamed his poor showing on the fact that my worker harass "screwed up his timings," which bronze players are physiologically incapable of having. Hell, I didn't have a timing, either; I had an anti-timing. I invested in 2 forges and upgrades, but I moved out before they were done because I got bored and tired of waiting. Not that it made the slightest difference, of course.I played him again, but the only noticeable difference in his play was that when I showed up with a probe, he chased it off with a single drone like I had suggested he do. Of course, he ended up chasing it all over the map and finally back to my zealot who then killed it, but one thing at a time. This game I simply made 4 gates. I didn't 4 gate rush him, I just made 4 gates off one base and warped in things for a while. He went for the same bizarre ling/hydra/upgrade build he had gone for in the previous game. He didn't scout, he didn't move out, he once again opted to not do anything. At another randomly selected time I sent my army out, attack moved, and won.At this point I thought I had identified his problem. Well, a few problems. OK, a lot of problems. Everything he did was basically a problem. Straining to find anything helpful to say, I first told him he absolutely needed to scout. In neither of his games did he make any attempt whatsoever to look beyond his base. He had no idea whether I was massing void rays, DT rushing, or AFK. He didn't even know where my base was. Secondly, I told him to make Roaches because he didn't have the macro required to keep up with the Larva Injects necessary to make Zerglings in useful amounts.We went into one final game. I didn't feel like this was benefiting either of us, but what the hell. Maybe he would do something interesting. He didn't. This time, he made roaches as suggested, but just like the previous games he didn't do anything with his units. He didn't scout. He didn't take a watchtower. He didn't even move them after they were rallied a short distance off creep. The only thing he did before I attacked him was kill a nearby Mengsk statue. The only time he had moved out of his base was when his drone chased my scouting probe around the map because I had forgotten to tell him to not do that in between the games. I had specifically told him that if he saw a Robotics Bay he should make a spire and some corruptors, but it never got that far.The most painful part of watching a bronze player play is the crippling, overwhelming idleness. I saw it in Warcraft 3, too, which was even more bizarre because WC3 has creeps to kill. For whatever reason, bronzies just don't do anything. They don't scout. They don't harass. They don't "poke" or "shark." They don't expand. They don't make any fucking sense. They just sit there in the general area of their base waiting for something. They aren't even macroing well during this time period, either, despite their protestations to the contrary. I don't expect multi pronged harass while never missing injects, but dear God, do something! Take a watch tower, send a ling to scout, spread some creep, anything. People in bronze are so inactive that they're almost not playing the game at all. I don't know how this could possibly be an enjoyable pasttime for them. I cannot understand why someone so disinterested in moving their units around the map would play an RTS and not a TBS or other genre of game entirely. No matter how hard I try, no matter how long I spend down here, I just don't understand these people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? Why are they here?It's almost maddening trying to come up with solid pieces of advice for people so bad. Everything they do is so unnatural, so counterintuitive that I'm not sure anyone can actually teach them. Clearly even Day9's continued efforts have failed. If even Uromacef, who in all respects appears to be a nice, literate fellow, struggles to learn even the most basic ideas, what hope do the raging masses of the bronze league have? I fear they have none, for there is something innate in their character that holds them back and prevents their growth as Starcraft players. It's not that they are casual. It's not that they are bad. It's that they are bafflingly, unexplainably dense.Part 4: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=328804