Went 6-1 in 2v2’s. A very abbreviated day due to a busy Thursday night/Friday morning so I didn’t get as many games as I wanted to get in but we did finish qualifying games and we’re in a platinum league. We were ranked 2 for a small bit but since we stopped a few teams have leapfrogged us. Our record is far better than other teams (13-2) but since I say that now I’m sure I’ve jinxed us.

Our only loss was due to playing double terran who rushed fast reapers. I see people constantly talking about how powerful reapers are and to a degree I can understand why. They are indifferent to terrain height so they can enter and exit wherever they want, move at a fast enough speed so that zerglings/zealots can be kited around, and most crazily, do something like 40 damage to buildings for some reason.

Now on the flip side, they’re practically wearing paper armor. If you can get hits on them they drop like flies. My first lesson now playing against terran is that if I’m going to defend my choke, I’ll do it with units/buildings only and I should probably double cannon my mineral line. This game specifically though we lost because as the reapers hit our base our army was midfield en route to their base. We decided to press an attack instead of return and were horrified at the speed by which reapers took down the buildings.

Otherwise the games I played were significantly more intense than yesterdays. I feel like 1 or 2 games went by where I lost my whole town and we had to race to the finish. My playstyle definitely needs work. When I watch replays I notice that I spend my economy primarily on economy/tech and least of all in units. I play in a way where I tend to get upgrades for things that I may only use very sparingly, like getting blink for stalkers when I only have like 4. So I need to focus my style and play with more consolidated units. I suspect this stems from my desire to want to be flexible and flip strategies on a dime which I’m not sure how effective this is realistically.

The league system has no clarification on how it works. From what they’ve said the overall ladder is now split up two ways. One you have your league which ranges from pro, platinum, gold, silver, bronze, copper, and practice.  You play 10 qualifying games to see which of these leagues you should be placed in (so you don’t constantly get destroyed).  Periodically if you start getting better than your league (or worse) you’ll be moved around accordingly. Ok but after that there are divisions in leagues, so there’s not just one huge platinum ladder, there are multiple with a cap on people in each one. I had heard it was going to be 100 people per division, but looking at the beta and how my friends are doing, I suspect it works a little differently.

Ok so all of this is conjecture based on observation. In my league there’s like 10 or so teams. 2 of them have horrible records and are below a qualifying line. Division 1 has like 50 teams but a huge majority of them are below qualifying line and most of those people have good records. So I suspect what happens is each league looks at the overall number of people in the division. Then it partitions each division based on the number of people, so once you qualify for Platinum, you get thrown in division 1, but if division 1 is full it splits off into another division and the divisions are created and balanced in this way.

Your division number is meaningless and you play people in your league but not always in your division which makes it kind of strange to a degree to be racing up a ladder where you play outside of your set division. Overall it seems cool, but at most I’ve seen 3000 people online and it seems like many people are either doing 1v1 or 2v2 random team so the arranged 2v2 ladder isn’t very populated at the moment.

This weekend I’m going to dive in and pour through games like mad. I need to go to the store and pick up more mix1’s though.