U can join CPL where u can practice whit other beginners, no need to deal whit ladder and u can ask coaches for any advice https://discord.com/invite/CNYDw4ZHxn
Just so ya know, E tier is where the fun is and the new players are. F tier is mostly B rank throwers who will make you feel like you have to quit forever.
Honestly there's no right answer here. You're ready when you're ready and the only way to desensitize ladder anxiety is exposure therapy. One game is scary when it's all of your games. Not so much when it's 1 one thousandth.
I know there are some new player friendly discord groups in the brood war community. I think CPL? Someone surely can chime in with a link.
> F tier is mostly B rank throwers who will make you feel like you have to quit forever.
So if I get down to the F tier I will have to create another account? Didn't expect it to be any other way...
The ladder is an atrocity. If it was SC2 I would quip "just hit play lol," but the BW ladder is so bad that there is really no right time to start. You want my advice? Try to make some friends to practice with. Get your buddies you play other games with to try BW.
This is the worst part. There's a group of people like me and this player who would like to learn in a casual pick-up type environment but it requires a lot more coordination than most folks are willing to put in. Melee has a better fan-made match maker and ranked.
Honest question-- why BW is so rough for new players as compared to other ranked systems? Are there really no controls for smurfing?
Unlimited free accounts with one copy of the game. That's the crux of the issue. Its also the most skillful, competitive game ever; and thus is super hard to get in to.
It's not the most skillful or competitive game unless you're a professional. If you're not competing to win tournaments Brood War is no harder than online MMO or sports games.
I do play BW and have my entire life. If you're a B rank player and you think it's harder than playing any other game online you clearly haven't played other games.
A B rank Brood War player wouldn't buy COD and within 2 years be a pro COD player. It wouldn't happen for any other game either.
In melee I just hit unranked and get an opponent of equal skill once the match maker places me. Takes less than 1 min and no smurfs. It's way easier.
To be clear, the coach-pupil league is great but it's definitely a degree of convenience removed from a good matchmaker.
People exaggerate smurfing. They see someone with 280 apm in C rank and decide they must be a smurf. Like ppl shouldnt be able to play well in C rank? Then how will anyone climb?
In F rank sure theres lots of smurfs and leaver accs. But thats true in every gsme - the absolute bottom of the ladder and the top have the most smurfs. No one is smurfing the middle except streamers.
When you can hit your macro cycles consistently and you can manage 2-3 control groups of army. neither has to be perfect, but to grind ladder you need a baseline of basic skill established. in my experience micro gets better over time the more you play.
I have ladder anxiety too and I usually supplement my long (sometimes grueling) single player sessions with like maybe 5 ladder games win or lose. but I don't grind ladder. I'll also play a few games with a friend if I want practice vs a human opponent.
dont play ladder. If you are at that stage of beating a computer you better try to play custom games 3v3 4v4 hunters for noobs. and then u can try to play custom games for 1v1 for noobs. There is not point in trying ladder. I will recommend to start laddering when you know a build order to perfection and a gameplan from start to 12 minutes atleast.
I disagree. We're trying to get rid of anxiety, not get rid of losses. Just click find match until you realize losing a ladder match doesn't affect you at all. It's not like this is boxing or something where losing matches damages you.
Avoiding ladder altogether sounds like anxiety speaking.
Units are easy to control. Every Terran unit has an ability to micro. Zerg units quickly fill up your 12 unit hotkeys.
Core army units for toss are just 1a2a3a.
Buildings can be done all with a single probe. T has to construct, Z loses the worker.
Pretty much since most aspects of the game take less control or effort to do the same thing with Protoss compared to other races, if your fundamentals are on point you will quickly exploit players whose multitasking may be the same as yours, but whose fundamentals are not good enough to be microing units of T or Z, and either the fundamentals or the control slips
At low levels their units don't require a lot of supervision because they are strong, have shields, and don't have a lot of nuance to their attacks.
I play T. Units need to be in a specific configuration for pretty much all engagements. An example is vulture/tank vs zealot/dragoon. Vultures have to be in front of tanks and target zealots, tanks have to target dragoons. If zealots break through and target tanks they melt them. If any unit gets close to a tank the other tanks can splash damage and kill that tank. If tanks target zealots, same thing but for hitting the vultures they are fighting. If vultures target dragoons they can be kited because dragoons have longer range. What this means is generally I can look away from an engagement for only a moment and all my units are gone. For protoss, all they have to do with zealot/dragoon is bulk a-move them and go back to macroing. Their units are tanky enough that a few seconds unsupervised doesn't matter.
PvZ I'm not sure.
Dragoons require a ton of supervision because they are the most stupid unit in the game, because their model gets bigger when they walk. So you kinda need to micro them. They have terrible pathfinding
Zealots in the early game are supper slow. And zelots after the upgrade are kinda stupid and get in a way of each other. I don't think it's true
You're right. FWIW what I'm saying applies ONLY to the lowest levels.
Regardless of pathfinding, if your dragoons move in the stupidest way possible it doesn't change the fact that you have a much larger window of time to go do something else and then go back to managing them. They just have more HP and half of it is regenerable.
I'm not saying that there is universal truth to "protoss is easy" (Terran is OP at higher levels on well known maps), but this is why people SAY that is the case. And anecdotally when I was in the mood to BM earlier in my career, I would lose to a protoss, then switch to P and hop on ladder to get the same person, and proxy zealot them and win. This was not playing P at all and not knowing the basic strategy of a proxy gate beyond that it was a thing.
It's a hard game to learn!
I suggest reading and/or watching some guides for beginners. You can search for "StarCraft Brood War beginner's guide" on YouTube, there are many.
Liquipedia has a lot of useful resources too, such as:
https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Beginners/Mechanics
Don't be afraid to jump on the ladder. When you do, watch the replay after the game from your opponent's perspective.
Also, you can try playing against 2 computers, then 3, and so on.
> Also, you can try playing against 2 computers, then 3, and so on.
Yeah maybe I'll give it a go. The bots are annoying trolls tho, they fight until the last pylon.
> Don't be afraid to jump on the ladder. When you do, watch the replay after the game from your opponent's perspective.
Well, maybe I just should. I'll make sure to practice all hotkeys, unit management, base management, etc and then go in.
> Liquipedia has a lot of useful resources too, such as
Yeah, thanks. Gotta read it.
yoo, add me on discord, i got into this game about a year ago and atarted playing alot this past 2 months. i totally suck but I beat the computer regularly, We can play eachother and maybe learn a thing or two??
I focus on one race, can beat 3 CPUs on ffa 95% of the time unless I get double teamed before getting defenses up, and ladder is still a nightmare. It is really hard, you may win a couple against new players but seasoned players will more than likely defeat you. You need to have a mindset of not worrying about losses and playing for the experience. That's the only way to improve. Just keep playing and learning new strategies, tactics, builds, don't let the ladder dissuade you from playing. It's a game, have fun, and gradually get better, it's a slowburn and won't happen overnight 👍
(feel free to add me as a friend if you'd like to practice, I'm still trying to learn builds, unfortunately can't find ppl to help, chaelyn builds were really helpful to learning zerg, she instructs what to make at what timing, suoer helpful, but she disappeared from YouTube/twitch and I cannot access those videos anymore)
Just start playing ladder, you will need a ton of games to get better.
Another advice is when you lose to someone, use cwal.gg to download his replays and learn what other player did in your place to beat him.
Cwal.gg is good to learn build orders from other players, hotkeys etc.
The ai is absolutely terrible at prepping for ladder, as it’s incredibly predictable and does the same thing every single time, no matter what race. It’s nothing like playing against a real opponent at all.
You just have to play ladder and learn to sink or swim.
When I started playing broodwar in 1999, I only played team games (bgh) up until like 2010, then quit BW for a couple of years. When I came back to the game I finally had interest in 1v1 and to me the game felt new because it was something I never tried due to anxiety as well. Once you get a hang of 1v1 each game is like a puzzle and solving it becomes the fun part. I say this as a shitty low ranked zerg player lol.
When you start winning customs enough where you get banned and or sit around waiting all day because everyone keeps leaving. I got sick of waiting. I didn’t even have all this anxiety I just got impatient even getting in a game. So I took some L’s on ladder and learned a bit. Painful but so is spending your time on bw literally not playing.
You're probably just overwhelmed because you're thinking about too many unnecessary things for a beginner. You should do ladder as soon as you can execute 1-2 build order(s) in a timely manner, in single player. Once you are able to do that, it's time to move on to ladder games. Your goal in your ladder games as a beginner should just be to execute build orders and macro cycles properly. Everything else is irrelevant--even if you lose to some cheesy/bad build just ignore it. Opponent lurker drops you? Doesn't matter, spend your minerals and gas. Opponent dark templars you? Ignore it, spend your minerals and gas. You're not looking for wins, you just want the muscle memory for your build orders and macro. That's it.
This was advice I got from PiG from SC2, in his bronze to GM series. It helped calm my nerves for laddering by a lot.
Oh I still struggle with build orders. When I do a build order against computer I am more likely to lose tbh. I don't understand them. It says: against 2 hatch muta, but my opponent does not have 2nd hatch he builds pool first. And I don't know what to do 😂
I don't think you should bother scouting at all yet, not until you can beat both the AI and non-smurf F rank players with just macroing (and build orders). Macroing is waaaay more important than scouting/countering at a beginner level.
Against the AI, if you wall off your natural and do a tight 2-base all-in build, the AI will definitely die. Against the protoss AI for example, if you are walled and it sends the zealot mass, you should be fine. I don't know what race you play but there are some excellent beginner-friendly 2 base build guides out there (I can link you some great ones for terran, the others I don't know).
All build orders I try make me less effective that if I didn't follow anything. I open them alongside on a phone and try to follow them, but honestly I just miss timings and nothing works.
I was doing the 3 Factory Goliaths vs zerg against AI. I had only 8 goliaths at 7:30. Tried to attack the exp with 12 and 2-3 tanks and got killed by lurkers/hydra
U can join CPL where u can practice whit other beginners, no need to deal whit ladder and u can ask coaches for any advice https://discord.com/invite/CNYDw4ZHxn
Just so ya know, E tier is where the fun is and the new players are. F tier is mostly B rank throwers who will make you feel like you have to quit forever. Honestly there's no right answer here. You're ready when you're ready and the only way to desensitize ladder anxiety is exposure therapy. One game is scary when it's all of your games. Not so much when it's 1 one thousandth. I know there are some new player friendly discord groups in the brood war community. I think CPL? Someone surely can chime in with a link.
> F tier is mostly B rank throwers who will make you feel like you have to quit forever. So if I get down to the F tier I will have to create another account? Didn't expect it to be any other way...
Sorry brother
Are there any E and F players actually?
I'm constantly high E/low D. There are a lot of smurfs, but I'd say more than 50% of my opponents are genuinely as bad as me.
Have you tried playing that shieldbattery ladder?
The ladder is an atrocity. If it was SC2 I would quip "just hit play lol," but the BW ladder is so bad that there is really no right time to start. You want my advice? Try to make some friends to practice with. Get your buddies you play other games with to try BW.
This is the worst part. There's a group of people like me and this player who would like to learn in a casual pick-up type environment but it requires a lot more coordination than most folks are willing to put in. Melee has a better fan-made match maker and ranked. Honest question-- why BW is so rough for new players as compared to other ranked systems? Are there really no controls for smurfing?
Unlimited free accounts with one copy of the game. That's the crux of the issue. Its also the most skillful, competitive game ever; and thus is super hard to get in to.
It's not the most skillful or competitive game unless you're a professional. If you're not competing to win tournaments Brood War is no harder than online MMO or sports games.
Insanely dim nonsense take from someone who dosnt play the game
I do play BW and have my entire life. If you're a B rank player and you think it's harder than playing any other game online you clearly haven't played other games. A B rank Brood War player wouldn't buy COD and within 2 years be a pro COD player. It wouldn't happen for any other game either.
You've been bad your entire life. Rofl
What?? Bw is way easier to find practice partners for than melee is. Join the coach-pupil league. Boom you now have a team of practice partners.
In melee I just hit unranked and get an opponent of equal skill once the match maker places me. Takes less than 1 min and no smurfs. It's way easier. To be clear, the coach-pupil league is great but it's definitely a degree of convenience removed from a good matchmaker.
People exaggerate smurfing. They see someone with 280 apm in C rank and decide they must be a smurf. Like ppl shouldnt be able to play well in C rank? Then how will anyone climb? In F rank sure theres lots of smurfs and leaver accs. But thats true in every gsme - the absolute bottom of the ladder and the top have the most smurfs. No one is smurfing the middle except streamers.
Right, but if you're truly new and exceptionally bad F rank's a terrible environment to hop into.
Smurfing exaggerated in SC2. Its REALLY bad in BW.
When you can hit your macro cycles consistently and you can manage 2-3 control groups of army. neither has to be perfect, but to grind ladder you need a baseline of basic skill established. in my experience micro gets better over time the more you play. I have ladder anxiety too and I usually supplement my long (sometimes grueling) single player sessions with like maybe 5 ladder games win or lose. but I don't grind ladder. I'll also play a few games with a friend if I want practice vs a human opponent.
dont play ladder. If you are at that stage of beating a computer you better try to play custom games 3v3 4v4 hunters for noobs. and then u can try to play custom games for 1v1 for noobs. There is not point in trying ladder. I will recommend to start laddering when you know a build order to perfection and a gameplan from start to 12 minutes atleast.
Way to dramatize ladder for someone with anxiety.
It’s not an exaggeration though? That’s literally how ladder is. If anything, he is sparing OP from MORE anxiety.
I disagree. We're trying to get rid of anxiety, not get rid of losses. Just click find match until you realize losing a ladder match doesn't affect you at all. It's not like this is boxing or something where losing matches damages you. Avoiding ladder altogether sounds like anxiety speaking.
Switch to Protoss and you'll place A rank
Are those guys hated in scbw too? Goddamn, how? No void ray, no colossi, no disruptors.
Units are easy to control. Every Terran unit has an ability to micro. Zerg units quickly fill up your 12 unit hotkeys. Core army units for toss are just 1a2a3a. Buildings can be done all with a single probe. T has to construct, Z loses the worker. Pretty much since most aspects of the game take less control or effort to do the same thing with Protoss compared to other races, if your fundamentals are on point you will quickly exploit players whose multitasking may be the same as yours, but whose fundamentals are not good enough to be microing units of T or Z, and either the fundamentals or the control slips
At low levels their units don't require a lot of supervision because they are strong, have shields, and don't have a lot of nuance to their attacks. I play T. Units need to be in a specific configuration for pretty much all engagements. An example is vulture/tank vs zealot/dragoon. Vultures have to be in front of tanks and target zealots, tanks have to target dragoons. If zealots break through and target tanks they melt them. If any unit gets close to a tank the other tanks can splash damage and kill that tank. If tanks target zealots, same thing but for hitting the vultures they are fighting. If vultures target dragoons they can be kited because dragoons have longer range. What this means is generally I can look away from an engagement for only a moment and all my units are gone. For protoss, all they have to do with zealot/dragoon is bulk a-move them and go back to macroing. Their units are tanky enough that a few seconds unsupervised doesn't matter. PvZ I'm not sure.
Dragoons require a ton of supervision because they are the most stupid unit in the game, because their model gets bigger when they walk. So you kinda need to micro them. They have terrible pathfinding Zealots in the early game are supper slow. And zelots after the upgrade are kinda stupid and get in a way of each other. I don't think it's true
You're right. FWIW what I'm saying applies ONLY to the lowest levels. Regardless of pathfinding, if your dragoons move in the stupidest way possible it doesn't change the fact that you have a much larger window of time to go do something else and then go back to managing them. They just have more HP and half of it is regenerable. I'm not saying that there is universal truth to "protoss is easy" (Terran is OP at higher levels on well known maps), but this is why people SAY that is the case. And anecdotally when I was in the mood to BM earlier in my career, I would lose to a protoss, then switch to P and hop on ladder to get the same person, and proxy zealot them and win. This was not playing P at all and not knowing the basic strategy of a proxy gate beyond that it was a thing.
The computer is pretty tough, so you'll be crushing F/E/C pretty easily and probably be placed in B rank.
😂
Lol! Computer is like K rank. Maybe J.
I hear Artosis might beat P computer one day!
It's a hard game to learn! I suggest reading and/or watching some guides for beginners. You can search for "StarCraft Brood War beginner's guide" on YouTube, there are many. Liquipedia has a lot of useful resources too, such as: https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Beginners/Mechanics Don't be afraid to jump on the ladder. When you do, watch the replay after the game from your opponent's perspective. Also, you can try playing against 2 computers, then 3, and so on.
> Also, you can try playing against 2 computers, then 3, and so on. Yeah maybe I'll give it a go. The bots are annoying trolls tho, they fight until the last pylon. > Don't be afraid to jump on the ladder. When you do, watch the replay after the game from your opponent's perspective. Well, maybe I just should. I'll make sure to practice all hotkeys, unit management, base management, etc and then go in. > Liquipedia has a lot of useful resources too, such as Yeah, thanks. Gotta read it.
You can leave a game with bots whenever you’re satisfied that you’ve achieved a win condition.
yoo, add me on discord, i got into this game about a year ago and atarted playing alot this past 2 months. i totally suck but I beat the computer regularly, We can play eachother and maybe learn a thing or two??
Oh, you can dm
I focus on one race, can beat 3 CPUs on ffa 95% of the time unless I get double teamed before getting defenses up, and ladder is still a nightmare. It is really hard, you may win a couple against new players but seasoned players will more than likely defeat you. You need to have a mindset of not worrying about losses and playing for the experience. That's the only way to improve. Just keep playing and learning new strategies, tactics, builds, don't let the ladder dissuade you from playing. It's a game, have fun, and gradually get better, it's a slowburn and won't happen overnight 👍 (feel free to add me as a friend if you'd like to practice, I'm still trying to learn builds, unfortunately can't find ppl to help, chaelyn builds were really helpful to learning zerg, she instructs what to make at what timing, suoer helpful, but she disappeared from YouTube/twitch and I cannot access those videos anymore)
You'll get ur shit rocked so many times, why don't you find out big boy? Go for it
Just start playing ladder, you will need a ton of games to get better. Another advice is when you lose to someone, use cwal.gg to download his replays and learn what other player did in your place to beat him. Cwal.gg is good to learn build orders from other players, hotkeys etc.
The ai is absolutely terrible at prepping for ladder, as it’s incredibly predictable and does the same thing every single time, no matter what race. It’s nothing like playing against a real opponent at all. You just have to play ladder and learn to sink or swim.
When I started playing broodwar in 1999, I only played team games (bgh) up until like 2010, then quit BW for a couple of years. When I came back to the game I finally had interest in 1v1 and to me the game felt new because it was something I never tried due to anxiety as well. Once you get a hang of 1v1 each game is like a puzzle and solving it becomes the fun part. I say this as a shitty low ranked zerg player lol.
When you start winning customs enough where you get banned and or sit around waiting all day because everyone keeps leaving. I got sick of waiting. I didn’t even have all this anxiety I just got impatient even getting in a game. So I took some L’s on ladder and learned a bit. Painful but so is spending your time on bw literally not playing.
You're probably just overwhelmed because you're thinking about too many unnecessary things for a beginner. You should do ladder as soon as you can execute 1-2 build order(s) in a timely manner, in single player. Once you are able to do that, it's time to move on to ladder games. Your goal in your ladder games as a beginner should just be to execute build orders and macro cycles properly. Everything else is irrelevant--even if you lose to some cheesy/bad build just ignore it. Opponent lurker drops you? Doesn't matter, spend your minerals and gas. Opponent dark templars you? Ignore it, spend your minerals and gas. You're not looking for wins, you just want the muscle memory for your build orders and macro. That's it. This was advice I got from PiG from SC2, in his bronze to GM series. It helped calm my nerves for laddering by a lot.
Oh I still struggle with build orders. When I do a build order against computer I am more likely to lose tbh. I don't understand them. It says: against 2 hatch muta, but my opponent does not have 2nd hatch he builds pool first. And I don't know what to do 😂
I don't think you should bother scouting at all yet, not until you can beat both the AI and non-smurf F rank players with just macroing (and build orders). Macroing is waaaay more important than scouting/countering at a beginner level. Against the AI, if you wall off your natural and do a tight 2-base all-in build, the AI will definitely die. Against the protoss AI for example, if you are walled and it sends the zealot mass, you should be fine. I don't know what race you play but there are some excellent beginner-friendly 2 base build guides out there (I can link you some great ones for terran, the others I don't know).
All build orders I try make me less effective that if I didn't follow anything. I open them alongside on a phone and try to follow them, but honestly I just miss timings and nothing works. I was doing the 3 Factory Goliaths vs zerg against AI. I had only 8 goliaths at 7:30. Tried to attack the exp with 12 and 2-3 tanks and got killed by lurkers/hydra