Great for this guy, sucks for us.
We know, we know.
There are training missions for multiplayer in SCII, hiding in and amongst our choices for great campaign action or out-and-out war against our brethren in the Starcraft Universe, but we haven’t bothered with them.
Instead, when we’ve had a moment, we’ve been slipping down to 1v1 multiplayer town to get a few placement matches in.
Oh that’s right, up until a few days ago we hadn’t even been placed in a league, so much has our attention been focused on the single player game, or searching out information for the legions of fans who peruse our work daily.
We know, we know – you guys don’t like to be mentioned, but still – good on ya, legion.
See, we hadn’t bothered with the multiplayer training missions because we were pretty sure we knew the score. After all, we had been in the Beta for four months! All we did was play multiplayer all day everyday, and we got to be pretty decent. We wrote strategy articles and knew what kind of build it would take to get things done in our (largely) Terran vs Other world.
In the first multiplayer placement match we played in Starcraft II, perhaps a week after it’s release, we absolutely dominated the competition. We jammed out some Marines, went on over to his base, and smacked him in his Terran face. Just like that, he quit and we won.
Number two was a struggle, but our Siege Tanks ended up winning the day. Sure, we had made it to mid-game, but that didn’t mean we still hadn’t DOMINATED. We hadn’t, but being in mid-game didn’t mean that.
Our flailing around and buying the totally wrong upgrades and leaving our SCVs sitting outside the Command Center for twenty seconds or so after being produced meant we hadn’t dominated.
Hey, a W is a W, right?
Yeah, you’d think that.
In the single player campaign, we find our forces (on “normal”, people – we’re not that good) to be decently powered. In small group battles, we don’t always come out ahead, but once we’ve got a decent-sized army, often chock-full of units that are not present in multiplayer, we tend to crush the opposition pretty handily.
After a while we started to wonder what the big difference between multi and single was anyway – we did the “kill a bajillion Zerg” Zertatul mission and, well, lost, but that was the point and we took a ton of them with us.
Wasn’t that constant base-rushing just like multiplayer?
So, we hopped back up onto our multiplayer horse, heeled him out of the stable, and made sure we were saddled right up.
Holy buck.
Our next three multiplayer placements were big, fat, fail-boating “L”s. While everyone we faced was quite polite, and one game actually got into the late-mid to end stage, we lost. Every single time.
The last two games might as well have been copies of one another. We built Banshees, cloaked them and tech’d up their weapons. Our opponent brought 2 Medivacs, 30 Marines and 10 Marauders to our base, then scanned us and blew up our Banshees.
We wept.
For a brief, shining moment, we had the upper hand in multiplayer, as those with no Beta experience figured it out. Now, we’re not so hot. Players have learned new strategies, and it looks like we need to learn to ride this horse all over again.
Still, the general culture seems to be more polite and respectful than we’d anticipated, which is a big plus.
With time, we hope to keep our getting bucked up to a bear minimum. The horse is bad enough. A bear knocking us out of the saddle would be something just extra unpleasant.
