The Kindness of Strangers

It never ceases to amaze me how creative, helpful and generally brilliant the StarCraft 2 community is and I want to talk about one aspect of this; how players who were just opponents can put aside their victory or loss and give each other advice on how to improve their play. Despite not having met this person before and knowing you will probably never encounter this person again two strangers can both try to help the other one out and overall improve their understanding of the game. Obviously, as it is the internet, you will get abusive messages too but even these people sometimes offer advice in-between insults.

It can be really helpful for someone of your own level to tell you were you went wrong and to point out where and when they were most vulnerable and how you could have exploited their weakness. When someone of a much higher level tells you how to improve an aspect of your play it can be beyond your capabilities and sometimes it's easier to improve in stages rather than to try to do it all at once. Also your opponent, having witnessed the game first hand, will have will have advice that fits the game rather than the more general advice you may find in other places.

I may be more approachable that others because I always say gl hf at the start of the game, gg at the end and am always up for bantering throughout so maybe that makes it easier for people to talk to me after a game. If someone says something bm at the end of a game I will sometimes try to explain where they went wrong from my perspective and how they could improve though not everyone wants to hear it. Sometimes you just play better than the opponent and sometimes you win because of the build you decided to go but there is always advice you can give to help other improve and if you can help someone else I think you should.

Practice, hard work and analysis of your own games is vital if you want to get better at the game but often it takes someone else pointing out weaknesses in your play for you to notice them. The best bit of advice I received was from a Zerg player asking why I played so passively after my initial attack and why did I let him macro so hard? To this I had no answer. Scouting is something I excel at at so I knew every time he expanded and let him do so unhampered. In the end I couldn't win because he could send max army after max army at me. From the next game on I started playing more aggressive all the way through using discrete armies to prevent expansions going up and trying to do as much damage as possible before rolling the next one out.

In the middle leagues racial differences shouldn't make much of a difference because you are supposed to be playing people who can use their race as well as you can use your so instead of complaining about balance and ask them where you went wrong. If other people are at all like me they will be happy to offer their opinion if asked but don't want to come off as arrogant by proffering it . The mentality of people helping each other improve at and enjoy StarCraft 2 more is part of what makes the community built around the game so great and I hope it continues to do this more and more in the future. If you enjoyed this article then you can follow me on twitter at @RobinTerran or follow the blog from the pane to the right. Thank you very much for reading.