Star Blog #15

Another NaNiWa update (you’ll all hate NaNiWa by the time I’m done lol). NaNiWa has been picked up by team Complexity Gaming. Complexity has an interesting SC2 team composed of Ryan, rsvp, CrunCher, ryze, drewbie, minigun, CatZ, TriMaster and NaNiWa. They have some good players but I don’t know if they have quite broken through at many tournaments yet. A player of NaNiWa’s prowess could/should help Complexity break through at some tournaments.

Played some 2v2’s and 3v3’s last night (supposed to be some 4v4’s but that didn’t happen) and had a really positive night. Me and my buddy went 2 – 0 in our 2v2’s and then with another guy we probably went 6 – 2 in our 3v3 league. We moved up from ~16th rank Bronze Division to 2nd rank in our Bronze Division so we are looking to move up into Silver. As we moved up you could notice the ladder throwing more and more skilled players at us. I think in our last 3 matches we were playing a Silver team, a Gold team and a Platinum team!

I love how the ladder systems work in Starcraft 2. Every time you play with a different mix of people you form a new ladder team. Your new team has its own rank based on your placement matches (to start each ladder per season of Starcraft 2 you play 5 placement matches against other players of varying skill levels). You could literally be in 20 or 30 different teams on different ladders based on the different mixes of friends you play with. In addition to that you have your own 1v1, 2v2 random, 3v3 random and 4v4 random ladders that you can participate in. Each season lasts about 3 months I believe. So you have 3 months to climb those ladders and move up the Bronze / Silver / Gold / Platinum / Diamond / Masters / Grand Masters ranks. Based on your 5 placement matches and how well you do you will be put in one of those ranks. You can move up and down ranks based on wins / loses and up and down with in your own division based on your wins and losses.

When you play a game in any of your ladders there is “favored system”. That is when you join a game you will see that you are favored, slightly favored, or that your opponent is favored or slightly favored or that your teams are determined to be even. You get extra points for your win if you beat a team that is favored or slightly favored (in my examples above the silver / gold / platinum teams that we were playing were favored so we got bonus points for beating them).

Another nice feature for someone like me that can’t be on all the time is your “bonus pool” basically you have this pool of bonus points that accumulates weather you are online or not. So when I miss a couple of days and come back in I have this bonus pool that will add some extra points to my wins if I win. Overall it’s a fairly great system. I didn’t get to play SC1/Brood War so I’m not familiar with that but from what I hear that original bnet system was even more robust.

Anyway here is some fun stuff  This is Team ROOT playing some 4v4’s and Day9 is on Skype with these guys harassing them coaching them…mocking them ;) I just wanted to show you how some of these bigger 3v3 4v4 type matches go – they get pretty crazy and funny.