forgot to hit completed checkmark

And with that, thank you to everybody for participating, and hopefully I’ll run something similar again next DK30

To finish off this project, I’d like to provide links for anybody from the broader Day[9] community that is interested in checking out the foreign brood war scene. There has literally never been a better time, especially for those of you in NA.

Events to Watch

Artosis hosted the Ascension tournament on his stream a few weeks ago, featuring the best NA players in the world playing for a total of over 3,600$. The games were amazing and showcase both legends of the old scene and the newest up and coming players.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxf6e-EcPqc&list=PLu7Ira8OztRyHKp_sEFQNo7DGzbPiwZJ1

The best foreign starcraft players in the world are competing in the Bombastic Starleague- and you can too. BSL 12 ladder stage is starting right now, and season 11 which just concluded was probably the most hype BSL we’ve ever had. NA players went deep and played excellent games.

Here is the youtube channel with BSL 11 and all previous BSLs. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2X7qrACarhblj7F26cDYLQ

They have an incredible new website if you’re interested in signing up for their lower ranked leagues, which include matches all the way down to C rank players. https://bombasticstarleague.com/

StarCastTV https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkbs-ojM-c_SXsarGvYErcw - Long time NA terran and Scan, one of the top 24 korean pro gamers, are casting the Afreeca starleague, the biggest tournament in the world with a focus on the analysis and strategic side of the game.

If you just want to laugh and have fun watching BW, then waiting a week or two for the Tastosis casts is the way to go, found here starting April 17th. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK5eBtuoj_HkdXKHNmBLAXg

Rogues Gallery: The newest big tournament in the scene, Rogues Gallery is a NA only tournament group that runs major events every couple of months. The most recent event was the Rogues City Rumble. If you want to support the NA scene, this is the place to do it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQPUDNs7FXqNRzYWyZDhZuQ https://www.twitch.tv/roguesgallerybw https://discord.gg/SEFcDZK

Events to participate in

The Rookie Starleague: The individual version of the coach pupil league, the RSL is a space for new players to enter the community and experience individual tournament play against opponents of their own level.

https://discord.gg/fX94ABy

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/mebqdl/rookie_starleague_6_a_brood_war_tournament_for/

The Coach Pupil League- The single place to learn starcraft in english, the coach pupil league is a staple of the community, and has been running for years. A teamleague where brand new players are welcomed onto teams with designated A and S rank players as coaches, the CPL is the best way to join the community. https://discord.gg/6QEXQ8d Last Season- https://tl.net/forum/bw-tournaments/567943-coach-pupil-league-season-6-cpl-6#4 The next season is scheduled to start in May, which is why this link doesn’t top the list.

For Fun’s Sake Clan League - This is the league I personally run, designed to remind everyone to have fun while we play this unbelievably competitive game that we all love. The goal is to create a league focused on enjoyment for players of similar skill levels to play and participate in not only the competitive 1v1’s but to have great times enjoying other for fun team games. This is also a great place to find a long term clan to join and play in the larger clan leagues with.

https://discord.gg/ADZCrdJ

As far as the data goes, I cleaned the data of identifying information and put some categories on it. Here is the excel file if anybody is interested in playing around with it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sqDunLw8-WETAJNFel_BY10SmFJs8TbE/view?usp=sharing

Some interesting statistics; 3864 games of brood war were recorded by our project. We gained a collective 900 mmr, with the biggest contributions of mmr coming from Grail, who gained 400, and June who gained 300.

A regression found that 9% of variation in mmr at the end of the project could be explained by #of games played in the last month, but the sample size was too small to make that statistically significant.

The likelyhood that mmr would change decreased as the rank of the player increased.

Starting with an mmr over 1600 made you more likely to meet your goal, though again very few datapoints made this difficult to attach significance to. People who played more days were vastly more likely to hit their goal, instead of jamming as many games over the weekend. Games played during the week was also an indicator of positive mmr.

of days played vs total change in mmr

of games vs total change in MMR

So, as expected, the dataset was too small to generate anything actually meaningful.

I have two updates.

1. The project has mostly been completed. I am working on the analysis portion over the next few days, but the sample was skewed enough that it spit out a bunch of nonsense results (newer players play more single player build order practice, and so single player practice makes you worse in my current model) so I don’t expect the update to reveal anything about starcraft improvement, just provide some fun numbers.

2. I have not played a single intentional, organized game of starcraft this entire month. I have had a couple of personal challenges stack up (lost phone which had 2fa to access schoolwork during finals, went through about fifteen interviews and then didn’t get the jobs, had to drive across the state a couple of times, started going to weekly therapy, and a two day breakdown, to name just a few.)

As a result of my personal life challenges, it has been the starcraft community that lifted me up and allowed me to continue working on this project.

People would ping me on discord “Hey when is that email with the survey coming?” “Did I fill that out, or did I forget?”.

It was really heartening and driving to realize how many people had gotten invested in the project, and hear from the people involved that it was “making me watch more replays” or “think differently about deliberate practice”.

Even just seeing jokes about what questions I could ask on the next week’s survey- “is artosis too salty?” “Why is this so much easier when I’m grinding ZvZ instead of playing 25 min ZvT mech slugfests” “only wizard truly knows which race plays more games” made me feel deeply invested and included by a community that has been so generous with their time and coaching, not just for this project but over the years I’ve been involved. Watching my practice partner from 2018 compete with the best players in the NA scene in the Ascension tournament has been incredible and really reignited my love for this game.

I’m off to reorganize my life and keep working on the analysis.

Week 1: I personally have had a brutal week, which is why this is a day late.

However, the rest of the group signed up is doing amazing things, and providing me with a fantastic opportunity to study the habits of successful brood war players. They’ve all been extremely generous to allow me to continue collecting data, and we have 53 respondents. We averaged 2.68 games last week, and our goals averaged 6.67. We’ll see how many games are played this week in a few hours, or more likely on Wednesday when I finish getting my ass kicked by finals.