For some reason the placement put me in copper league, while I routinely beat buddies in bronze and sometimes silver in custom games.
It seems copper league is mostly people repeating cheese strategies they found on the internet. PvP, half the time people cannon up their main and rush for carriers, another 25% is proxy gateways or void ray rush and the remaining 25% is people going for epic pylonspam-single gateway builds (in other words: no clue. There's been instances where I arrived with 2 Immortals, 6 Stalkers, 2 Sentries and 10 Zealots and all they had was 5 gateways and and expansion. No units at all.).
About the same for PvT and PvZ. All-in Marauders or zergling/roach rushes, all the time.
The difference between copper and bronze seems to be that all of the 'good' BO's and good play habits actually work in bronze, whereas in copper, there's just huge turtlefests where an efficient BO is not going to help you one bit unless you do the exact same thing. The downfall of most copper players, including me in this case, is that the only counter to such a turtly playstyle is perfect macro while expanding. Most players of this level do not yet posess the macro skills and multitasking to efficiently and consistently build off of 4 bases at once. Even though they've got the bases to overpower the turtle, it's hard as hell even controlling that many units correctly, let alone build them all while using chrono boost and building pylons in time to support 12+ gateways AND controlling the battle.
*sigh*
Of course, all those cheese strats have counters, but it becomes really tiresome to not be able to use a standard BO at all, ever. Quite often, I'm taken out by them because I'm trying to experiment with build orders or unit composition and they just go for a quick all-in strat that's a guaranteed kill if you don't scout it in time. The Thor rush Kantham posted is a good example.
Easy to beat once you see it (send your first two zealots to the proxy factory and kill off the SCV constructing it, continue from there with eco advantage), but with strats like this being used almost exclusively in copper, you're going to be spending more time scouting than actually playing.
On Scrapyard alone, there's countless Terran cheeses to watch out for.
PF rush, bunker rush, massive wall-in + turrets to battlecruisers, marauder all-in, thor proxy, quick banshees, floating barracks into your base, them stealing your natural expo with a CC, etc.
The better players I've played often forego strats like these in favor of a safer opening, knowing that they are basically an all-in gamble.
edit: Tried to add you guys, couldn't. Different realms 'n ****. It's been confirmed SC2 will have a realm list at release, just not now.
