> If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.

That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos.

That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.

You can see what your opponent did. If you're new, this will probably be that the opponent did more things and did them faster, also their build order might be new to you or could be something new for you to scout for to counter.

I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro - in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and communication. 60% winrate last season :)

Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.