YES!!!!!!!! When i read on TL that the map pool wasnt going to change i was so disappointed. Now i have nerd chills.... I hope i make masters of this placement match, i was beating low masters all day yest :D
As for the drop stuff... what other people said is definitely right, so don't take this as refutation, i just think its more powerful to understand more theoretically since that is more dynamically usable.
In starcraft there are 3 resources that you must always be managing. 2 are pretty obvious, minerals and gas. The third is your attention; like a computer, you can only be doing or focusing on 1 thing at a quanta of time. Good harasses and attacks tend to have a lopsided attention ratio between the players. That means, it takes less attention to do the harass than to defend it. As attention becomes more an more of a limited resource (as you move down the skill range), these things tend to scale in effectiveness. Since the effectiveness tends to be so high, the risk:reward ratio is in the aggressor's favor. Because of this, aggressive strategies dominate the lower leagues while towards the plat/diam area it starts to stop working since players in that skill range can stop it with their attention level.
The key to playing a defensive macro style is to play from the minimap. Macro, but do it while keeping a constant gaze at the minimap. You have roughly 2 seconds to spot and react to drop. If you don't have units in place, move your workers until they can get there to defend. Don't move your whole army either, only bring enough to stop the drop. If you drag your whole army they could either attack your front or lift and go to your expansion or any number of annoying things.
When we were talking before I mentioned learning in steps. Macro is the first one: just learn how to make units all the time and spend your money so its not getting very high. After that you should start learning what types of units you should be building, whats good against what, ect. Doesn't matter if you spend all your money buying marauders if the zerg player shows up with 10 mutas. That is a very gradual process, as is playing from the minimap. If you improve yourself in those 3 things you will be plat/diamond by the end of this season.
