SC2 Pro Tournament Discussion

So. Goswser vs Bomber, game 2 on Whirlwind.

They go back and forth all game long, and Goswser finally gets into a position where he's solidly winning. He's up like 100 supply or something, crushing his way right into Bomber's third base. The game is over at this point, Goswser has it won, etc.

Then... Bomber targets one of his own medivacs with three or four seeker missiles. The medivac is at max activation range for the hunter seekers. He waits for them to activate and start to shoot toward the medivac, and then boosts the medivac over top of Goswsers army. The seeker missiles go off, flatten Goswsers army, and Bomber lives on and wins the now completely reversed game.

WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Bomber just nuked his own army. What?

God that Bomber vs Goswser match is epic.
It just keeps on going. And delivering.

DAT GAME

I hope they release the replays. Could be a fun minigame to resume it from the hour mark and see if you can win as Bomber.

http://i.minus.com/i496Ht5KLWt55.gif

Or a drinking game every time Bomber nuked himself.

The Medivac bomb from game 2:

Thin_J wrote:

So. Goswser vs Bomber, game 2 on Whirlwind.

They go back and forth all game long, and Goswser finally gets into a position where he's solidly winning. He's up like 100 supply or something, crushing his way right into Bomber's third base. The game is over at this point, Goswser has it won, etc.

Then... Bomber targets one of his own medivacs with three or four seeker missiles. The medivac is at max activation range for the hunter seekers. He waits for them to activate and start to shoot toward the medivac, and then boosts the medivac over top of Goswsers army. The seeker missiles go off, flatten Goswsers army, and Bomber lives on and wins the now completely reversed game.

WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

That was the most insane thing I've ever seen in a game. So creative.

Shadout wrote:

God that Bomber vs Goswser match is epic.
It just keeps on going. And delivering.

That third game was nuts.

Thin_J wrote:

The Medivac bomb from game 2:

Holy sh*t, that was amazing.

Terran players are currently undefeated at MLG. 23-6 in games (with the one TvT excluded)

This is going to be standard for the near future folks. I hope everybody liked that time when they referred to GSL as GomTvT.

There may be one loss for them in the next hour or so, but if it happens it will be Thorzain. Doesn't really count.

I don't believe Leenock can make any kind of real recovery against Innovation. He'll try, but I can't see him winning 3 in a row with the way HOTS works right now.

Well it doesn't take a genius to see that those new medivacs are broken. They're gonna be looked back upon like 1 supply Roaches.

Rain just barely squeezed out a win in game 5 over Jjakji.

Don't think he'll manage the same against Innovation.

Also, Ret vs Flash is nasty. Ret is playing great and it just doesn't matter.

*One last bit for the night:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/bjYRLSQ.png)

Only 1 Zerg in the last 8...WTF?

PWAlessi wrote:

Only 1 Zerg in the last 8...WTF?

To be fair, zerg was for some reason* severely underrepresented among the Koreans. Which are the only ones who matter anyway
50% of koreans from each faction actually got to round 3. Balance!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/lFKsnoF.png)

*Not sure how participants were selected. If they had prematches, I guess the explanation could be that the korean zerg players had already lost to medivac drops before MLG even started... though that wouldn't explain it being reverse for non-koreans.

Life played an amazing series against Last. Those miracle Mutalisks in game 5 really turned the tide of that game and saved Life's bacon. Looking forward to the semifinals!

*shrug* I think they should let the players figure out how to deal with things for some time before applying the nerf bat. Excessive nerf batting is was led to WoL becoming such a stale game towards the end of its life. Imagine if you could still build a rax before depot how that would interact with the Queen buff. Making it harder for Z to get to Hive would have been great but a combination of rapid patching and maps growing much larger than the dev team thought they'd ever be led to a "balanced" but much less exciting game to watch.

Also the final four are 2 Ts, 1 Z, 1 P and considering they are top tier Korean talent I'd say it looks fine. The foreign Zs and Ps didn't really stand a chance and the Korean T line up was stacked.

silentsod wrote:

Making it harder for Z to get to Hive would have been great

I think you have some spectacular kind of selective memory in regards to what the game looked like before Zergs started getting to Hive.

Thin_J wrote:
silentsod wrote:

Making it harder for Z to get to Hive would have been great

I think you have some spectacular kind of selective memory in regards to what the game looked like before Zergs started getting to Hive.

Most of the time in WoL, they didn't need to because infestors took care of everything...

>_>

<_<

>_>

Thin_J wrote:
silentsod wrote:

Making it harder for Z to get to Hive would have been great

I think you have some spectacular kind of selective memory in regards to what the game looked like before Zergs started getting to Hive.

Are you going to say that post-Queen patch the game got better to watch or worse? I think it got a lot worse as Z was suddenly able to just default to 15 minute hive and crush. The early game aggression and dynamics was a lot more fun to watch before the Queen patch. Are you also going to say that the top tier Muta Ling Bling players weren't really fun to watch? Sure, GomTvT happened but the rapid patching by Blizzard shut down a lot of strats before they ever had a chance to get figured out.

Additionally the removal of early, early and risky aggression by the T didn't make things any better when map sizes got to be huge.

Post queen patch did the game get better or worse?

It stayed the same. Except that I didn't have to keep watching Zerg players lose in the first 10 minutes to pressures that were so much harder to defend than they were to execute it wasn't even remotely fun to watch.

Instead of watching gross games end in 9 minutes I watched gross games that ended at the 30 minute mark, one way or the other. Terrans still won early midgame with tank and mech pushes. Terrans still won games with Hellion pressures. There were still a million ways to kill off a Zerg, and they all happened regularly.

The only thing that truly changed was the 60/40 win ratio Terrans tended to have in the matchup before that, and how long the games went.

And I like how you casually brush off the GomTvT joke. There were so many Terrans everywhere it it became a running gag. For over a year. Maybe you were cool with that, but most of us weren't. It was no less boring than anything that occured post queen patch.

The Queen buff did a lot of things to make the game a lot more exciting. It helped promote Zerg player in getting extra queens which also resulted in more creep spread and on the flip side allowed Terrans and Protoss to get more greedy and go for earlier expansions.

The changes to WoL did make a lot of builds basically non existant, but I think it helped shift the metagame to longer games.

For some reason I've been thinking for ages that Ignite Afterburners costs Medivac energy. Heh.

Concave wrote:

For some reason I've been thinking for ages that Ignite Afterburners costs Medivac energy. Heh.

That's a popular suggestion for a potential fix, to at least make it so it can't be used so freely and without consequence.

Despite the TvZ discussion, IMO the medivacs actually seem to me to be a bigger issue in PvT. Protoss players don't have Mutalisks to chase them down. Sure, they could use Phoenixes, but those don't have the same versatility that Mutas do and they leave you weaker in other aspects. IMO a Zerg player can get a lot more value and utility from a big group of Mutas than a Protoss player can from a group of Phoenixes, at least against Terran.

Another popular suggestion I've seen (and just for some perspective, this comes from the mouths of people like Idra), is don't nerf Terran from here. Wait and see how things pan out, and then buff Zerg and maybe even buff Protoss a little bit more too. Give them some more early and midgame variety to compete with all those options a Terran has. Give them some more interesting tools to fight with.

Right now both Zerg and Protoss can get heavily controlled and railroaded into specific tech paths by what the Terran does, and it leaves the Terran in complete control of how the game starts and possibly how it flows through the midgame.

The Queen buff was necessary, it was what finally put the nail in the coffin to Zergs being by far the weakest race in the early game.

Clearly Terran wasn't buffed enough.

It would be sad if Blizzard overreacted on this - Terran surely does seem to be stronger than the others right now (if nothing else, at least in the amount of options they have), but you cant conclude much based on this event.
Half the participating Koreans happened to be Terran, all but one Terran being Korean, while the majority of Zerg/protoss weren't Koreans. The only thing you can conclude here is that Koreans beat non-koreans. Which isn't exactly new and surprising.

One match doesn't erase the rest of the tournament

That said, I don't agree a nerf is necessary yet myself either. But the community is so reactionary and so quick to judgement I won't be surprised if Blizzard capitulates and goes for one anyway if we have another major event or two go the way this one did as far as overall win rates are concerned.

Also, Flash really should have changed it up. I feel like what we saw from him here was *not* the kind of play quality he's really capable of in a longer series like this. I really don't understand why he so stubbornly stuck with the bio/mine composition so hardcore.

There are much better ways to hold off what life was doing. Namely... mech. I can't believe he just kept going for the mines even after Life showed him he could just fight his way right through them.

I feel like they're a supplementary unit. He was treating them like the backbone of his strategy, and I think he got punished for it.

Did flash even get the mine upgrade?
Anyway, I don't think this series was close at all. On daybreak Flash couldn't even kill Life's greedy 4th that he took while still teching to Brood Lords behind it. Ugh.

Shadout wrote:

but you cant conclude much based on this event.

This is just truth.

I'll be putting way more weight in regards to my own opinion on the upcoming GSL season. I think that will be a far more comprehensive view of how things are truly going to be.

That said, I do expect some similar results. Not quite so lopsided, but I think the disparity will still be there. Whether it's enough to deserve any changes, well time will tell. Hopefully Blizzard doesn't stick with the update schedule they were holding at the end of the beta where there was a patch every two weeks. It was crazy. I think if anything they need to wait until after this next GSL before they start really considering any possible changes.

kyrieee wrote:

Did flash even get the mine upgrade?
Anyway, I don't think this series was close at all. On daybreak Flash couldn't even kill Life's greedy 4th that he took while still teching to Brood Lords behind it. Ugh.

See, that's what I'm saying! I feel like we saw better TvZ from Innovation earlier in the tournament. This felt like Flash's B or even C game, not his A game. The builds and compositions he chose were just weird, and not at all suited to the maps. For instance, why no mech on Cloud Kingdom, where it's been shown time and time again how powerful it can be?

Don't get it.