SC2 Pro Tournament Discussion

I like the fact that Medivacs and Mines feel very powerful and scary at times. Hopefully Blizz takes some time to see how the metagame plays out with Terran before they start buffing and nerfing stuff.

Motleyai wrote:

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.

I distinctly remember NSHS_Seal and others with exceptional creep spread pre-patch. Taking away the ability for T and P to pressure early takes away a lot of the hectic action and dynamism of the game. 15 minute no-rush is boring, much like seeing BL-infestory in every ZvZ (including mirror) is unexciting. I love a good macro game, I love a good cheese, I love just about everything in between but when it's the same damn builds with very little variation time and again it gets stale quickly and the prominence of post patch Zerg made for me skipping the majority of GSL matches simply because there wasn't going to be anything new.

It didnt take away the ability for Terran or Protoss to pressure. Or cheese. Or anything else.

Claiming otherwise is factually wrong.

It would take only a few minutes to find tons of games that were lost to hellions, banshees, and any number of other things that you would seem to claim the queen patch invalidates.

The only thing that changed is it started to require some actual honest effort to do that stuff instead of just throwing sh*t at the zerg and giggling when they die because they had no stability whatsoever in the early game.

David Kim:
- We'll try our best to not be too quick to make judgments on things that are allowing players to play a much more aggressive game. For example, yes Medivacs look strong but it's forcing even the opponents to play aggressive and the constant action throughout the game is looking to be really fun to watch.
- We'll continue watching all the pro and community concerns, but keep in mind we'd really like the game to settle before we step in and make a move.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/to...

Sounds promising.
I think I might have to buy a GSL season ticket.

Thin_J wrote:

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.

The problem with this tourney, just going by the current code S players, was that it was heavily stacked towards Terran and Protoss over Zerg. The only three code S Zergs were Life, Stephano, and Leenock.

Terran had 5 code S players(6 if you count polt, who ended up giving his spot to Stephano), and Protoss had 4 of the 5 total current code S.

Shadout wrote:
David Kim:
- We'll try our best to not be too quick to make judgments on things that are allowing players to play a much more aggressive game. For example, yes Medivacs look strong but it's forcing even the opponents to play aggressive and the constant action throughout the game is looking to be really fun to watch.
- We'll continue watching all the pro and community concerns, but keep in mind we'd really like the game to settle before we step in and make a move.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/to...

Sounds promising.
I think I might have to buy a GSL season ticket.

That is what I missed most in the majority of games in the past year. Action across the map, it feels energetic and Brood War like as a spectator. The TLS, a BW tournament, is ongoing right now and even though the players aren't top caliber the games are still very fun to watch.

ETA: 2 Rax and Sentry-Immortal all ins are both very predictable and boring after the first two or three times you see it. All the action will be in one location and if it fails you transition into GG.

silentsod wrote:
Motleyai wrote:

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.

I distinctly remember NSHS_Seal and others with exceptional creep spread pre-patch. Taking away the ability for T and P to pressure early takes away a lot of the hectic action and dynamism of the game. 15 minute no-rush is boring, much like seeing BL-infestory in every ZvZ (including mirror) is unexciting. I love a good macro game, I love a good cheese, I love just about everything in between but when it's the same damn builds with very little variation time and again it gets stale quickly and the prominence of post patch Zerg made for me skipping the majority of GSL matches simply because there wasn't going to be anything new.

Thin_j said it best, the Queen buff was the perfect fix for the early game and it never stopped all-in or cheeses, just discouraged it. I think your complaints of boring play come more from the lategame.

Yes, the lategame for Zerg was borked. Most games ended up being Infestor + Broodlord -- and I feel like that's more of a result of Zerg being the least fleshed out race when compared to Terran or Protoss. The experiments and tweaks to fix them never went beyond buffing Zerg's only casting unit to godlike levels. They never gave the right kind of attention to Ultras/Hydras and Mutas as well -- as a result the metagame got stale and one dimensional.

I think HoTS so far has done a decent job to diversifying the race. I still don't know how I feel about Swarm Hosts, but the tweaks to preexisting units, Mutas, Ultralisks, Hydras, and Infestors have really improved the game. Oh and Vipers are incredibly sexy.

Motleyai wrote:
silentsod wrote:
Motleyai wrote:

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.

I distinctly remember NSHS_Seal and others with exceptional creep spread pre-patch. Taking away the ability for T and P to pressure early takes away a lot of the hectic action and dynamism of the game. 15 minute no-rush is boring, much like seeing BL-infestory in every ZvZ (including mirror) is unexciting. I love a good macro game, I love a good cheese, I love just about everything in between but when it's the same damn builds with very little variation time and again it gets stale quickly and the prominence of post patch Zerg made for me skipping the majority of GSL matches simply because there wasn't going to be anything new.

Thin_j said it best, the Queen buff was the perfect fix for the early game and it never stopped all-in or cheeses, just discouraged it. I think your complaints of boring play come more from the lategame.

Yes, the lategame for Zerg was borked. Most games ended up being Infestor + Broodlord -- and I feel like that's more of a result of Zerg being the least fleshed out race when compared to Terran or Protoss. The experiments and tweaks to fix them never went beyond buffing Zerg's only casting unit to godlike levels. They never gave the right kind of attention to Ultras/Hydras and Mutas as well -- as a result the metagame got stale and one dimensional.

I think HoTS so far has done a decent job to diversifying the race. I still don't know how I feel about Swarm Hosts, but the tweaks to preexisting units, Mutas, Ultralisks, Hydras, and Infestors have really improved the game. Oh and Vipers are incredibly sexy.

Vipers are sexy, I agree with you there. The ramifications of the Queen patch primarily lie in making that early aggression so hard which made Broodfestor much easier to get to. Shutting down huge avenues of play rather than strengthening core Zerg units for their own aggressive possibilities was a mistake, IMO. I guess I don't see it as a fix,i saw it as narrowing the game.

I am really, really excited to see what happens when Z and P figure out their new toys. Lots of things in BW are "op" if the player is skilled and I'd like to see that come back.

EGTL new coach did a korean interview recently, here's the translation:

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...

Small snippet:

Q: What do you think is EG-TL’s biggest problem right now?
A: We need Terrans (laughs)

It's interesting to me that EG let go of Puma right before they picked up Coach Park. You'd think a player like Puma that kind of thrived as a practice monster in the KESPA format before would have been an asset to someone like Coach Park that would know better how to get the most out of that kind of player.

Well, from the EG press release it seemed like they wanted to keep him but lower his salary due to no results outside of NASL and poor performance in Proleague, which he didn't agree to. I consider it a lost opportunity to finally see the real scale of Puma's skill, not just his strong all in strats which made him famous and got him sort of a bad name among fans.

You know, they talked about this on SOTG and I saw it mentioned in a few other places, but has anybody else actually watched the video for the Gameheart observer interface custom maps?

Why has EVERY SINGLE TOURNAMENT NOT STARTED USING THIS GUY'S MAP VERSIONS ALREADY?

It's just better.

*This is not taking advantage of Blizz's new custom observer UI api stuff. He could do some of the stuff he does in this using that, but a lot of the cooler stuff is impossible in their built in mod system.

The only way to make a lot of it work is in custom maps.

*Just a heads up, GSTL starts in the morning and is from Gom's new studio so it should/could be an interesting broadcast

And Fantasy GSTL is up on TL.

Thin_J wrote:

You know, they talked about this on SOTG and I saw it mentioned in a few other places, but has anybody else actually watched the video for the Gameheart observer interface custom maps?

Why has EVERY SINGLE TOURNAMENT NOT STARTED USING THIS GUY'S MAP VERSIONS ALREADY?

It's just better.

*This is not taking advantage of Blizz's new custom observer UI api stuff. He could do some of the stuff he does in this using that, but a lot of the cooler stuff is impossible in their built in mod system.

The only way to make a lot of it work is in custom maps.

*Just a heads up, GSTL starts in the morning and is from Gom's new studio so it should/could be an interesting broadcast :D

This is very cool. I really like the telestrator. Also, I'm surprised that the organizations like MLG aren't jumping all over putting their logo and sponsors logos on the maps.

The GSTL match for tomorrow morning is none other than FXO, last season's champs, versus IM, who took top four for their team at the IEM finals. Has all the makings of a pretty great match

I, for one, am interested in seeing if the pros who didn't leave practice for MLG have ironed their play out somewhat more.

Naniwa announces he's joined a new team and it will be officially announced in a week or two, but then just can't manage to get through the announcement interview without being a douchebag and casually dissing Thorzain.

*Still a lot of rumors right now, but apparently there are big changes coming in Korea. Sounds like most of it is being forced by Blizzard.

*There have been notes on twitter from Scarlett, and then more recently Totalbiscuit, talking about some majorly negative rumors about SC2 coming out of Korea.

Popular theory right now is that Proleague is essentially dead in the water due to a Blizzard partnership directly with OGN. Sounds like a whoooole lot of nose thumbing in KESPA's general direction.

Course it's all still rumors for now.

https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/sta...

On the topic of rumours.

Lolwut.

Ah, that bodes well. Thanks for linking that, I missed it myself.

*EG Picked up Alive and Oz, both of whom seem like people that will jive well with Coach Park. Man they really are taking the Proleague failings seriously.

Awesome. Alive in particular is an almost perfect pickup to replace Puma.

***Was looking at the maps for round 4 of Proleague.

Uuuuuh...

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/40X1trIh.jpg)

Talk about a map that's going to break every single timing people know.

Concave wrote:

Lolwut.

Yeah. All gold minerals plus what I would assume is one rich gas per base instead of two normal gasses. Which sounds fine in theory, except that a rich gas doesn't actually equal two saturated normal gases. I feel like Artosis at one point ages ago pointed out that a rich ends up being like 75% of two saturated normal gasses. So everyone will have tons of minerals and no gas, and bases are going to mine out extra fast.

Combine that with the third base options both being far away and I expect to see a lot of gas starved games that develop in super bizarre and at times really dumb ways.

One thing that got brought up on State of the Game was that this makes Mules basically worthless so Command Center energy can and should probably be used in other ways. Maybe even supply drops.

Could turn out to be quite the playground for Terrans.

That map is nuts.

Today's GSTL was quite interesting. ST vs NSHS

liquid wrote:

Today's GSTL was quite interesting. ST vs NSHS

Game 1 was just ok, but I'm about 15 minutes into game 2 and it's super, super interesting.

On the other hand, OH MY GOD TERRANS PLEASE BUILD A TANK. I've seen so many situations since the release of HOTS where they just keep stubbornly shoving out widow mines over and over and over when even just a very small number of tanks could make an absolutely HUGE difference if placed well. There's already been like ten engagements in the same spot in game 2 where if Sound had just built like two siege tanks to back up his widow mine/bio he would have just absolutely destroyed the attacks coming his way.

*Good lord, game 2 is nuts!

*Also, I feel pretty slick about using one of my lower point picks on my fantasy GSTL team for Sound. Almost makes up for throwing MMA on my anti-team, expecting him to get thrown out almost every week and lose

I was going to pick Sound at first but for some reason I checked his team league score from before - abysmal. Thought the IEM thing he did was a fluke since I haven't heard anything from him since then - what a mistake, lol. And MMA in my anti-team is hurting too, that sucker!

liquid wrote:

And MMA in my anti-team is hurting too, that sucker!

You did it too? I thought I must have been the only dunce that tried that

Yeah I was just so sure he was going to remain the mediocre version of him we've been seeing for so long.

Also, just finished Startale/NSHoseo. Man. That certainly worked out in my favor. lol.

Prime/Azubu is a weird one for me. I have Prime in the team slot, but I also have Genius. Who I picked because, hey, they buffed Void Rays. If Void Rays are good, surely Genius can win a game or two.

Yeah. After his recent performance in HOTS I was sure he was going to be feeling right in place there. And I was grinning so much as his SCV-train all in was failing. Then of course, the zerg felt like he had to throw the game and ruin my fantasy point gathering. TT

Btw, I made a GWJ group in the Fantasy section, if you want you can join (all that play the fantasy game anyway) and compare scores. Gotta measure the e-peen in one more way!

San has to lose. I put him on my anti-team

*Wait. Wait. ... Wait. That is San isn't it? Are they seriously sending out another Protoss player? Byun just demolished Vines with almost nothing but marine/medivac even after he got out multiple Colossus.

So you... try it again? I don't understand some of these coaches!

Just watched Byun split pure marines (16) against zealot/colossi (6-7 zealots and one colossi) and take everything down. o.O holy crap, while attacking somewhere else and macroing at the same time.