https://i.imgur.com/EJjxGUc.jpeg
I don’t think so. There are many great and wonderful things beyond SC2. This is the Hall of Mirrors in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. I recommend a shot of whiskey before going into the mirror room–it makes it much harder to get back out. You guys are the ones missing out.
SC2 doesn’t have a monopoly on my time and attention, and my patience has simply run out. Protoss have been dominating Grandmaster since the 2018 void ray buff. I’ve been endlessly harassed by the community for simply pointing out the obvious [that protoss is busted]. Not only does the game suck, the community is literally psychotic. Imagine deranged people who can’t understand 5th grade math believing all their problems are because of Serral. It reminds me of the Drumpf obsession that radical leftists have. There are so many degrees of seperation between you and Drumpf that he has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you are getting kicked out of your apartment (should’ve paid rent). Likewise, every Protoss on the ladder is convinced they lose because of Serral and many of them psychotically harass and obsess over community figures who don’t conform to that narrative. One streamer calls me an abusive scumbag for the great crime of beating him with a meme build, saying “I smurf at a lower mmr level so I can abuse lower ranked players with overpowered strategies.” The statement doesn’t even make sense – how must I reduce my mmr if the strategy is overpowered? But that’s where internet culture is at these days. People with severe mental health problems have found a way to make money by having daily melt downs on reddit and twitch.
I was helping a buddy paint some cupboard doors, staying at his house in rural Idaho where the internet is only 128 kbps. Idaho can have some pretty insane weather swings between day and night. It can be 85 degrees and clear skies during the day, then be a thunderstorm at 45 degrees at night. Well I get out my giant graco airless paint sprayer and paint all these doors EZ PZ, while enjoying the sunset, and then go inside to chat and visit. At 11 PM, everyone has gone to bed except me. I am watching an asmongold video at 144p and still getting lag. That’s when I hear the thunder and I get a shot of adrenaline. It’s probably raining on the fresh paint. I go outside and, sure enough, it has started to rain. There is heavy rain in the distance, the trees are swaying from the wind, and lightning is hitting the ground probably 2 times a minute. For a second I wonder if I shouldn’t go out there, I have lots of wilderness training from my time in Boy Scouts and know how and when lightning is dangerous. I think to myself, “I’ll be fine if I am fast.” So I start running out into this field, collecting cupboard doors and drawers, and running them back into the house. I have only one more door and a drawer left, but the heavy rain has reached me (that’s where the lightning was hitting). So I run out there really fast, and as I am grabbing the last item and start walking away, when the whole area lights up as bright as day and I hear a giant crack behind me. You can tell how far away the lightning is based on the delay between the visual effect and the sound effect, and there was no delay. I didn’t look back, and ran inside. The next day I went outside to find where it had struck, and there were scorch marks in the neighbor’s field only 40 feet from where I had been standing. It does make for nice sunsets, though: https://i.imgur.com/jDFM5bZ.jpeg
It seems the SC2 intern is following something approximating my advice, so maybe there is hope. He or she is doing radical changes (very good), doing multiple opposed changes to the same item. So he buffs one thing by 50%, drops another attribute by 25%, then increases another by 12.5%. It’s a good scheme due to regression to the mean. You are much more likely to make a unit balanced by doing multiple changes at once. That’s because it’s hard to know exactly how a unit behaves in all circumstances and so you adjust it across 2 or 3 dimensions and this will make the unit much more stable across a range of scenarios whereas if you only adjusted 1 the impact would be much more limited. The reason you do the 50/25/12.5 scheme is because it makes the changes convergent. You won’t get a runaway effect that way.
They should’ve listened to this advice when I posted it back in 2015. Oh well, better late than never. Truth be told, they probably never saw it because this place was a hurricane of mindless QQ. That’s why they need to use AI to generate summaries of community feedback. The AI can automatically filter out the deranged responses.
This scenario is analogous to grandmaster level micro in SC2, by the way. Clem flirts on the edge of danger because he has precisely mapped out where the danger is at. Likewise, years of adventures and near death experiences has trained me into being able to tell there was enough time to save those cupboard doors before the lightning struck. It’s the same fundamental mechanism at play. It’s pattern recognition. Lightning is where the rain is at, the rain is light near me, the wind speed isn’t too high so I have time. It’s the same thing as what happens when judging how close the medivac can get to the stalkers.
A slight sub note to this. Because they listened to the mentally insane apm spammers on twitch, chronically basement dwelling and hyper anti social, the game was designed to sooth the anxieties of these people. Most people simply don’t have those issues. Radical redesigns will obviously make them upset, but normal people will love the change of scenery. They do this in Magic the Gathering, a social game, and in Hearthstone, for contrast. SC2 has been spiraling away into irrelevance because nobody is willing to stand up to internet psychos who will lose their minds if they can’t do the same build on repeat that they’ve been doing since 2010. These people are so engulfed in the game that their entire self worth is dependent on having 4800 mmr. So when the game is mixed up, their mmr will tank by 1000 and their self worth will be literally destroyed, causing melt downs and back lash. You gotta ignore it. Follow MTG’s lead. Follow the lead of minecraft youtubers who constantly add ridiculous mods like upside-down world generation. These people get millions of views. Stop listening to the hyper toxic twitch crybabies in the SC2 community.