Can you tell me why other Zergs don’t copy Serral’s drone protector nydus networks? I mentioned that it was the first time I saw this being used in twitch chat and I was blasted by a cabal member saying you need perfect map awareness and control to pull it off. Zerg cabal members already scared it’s going to be nerfed. 
The nydus is insanely busted. The only thing missing is the ability to mine through it. It should yield a lower per base income. This would allow island maps to be a thing. Basically the nydus needs a “gather” rally like the hatchery. If you “gather” rally to a hatchery, the nydus automatically unloads drones which deposit & go back to the nydus; if you “gather” rally to a mineral patch, the nydus unloads any drones which go to the patch, mine it and return to the nydus. You could have multiple mining heads and multiple depositing heads. Of course this would net a lower income rate than a standard base. Probably 1/10th peak saturation of a hatchery. There should be no limit on how close you can place the nydus, because the load/unload speed is the limiting factor in how fast you can mine. You could get higher saturation if you spent more, built more nyduses, which might be worth it in the right scenarios.
Honestly I’ve often thought, in the past, that the nydus should be the only way that zerg expands. You only get 1 hatchery and it’s the one you upgrade to hive. Nyduses should be available at tier 1 and that’s just how you expand as zerg. This would make zerg expansion mechanics / economy totally unique compared to terran and protoss. Each one would be unique in their own right. Right now they do more or less the same thing but with minor variations. That’s how you know EZcraft isn’t a strategy game. Each race is practically a carbon copy clone of the other with minor changes.
The nexus should float, by the way, making it totally immune to ground attacks. The probes would place the minerals underneath and they would float into the air to get to the nexus. That would be awesome. Too bad I wasn’t in charge of sc2. This game could’ve been truly awesome. Instead we are stuck with MarineSpam Simulator.
Imagine how much easier it is to defend baneling runbies when the probes can run under the nexus, and the protoss units can defend under the nexus. It will be 10x easier. Right now the probes clump to get out, and that makes the banelings so painful. Protoss need permanent focefields and floating nexii.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2082707099
1 hour 39 minutes is the moment when he realizes what is going on. GG. Haters will say its ez pz to win with swarm hosts but literally anyone who has ever tried knows they are the worst unit in the game bar-none. The number of vulnerabilities that SH play has is incalculable. How do you ever expand past 3 bases? You don’t even have to attack the SH player. You just expand and play defensive and max. They can’t get off 3 base because the spine defense is exponentially weaker with how wide open the fourth bases are. Max, get your larvae count up, deny the fourth, go for an attack after a big locust wave is cleaned up. There’s nothing that spines can do to stop a maxxed roach army. You don’t hydras or some fancy tech. You just max, deny the fourth, and wait for a big locust wave to whiff.
typical for a stream sniper to show off his wins. Picks the one zerg player that plays like a toss with no speed upgrades and wins by out positioning. 
Did that work in hots? I remember Stephano HATING swarm host ZvZs.
I really don’t know much about how he plays except that he’s pretty decent. I think he’s 5400 on EU. That’s pretty good. He’s that high while protoss dominates sc2. It’s impressive.
It’s been too long. I don’t think they really became a thing in ZvZ because the roach was so oppressive. It was crazy hard to survive without doing a mirror copy of your opponents build. It was literally roaches head butting one another for 10 minutes. The way I won a lot of games is that I would squeeze out zergling speed, which was actually very hard to do because it meant -4 roaches. I offset that with a spine. From there you were larva bound so you had to wait for him to lose units by attacking you and then you had extra larva. You make 1 round of lings and use that to knock out a mineral line. But this was super high level zvz where builds had to be perfectly optimized. I am talking, every game vs players like JimRising, and the occasional game vs someone like Snute. Every game was a colossal pain to win. Even if you were ahead it was a huge chore not to lose the lead, you know what I mean. I used the same ling trick vs a old 6k GM player called “Hunta”. He was part of that maegis group that was always trolling the sc2 community. They had a website were they coordinated their efforts. These days they just use discord and various groups still engage in trolling and brigading. Anyway, I used this ling trick on him and he died to it too. That one ended up on the forum way back when.
Honestly this forum is a much better place than it used to be. Reddit is like the old forums. It’s absolutely insane over there. I had a guy who was upset about ladder banter. He’s all attacking me, calling me pathetic and a variety of other labels. Basically I beat him on the ladder, once upon a time, and it was an embarrassing loss combined with some banter, and he holds an omega grudge over it, lmao. I live rent free in some peoples’ brains. It’s fascinating to see. Saying “ez pz” to him is a crime against humanity, but he gives himself a free pass to say far worse things. It’s classic sociopathic behavior. They play the victim and demand that you comply with their emotional whims. If you do not, they act like you are the aggressor. I’ve said for a long time that the SC2 community has some absolutely insane psychos in it, and I mean that 110%. We’re talking legit looney bin levels of crazy. If I ever attended a tournament, I would wear a Kevlar vest. That’s how legit crazy these people are.
People ask me why I never went pro. I had the skill. Why not? It’s just not worth the headache. There are dozens of Avilo type personalities that have a vehement hatred for me in particular. I am basically the antithesis of their personality. They are insecure and demand other people comply with their needs. They cry about maphacks and stream cheaters. I go on twitch and invite the stream snipers to my channel. I ask people to install hax. I don’t mind being silly and losing games. It’s GIGAchad behavior and they don’t like that, at all. It makes them so mad to see me with 80 viewers. They need to find inner peace, you know what I mean, but their issues are too deep.
The problem with cluster b psychopathology in combination with the internet is that the crazies find other crazies and they validate one another’s feelings and they push one another off the deep end. It’s bad. The internet seriously breaks a lot of social dynamics that used to work well. Normally these people would be forced to integrate w/ society and they would learn to be less extreme. The internet does the opposite. Do you want to know how school shooters are becoming so common? It’s 100% the internet. So I get these crazies spamming me messages and I am like “nuh uh, you won’t catch me at an offline event”. It’s legit not worth the risk.
I totally understand why celebrities don’t go out in public. Best case scenario, you get harassed by paparazzi and worst case scenario one of your haters decides to escalate. I’ve got a whopping 1k followers and the issue is this big. Imagine how hard it is to be, I dunno, a Brad Pit or Paris Hilton. It’s a strange to be where I actually feel sorry for these people. I am not sure any amount of money is worth the kind of BS they have to put up with. I guess there is a reason they hide away in their mansion & never show their face in public. I’ve heard Keanu Reeves takes public transit and stuff. That’s amazing. It truly is.
I am just going to stick to my hot rods, big boats, motorhomes & hot babes. Being a celebrity is legit not worth it. I’ll just play SC2 from my boat as I float on the Lake Powell.
Twitch celebrities are in particular very perplexing to me. 99% of them make poverty wages. What is the gain here? If you put that kind of effort into anything else, a walmart job for example, it nets 10x what most people could get off twitch. Really the only thing it does is it feeds into ego centric attitudes of cluster B psychopathology. I am talking of historionics in particular. They do really crazy things just for a bit of attention. They will do anything for any amount of attention, no matter how small. Another marker is that they tend to have dramatized emotions. They over-react to things. So I get this guy on reddit insulting my twitch stream (he’s obviously jealous & is an aspiring streamer) and he’s over-reacting to video game banter, and all the flags for cluster B pathology are there. It’s just crazy stuff.
There is talk about requiring photo ID to use the internet. I am not a big fan of that because it gives too much power to the government & government-adjacent tech companies, but how is society supposed to deal with the psychos on the internet? Jordan Peterson, I believe, is in favor of photo ID on the internet. I can understand where he’s coming from. Anyway, I think the battle.net forum does a pretty decent job at it. It’s not perfect. I can criticize the moderation a bit because it’s susceptible to trolling. A guy with 5 accounts can spam reports on someone with 1 account. You know, that sort of thing. But I honestly think this place comes pretty close to achieving the theoretical “internet utopia”. It’s as close as I think you can practically get, without using photo ID or some other extreme measure.
I think an obvious way to improve things is to make all the information public. For example, right now someone can brigade-downvote you from 10 alternate accounts. If you made likes/dislikes public information, it would become clear if someone is upvoting themselves. The same should be true for reports. If you report a post, your user account should be attached to the report. The psychopaths love anonymity because it makes their dubious behavior easier so if you remove the anonymity you can solve a lot of the issue. Photo ID is probably taking it too far, but making likes/dislikes public etc might be a good compromise.
Honestly in red states they just might pass photo ID laws to use the internet. It opens up some interesting legal arguments because a company would be required to photo ID residents in another state in order to operate in this state. Is that constitutional? Does it violate the commerce clause? Those are some interesting legal questions.
I looked this guy up. His reddit account is easy to link with his sc2 account. His match history is vs slammer, rotti, berry, and killjoy, aka all streamers. He’s stream sniping berry crunch and berry crunch is calling him names and telling him to get a life. Vs killjoy he’s trash talking him, calling him drunk and cheesy etc. Classic psychopathic behavior.
That is what I was saying about stream sniping. I didn’t think it was a big deal until I streamed. Oh boy, was I wrong. Stuff like this is irrefutable. Stream sniping is a huge issue. I am a data man and that means I set my opinion to whatever the data says. There is a 0.0% chance 1 account could hit 4 streamers in such a short time span.
That’s why, if I stream again, it will be with a blur mod for obs. That way you can stream and they won’t know your mmr or account name etc. Add a random delay to each stream, queue a new account every game, etc. It’s the only way to stream without being harassed unfortunately.
IMO Jakamalaka was the annoying Maegis member. He was ego driven and held personal vendettas like that time he spread the Livibee not being a GM etc. Theriddler was chill even though he copied Avilos name. I would always mock avilo in our games for a mutual giggle. He never gave me any problems even though I proxy 3 rax reapered him constantly with Aus ping. XD I don’t remember any instance of them crossing a line.
Found the Nikki Haley supporter!
PS did you see the game between Dark and Stats? The Bnet forums were still lamenting that motherships are useless. XD
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Stat’s play was sloppy but he made it work. I am telling you, he is potential rival to Serral. He just needs to polish his play a bit. I crack the joke that 1 hotkey protoss can make it to the finals and 2 hotkey protoss will never lose another game. It’s very true. What makes stats good is that he splits up & does multiprong. There were a couple bad rallies and one F2 that I saw, but, other than that, it was pretty good.
I also saw more evidence that adrenal zerglings are just busted. They clear out static defense a little too well. The way protoss responds to attacks is via warp ins, and those don’t work vs the dps of adrenal. I hope the balance team takes a serious look at adjusting how powerful adrenal is. Bare minimum, make it longer to upgrade or something like that.
Nikki Haley is in the same category as Desantis in that she had a promising career and then she was baited by democraft donors (with deep pockets) into picking a fight with trump. Trump is too popular to attack unless you want to totally jump ship and become a democrat. It was career suicide. In the case of Vivek, he’s probably safe. Desantis and Haley have a problem and that problem is that Trump asked them if they’d run against him and they said no, but they did anyway. Haley in particular gave dems a lot of leverage. He’s never going to forgive them. He might not necessarily attack them like what he does with dem opposition, but they are radioactive as far as he is concerned so it will be like they are invisible. No job opportunities, no endorsements, no introductions to donors, etc. Polling seems to indicate that Trump is likely to win (vs Biden at least) which means Nikey/Desantis missed out on a shot to be vice president. Trump’s issue is suburban women so I think has no choice except to have a female FP and really the only option there is Tulsi Gabbard. Vivek is great as far as the MAGA movement is concerned, but trump has that sector consolidated already. He needs democrat support. Tulsi used to be a democrat. It’s the obvious pick. That’s where I am placing my bets.
It was mainly Jakamakala and Incubus, but the rest of the maegis members were “along for the ride” and totally fine with what these two were doing. I’d classify them as “adjacent”. They wouldn’t do that stuff themselves, but they didn’t object to it being done. I think at one point, the Maegis “leader” finally had enough of Jakamakala, after finding out that he was stream sniping people & dropping slurs on stream, and did eventually ban him. But the same guy absolutely refused to ban Jakamakala and Incubus who were, at one point, obsessed with harassing me.
Riddler and eurotrash weren’t really part of the whole maegis shtick (as far as I know). I had beef with them but it was your typical friendly rivalry. I’d place Hunta in that category as well.
There is one other that fits into the equation and he didn’t poke his head up as often. He was bossterran. Back when the harassment campaign against me was reaching borderline criminal levels, I documented a clip where he was streaming & talking about how obsessed someone was with me.
I often wondered how these people were able to coordinate their harassment so well, their harassment was almost real-time, and then I realized it’s via twitch streaming. You are going about your day, playing some SC, and these trolls will watch a stream and see that you are online. They will open a chat message to you, while you are in game, spam hate-mail and then look for your reaction on the stream. You know, things like that.
Well, I win again. I made a reddit thread saying fungal is too powerful (in combination with hydras) and was downvoted to oblivion. New patch is announced:
Fungal Growth range increased from 9 to 10.
Vision range while burrowed reduced from 10 to 8.
Unburrow time increased from 0.36 - 0.71 seconds to 0.54 - 0.71 seconds.
(Range relates to random delay).
Burrowed Infestor is now more visible while moving.
Clearly I know what I am talking about & redditors do not. The infestor is busted & I totally called it. People will still call me biased. Watch for it. Now I can link them to this thread to establish that I have a history of calling out Zerg for being overpowered.
It’s so interesting that the reward for being knowledgeable about SC2 is to be constantly harangued by internet users. You would think the smart thing to do is to identify who the smart people are, befriend them, and learn from them. That’s what I do on twitter. I pay attention to who is right and who is wrong in their predictions and I follow them & nobody else. Redditors on the other hand will resent you for being right.
Balance council giving massive improvements to amatuer Protoss while nerfing what Serral just did in the previous tournament, classic. We’re going to have an even more increased presence of Toss at the expense of Zerg.
Make infestors slightly more visible while burrowed but remove their armour tag for goodness sake. I saw Shinn steal all of Maru’s siege tanks but one, so Maru dropped a scan and took the easiest fight of his life.
Yeah they were going to take a middle of the road / split the baby approach. The protoss changes aren’t too impactful IMO. What are they going to do with slightly more durable sentries, faster building obs, and a slight sight range buff on pylons? Fungal on the other hand was extremely problematic for terran as a surprise mechanic. Zerg is also weak vs skytoss and the fungal range will help with that.
All in all toss nerfed, zerg buffed vs toss, zerg net neutral vs terran, and cyclone buffed (not a balance change / a diversity change).
I was saying cyclones were trash on stream and people were like WTF. I also said cannon rushes are bad, but they will never buff those. Taking on all of reddit be like, to quote Trapt:
Back off, I’ll take you on
Headstrong to take on any one
I know that you are wrong
Headstrong, we’re headstrong
Back off, I’ll take you on
Headstrong to take on anyone
I know that you are wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqbXc5h4KDw
EDIT:
I just realized the pylon sight range buff IS a buff to cannon rushes. Holy cow, it’s like I got my Christmas list.
Taking on reddit? pfft. you give them ideas that hurt Terrans chances of dominating all aspects of SC2. I will never forget what you made them do to ravens.
Yeah. I lost 1500 karma a few years back because I pointed out that SC2 isn’t an RTS, it’s EAM. They proceeded to nerf creep spread which most interpreted as a power level changed, but I see it as a reduction in the mechanical requirements to play zerg. The widow mine change can be analyzed under a similar framework. I’ve been right, time and time again, and reddit is always wrong, every single time. They are so confident they will obliterate you in downvotes for pointing out something that is painfully obvious to an expert. Reddit is midwit syndome incarnate. They know enough to think they know it all, but not enough to realize the real world is bigger and more complex than they could ever imagine. This gives them smugness and zeal. That’s how they end up mailing their burger king paychecks to capital investment firms. I can just picture some burger king employee somewhere on Earth smugly buying GME stock to “fight the system”. Lmao. I know people who made absolute bank by short selling GME. Basically anyone who had GME stock saw their portfolio skyrocket and head off to social to #FightTheSystem and get the normies to buy the stocks. Boom, you make mega fat stacks by owning an assortment of stocks and waiting for one of them to skyrocket.
I actually tried pointing this out on reddit once and was just obliterated in downvotes. They are too smug. Their smugness prevents them from engaging in introspection. They are right, they know they are right, anyone who disagrees with them is obviously an evil person. That’s literally the framework they use to interpret the world.
You lose nothing by entertaining an idea but reddit will verbally assault you for sharing ideas. It’s the craziest thing. It’s the whole “don’t bite the hand that feeds” idea. Don’t verbally assault people who share ideas with you. It takes time out of their day to do these things and there is no reward for it. Add on top that you will be verbally assaulted and nobody is going share ideas. That’s how you get echo chambers.
Historically, I’ve basically never downvoted people who respond to my comments, because I don’t want to punish the sharing of ideas. Recently I’ve started just outright blocking people who display this syndrome. A guy who calls you 3 or 4 names clearly isn’t going to contribute any good ideas, so I will insta block them. I used to ignore them, except they will legit go into your post history and downvote you for months after the event. It’s best to nip it in the bud and insta block them if they are too unreasonable at the very start.
Reddit doesn’t listen to me, dude. It’s pretty obvious that actual people of power do watch & listen for feedback. That’s definitely the case. It’s clearly a political machine. Ideas enter the thought-market and people purchase them and share them. It’s market mechanics applied to ideas. They have their thumb out in the wind, so to speak.
I wasn’t as vocal back then as I am now, I don’t think I had any impact on design back then. I did hate ravens. There was a GM on NA called Timorus and he was a good player that was tough to beat, but when massing ravens it was literally impossible for him to lose. Seeker missile was a huge design fiasco.
EDIT:
I sitting here working, and trying to think of the lyrics to a song that describes reddit. Thank you, Coolio:
It’s going on in the kitchen, but I don’t know what’s cookin’They say I gotta learn, but nobody’s here to teach me
If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me?
I guess they can’t, I guess they won’t
I guess they front, that’s why I know my life is out of luck, foolBeen spendin’ most their lives
Livin’ in a gangsta’s paradise
Dark needs your advice. Back to back games he was PROTOSSED by the new mothership. Against Stats it wasn’t so bad because a carrier fleet is hard to engage but then MaxPax had to rub salt in the wound with colossus HT in a PvZ. https://youtu.be/CL0m7kK47rc?t=3589
Maxpax splits his army by recalling on top of a cliff; proceeds to lose a bunch of immortals for free. That is such a protoss move. It’s a totally unforced error. WhY ArE tHeRe No PrOtOSs ChAmPiOnS?
The problem that game was the tempests. Everything else was fine. Darks positioning was a bit off a couple times; he lost some bases that he didn’t need to lose. The point where dark had no hope to win was when the tempests were out. Skytoss is simply way stronger than ground toss.
The biggest thing I’d criticize is the lack of infestors. Fungal and lurker burrow will delete a protoss ground army in the blink of an eye, especially of coupled with 1 viper for blinding clouds. You just have to get him distracted witg a counter attack, and attack his army in an unusual place on the map. It’s really easy.
With the new dropalord buffs, baneling bomb strats might be a valid counter to ground toss. Back in the day, they were one of my go-to builds vs protoss. You upgrade your lings and spend all your has on banelings and dropalords. You might want about 12 roaches for a bit of durability. You just get a surround so the toss can’t move, and drop some banelings. Ez pz.
Ling styles vs toss are terrabad because of storm, archons etc. It barely worked before the inject nerf, chronoboosr buffs, zealot buffs, archon buffs, high templar buffs, baneling nerf etc. It is probably in meme-build territory because of chronoboost alone, despite the new dropalord buffs. Dropalord buffs are for doom dropping the main, bane bombing mineral lines. Serral won a lot of tournaments using bane bombs before this buff. Get ready for another wave of zerg dominance. They’ve guaranteed serral will win the world finals at gamers 8.
Damn, that GSL bracket was an incredible one; I was not expecting both classic and Stats to make it through - especially beating Dark to do so. They both looked incredible, and Stats specifically was the one that I was really excited to see in the form that he was. Doing the constant multi-prong, clearing creep consistently, keeping his oracles alive the entire game for revelation, stasis ward and just generally being annoying - THAT is what Protoss players are missing these days.
Stats was rallying tempests into spore crawlers. Less of a “played well” and more of a “played well enough”. Imo.
His oracle usage is superb. I agree with that. He always has three oracles & retains them all game. Hero will throw them all away for 1 drone kill. Stats, historically, won’t even both doing drone harass (sometimes).
Terran weebs when speed overlords start depositing banelings in every mineral line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcO1bA6C9Os&t=86s
When people think that the WM changes will make ling bane unbeatable:
https://youtu.be/Dkk9gvTmCXY?t=46
Eww, a swiftie. Terrans finding something to finally validate their whining:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMlvMsGRouM&t=85s
Zerg truth tellers after getting buffed to the moon en every matchup: