I quit SC2 after the 8 worker patch became live

General Discussion
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Hello. Kwyjibo#21416 here. I started grinding SC2 during CoVid (2020) reaching a total of 27,945 games on EU server according to what I just pulled out of nonapa (it’s more than that, adding the unranked games and the NA games). I play(ed) 2 races, Z and T. I recently hit Diamond1, which means I am no good player. I am a slow and old gamer by today’s standards (43).

I use small improvements over time in a reduced amount of builds per matchup that I know how to execute to a minimal degree of optimization to gradually try and improve my play. When the 8 worker patch became live, I became mentally drained and exhausted with the tax of having to re-learn all the macro timings of the two races I play. The game is even more boring, with more idle time of nothing happenning, a game which was optimized for 12 workers in the first place. One thing appears to be clear: a big portion of the player base seem to be enfranchised players who already have dedicated a lot of their time to reach the level where they are now. Like me, some of those are probably not young gamers and might not just have the time needed to re-learn SC2. Instead, I would like to underline what I have been witnessing from the social media in regards to the community’s reaction to the 8 worker era patch(es): high level and low level players leaving the game, dissatisfied content creators, and more seems to be happenning but I am not a very informed person regarding tournament stuff.

I don’t want even to dive on the balance issues, because that’s a whole can of worms to go into, of which I’ll just state one example of failed goals: apparently, on ZvP it’s now common for Toss to go turtle SkyToss most of games because ground no longer works as before and to my knowledge, not even Protoss players enjoy having to play like this every game against Zerg… This is transversal to the usual balance whining of races that usually goes on after a patch hits, this is seeing a huge feedback of players from all sorts of levels indicating that, simply put, the 8-worker patch is bad.

Thank you for your attention.

Hopefully, I believe there is a chance for patch revertion back to the 12 worker era.

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Yeah no wonder why protoss players quit en masse. They used to have 30% in diamond league and upwards and now they are only 23%-24%.

And its not like going straight to skytoss is actually good either. Its just plain bad. But its sadly the only thing they can do now.

Its a mix of very bad balance currently and toss being the only race that really got changed because their core mechanic got changed massively.

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same here, been playing lotv since the very beginning, haven’t played a single match on ladder since this stupid patch came out

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There is a mod from 5.0.15 created by heros cause pros just werent be able to make playeable tournament with 5.0.16ABCDEFG

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I basically agree to all what you have written here.

It would seem that this game more and more is “rebalanced” and “improved” with only the top-of-the-top 1vs1 e-sports competitive players in mind. The rest, the vast majority of the normal players who enjoy to play the game for itself and for what it is, is basically dismissed with a “you’re a n00b, so get better and don’t complain”.

I also have been playing this game since its start, the WoL variant. And while the unit balance might not have been the best, the game - for me - was more enjoyable. The matches lasted longer, the units didn’t die like flies, you didn’t loose in a 10 seconds sudden skirmish an army that you spent 10 minutes to make, you managed and played and participated in the skirmishes, you had time to do some micro of the units without panicking from the fear of a single misclick. (Unless the short attention span fueled from social media and the effects of “youtube shorts” have started to manifest in the very mentality of the current playerbase - in which case there is no hope anymore to get this game be great again as it once was)