I think soo is losing interest in sc2

I wouldn’t be surprised if soon we see the news that he switched back to BW.

He never scouted the main base once of Creator’s and he stayed on low tier tech for far too long.

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I think soo is losing interest in sc2

That’s everyone, my man. This game is in dire straights. It’s an APM spam game that has such an extreme emphasis on mechanics that you can’t even call it an RTS game anymore. SC2 is a multitasking game that rewards people who click the fastest. It isn’t surprising that people are going to lose interest with the game given the state of design.

Players spend 15 minutes setting up their bases to then have 1-2 minute of battle interactions that decide the whole game, and who wins is almost entirely decided by who makes the first multitasking mistake. A player will look at the wrong spot on the map, lose 20 marines to some banes, and the game is over. But, that’s not the worst of it: the game is obviously lost, but it drags out for another 20 minutes while the player hopelessly struggles to get back into it but can’t.

The game is designed to emphasize multitasking 99% and strategy 1%, and that makes the game boring. The game designed to stalemate, and that makes the game long and boring. What do you expect to happen? Nobody is going to watch / play this. This isn’t the video game they bought 10 years ago. It’s a totally different game in a totally different genre.

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It is really weird to hear from the guy, who is proud of getting GM with cheeses about 15 minutes games.
And even more weird to hear that LOTV is long and boring in comparison to WOL, where in the first 5 minutes nothing happen at all.

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When the game is designed to stalemate, and Zerg especially is designed to only win at hive tech, it is a tremendous feat to win in the first 5 minutes of the game. I have one game where I beat PartinG in 3 minutes and 54 seconds, and another one where I beat him in 4 minutes and 3 seconds.

Zerg is super-glued to creep in the early game with the exception of the zergling, has nothing that shoots up that can leave creep until at least lair tech but all of Zergs lair tech anti air is easily countered by things like disruptors until you add on vipers from hive tech. That means if you make an air unit and a wall, it is virtually impossible for a Zerg to win until at least hive tech. Literally the only thing you have to do is make a void ray or a banshee and it’s virtually impossible to attack you. That’s not even considering how Zerg has to sacrifice drones to do an attack, which in and of itself means early aggression is totally non viable. If you do an attack, it has to kill more workers than you already sacrificed by making roaches and lings rather than drones, and that’s virtually impossible feat.

To illustrate how insanely hard it is to win as Zerg in the early game, my normal MMR when I play standard is between 5500 and 5700. When I play cheesy, my MMR is between 5000 and 5300. It’s legitimately a -700 hit to your MMR to try to end the game fast. That’s ridiculous. This game is an multitasking/endurance game, not an RTS game.

Do you know how good you have to be to have 5500 mmr? You have to be the best player in roughly 10,000. If SC2 were an IQ test, it would be the equivalent of roughly 160 IQ. What about 5000 mmr? It’s roughly the best out of 4,000 which is about 147 IQ. Playing cheesy legit drops your SC2 IQ by 13 points. A person with 160 IQ has some IQ to spare, sure, but let’s put this into perspective for Pete’s sake. For an average person to take a 13 IQ hit would be like reducing them from being average to being in the bottom 20% of players. That would be absolutely devastating. Unless you are a Grandmaster, don’t cheese, bros: it legitimately nukes your MMR rating.

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I wasn’t speaking about balance. I was speaking about 15 minutes games. So my average game length is way less than 15 minutes, because I like 2 base all-ins. So I do think that sc2 is pretty fast and fun. Dota2 or LOL feel really slow after sc2.

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“If you don’t mind losing, any playstyle is viable” is not a valid argument for what playstyles are viable. To be viable, a playstyle must net a 50% win-rate against an equally skilled opponent.

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What are you even talking about?

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You can’t use losing as a way to artificially shorten the game length. “The game isn’t long, you can lose at any time!” isn’t a valid rebuttal to how the game is designed to stalemate. When I say the game is too long / boring / designed to stalemate, it’s assuming you are trying to win against an equally skilled opponent.

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I’m not speaking about any design. I am speaking about reality of sc2 and LOTV. Where the game can end in first minutes, because of cheeses, which are at my 4500 level happen more often than macro games. Current ladder TVP almost always going in the same way terran either winning with his 2 base all-in or lose in games <10 minutes. So I find the statement with 15 minutes games and 20 seconds fight exaggeration.

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Says “I am not speaking of design” then proceeds to speak of design. This conversation is a waste of time.

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Of course, it is waste, you are talking some bu%!&#it again. No one designed sc2 to be around cheeses, but players still invented them, and not a single nerf to shield battery stopped protoss from abusing it with voidrays against terran.

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Can u blame people? I personally don’t think its all Apm as " [lllIlIlIlIl]" says. I think it’s more that Blizzard is terrible at keeping the game fresh (new maps (I’ve been playing the same team maps for years now), new units, mods etc, etc) which in turn, causes people to lose interest in the game.

What makes new maps interesting is that it rewrites the meta, and the meta is what composition of strategies and how commonly they are used. The fundamental problem is that SC2 has such a heavy emphasis on APM spam that the meta will always converge on what strategies maximize the multitasking-pains of your opponent. This is a universal weakness regardless of the maps or any other factor, and it’s the biggest factor in deciding every game’s outcome by far.

The meta and things that affect the meta, like maps, wouldn’t be so boring if the game didn’t have a very strong preference for a very limited selection of strategies which orbit APM spam. The strategy of the game would flourish, even on old maps, if the way to win was to strategize rather than to multitask. If you want maps to have a big strategical impact, you have to reduce the “APM exploit” which goes roughly like this “I have more APM so I win, regardless of any other factor.”

Obviously 99% of pro players will be opposed to this, and that’s because they are APM spam abusers with zero strategical understanding of the game. They exert a minutia of strategical thinking to find a couple of strong builds, but then they practice the heck out of those builds to where they can do them perfectly. It’s much like playing the piano: rote memorization, and zero thinking. The game should be the reverse: players should know a broad spectrum of builds and strategy selection should decide the game outcome much more than minor multitasking mistakes.

The professionals will not like this, because they will go from being #5 to #50 or from #2 to #200. If the game were changed, crazy players like Gumiho and SoS would be the best players by far. Players like Maru and Serral would probably never win another tournament. We’d get builds like Gumiho’s thor drops, or SoS’s hidden gold base strategies. That sounds like a lot of fun, but the game is dead. It’s an APM spam game. Build a billion bases, make a billion units, spam a billion attacks at the opponent until he slips up. BORING.

but wasn’t that the playstyle of SoO? overrunning your opponents with mass units?

I think Scarlett said this once at a pig coaching session, many lower zerg build up gas too early and then fall off.
Therefore, the main goal of Zerg to get the first 3 bases full of workers.

riot, lol has shortened the game time. earlier 40-60min now ~30min.

I am not speaking about length of the game, but the tempo, the speed of action.

Yeah Zerg’s economy can only compete with Terrans/Protoss’ when the Zerg takes a third base and dedicates 99% of his larva production to drones and overlords. You absolutely cannot keep up in tech or upgrades. If you try to keep up in either of those categories you will be so far behind economically they will just run over you with units to the point that micro is irrelevant. They can just f2 + aclick and will obliterate you. You generally take 1 gas and sometimes you even pull drones off gas for awhile.

This is part of the reason why 2 base speed roach plays are nonviable in LotV. They are a type of “tech rush” and they put you so far behind economically the Terran will have so many flipping units that every other advantage in the game just don’t compare to how many marines he can make.

That’s why it’s a joke that they say Zerg has a stronger economy. Nope, if the Zerg commits 99% to economy and forgets everything else, he has a stronger economy. But, he’s behind in every other domain and will trade at a deficit in battles until he can catch up in upgrades/tech. So what Zerg’s economy really does is it forces Zerg to waste many thousands of resources just to stay in the game because they can’t afford both economy and upgrades/tech and it’s better to go with economy plays and trade at massive deficits than it is to simply be over-run by Terran’s/Protoss’ superior economy (if the Zerg goes for upgrade/tech plays). Zerg’s economy is not a strength – it’s most definitely a weakness. If the Zerg tried to progress in tech and upgrades as fast as Terran/Protoss, the Zerg would have an absolute trash economy. Zerg’s economy is not strong.

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Please tell me you’re not spamming queens while going for aggressive roach plays.

You have to or you simply die to a liberator. He can hold his main’s ramp for infinity so even if he has to lift his natural it’s no big deal. 1 liberator can counter attack and it totally shuts down all mining because you’ve only got 2 queens and 0 transfuses. 1 viking shuts down high ground vision and then liberators easily secure the natural and fresh mules drop. That 1 liberator is so incredibly disruptive that it totally shuts down your ability to be aggressive because your attention is back at home dealing with the liberator. That’s completely discounting the threat of a hellion counter-attack. The moment the roaches move out they will be going in to kill drones. 4 hellions can take down a queen which would be blocking your wall.

That’s why ravager ling is a better variant than 2 base speech roach. Ravagers can hit up into the main easier, can deal with the liberators, and the lings are faster than roaches and can catch him off guard more easily. Not to mention the key to success is to hit extremely hard and fast, which means killing the wall virtually instantly, and ravagers do that better too. I like to go 4 queens and to send 2 queens with the attack or leave them to defend depending on the scenario. You might as well spend all their energy on creep since they can’t transfuse anymore.

Oh, another advantage is that with 2 base speedroach you have to mine gas earlier and start a lair. With ravagers you can hit the same timing but because you don’t need a lair for it you can take a third instead, which gives you more power to transition and it looks like a normal macro build so it’s harder to scout. If you are lucky, he might even throw a liberator away to ravagers before the attack. Just don’t reveal all your ravagers.

2 base speedroaches are just a horrible, horrible build.

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I completely agree with the wall of Ls and Is and WoL was way more fun exactly because the game was slower paced and the player base was new. The demographic for this game is men in their 30’s no one cares anymore about skill in sc2 other than people who already feel very invested in it. This feeling of investment is misguided and akin to the guy who feels compelled to buy more microtransactions in diablo immortal. we want to play fun RTS games WC3 is infinitely more fun because you’re using the units not spamming mechanics. That ship has unfortunately sailed for this game but here is to hoping if they ever make a new wc or sc game they focus on making it fun and accessible first and let the pro scene sort itself out.

Losing interest? Who wouldn’t when you have to play perfect to win a game vs someone making mistakes left and right? We all know why Pro Sc2 players are dropping like flies the past year. If you aren’t one of the top 10 players you aren’t winning money because all the lower level tournaments are swamped by Protoss players.

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