There were two self reinforcing processes that created this:
- The game started out with a slight preference for high speed players. High speed players dominated esports. Blizzard asked for balance feedback. Pro players gave feedback which was overwhelmingly biased towards faster play.
- The tournament people wanted more action in tournaments, and faster play creates more action. All the feedback they give is also overwhelmingly biased towards speed.
If pro level sc2 selected for strategical players, these processes would’ve honed in on the strategical elements instead. For example the way you win with strategy in a game with a defender’s advantage is to trick your opponent into attacking you when you are ready or into letting you attack them when they aren’t ready. A method for this is to make a bad move. The bad move makes the opponent think there is a vulnerability, so he will attack. You then hard counter whatever attack you think is coming. That’s how it works. Signalling a weakness, but having a followup that is more refined than their attack. Your followup has to be more refined because by creating a weakness you put yourself behind. So you are giving up your footing in the game in exchange for knowing what your opponent will do next. That’s how it works.
That’s not how SC2 currently works. It’s about getting to an ideal worker count as fast as possible, then burying your opponent in so many little fires that they don’t have the APM to deal with it all. Eventually they make a mistake, and that mistake compounds into a loss. It’s literally APM spammers spamming APM at the other APM spammers until one APM spammer spammed slightly less APM spam than the other APM spammer and died.
Yeah I remember getting banned on the old forums for calling out an EU gm who said worker scouting isn’t worth it because of the mineral cost. I pointed out that for 99% of people the 50 minerals lost would be unnoticed but the ability to identify cheeses a minute earlier is worth its weight in gold. I even accused the guy of trolling the forums with bad advice meant to deliberately derail gold league players. If I wanted to prevent new competition entering the skill market, that’s exactly the kind of advice I would give: advice that is technically true, but highly misleading.
Absolutely. Talent peaked in 2015-2017. Innovation was the king during that time period and is definitely the SC2 goat. Serral and Clem only came after the talent pool had declined drastically.
I regularly run into people who don’t know game basics like undersaturation, saturation, and over saturation. Oversaturation provides maximum income per base. Under saturation provides maximum income per worker. Saturation balances the two. Most macro games are played at saturation, but both under and over saturation are both extremely useful tools. The key to a lot of 2 base timing attacks is over saturation. You have nearly the same income as a 3 base player but you have a tighter defense. This allows you to launch a series of hard multi prong attacks while you expand and transfer workers from over-saturation to saturation. This allows a 2 base tech style to play a macro game with equal economy.
Yes exactly. 
%. The SC2 pro scene is filled with bots who do the same build on repeat until it’s perfected and this makes esports extremely boring. It’s the main reason I don’t play high level sc2 right now and haven’t for years. It’s way more fun to play more diverse strategies but the cost you pay is reduced performance. So I am now a measly top 50 GM which ironically is a huge bruise to my ego but I care more about having fun than being competitive.
But that’s why Serral is currently whining that some maps don’t have enough close mineral patches because it throws off his attack timings by like 5 seconds. The entire game is about the speed to achieve a target worker count and nothing else matters. The game is a shell of its former self.
Not only should there be 4 player maps, but asymmetrical maps and asymmetrical spawns. The layout of minerals inside of bases should vary radically rather than being a clean and organized cluster right next to the command center. There should be maps where players spawn in the center instead of the corners. There should be single base maps. There should be island maps.
Yes, some of the maps will favor one race. That’s fine as long as each race has a map they are favored on for each matchup.
I actually think it’s a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. People with OCD have repetitive thoughts which manifest in a process they do over and over, like cleaning. If they make a mistake in the process, they start over. So you’ll get a guy cleaning his house ten times a day. That sounds a lot like the way SC2 pro players grind the ladder.
Another thing worth noting is that OCD people also tend to stay indoors in their controlled environments which is the perfect place to play video games. I think the SC2 pro scene is dominated by people with pathological levels of OCD. They are obsessed with perfecting build orders down to the second of a timing attack and making a single mistake makes them want to throw their monitor out a window.
Strategical play doesn’t jive well with this because it requires more adaptive and dynamic and messy game play. There are no “clean” wins in a strategical win. Strategical wins are about making the game messy deliberately for finding an advantage inside the mess. There are no clean build orders. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers. Every build is a winner and ever build is a loser. It’s all about how you play it out in the moment that matters. There is no memorizing the correct answer with 1,000 games of practice because there is no correct answer.
The difference between strategy and mere optimization is that optimization takes control over variables in a system to maximize the probability of an outcome. This can be done without any knowledge of how the system works by simply play testing a random assortment of things and seeing what wins and what loses. It’s the hot water method: you turn the knob until water comes out of the faucet hot, but don’t know anything about what’s actually happening inside the system producing the hot water.
With strategy you are dealing with an intelligent opponent who can manipulate the same system, meaning there is no expectation of trust. It’s like having two knobs that can both manipulate the water temperature, and what answer the opponent chooses is unknowable until you also choose. How do you get hot water now?
Getting a good outcome with this system is very a much a matter of knowing the exact mechanics that govern the system because they are critical for measuring what the opponent is doing and countering it.