Lings are OP (even in ZvZ)

https://youtu.be/J2nQ8JvOTe0

Games like this show how insanely busted lings are. I fall behind by doing a nonsensical proxy hatch build that only wastes money, then get back into it by catching my opponent out of position with ling maneuvers. 1/1 lings are just too good at shredding bases/workers, and lings are too fast to properly jockey your army to be in position on time. So to defend this you basically have to hug your hatcheries with your roaches, which gives plenty of time for the ling player to expand and get out mutas, and now your roaches are useless and you are behind in economy.

Ling runbys are almost exclusively the way top zergs win tournaments, so when is Blizzard going to nerf this blatantly OP mechanic?

Every mineral unit does better then lings they are weakest and worthless unit in game.

If u know put all your workers on to single patch they one shot lings and can stop mineral line run.

Plus’s u build then build banes and then comes down to better player who pushes and expand and defend.

Your problem is u don’t like useing lings and haven’t come with proper way defend.

Key point mass queens blocking runs till u build touches push out and attack.

So lings all ready weak compared to any mineral unit.

The answer is never. Zerg really needs ling runbys to stay on par with terran and zerg economy. How would zerg be able to beat terran and protoss players 4-0 on premier tournaments without ling runbys ? Are you joking ?

Ling runbys should even be buffed so that zerg has a chance to compete at pro level. We all know how zerg struggles to win premier tournaments and you want to even nerf it ? WTF man ?

Btw who is this person sitting at the right bottom of the screen ? I want to see batz because he has 6pack and is very handsome so i have reference to someone much more attractive than me so i know what parts of my body i need to work on to be remotely close to batz sex appeal.

Not even remotely close to true. The mobility of the zergling gives it an evasion advantage that makes it the best unit in the game. I said it back in 2015 when Life was the GOAT: you could nerf every zerg win con in the game, but, if you leave zerglings alone, zerglings will continue ravaging mineral lines for free wins.

+1 carapace halve the efficiency of banelings (not to mention split micro) unless you want to invest into +1 attack on your banelings, and that makes no sense to do. You’re spending massive amounts of gas to counter a mineral unit that deletes your economy from the game if you are out of position for half a second.

Do you think adding on a couple zerglings is going to outway mass zergling? No chance.

Incorrect. Zerglings are the best unit in the game, much better than any gas costing unit in fact. Frankly zerglings SHOULD cost gas for how much value they provide.

1 Like

There was a game between Serral and Heromarine a few years back. It was at the WCS world finals. Heromarine played flawlessly and had Serral on the ropes. Then serral got 8 lings into heromarine’s fourth’s mineral line, and the game was over. Zerglings are clearly the strongest unit in the game. Their ability to delete mineral lines for such a low cost investment is just plain busted. Innovation once said the most important aspect of winning high level games vs Zerg is watching the minimap for runbies. How many terran and protoss are going to be denied champion status by such a blatantly op unit. As soon as adrenal finishes even planetaries can’t keep a mineral line safe.

Hit the gym 3 times a week, 3 exercises per muscle group, 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps per exercise. Back and biceps, chest and triceps, core and legs are a typical way to split. Push to failure each exercise and then switch to targeting something else, for the next exercise, while that thing recharges. Creatineand caffeineare excellent supplements; everything else is a scam. Do keto to manage body fat. It’s that easy.

By the way, Innovation is the best terran, historically, not Maru. Maru got a lot of his big tournament wins off of ravens, ghosts, and proxies, all of which were op and eventually nerfed. Innovation on the other hand took a WESG, a massive tournament, from Serral when balance favored zerg. He’s the only player to do it in an asymmetrical matchup. He wasn’t even at his peak when he did it. He was 6600 on kr but he peaked at 7000 before then. People can’t beat serral even to this day with nerfs to transfuse, creep, broods, infestors, lurkers, the list goes on. He’s easily the best terran and arguably #1 in terms of raw skill. Problem is, region lock protected serral for a long time.

When the GOAT says ling runbys are op, we should listen.

Was there any period since release of LOTV where balance did not favor zerg ? The last time zerg was balanced was the end of HOTS with old economy (Probably zerg was maybe little bit underperforming because most zergs did not know how to deal with widow mines). During HOTS Life was the only zerg player to consistently win premier tournaments and in my eyes Life is the best zerg player ever, not Serral, because Life was winning during HOTS era which is widely regarded as the worst expansion for zerg.

Innovation at some point was close to the status of Maru but he isn’t GOAT because Innovation never did well in TvP. Protoss was his Achilles heel. If you call someone a GOAT then you assume guy had virtually no weakness as a player and performed well regardless on balance at a given time.
Maru on the other hand was always strong (even when Terran was underpowered) and in all 3 match ups. So not sure why you call Innovation GOAT - just because he was able to beat Serral couple of times ? But Innovation surely belongs to top 3 terrans of all time.

For some reason Batz puts more emphasis on Inno beating Serral at WESG than Maru winning every GSL in the calendar year. Maru was also the only Korean Terran to qualify for the WCS global finals in 2019. Probe’s GOAT discussion video is probably the gold standard.

Lmao. I got news for you. Maru had the same issue but worse. That’s why he proxied his way through tvp for many of his gsl wins. Playing a straight up game vs toss was suicide. You might as well gg at the start and save some time.

PvT balance was so bad at one point that terrans didn’t win a single premier or major event for about a 13 months. We had protoss in the finals of GSL forgetting to start zealot charge, and things like that. It’s much akin to the current protoss scenario in PvZ. We have people losing 4 oracles, unforced errors, and yet punching deep in tournaments with that level of skill.

Beating protoss back then was virtually impossible, so I don’t hold it against innovation.

As long as the zergling remains unnerfed, zerg will continue to be OP. Terran doesn’t the ability to outmanuever such a fast unit. It’s literally facts.

That’s straight up wrong. He never beat serral let alone with a balance disadvantage. Innovation did. I think there was one gsl win that maru achieved where I looked at his play and didn’t see some balance gimmick like proxy cyclone or 2 rax or mass raven.

Innovation on the other hand was able to thread the needle with mass liberators to beat top protoss on patches where maru couldn’t win. It’s ridiculously hard because you can’t stim. Innovation is the only terran to macro his way through top zergs and top protoss even on balance patches that disfavored terran. Marus solution was to abuse proxies that were so busted it was literally impossible to defend them without coming out behind in workers. It’s literally the definition of a free win. You are just guaranteed a worker lead as terran on that patch.

When maru marcrod vs optoss, he accidentally nuked his own army, and stuff like that. You could never make a big mistake going mass liberator vs the unnerfed blink stalker. A tiny mistake like stimming at the wrong time would be an instant throw and innovation made it work.

The point is, if innovation says that tvz is too focused around runbies, it’s too focused around runbies. He is without doubt the best TvZ player ever, arguably the best terran, arguably the best player period. He is certainly the only player to take a tournament from Serral during the peak dominance of brood infestor. You know, before the spree of zerg nerfs, including multiple transfuse and creep nerfs, brood nerfs, infestor nerfs, all aimed specifically at broods. Innovation beat Serral at a huge tournament before all those nerfs. Maru still can’t do it to this day.

Innovatin once said high level tvz is decided by how well the terran watches his minimap. Ling runbies are insanely OP when they can shred a mineral line or blow up a planetary in the blink of an eye and for mere pennies of investment from the zerg. Zerg has new tools. Lurkers and nydus etc. It’s time to nerf the zergling.

LMAO What creep nerfs ? The only nerf to creep mechanics in recent years is that reduced vision of a creep tumor by 1 (!). Yes ONE unit of vision. A change so meaningless that it could as well not even be considered.

I think you struggle to distinguish “NERF” from “REDESIGN”:
If unit is weakened for no compensation - it’s called NERF
If unit is weakened for compensation in other areas - dps vs speed of a unit, hp etc. it’s called REDESIGN. Infestors and broods were not nerfed. They were changed - infestor got its infested terran ability replaced with microbial shroud, and broods became faster at the expense of broodlings life longevity. You even made a video about it "Did Blizzard accidentally buff brood lords ? " This video i believe no longer exists on youtube.

Let’s get back to Innovation. In WOL he was average terran, in HOTS he was decent but inferior to Polt, Taeja and possibly even Bomber. In LOTV is where he shined as he was one of top 2 terrans in the world (the other being Maru). But let’s be real the period where he was beating Serral (2018 - 2019) was when Serral wasn’t even remotely close to his current performance. At some point he was no longer able to beat Serral.
Currently the best TvZ player on the planet is Clem with his non-stop aggressive style which relies on hitting multiple spots at the same time and excellent inhuman control of his army. Clem has arguably the best speed, finger dexterity and reaction of all SC2 players on the planet. Yet you had the audacity to call him garbage:

“Clem is garbage - he is the type of player to click fast, not smart” - this is YOUR opinion from 1-2 years ago.

Sight range, unable to cancel tumors, etc.

That’s called delusion. Anyone who thinks the infested terran delete was a “redesign” isn’t in touch with reality.

You do realize there are historical performance records, right? Taeja and Innovation were about the same level. Bomber was definitely worse – about 10%.

Serral’s performance has gone down because he doesn’t have access to the insanely busted mechanics that existed in previous patches. Zergs went from 40% of GM to 20% of GM and you’re like “it was a redesign, not a nerf!” and anyone with a brain is like :roll_eyes:. They were on a mission to stop the outlier of outliers from winning a best of 7 and deleted zerg from the ladder, and people are still like “it was REDESIGN”.

Clem sucks. He overmicroes and it’s clear there’s not much thinking going on. He’s just spamming apm as fast as possible and it often is counter productive. Unlike Innovation, he was basically non competitive at top levels until they took the nerf bazooka to zerg. They changed transfuse to be a defensive only ability AND nerfed the instant healing, nerfed queen range, nerfed creep tumors twice, deleted infested terrans, nerfed broods, nerfed lurkers, the list goes on, and Clem can’t still win. Innovation didn’t need any of that welfare to win but clem can’t win even with it. The same is true for Maru. Innovation was definitely the strongest terran and strongest tvz player historically.

All terrans universally struggled vs protoss, Maru/Innovation/Bomber/etc all had vs P as their worst matchup. Protoss is a meme because it requires half the mechanical skill as Z or T and so to be competitive at top levels it was buffed to where zealots could amove through top terrans. Players like Maru only won GSLs because the Protoss were so awful that they’d make very basic mistakes like forgetting to research charge. “Innovation was bad vs protoss” isn’t a valid counter argument. Protoss, historically, has been insanely busted in PvT. Innovation got through protoss using mass liberator, and that’s difficult because you don’t have medivacs to heal, which means no stims. Maru got through protoss with proxies, and there’s no doubt those were OP and ended up being nerfed several times. Innovation’s raw skill got him past APEtoss in the tournaments, Maru was lucky enough to discover something OP which let him squeak past them and, even then, he still probably would not have won except for the ludicrous amount of luck he had in getting protoss in the finals who were totally clueless on how to play the game.

That’s where we are at today in PvZ. Protoss dominates zerg but top level protoss are so incredibly inept they find a way to lose despite the advantages. The throws are unreal. I have 5500 gm protoss opponents on the ladder who do better cannon rushes than the one whats-his-face used vs Serral in the finals of masters colloseum. It’s unreal how bad these players are. PvZ is in a state where zealots can amove through top zergs, excluding serral, just like the way it was for terran back in 2015. Despite this, forum trolls will tell you “it was a REDESIGN, not a NERF!” and I am wondering if I am talking to someone who is intellectually disabled, lmao. It’s an obvious troll because no honest person could actually believe zerg wasn’t nerfed when protoss win 40% of tournaments and dominate 40% of gm league.

Anyway. The zergling needs to be nerfed. The reason the ling was so busted in the past is because zerg needed a mobile unit to cover ground and respond to attacks. Zerg has more bases & is more spread out than terran. Zerg doesn’t need that anymore thanks to the nydus and lurkers, so lings have become oppressive in their ability to shred mineral lines in the blink of an eye. They gotta go. I am thinking that after adrenal is researched, each zergling costs 1 gas. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

And that is factually incorrect. There were few terrans who could beat protosses consistently, namely Polt and Taeja. They were beating protossess even during early HOTS era where toss was most overpowered through entire history of SC2 - super fast oracles 2-shotting SCVs, nexus overcharge, mothership core, super strong 2 base blink stalker etc. Polt was even called “Nexus sniper” because of multitasking, and ability to snipe toss’ bases. Aside from early HOTS and proxy void ray era toss was never OP vs terran at pro level.

Yet his style is the strongest and most efficient because zerg except Serral struggles to deal with non-stop aggression and multitasking. Innovation can only dream of such speed, dexterity, yet you have the audacitly to call Clem “garbage”. Essentially terran has only two styles vs zerg that work:

  • Clem style
  • ultra turtle with ghosts, PF, libs and waiting until zerg bleeds out to death.
    If you cannot kill zerg before 10 minutes, you have to commit to turtling - there is no other way.

What tournaments ? Maybe some weeklies and minor tournaments like WardiTV, but toss has zero chance of winning Premier tournaments because race is complete trash these days. Protoss cannot compete at pro level. Maybe protoss players are bad but aside from that there is little protoss can do vs best terrans or zergs. Even the most recent “buff” to protoss - Raven IM research, ghost EMP nerf etc. didn’t do anything.

Maybe because lots of protoss players have alt accounts ? It was proven that majority of gm protosses are alt accounts of players like Showtime, Harstem, PtitDrogo etc.
This argument is stupid and boring. Quit it. They should simply delete all those accounts and then you would get factual representation of each race in GM.

No. Zerg early game needs to be nerfed. The reason why zerg is OP is not because of lings. You can nerf all zerg units you want: ultras, broods, infestors, vipers, corruptors etc. Still it won’t do sh*t as long as zerg has invincible queens and creep spread on 70 % of the map.

LMAO

:rofl:

Polt played in the foreign leagues and doesn’t count because they were weaker. The same is true for taeja.

That’s semi true. There was a 13 month period where terran won zero. That period was broken by Taeja.

Yeah because modern sc2 is designed to be an apm spam game. The quality of moves matters a lot less than the quantity. Back when Innovation was winning, it was important to actually make smart moves. There was a guy called Select who killed 8 zealots with 3 marines. That’s the time period we are talking about. Nowadays you can throw away a BC and be like “eh, whatever.”

AKA the cancer of sc2. HotS era saw a steep decline in popularity because the game trended towards turtle stalemate games. They blamed the swarm host, but kept the stalemates and SC2’s popularity has been on a downward spiral sense then. The real issue was the prioritization of the siege tank over the widow mine. Tanks are too weak in an offensive posture and too strong in a defensive and of course this means terrans don’t attack but instead turtle to no end. ZZZZ 10 years later and the game designers still haven’t figured out the issue. I called it 10 years ago.

A basic statistical test like the IQR would show that premiers have zero statistical validity for measuring balance. Skill outliers are going to control the game outcome and it will have zero correlation with balance. That’s why you can nerf bane HP and yet Serral crashes banes into maru and wins anyway meanwhile the rest of zerg struggles to maintain a 50% win-rate vs protoss on the ladder as a result of those nerfs.

To measure balance, you need a robust sample that meets the Lyapunov condition in the central limit theorem. Basically, if you take the average performance of Protoss as a group, but one item in the average dominates the average, then it’s not a valid sample. The Lyapunov condition makes sure the correlation is between Protoss as a group and win-rate, not a singular protoss player and win-rate. If you take the average performance of premiers it fails the Lyapunov test because Serral clearly carries zerg so the correlation between winrate and zerg is 0 and the correlation between Serral and win-rate is 1.

The place where that data can be found is the weeklies and, guess what, they are dominated by Protoss with numbers nearly identical to Grandmaster league.

  1. The win-rates in GM definitely falsify that theory. If smurfs were the reason, ZvP winrates shouldn’t be differentiable but ZvP win-rates are drastically lower than any other matchup. ZvP is 56% while all other ZvX are 62%.

  2. You are making a special pleading fallacy. E.g. you are assuming all smurfs are protoss. I, as a GM zerg, have 3 accounts in GM. I know a guy who has 15 accounts and he’s Zerg. The fair assumption, called the “null hypothesis”, is to assume that there is zero correlation between race and probability to smurf.

“You understand statistics at a collegiate level, STOP IT, it makes us balance designers look like we don’t know what we are doing!!!”. :rofl:

Oh my. Zerg’s early game is the weakest of the three. Their tech and upgrades are the slowest and their offensive options are the fewest.

This shows your league because cancelling creep tumors was a huge asset. You could walk creep up cliffs, you could save tumors from being killed, you could use tumors to block holes in your walls for an extra second or two of defense, etc. These were quality moves that you could make to get extra value. Nowadays the emphasis is on APM spam so you just rapid fire the crap out of the creep while wiggling your mouse. SC2 isn’t a strategy game, it’s an APM spam game. That’s why its popularity is plummeting while other games in the RTS genre, like League, have huge player bases. League emphasizes micro and SC2 emphasizes mechanics. Any game designer could’ve told you that players hate mechanics. It’s just a fact of reality. So of course if you make SC2 an APM spam game, nobody is going to play it. Most people don’t like to mindlessly spam creep tumors; the actions themselves have to have meaning and thought put into them or it’s BORING.

Nerfing creep tumors took a huge amount of strategy out of zerg and just deleted it, in favor of mindless apm spam, and that’s been the theme of SC2 design changes for the past 10 years. Delete anything that has strategical value and buff anything that has multitasking value. Like magic, the top APM spammer can’t lose a game and dominates every tournament. Who could’ve seen this coming. Oh wait, I did.

You say “LMAO” because you think it’s silly to cry about creep tumors being nerfed, and I see it as the reason why SC2 is on its deathbed as a competitive video game. The game went from being a RTS to being an “EAM” aka “endurance and multitasking”. It’s not an RTS anymore, and creep nerfs were part of that transformation. SC2 is barely recognizable in its current form. I do 1 base hive rushes because I am trying to hold on to when SC2 was actually an RTS game and was fun to play. The SC2 designers are living in a bubble and have no clue what they are doing and why it isn’t working. Worst of all, they are resistant and even aggressive towards anyone who gives feedback like what I just gave to you here.

If I posted this analysis, which is a correct analysis, onto, for example, Reddit, I would lose 2,000 karma and be harangued by hundreds of internet lunatics, lmao. The irony of it is that most players play arcade, aka they like the more MOBA-style take on RTS, but they will show up, breathing fire & beating drums, to crucify anyone for criticizing the 1v1 competitive design. It reminds me of communists. 99.9% end up working in the steel factory while eating starvation meals, but they can’t tolerate anyone who criticizes the great leaders. Really it’s a shift in societal values towards institutionalism and credientialism and it shows up everywhere, even in SC2 game design. It’s obnoxious. SC2 is a perfect example of why communism never works.

In america, they knew that angry mobs were a form of dense concentration of power, and that it needed to be subverted like every other form of dense power. Their goal was to empower the individual, not to let angry mobs harangue the government into complicity. That’s why it’s a republic and not a democracy, for example. They knew that a majority vote would be used to punish the minority, the minority would leave, and the majority would continue on a self-destructive trajectory. That’s exactly what happened with SC2. We had apm spammers take over the game via crying on Reddit and Twitter, and now the game is headed on a self destructive trajectory and nobody can criticize the great leaders for fear of being gestapoed.

SLAMMER streaming WoL Nightmare difficulty waiting room.

Giant grant gaming gets half a million views on his videos of the SC2 campaign and sc2 designers (certifiable morons) still think that it’s a good idea to design 1v1 around apm spam. An IEM event peaks at ~300k views for a 10 hour stream. Lmao. The writing is on the wall, guys, apm spam is killing the game.

If I were in charge of SC2, I would ask GiantGrantGames what he makes on his youtube channel. I would tell him his base salary is twice that if he fixes the SC2 ladder, and I would give him 10% of all sales going into the future. Like magic, SC2 is a success again.

1.9 million views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWRfm8ocl3g

People just don’t care about the 1v1 format because it’s an awful game design. Spam apm for 40 minute until one of you loses some marines to a bane or something like that. You could condense that entire game down to that final interaction and just save time. Everything before that point was irrelevant. It’s just mindless apm spam. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Cut the multitasking of 1v1 by 10% and you probably double the popularity of 1v1.

I digress. The zergling needs nerfs because it’s a multitasking mechanic to get your opponent out of position and shred a mineral line in a split second. Innovation, the goat terran, knew what he was talking about when he said high level tvz is decided by how well the terran watches his minimap. If we start chipping away at the APM spam win conditions, it will naturally buff strategic win cons by contrast. You won’t get as much value from spamming apm so the strategic win cons are better by comparison. Nerf the zergling.

There’s no need. You’ve already stated the possible solution time and time again and by playing WoL nightmare difficulty it would only reinforce the idea. In the mode, you rarely ever get missions where you have a 3 base economy and the ones that are most difficult barely have enough minerals to sustain a healthy army count so your army retention is most important.

I found the reaper mission to be the most difficult, especially when you want to get all the research objectives. The banshee mission was similarly difficult but I won’t spoil it for you and tell you about the unit that just deletes all your forces.

I think GGG’s first goal if he was given absolute control would be to make it so you can share campaign replays. I’m saddened that this isn’t a thing after the battle that was WoL Nightmare difficulty.

Part of the reason that Life’s ling runbys were more impressive than Serral’s is because he wasn’t spamming 15 queens as defence allowing the lings ample time to pick the perfect engagement. He also didn’t have perv pillars nor the standardized maps that we have currently. That’s all going to change next map pool but I wish they went a bit more extreme for example maps with only 5 bases on each side but the same sized map.

The thing you are 100% wrong with is which terran will benefit the most from your ideas coming to fruition. Inno over shadowing Maru when APM demands have been decreased and ingenuity increased? I don’t think so.

It’s just an alternate win con. You keep your expensive units alive and retain them for extra value which adds up over time. Nowadays you kill 2 bcs and the terran’s like “lol whatever”. The only way to win in the current game iteration is to go late game and out multitask them.

HotS design was better because the widow mine sucked at defense but was awesome for offense. If you had a field of mines obstructing rallies and things like that it quickly became impossible to manage. But if you were amoving ling bane into a defensive mine setup you could split “well enough” and get through it. The same was true for mutalisks. Mutas on the defensive were awful. Nothing worse than 3 thors pinning you down. But if the mutas were on offense, they were amazing because the thors couldn’t keep up.

They basically buffed defensive mechanics and nerfed offensive ones. If my units suck at defending but are great at attacking then, obviously, I want to be the one attacking. This incentivizes players to attack. That’s why you often got counter attacks or base trade outcomes. You’d rather base trade than defend. The game was designed to resolve via an attacker’s advantage and that was the default outcome. The default outcome is now that everyone gets a 10k bank and the first person to attack will have a 20% unit trading efficiency.

Since the games go longer, there’s more stuff to manage, and that makes the game a multitasking / mechanics / endurance game where quantity of actions is much more important than quality.

I played through WoL campaign years ago. I haven’t tried any of GGG’s stuff. The campaign was too easy for me and the story was cringe. I didn’t finish LotV after protoss were like “oopsie, we forgot we had an army that was capable of saving our butts and let our home-world be overrun. Oh by the way the zerg didn’t notice it hiding underground or whatever.”

The thing that makes the campaign interesting is that it has lots of alternate win-cons. SC2 really needs more win cons than killing your opponents buildings. There should be capture the flag, waypoint control, etc, these are basic things added to almost every other game.

GGG’s channel is simply proof that the multitasking-heavy flavor of RTS is extremely unpopular. I am very good at that kind of RTS, been in GM more times than I can count, but I think the game designers, if microsoft resurrects the project, should do a hard-line realistic analysis and consider a more strategy and tactics focused version of the game. This version of the game is just awful.

Sounds like a nightmare from a software perspective. The replay feature would have to work across all versions of the campaign. That means total backwards compatibility. The way they handle that is the launcher picks the right version of SC2 and it keeps all data files from all previous versions. So they have like 20 or 30 versions of the software. If you add the ability to watch replays, you’re going back and adding it to every version and resolving incompatibilities as you go.

The maps allowed him to 14/14 cheese his way to blizzcon. Protoss used to open 2 gate in their main just to secure their natural. Forge fast expand became a thing because the natural bases started to have chokes that allowed protoss to forge expand instead of 2 or 3 gate expand. It was a very different meta. The toss had a battle on his hands just to get his natural up. That’s what you call action packed. Nowadays it’s 200/200 carrier storm f2 aclick zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and everyone falls asleep.

There are a lot of map options that can be explored. You can do super-massive maps. You can do asymmetrical maps. I’ve never, in my entire life, seen an asymmetrical map on the ladder. That would be like 2 maps in 1: in one spawn configuration, the game plays totally differently from another spawn. Imagine an asymmetrical map with 6 spawn locations. That would make decision making / strategy very important. There can be island maps. There can be small maps. Etc.

Part of the reason a 1 base hive rush doesn’t work is because it’s too easy for terran to secure his natural. Imagine a map where there is only 1 base and/or the natural isn’t close to the main. Boom, 1 base hive is viable.

Innovation was a truth-speaker. He’s like me. I get all my wins from APM spamming bad strategies to a victory but have to point out how insanely busted it is to have an APM advantage over your opponents. Literally nothing else is relevant. So you want to know how to 1 base hive rush and beat GM terrans? It’s easy: click faster. He’s telling the truth even though it’s not in his incentive to do so. The reason he could make mass liberator play work is because he could shuffle the liberator positions fast enough to keep up with a toss that was blinking stalkers around. Nobody else could do it. He was a mechanical beast. He was so good at attacking that even when down in supply he’d be winning. Todd’s “look at the SOOOply” didn’t apply to innovation. Everyone else lost once they were down 20 army supply. Innovation would regularly be winning from 40 army supply deficits due to better positioning and tempo. Game rules literally didn’t apply to him. It’s a lot like how serral is now. Spamming mass bane vs terran right after a bane HP nerf. Balance isn’t relevant to them because they are insane multitaskers and win through that merit alone. You gotta respect their skill but at the same time realize this isn’t a healthy formula for a successful video game. It’s just not. Time to nerf the zergling.

POsting truth on bnet be like

:musical_note: Burden of guilt
Branded a liar
Falsely accused
Trial by fire

Committed no crime
In my innocence
I have endured
Trial by fire :musical_note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YqZuo1WKk4

Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. You’ve been talking an awful lot about stream sniping/cheating yet you’re still unaware of the worst type, reverse stream sniping. This is where people tune into a stream purposefully to dodge a player. When suddenly all that matters is strategy and you’ve got the 1 guy (with his grandpa hands) that has perfected the 1 base hive build, you will do all that is necessary to dodge him or be embarrassed on the battlenet forums forever.

Sure but once the Toss/terran scouts what the zergs objective is, it comes apparent what you should be doing, that means Life was heavily committed to it working whereas the times that serral uses it are heavily calculated and safe. Seems only Byun can get away with an orbital at the fourth.

What do you think of the lotv versions of WoL/hots maps. Neohumanity looked exactly like Metalopolis.

That’s true. Neohumanity was the map where I learned to trade roaches into tank lines by using the mobility advantage. It’s the map that idra did his first game on as a caster. He casted a 4 gate. It’s the map that idra got wrecked by a 2 rax bunker rush on, and why there are destructible debris at the base of ramps. It’s the map that had vicious cannon rushes, and why you had to patrol a drone at the base of your ramp. We then later discovered you also have to patrol a drone at the top of your ramp, too. It was a good map.

If a 1 base hive rush is perfected on a map that it is good on, everyone and their dog will have lost to it so it’s not exactly embarrassing at that point, it’s just normal. Right now, being the 1 guy to lose to it sucks because it’s such a horrible build that it takes a guy smurfing 1,000 mmr below his skill level to make it work, and even then it has a 95% loss rate.

Besides, I’ll be using a blur filter, randomized account queuing, and a randomized stream delay. Aint no way you can get anything but a randomized ladder match with that configuration. Stream snipers gonna have to cry into their pillows cuz nothing else is going to work at that point.

“Grandpa hands”. >99% of young players play league or dota. SC2 is the “grandpa” game, sorry to break it to you.

There are 180 million league players, 5 million who play SC2 arcade, and 0.5 million dota 2. That means SC2’s measly 160k, who play the 1v1 ladder, is 0.8% of the RTS player base worldwide. Most kids play the strategy/tactics version of the game. I am not saying to compete against league/dota, I am saying don’t be on the polar opposite extreme because that’s so niche it won’t have enough active players to be worth the financial investment to update the game regularly.

Nah, the 14/14 was roughly as committed as a 2 gate. So you could allin or expand. Toss had no map control except maybe a hidden probe to scout with. First question would be did the zerg expand or is it a baneling nest or a roach warren. 7 roach rush was vicious against toss back in the day, especially vs forge first. Guaranteed GM promotion. Protoss just defaulted to making sentries off of 2 gates, built up energy, then allined on 2 bases once they added on either +1 and blink, or a robo and a couple immortals. At that point you traded out units to wear down his forcefield bank. The 14/14 opener was to put pressure on him, kill a sentry or two, waste forcefields, etc, so that he didn’t have enough to push later on. He’d take a third instead, and that’s where the roach max builds came into play.

There were protoss champions back then because it took skill to meter your forcefields, as well as place at the right time and place. Protoss has no champions today because it’s an f2 aclick ape race with zero skill, and that handicaps it at the highest levels. It doesn’t have the same refinement capabilities that toss of old had. Literally half my toss opponents mass carrier, f2 and cast storm, and that’s it. No fancy builds. No fancy positioning. No fancy micro. Just amove and cast storm. The problem is that we don’t have an air baneling. You can punish a terran deathball by blowing it up with banes. What do you do against toss? They have a dps dense deathball with 15 range and ranged banelings that cost energy. Wtf are supposed to do against that. It’s facially absurd. Allow parasitic bomb to stack and now zerg can actually punish protoss deathballd but right now you get 80 apm clowns in gm.