Lowko’s latest video or the reddit post on why HEROMARINE doesn’t play online cups anymore.
yes, exclusively Protoss…NO ZERGS.
But but but…Protoss is underpowered, Protoss needs help, please buff Protoss more please.
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We should let the meta settle,obviously.
Its protoss fault that zerg pro Players dont participate in online Cups ?
Serral got 1 esl Open Cup win. Thats all we need to know.
Where are Lambo, elazer, serral, (bly), reynor, Scarlett, dark and rogue in their respective esl Open Cups ? They are notorious for Missing. But yeah…obviously this is protoss fault.
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No its not Protoss fault! We need all tournaments to be 1 race only, Protoss. Ban all those Terrans and Zergs whose races are overpowered or nerf them until Platinum Protoss can beat GM Terrans and Zergs!
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Classy Response without any Argument. Just how we Like Our whiners.
Masters Colosseum seems to Go Well for zergs…
Old news. Toss has dominated ESL cups for years. What’s new to this situation is that even with big tempest and mothership buffs, they still can’t beat serral. They made the mothership auto target changelings for crying out loud. Toss doesn’t even have to worry about changeling nydus if they just build a mothership. They still can’t win. Serral by contrast has had to deal with changeling nydus in zvz for basically all sc2 history. Toss professionals are terrible at starcraft and it’s undeniable. Even the most ardent protoss whiners have finallly woken up and smelled the coffee. The problem is, it’s too late for sc2. The sun has set on this video game and so the next realization the protoss will have is that they get to play PvP against other protoss for the rest of history. SC2 is dead, apetoss killed it, nobody wants to play it except other protoss, and that means pvps. They are slow on uptake. It will probably take most “grandmaster” protoss at least a year to realize this. Just move on to other video games and laugh from a distance. It’s the only thing you can do. Some people can do more and will do more, but the only way to solve an issue like this is to make a new RTS game from scratch and ban anyone who contributed to SC2’s collapse in the EULA. Then the only thing they an do is cry about it from a distance on their dying youtube channels while a new RTS empire rises. The only question that remains is if the branding issue forged by SC2 will bring down the entire RTS genre with it. We will have to wait and see on that one, but I suspect it is the case. I know people in the video game industry who spent incalculable wealth developing rts games who have now realized it’s better to wait a decade to release them. Look at how other rts titles have recently flopped. People initially thought the decline of sc2 would open up the market for new RTS games, but the flops prove otherwise. The RTS genre is dead. Did RTS kill SC or did SC kill RTS? That’s the question. RTS adjacent games like MOBAs do just fine so it’s obviously a branding issue for basebuilding RTS games. The biggest hurdles new RTS games face are cultural issues and branding. The genre has to be rebranded away from the fast pace “real time” strategy games that are 99% speed, 1% luck and 0% strategy. If that can be done, the next hurdle are the toxic youtube trolls who think they own your IP beause they make videos about it and who will balance whine your game into one bad design decision after another because they feed off of drama and a good game doesn’t generate drama and so they seek to make the game worse, antagonize fans, and generate youtube content from it while sucking the life out of the game like a vampire. Those are the issues new RTS games face: branding and culture. Really, the culture issue is a subset of the branding issue, because the branding determines the types of customers you will attract. Imagine putting up a sign that says “Howe’s Finest Ladies: A Gentleman’s Establishment” and then being surprised when horny teenage boys flood your store. Oh it’s a bible store. Why didn’t you say so. The branding and marketting of sc2 has created the culture of sc2 and that’s why we are in the mess we are in with 70% of the top 20 worldwide being protoss and yet protoss still think they need more buffs. When a video game advertises a race as f2 amove free win race “loloolol dominate your opponents with 0 effort” guess what kinds of people it attracts. And isn’t that the persona the protoss project in the Legacy campaign. Of course it attracts stubborn people looking for free wins and domination of others. It’s baked into the branding of protoss. It’s literally the protoss identity. They didn’t put much effort into understanding the branding they were creating and the types of customers they’d attract. Imagine if instead of this firstborn of amon nonsense they instead were irrelevant nobodies. Nothing special about them. Imagine if they didn’t project strength and endurance and instead cleverness and patience. Imagine if their survival wasn’t guaranteed because they are special, but in not being guaranteed they must learn to be clever and protect themselves. Do you think the same people would’ve latched onto the protoss identity to such an extreme they balance whine about serral every time they, themselves, lose in gold league? Of course not. These people view their own losses as an endurance problem. They simply have to endure these tribulations until the balance gods reward their patience and bestow upon them their rightful rank of grandmaster. That is the psychology of these people. They think endurance is winning. They think only the strong endure. Because they are strong, they deserve the reward of their endurance. Just like the protoss. Branding issue.
This leads us to the brilliance of the design of MOBA games. Each character is its own brand, giving them the ability to attract a broad variety of people. SC2 only gets 3 brands and they designed one of the brands to attract stubborn and braindead people. No wonder sc2 is in the mess that it is in. The future RTS’s needs at least 5 races or 1 race – no in between – and none of the races can project this stereotype of “I am special because I am stubborn.”
MTG by contrast brings out a new brand every set. Every release is a new set of cards with a new brand. Don’t like Khaladesh? Fine, play Kamigawa instead. SC2 was sensitive to branding risks and the designers weren’t aware of that and maximized those risks in the design of protoss. Now it’s called PvPcraft 2: Spammers of the apes.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that Tolkien, the greatest world builder humanity has ever seen, designed his story to have so many christian elements? In doing so, he knew he’d attract a loyal following of people who appreciated the fine details of the characters and their character. Consider how Aragorn is gifted an ordinary ring that merely belonged to his great grandfather, and yet this ring inspired him to rise up and defeat Sauron and The One Ring. It’s obviously a christian story. He designed the story to create a brand that maximized the story’s popularity. Christianity has been deeply rooted in western culture for thousands of years. That’s an example of how powerful branding is.
What is protoss branding supposed to portray? What is it supposed to represent? What kind of people are you trying to attract with it? Gold plated protoss who amove everything with no effort and win because the gods deemed them special and nothing more? So they win through sheer stubbornness and luck (luck which they misinterpret as their own specialness)? Don’t forget that the protoss are mystical and use superstitious reasoning. Basically apes flying star treck space ships. Boring.
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Just for one tournament season I wish they went all-in on team games instead of 1v1. More unit interactions, more chances for teams to attract sponsorships, they can even do another wild draw from content creators. They also can have a fresh experience without having to change the game drastically. It also makes prize pools less focused on the top dogs, and also doesn’t have the mirror matchup fiasco nuking viewership.
Heromarine and Uthermal are ahead of the curve, both turning to team games for content.
They are following the league and dota route. 1v1 puts a player in the spotlight and most players don’t like that. Most people like to work in teams (myself excluded) and part of that is group psychology of depending on the group and also the ability to direct blame off yourself and onto the group. It also simplifies the game because it allows for specialization. One player can say I will make siege tanks and the other says they will make mutalisks and so one does defense and the other offense so the game 's complexity is cut in half via specialization. League gets additional benefits because it creates a faster pacing from the perspective of the viewer but not from the perspective of an individual player. SC2 pros have a ton of pressure to make things happen in the game and as a singular person it takes too much apm and so only serral can do it. League by contrast you control 1 character but because there are many players the game from a viewership perspective is still action packed despite being slower paced for the individual. SC2 management is just barely figuring out the things league and dota figured out over 20 years ago. That’s how you know they are managerial types and not entrepreneurial. They don’t like to build new cookie factories, they like to manage an existing cookie factory until they retire with a 40 year award and a pension.
The reason I hate working with people is because of regression to the mean. Incredible talent is rare and so if you have a group of people working together the odds that you get exceptional results are very low. It’s likely that you get average results and that’s a terrible outcome if you consider how bad average performance is. Plumbers score a whopping 90 average on a nelson-mendella test. What’s crazy is that half of them score below 90 and only a small fraction score above 110. This is the reason I absolutely despise licensures. You have to hire someone dumber than you to do a job for twice the cost and triple the time than you could’ve done it yourself, and you end up with a worse result. At the end, you are left wondering if the man was a day drinking drunkard, because little is done right and none of it of excellent quality, but, no, this is just his experience as a baseline.
I’ve got this plumber who has held up a project for 5 days when it would’ve taken me 1. I am not licensed in texas and for the city to recognize the improvements, which legally increases the value of the property so after resale the remodel pays for itself, you have to have a licensed plumber do the work. He glues together pvc fittings with so much primer it runs down the pipe and puddles – not supposed to do that because it weakens the pipe and icreases the probability of cracking. Every PVC joing is misaligned and none of them are fully set. He was supposed to install shielded couplings on transition joints but didn’t so instead of removing the wrong coupling he installs a shielded coupling over top of the previous wrong coupling. The list goes on and on. That is what you get if you rely on other people to do the work, and licensure laws require you to rely on these people. That is why I hate licensures.
He has to run hot and cold lines to the bathroom and so he runs them 1 foot apart which means now he has to use two metal plates instead of 1 which are installed to prevent drywall screws from hitting the pipes. A pipe, that had to be replaced, already had a coupling and, instead of breaking the pipe at the coupling, he cuts it, installs a new coupling, leaving the old one there. Either use the old one or use the new one. Why both? Now we have the cost of a new one and the risk of the old one. What on earth is this guy smoking.
Not a single wall is square nor level. Not a single board in the wall is straight. So the framers were drunkards too, I guess. So now every single board in every wall has to be sistered with a new board that is square, parallel, and level. If not, it messes with the alignment of wall tiles at perpendicular joints, skews the size of grout lines, and changes the way the lighting falls on the wall. This is what you get when you rely on other people.
This is why AI and robotics are so tantalizing. A robot can do complex manuevers at lightning speed and with micron precision, and they don’t complain nor do they ask for days off. They also run 24/7. Right now they need operators, but with AI that soon won’t be the case.
Oh and the electrician drilled holes on the extreme points of structural boards. The general rule of thumb is that you drill 1/3rd the board size and within the 1/3rd center of the board only. Additionally, they aren’t permitted near the ends of boards if it’s shear-loaded. Some of the boards were drilled on the extreme points and the center, meaning the boards now only exist for moral support and not structural support.
After squaring and levelling with a laser level and digital level, we verified with a diagonal measurement. You measure the along the largest wall the length of the small wall, and from that point diagonally to the opposite corner of the small wall. That distance should be the square root of 2 times the length of the small wall. We were off 1/16th of an inch for a 101 inch span which is an error of 0.06%. Now that’s how it’s done. This tile will look incredible. 
Long story short, I hate team games. Relying on teammates sounds like a nightmare. Why on earth anyone likes team games is beyond me. You’d have to be crazy to think that’s fun.
Seeing is believing, so here you go. Do you see that giant hole right through a structural member? Yeah. That board is part of the exterior wall. Window is installed there and all the weight that would normally travel through all the beams, where the window is, are interrupted by the window and instead carried and loaded onto these boards. The plumber took out probably 90% of the cross sectional area with that 1 hole. What’s crazy is that he then drilled TWO MORE HOLES below it. Yep, that beam is TOAST. This is what you get when you play team games lmfao. Now the crazies part is that there is no way to fix this except by tearing out his plumbing, jacking the wall up, and replacing the beam. Then he has to redo all of this in some way that doesn’t delete the structure of the building. This guy is the only plumber available in this town.
I did some rough calculations. An asphalt roof can put 40 lb force per linear foot. This beam holds up 4 linear feet. A Wallis normally rated for 800 lbs per linear foot, but the guy removed 90% of the board. That means the beam is at about -70 lb force. It’s doing nothing in other words. This is why they build homes with a safety factor of 2. The wall is twice as strong as it needs to be because of guys like this plumber.
Team games like league are really fun if you’ve got the right people. Nothing beats executing a strategy with people you get along with. Try playing 2v2 in a lane, that’s wicked. If you don’t get along, it’s the worst thing ever though.
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Drama is the way you enhance viewership. Reynor and Clem playing as a team with all the banter included. No more gg and glhf only in chat.
Same reason why Overwatch 2 failed so badly, the format is utterly garbage if you’re not queuing up with friends…and lets be real here, Blizzard match making is some of the worst in the industry.
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The format being garbage is one very, very small part of why it failed. Numerous broken promises, the fact that they literally resold the same game a second time without actually changing anything important, promising an offline campaign with the 2nd game only to renege on that particular point (among many others as I already stated) the absolutely atrocious game balancing and many, MANY other reasons all contributed to its failing.
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Or, you know, competing in a market with a hundred competitors. They had to compete with fortnight and call of duty and destiny, but now they have to compete with marvel’s rivals. Imagine trying to compete with the creators of ironman and spiderman. Ain’t no way that’s gonna work. It doesn’t matter how much money and power blizzard has, they will never match the brand recognition of marvel.
Middle management of euopean esports companies are risk averse considering the content is multinational. Desperate housewives might be received differently in countries that require women to never show their face in public or punish them for speaking out of turn. Desperate housewives is feminine drama on steroids. Could you imagine how people in them middle east would react to a strong willed and opinionated woman. It wouldn’t go so well. Really it’s a lack of a spine. DRUMPF is the perfect example. Democrats were convinced he’d make America look bad and now he has a worldwide cult following. There was a parade in Japan for him not too long ago. Crazy. The world respects leadership and cowtailing to every crybaby rando on Earth shows the exact polar opposite or leadership. Leadership is about going first, breaking barriers, and showing other the way. Pleasers can’t be leaders because they are too afraid of negative feedback, even if it’s a miniscule minority. Their sensitivity to negativity is rooted in their lack of competence. They can’t dismiss the whiners with confidence because in the back of their mind they think maybe this whiner is right. They refuse to act because they don’t know what the right action is and rely on others to tell them what to do, but when dealing with large numbers of people you can’t do that because you will ALWAYS be bombarded in negative feedback. Your confidence has to be rooted in your fundamentals. It’s like first order principles in physics. Everything else can be derived from first order principles. This is why christians latch on to a moral code because it’s a fundamental concept they use to give themselves confidence to take risks in a world that is complicated and scary. So what exactly are the fundamentals for esports? Those can be derived by studying esports. A good spot to start is to look at what more successful people are doing. What are minecraft youtubers up to?
The new part is in the new Youtube video Lowko posted about this where even he has no choice but to say Toss is overpowered on ladder (albeit he was still not as firm in his statement). He mentioned an interesting point is that what would happen if Serral and Clem and 1 or 2 other top korean T/Z did not participate in premier tournaments.
It is kind of blatant now that it is not that T and Z are dominating, it is purely just Serral or Clem or sometimes a few other top korean T/Z are winning.
I find it kind of funny despite him saying this, he also mentioned several times like he is puzzled at why Protoss can’t win Premier tournaments then proceeds to say Hero is currently the top Protoss but criticizes some of his plays, and MaxPax doesn’t play in offline tournaments.
It seems to me that he probably wanted to say Protoss is absolutely overpowered, and that maybe the best Protosses are less skilled than the best T and Z but he can’t cuz of Protoss apologists which is the conclusion we, and anyone with no bias and a brain would very likely reach at this point.
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Yes I absolutely agree with this. They should be perma banned and IP flagged for any alt accounts.
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While it’s not a premier tournament, this is pretty indicative of the current state:
19 protoss, 7 terran and 6 Zerg. This is the current OSC tournament that Wardiii has been casting, and there ARE some big names here; no serral, but Dark, Clem, Shin, Byun, Cure, Classic, Creator, HerO, MaxPax and several others.
Of those protoss, arguably most of them wouldn’t have a chance of making it through. And frankly, even of the protoss that ARE names here, I would argue aren’t always consistent. With the exception of MaxPax and herO - the latter of whom is notorious for his inconsistency, most of the other “big name” protoss are currentlyat or around Spirit’s level. Or lower.
Classic, for instance, fell to Arrogfire, who is, for all intents and purposes, a no-name player.
Almost every Terran and Zerg who isn’t a top tier player were all eliminated by Protoss in the first round or two, and most of those players weren’t top tier themselves.
Every stat we have, except premier tournament victories, points to the fact that Protoss is - at the very least - doing extremely well for themselves in both matchups.
Protoss has a positive win-rate in almost every map, in almost every matchup they play, sometimes by huge margins in Masters and GM.
PvZ and PvT have been positive since april last year, with PvT only dipping below 50% once, and only just. PvZ has had multiple periods over the last year where they were at or above 55%. Currently PvT is sitting at 51.38% win-rate for Protoss and PvZ is at a whopping 55.80% for Protoss.
This is a graph of victory by game time.
If a game goes longer than about 9 minutes, the likelihood of a terran winning is below 40%. Zerg has a couple of moments where they get an opportunity to win if the game goes longer if they don’t win with a timing, but these moments are few and far between.
Korea is the only region in which protoss doesn’t just straight up flatten their opponents, even at high levels.
This notably changes if you go below GM.
Interestingly, across all regions when taking into account all leagues simultaneously, Zerg actually has the lead… but this actually only applies in diamond or below, and the diamond win-rate for zerg is pretty close, while PvT is just never positive at all.
Long and short of it is that Protoss is, unequivocally, REALLY good according to every metric.
And frankly, it has been for a long time. Before the overcharge rework, even. And again, going back through the stats backs this up.
Sources:
https://sc2pulse.nephest.com
http://aligulac.com/misc/balance/
https://nonapa.com/balance?season=62
Yeah, well, it’s so obvious now that even a blind man couldn’t deny it. Lowko has never impressed me so I haven’t seen any of his videos in years frankly. He’s 4 years behind the curve at figuring out this problem so nothing’s changed. I will continue to ignore his existence.
These youtuber personalities spent a lot of the times on the forums where they mocked and harassed me for years. They were convinced I was trolling. Now they see I was not only not trolling, but I was 100% correct in my predictions. So yeah I don’t expect good relations with any youtube personalities going forward into the future. Best to ignore people like lowko.
I’ve actually started listening to PiG casts on mute because his protoss bias is some of the most severe I have ever witnessed. He’s up there with Artosis at this point. I used to watch the GSL on mute too. He fundamentally doesn’t understand how to win except through optimizing drone counts and is perplexed at the “inefficiencies” of Dark’s builds. A good comparison is someone in chess who can understand that losing a rook instead of a pawn is a mistake, but who lacks the strategical depth to understand there are situations where sacrificing a rook is the objectively correct play (because a slight inefficiency now nets a large gain in another dimension and/or at a later point in the game).
Dark in particular is probably the best SC2 player ever because he wins with aggressive plays when everything about zerg is designed to prevent aggression. Creep limits your movements to near your hatcheries. Slow tech progression means you are behind in tech. Slow upgrade progression means you can’t hit timings with an upgrade lead. The only advantage zerg has is inject and drone production, and you give that up the moment you make anything but drones. You are automatically losing the moment you decide to attack, and yet dark does it at a 6800 mmr level. It’s like winning a boxing match while being a foot shorter than your opponent. It’s like winning a poker game while holding a 2 and a 7. He is seriously the most underrated player of all time. Meanwhile casters cry “REEEE his supply block lasted 3 seconds longer than serrals” and “rEeEeEE he made two overlords instead of one.” Serral is good but he plays ape-zerg that turtles on creep to 100 drones and waits for the opponent to leave. It’s an incredibly powerful way to play but not impressive at all because it’s purely a game of patience. You wait for your opponent to leave. Well, first they attack you and then you trade well and then you rebound and win. But you are waiting for that initial attack and so it’s just patience. Dark is a far superior player because he wins in a way that maximizes zerg’s weaknesses and that deserves a much deeper dive than “ReeEeEeEeEeEEeEEEEEEE his build is sloppy”.
Instead of praising exceptional players and giving credit where credit is due, Dark is used as an example for why hero or showtime deserve to win a premier. Dark during the void ray meta was beating skytoss with ravagers. Meanwhile current top toss can be in unlosable positions, having every advantage, and they thow by finding the one possible way they could lose. Serral vs Hero game 2. Hero kills 2 bases, takes amazing trades, and has won the game if he simply recalls. Instead, he fights Serrals corruptor remax. Corruptors are totally useless vs cannons so recall and make some templar and then move out again with fresh storms. Guaranteed win. Instead, he fights. Beating zerg has been well understood for a VERY long time. You always back off to a more defendable position to weather the remax. This is true UNLES you have a VERY good terrain advantage secured, and even then it’s probably still a bad idea. Air vs air fights, terrain advantage is usually a non consideration. That makes this analysis easy. Retreat is the obvious choice. It’s 2025 and people who don’t understand basic game strategy are being D-E-I’d into the finals of big tournaments. Meanwhile people like Dark are criticized and abused because of a supply block or whatever.
Yeah it’s a classic hasty generalization fallacy. The general population has a very poor grasp of statistics or complex systems (which are measured and understood through statistics) and this is a good example of it. I am not sure if it’s an issue with education or if it’s just really hard for most people to understand inductive and abductive reasoning.
Exactly, and the youtubers can’t admit to it because they all bet their reputations on the fact that protoss was underpowered. Who on earth is ever going to listen to anything they have to say ever again. So their best play is to ignore the issue or address it softly. I would do a video thoroughly debunking the protoss whine narrative with monte carlo simulations that make it intuitive to understand the systems and how variables affect the system. But I am a very busy man and frankly these people aren’t deserving of my time. Priorities are important and some rando kids inability to understand game balance is probably the absolute lowest priority I could possibly imagine. The people worth paying attention to are the ones who pay you money, because you know they value your attention.
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Adding to this thought. This requires trait-identification. How do you define a trait? A trait is a measurable variable that has the lowest overlap with other variables as possible (ideally zero) and which is predictive of the dependent variable (which in this case is youtube success). So you can aggregate data on youtubers such as titles of videos, hashtags, keywords in the description, etc. You find the keywords that are the most unique to each youtuber. You delete keywords they all use. For example, if a large portion of them use the word “minecraft” then you delete that as a keyword. A bonus to thisis that you automatically filter out words like “the” and “and” and “because”. You are looking for keywords that are different between the youtubers, and plot their 3 most common keywords on a graph vs the number of views their videos get. This will tell you what traits predict youtube success. Words represent concepts and ideas, and so the most unique and most common keywords are the defining trait for each youtuber. This also requires finding some bad youtubers, which is a challenge because the youtube system tries to share only the best things with you. Obviously, you won’t get much of a correlation unless you can find some bad youtubers and some mid tier youtubers. You can do this for the video transcripts as well.
What would be really interesting is if you could correlate this with chatgpt style sentence-vectors. GPT treats sentences as vectors where each dimension encodes a word, which allows sentences to be added and subtracted in a way that produces a new sentence that makes sense and is obviously a result of the operation. For example, “fascist dictator” + “germany” = “hitler” while “fascist dictator” + “itally” = “mussolini”. If you could define the traits by not just keyword but also by sentence structure, you might be able to capture the speaking style of the youtuber.
With lots of data on what works and what doesn’t, it becomes very obvious what the correct answers are. Knowing the correct answers, you can confidently act without relying on a moral code or the affirmation of authority nor the luck of the gambler nor the blindness of the stupid or the faith of the religious. You can act rationally and confidently. Now whether that translates into leadership depends on if you want to to accomplish something that requires enough manpower that you have to rely on other people to do it, and, if so, leadership is born. In the case of youtuber, what kind of leadership opportunities are there? No clue. Leadership is about going first and that means you gotta do something nobody else does. There are loads of social problems that could be solved, like the male loneliness epidemic or the social coordination challenge (groups of people with similar interests can coordinate through youtube in a way that would be otherwise impossilbe). There are obvious educational problems to solve, like promoting interest in science but that’s not really trailblazing. You can expose more people to a problem, like a math problem, which increases the odds some progress can be made towards solving it, but, again, nothing new to that.
Probably the best example of youtuber entrepreneurship is jordan peterson. He used youtube to bring millions of young men mental health counselling as well as general self help advice. That’s a pretty unique way to use youtube because he reached out to a group of people who would normally never go see a psychiatrist. He found a way not to reach just one person, but millions. He showed them how to solve problems in their lives and laid out a format for other people to use youtube in a similar capacity. That is definitely leadership. He is probably one of the most influential psychologists in history as a result.
In sc2 we instead have youtube trolls killing sc2 by balancing whining on twitch. Out of all the things you could’ve done with the power mankind has laid at your feet, you choose to wreck destruction rather than admit serral is better than you. There is a problem a trailblazer can solve: how do you prevent systems like youtube from being misused? That’s a really hard problem to solve becaues philosophers have been struggling with a similar dilemma for thousands of years. What is a moral action? No matter how you define the “right” action, it is possible to create contradictions in the reasoning that are absurd. Some would argue that a right action is one that does good, but what’s good for one might be bad for another, so what is good depends on goals. So then the utilitarians say what is best for the majority. But that creates tyranny of the majority and abuse of minorities, which is obviously wrong. How do we solve this? Western law is based on the principle of doing the least harm. It’s easy to see what is a wrong choice, but it’s hard to know what is a right choice, because what is right is complicated, so let’s start with not doing wrong things. We can improve on the “doing the least harm” standard a bit by including the “to the most vulnerable party” stipulation which means if, all things being equal, a granny losing 60k would be a worse outcome than a billionaire losing 60k, so obviously don’t do the harm to the granny as she is the most vulnerble party. How then is this standard to be adapted to youtube balance whiners who think they are the next gsl champion if only zerg recieved but only 1 more nerf?
I think this is a psychological and socioeconomical problem primarily. I quesiton the sanity of anyone who thinks they are deserving of the #1 title because only 1 in millions can claim that and the odds it’s you is very low – is this rooted in competence or ego and delusion? Probably ego and delusion. I also question the mental health of anyone that invested in a video game, who puts their financial future on a video game, and who can play a single video game that much. Too many red flags there. There is probably an economic factor because they don’t want to get a real job and do real work. There is probably a social factor as well because they are scared of being judged as they enter the work force. They feel like a failure because they didn’t succeed as a pro, and a failure because they are now years behind others of their age in terms of education and career advancement. And that tells us exactly why they care about video game balance to such an extreme degree that they balance whine on youtube: it is the focal point of all the problems in their life. Translation, the solution to the protoss whiner on youtube problem is to send them videos of jordan peterson, and to tell them to get a real job. TLDR.
This satisfies the doing the least harm to the most vunlerable party because entertaining their delusions of grandeur while encouraging them to focus on problems in a video game, while ignoring all the problems in their real life, is obviously doing harm to that individual. They will be far better off if they stop caring about protoss and instead care about ACT scores. Heck, most of them probably need a GED let’s be real here. Get a stable source of income and work your way up the educational ladder. Experiment a bit to find something you enjoy. It could be running a bio lab or cooking up chemicals for a pharmaceutical company or fixing diesal engines on submarines. Whatever it is, it’s better than crying about protoss while deluding yourself into believing you are the next serral. It’s time to move on and see the real problems in your lives.
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Compare and contrast team game fights to 1v1 fights.
1v1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/E8ch63o5FXE Blinks forward 1 stalker to deny the tank shots, f2 a move storm from 1 angle. 7 second fight.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/og4CfaP85Sw An insane comeback with a full surround, multiple high grounds and ramps blocking the path, multple spellcasters that were brought down by counter play, 25-35 second fight.
Toss gonna toss.
Yeah nothing interesting there. First person to attack loses. Never attack an opponent in the location where he’s prepared. Where are the multipronged attacks that get an opponent out of position? It works something like this. I, the superior player, will randomly split my units into two groups. I will attack multiple locations. Assuming you are as skilled in multitasking, it comes down to deciding when and where to fight with each group. I, the superior player, can better predict what a random group of ragtag units will be capable of, and I will avoid fights I can’t win and take fights I can. I will also bluff with maneuvers of low risk, attacking forward to show strength when actually weak or retreating and pretending to be low in numbers when actually strong to provoke an attack.
So the game comes down to the ability to make split second judgements about army strength, and reading the hidden game state. Uthermal for example will pay attention to if the opponent scans ahead or behind their army. A player who scans behind will scan a location that is a counter attack, letting them know they can safely continue to move out. This signals they are in the position opposite of what they scanned. A player that scans ahead of his army will signal an attack is coming at the location of the scan to avoid the worst case scenario of boosting medivacs to their doom. So uthermal pays attention to this because it’s useful information that helps with the bluffing. Is this medivac alone, or are there tanks on the highground? Now that’s the 400 thousand dollar question.
The only thing I see happening there, in your clip, is an f2 amove up a ramp, which is a classic “first person to attack, losses” scenario. You can only attack when you have the attackers advantage, which is tempo. Defender’s advantage is quicker rallies, terrain advantages, tighter defense. Tempo is map control, freedom to expand, more scouting information, an army supply lead, can be a terrain advantage too if they are out of position, it can be a tech lead. This puts the opponent 1 step behind in dealing with problems, meaning he is reacting to the problem after it has already become a problem, which is a turn order advantage. How do you create a tempo advantage in a 2v2 game? I dunno, but certainly not f2 amoving into an entrenched position.
A common move used by high chess grandmasters is called stirring the pot. You just put your rook in a weird spot and see what happens. Sure, it’s probably a bad move, but you gain an advantage from it in that your opponents actions become more predictable (he will take advantage of the bad move). You just need to make the game state weird and then look for an advantage. When the opponent is in a defensive stance, your goal is to get him to give up that stance. So you throw some units away, signalling you are weak while you remacro, and then they might move out and try to kill you. That’s usually how it works. This can be coupled with a tech switch. A terran mech turtler might not be ready for mass 2/2 mutalisks for example. So you put your rook in a weird spot, throwing away 80 supply of roaches or whatever, and you now know he will attack with his tank heavy army.
There are other ways to do this too, which is to do multiprong and constantly rearrange your army. This is especially the case in TvT because having liberators where the opponent has tanks is obviously a huge advantage. So they do multiprong, rely on their gut feeling for if they can win a fight, and because unit composition is so complicated, and they make it complicated be rearranging their unit groups, it’s hard to have the right combination of units in the right place. 95% of uthermal’s cheeses rely on this exact mechanism to win. Innovation used to win this way too. He’d have his tank and viking and liberator waves mapped out so that liberators were arriving on the front lines right after he won the viking war and tanks arriving just in time to prevent marines from stimming under the liberators and vikings arriving just in time to prevent his liberators from being picked off by other vikings. He was a wizard and making it impossible to have the right unit comp in the right location. But it all boils down to making deliberate mistakes that make your opponent’s future moves more predictable.
You could for example have a hidden advantage like a double medivac drop that the opponent doesn’t know about yet, and you choose to reveal that because you know he will move in to intercept it. It makes his future actions more predictable, and you exploit it. That’s the tempo advantage. He’s reacting to the drops after it appears and after it’s already a problem and that makes him predictable. You can have the same thing in tech. You reveal a BC to the protoss and you just know his next warpgate wave will be stalkers. Or you pop a nydus, knowing he will send some units to look for it, and then you spring a full attack with your entire army knowing his army is split. This relies on being 1 step ahead in the information war. You gain that because you have map control. You have map control because the tempo is in your favor. That is the attackers advantage.
So some guys f2 amoved up a ramp. Do they even know what tempo is and how to leverage it? Looks like a rage quit in the game honestly. They just wanted the game to be over.