10 years ago, 2015, most poster’s get a response every few minutes and on most days several new threads gets created.
5 years ago, you are guaranteed at least several response/new posts per day.
Today, we are lucky to get 1 to 5 posts per day. And even on multiple post days it is usually the same few posters posting. It is arguably safe to say that at this point these forums are dead.
And this is ENTIRELY (99.99%) caused by Protoss imbalance. The imbalanced part will not be explained because it has already been PROVEN with rigorous statistical analysis (Protoss is extremely overpowered on ladder) on several other threads. I will explain now why Protoss Imbalance has killed these forums.
Protoss imbalance created a chain effect of players quitting the game and posting.
Both PvX where X is not P is severely Protoss favoured mostly because sky toss is unbeatable and this has caused Z and T players to quit playing the game. Mostly Z players because skytoss is more imbalanced towards Zerg.
As Protoss players outnumber the other races, PvP increases in frequency and this causes Protoss players to quit as they no longer can blame their issues on balance, but now on “game design”.
Long term Protoss imbalance created many Protoss players with an entitled mindset and toxic attitude on these forums.
There is nothing to explain here. I’ll just explain using an example. Suppose there was a girl in her early 20s who is extremely attractive and have many guys pursuing her. Because they all want her, they will give her whatever she wants during dates. Over time she will feel entitled and that this is how men are suppose to treat her normally. When she hits her 30s and lose her youthfulness, other men will stop treating her the way they did when she was in her 20s. She will then feel angry and bitter and complain that she is being treated unfairly when in fact they still probably treat her more kindly compared to their friends. This is exactly the case with many Protoss players.
These entitled players proceeds to form a coalition on these forums (PPP) to garner attention and viciously attack any posters that does not suit their tastes in all circumstances. Many legitimate concerns and issues were sidelined or flooded by trolling and underhanded tactics. This caused many frustration for several reputable posters like Reno to quit these forums.
Protoss imbalance caused Protoss players themselves to quit the game and consequently quit posting.
I mentioned one reason being the chain affect but there is another very simple reason for this: higher level pros want to win and they will most certainly switch races if it gives them that better chance. So a few T and Z players who kept getting beat by Protoss decided to switch to Protoss. Because Protoss is imbalanced making that transition was easier. And so these T and Z players that successfully transitioned started beating the same P players they couldn’t beat before! What impact do you think this would have? Then those P players just quit due to embarrassment.
It is a little late now, but had the balance council ignored blatant pleas of making Protoss more overpowered and instead objectively analyzed balance and gameplay, none of this would have happened.
I’ve said this years ago that Protoss imbalance would kill this game and forums. Hope this was a tough lesson learned.
your delusional, the reason why you aint seeing post is cause the game is how old now. its basically a dead game, on life support and frankly the only thing people post about is how bad the balance council is now, cause well we all know there doing a terrible job. its just that simple dude and your over thinking it cause your biased against toss, even tho we all know terran is the op race and has been for a long time.
eh wrong, its a dead game cause it was retired back in 2019, has had no developement since, no tech support and no one fixing bugs that have had been here for along time. even the major tourneys are in question this year as esl and gsl might just drop sc2. this doesnt have to do with logic at all but just straight facts. gee you say the balance council is doing a terrible job cause protoss is imbalance, when they litterally just had to do a bunch of buff to toss in the last few patchs cause they have been widely under performing. yep now whos logic is a problem, like gee guess you havent been following the patchs for the last two years now.
recognizeing a fact, what fact, your litterally talking out your rear end with no facts at all, just crying cause you think protoss is op, and claiming its why the forums died. it definitly isnt. again if anything killed the forums its people posting and crying about protoss being op, cause frankly most poeple are sick and tired of a bunch of cry baby whiners posting 4 topics a day about protoss imbalance and when there proved wrong they go, " your all wrong and cry more"
Thats right, Protoss is extremely OP to anybody that doesn’t play this game as a job. Zerg is also OP at lower levels, but not at GM, where it is weak.
Toss has too many options that aren’t difficult to execute.
Zealots are too good, Stalkers got buffed, Toss gets great macro, start with chronoboost, workers don’t have to build, GG.
Terran is the tryhard race, Protoss is the fun race, this is assuming you abuse their strengths.
You would think some of the cheese in this game is due to developer neglect, then you read the patch notes and hear them talking about it.
The people balancing this game are literally kids, more immature than me. Not a good look.
please, anyone with average iq can beat protoss, it doesnt require being a pro to do so. i aint no pro and i have no probably wiping the floor with toss.
please, again, proper scouting and wont have a problem. and you, you think you study it, but you dont and we all know that by your post on these forums. the guy who crys because people can build stuff in his base, mainly toss. your litterally one of the biggest protoss race haters these forums got and youve been proven wrong a million times over, and all you do is stick your fingers in your ears every time and go " la,la,la, I cant here you, your all wrong." like a little kid everytime. guyza you yourself are one of the reasons why people dont post on the forums, cause you argue the same stuff daily on here even tho youve been proven wrong countless times, and one of the worst ones for it.
I’m tired of hearing it as well. Basically, i’m mainly talking to the people in charge, not randoms on here
And I know they left so you don’t have to remind me lol
It’s common for youtubers like Lowko to browse here. Lowko once made a “lets see what the forums are up to” video where he went out of his way to single out one of my posts so he could insult me directly. The post compared banshees to roaches, and there was nothing in the post to justify the personal attacks he engaged in as a result of reading that post – attacks which he didn’t do vs other posts. It was obvious he had no interest in anything else he was reading and that he had personal beef with me due to losing a debate here on the forums.
Berry crunch and upatree definitely browse here as does pig, feardragon, and a few others. A youtuber called “playa” also browsed here at one point, and I suspect Clem has browsed here before, and there are others.
You can recognize streamers because they don’t post when they are in game on stream, and they will have speech patterns that are hard to ignore. For example, anytime upatree loses a debate, he says the other person consulted chat GPT. So if you see a guy compare someone to chat gpt after losing a debate then, well, it’s probably upatree.
You can compare their demeanor and biases as well. PiG has a PvT bias and thinks terran is OP for example. Berrycrunch has an stereotypical “terran requires 1000x more effort than p/z” bias. Feardragon has an aversion for conflict. The list goes on and on.
The general rule of thumb is that the only people who care about SC2 enough to engage with social media on a regular basis are streamers and people who are paid to market something – either a marketing team for the game itself, an event, or a streamer trying to promote something. A good example of this was the recent incident where UpATree tried to promote a CPU on reddit. I’d say it’s highly likely he had some kind of financial incentive to do that.
So yeah the internet is filled with people trying to market themselves or a product which is why they hate my guts. I am analytical, data oriented, and I am not afraid to call out BS if I see it which means they have to put a lot more effort into making their pitches or they end up looking like clowns. They’ve even begged me to not post here anymore because my ability to derail marketing campaigns is legendary.
Some of them even tried harassing me from alt accounts like “nomufftotuff” in order to get me to leave and it didn’t work. Now they’ve just given up. They’ve accepted the reality that it’s impossible to defeat my arguments and so they don’t even try.
SC2’s mishandling will go down as one of the biggest business blunders in history. StarCraft went from being the creator of esports to being a meme of spamming apm faster than the other guy. It went from being worth billions to “not worth the time.” Truly it must be one of the biggest blunders ever. Going into the future, it could’ve defined the strategy/tactics genre and been worth a trillion over the next hundred years using Elon-Musk style tactics.
The Dota people were way smarter. They used the WC3 arcade to experiment with game designs until they found one people really liked, and turned it into its own game. They experimented to find what people were interested in, and that’s how MOBA was created. MOBA is now 700x more popular than SC2. It’s mind boggling. The MOBA industry is now leveraging their vast wealth to enter other industries, like the TV show called “Arcane”. They recently defeated Apple in court, something considered impossible to do. Imagine where it could go from here. The possibilities are limitless. The amount of power they wield could quite literally reshape humanity. RTS video games defeated the AppleStore monopoly for crying out loud. Do you know how rediculously powerful you have to be to defeat the most valuable company on Earth in a way that will cause tremendous financial harm to that company?
That could’ve been SC2 with better management. The business managers at blizzard made the mistake of listening to esports people who wanted faster pacing and more action, and that made the game unplayable for most people. SC2 was already faster paced than literally any other game on the market, and by a very large margin, and they kept moving further into that extreme. What they needed to do was move the opposite direction as that’s obvious where the markets were headed by looking at other games and where players were spending their money. They needed to cut the multitasking by 10% and instead they increased it double or triple by making the game resolve from a 5-7 base economy. The only way you can manage a 5 base economy is with ludicrous speed.
Now they have a generational issue. Gamers have been impregnated with anti-RTS biases that are going to be hard to break. Now they gotta wait 15 years for a new generation of gamers who don’t have those biases. The democrats will have a similar issue in federal politics in the USA due to their lack of tact when dealing with the financial insecurities of young men who now view the democratic party as an anti-male party, and the republican/libertarian party is now deeply entrenched in that base. Other games are deeply entrenched in the slower-paced real-time strategy category. Normally the way you’d break into a market is by selling at a loss for a million or so units sold because consumers will buy a cheaper product even if the brand recognition is inferior. After that, you raise the prices to normal. That’s what Redbox did to put DVD rental stores like Blockbuster out of business. The problem with free to play games is: how on earth do you sell a product for cheaper than free? And that’s the fundamental issue that will allow games like League to hold the gaming market in a vice grip for the next hundred years.
Blizzard bungled a trillion dollar video game in a way that will be near impossible to fix, especially since I don’t think they’ve figured out how any of this works.
and then theres this guy who does this right here, another reason why people stop posting, cause no one wants to read his bs dribble either. and he likes to hijack threads and throw post out there no one cares about and usually that has nothing to do with the topic. yep and yall wonder why the forums are dead.
Simply isn’t true. Historically, my posts have generated the most clicks out of anyone on the forums and by a very large margin. It’s not uncommon for my threads to get 5k or 10k views. The forums died because they were over-taken by low-effort trolls who attack other posters instead of engaging in genuine discussion, and who abuse the reporting system to ban those who do engage in actual discussion.
At one point, it was so bad that you couldn’t post literally anything without having moderator action. I ran an experiment once. Had my buddy create a thread. I also created a similar thread. Mine got instantly removed by the mods and I was given a month ban, meanwhile his was left up even though it was designed to be very similar. It’s obvious that trolls were simply flagging any post with my name on it, and they did this not just to me but anyone who had high visibility on the forums e.g. those who generated large amounts of engagement.
The people who created content on these forums were harassed until they stopped posting. That’s basically why these forums died. There’s nobody creating forum content anymore. Reddit has a similar issue. It’s the fundamental issue with websites that allow user generated content. How do you prevent the users from harassing the content creators. It’s an open question. Nobody knows the answers yet.
I saw a similar thing happen to berrycrunch just last night. The poor dude loses a frustrating game and his chat is telling him “learn to play” and all this other stuff. Normally a business will protect its employees (and other customers) from hecklers, but on the internet there are no such protections because there is an endless supply of hecklers.
Probably the most analogous situation in society is when a comedian is harassed by a heckler in the crowd. The comedian would spring-board off the heckler by making fun of the heckler himself, however, on the internet this would result in an immediate ban for the comedian because the hecklers would mass report the comedian and the auto mod would kick in and insta ban him. Moderation systems don’t protect content creators and that’s the issue. They need to give special protected status by flagging content creator accounts and making them immune to auto mod action.
