In physics, I had a professor who would mark answers wrong even when they were right. He said to show my work. I showed my work, and he still marked them wrong. Why? He couldn’t follow the logic of the calculations and so he assumed I was scribbling in nonsense.
I had the same issue with SC2 for years. I told people I was high gm for years and years. People always said I was lying. I am currently 5242 mmr. Other 6k gms like Snake, who peaked at 6100, are 5163. MMR got remapped and so now 5200 is top 50 which is where 6k used to map too back in hots and wol. People here would see me say weird things like you win by burrowing swarm hosts in the terran’s main and they think there is no way this guy is GM. Then I did it on stream and proved it and they were like holy cow I didn’t you know you could even win that way. Yeah welcome to the story of my life. Unconventional problem solving to such an extreme degree that people think you win through magic.
People are procedural problem solvers. They don’t understand the problem, they just follow a procedure they were taught in school. It’s the same in sc2. They don’t understand the game, they are just following a build order and collecting wins. Probably 80% of grandmaster is in this category, and 100% of pro players in this category. They don’t understand why they win, they just tweak builds until they do. Sure, they make some basic optimizations like hitting a timing 2 seconds faster or whatever. But as to the grander strategy and the real nitty gritty internals they have no clue what’s going on. Then some guy on the internet says yeah man just beat 6k GMs by burrowing swarmhosts in their main base and they think yeah no way this guy is GM let alone top 50 GM. Not only am I top 50, but I play like once a month so mmr gained per time invested has to be astronomical compared to other GMs.
So anyway there is a book called “The Name of The Rose” which perfectly captures how mankind thinks and how society operates on a very fundamental level. It’s a story about a monk who studied the works of Socrates. This monk is brought into a monastery in a remote village 1300’s to figure out how people are dying. They are being murdered, but everyone is convinced the devil is killing people and they are starting to panic. He’s a logical thinker surrounded mystical thinkers who use superstition to explain everything. S P O I L E R A L E R T it turns out that a monk is having a gay affair. The gay monk is convinced a book turned him gay, and so he’s frantically going around looking for the missing book and killing anyone who finds out about the book, thinking they will find out about his sins. In the process, there is a greater villain lurking in the shadows – the abbot has an entire library of forbidden books, and he is worried that someone might find out about it and that the Inquisitor (religious zealots who go around burning books and burning anyone they deem a “witch”) might fight out about the books. So the abbot is the real villain and the gay monk is just an agitator. The Socrates-monk is true neutral – he’s just trying to figure out what’s going and doesn’t have any allegiances. He’s enthralled by the mystery and wants to figure it out. The abbot percieves him as an extreme threat because he’s smart enough to figure out what’s going on and he’s smart enough to manipulate public perception and that gives him the power to destabilize the social order of their monastery and the localized government. He ends up doing exactly that, and the entire monastery burns down.
So anyway it’s a book about how mankind is a fundamentally superstitious creature that uses nothing but mystical thinking. A small minority of rational thinkers use the superstition to create social order through religious codes and moral imperatives that to a logical thinker are absurd but are crafted like patchwork to create social order that kinda works. There is no right and wrong but only agendas clashing for power to implement their goals with political games played to manipulate the ignorant masses for that power.
Well, that’s SC2 in a nutshell. Nobody understands how the game works except a small minority of elites. This minority of elites battle on youtube and twitch to control the mystical thinking of the public. The public is totally unequipped to understand anything about the game; even the most simple things are always explained using superstitious reasoning (in the same way the monks blamed the devil for the murders, the sc2 population blames the balance counsel for Protoss being unable to win a premier). This same system is extremely sensitive to rogue logical thinkers because they understand SC2 and they understand politics and that makes them a threat to the social order of SC2. So when you beat 6k gms on stream by burrowing swarm hosts in their main, the elite class of SC2 has a collective aneurysm because there is an outsider showing to the public that everything they thought about the game was wrong. Yeah, turns out that SC2 pros aren’t actually good at Starcraft – they are just fast at clicking. Wanna know why SC2 esports is so boring and dying? It’s because you let these guys reduce the game down to APM spam and they are terrified of the possibility that the game is redesigned around strategy because they will go from hero to zero in the blink of an eye the moment that happens. Their esports career will be over because they won’t be able to get into GM if they can’t spam APM to get there, let alone compete in tournaments.
This is the fundamental reason they have always been so intensely hostile towards me. They want control over the game so that they can ensure the security of their esports career. An outsider who isn’t financially invested in the same system and yet who has a better understanding of that system than they do is DEFCON-1, code red, to their brain. Literally the only advantage they have is that they are already entrenched in esports. So they leverage their twitch and youtube to harass you because it’s their only advantage. And so that’s how you end up with coordinated harassment campaigns. I’d play a random guy on the ladder and suddenly CrusaderKing is harassing me on the forums in a way that is highly specific to that game. Oh, right, turns out he’s a buddy of a streamer who hates my guts and that random guy I played on the ladder was actually a streamer. Go figure. It all makes sense now.
The moment that Gumiho, sOs, and Rogue are the GOATs of each race, sc2 esports will be saved. As long as it’s standard terran doing the same hellion banshee into 8 rax marine parade pushes, like have been done on repeat for millions of games, esports is doomed. We need sOs using a proxy nexus to recall dts into his opponent’s main. We need Gumiho and his mass battlecruisers. We need Rogue and his clever 2 base allins. When decision-making decides who wins and who loses, the game will be saved, but as long as spamming apm faster than the other apm spammer is the mode of winning, esports will be over. APM spam creates the most boring games imaginable with zero variability and zero volatility. Strategical games are complicated with high volatility. Every game will be different, every viewer will be on the edge of their seat. We will see 1 base plays and 7 base plays and everything in between. We will see weird unit comps like marauder viking and we swarm host mutalisk. Yep, I’ve been beating 6k gms in zvz with mutalisk swarm host nydus. Super interesting games because the mutalisks spot for the nydus, kill overseers, and protect the burrowed swarm hosts by preventing overseers from seeing them. Nah bro we need to see roach v roach headbutting in the middle of the map for the 10000000000000000th game in a row. Give me a break. Stop listening to these morons. They are killing the game. So the best sc2 player is the guy who can squeeze out 2 more roaches for the same roach headbutt timing, and this is supposed to be interesting? Not a chance my man. That’s the opposite of interesting.
Oh by the way, in this analogy, the moderators are the inquisitors, since they enforce the purity of the system by burning books which in this case is the removal of posts. That’s how you end up with websites like Reddit which are so ideologically captured it’s indistinguishable from hard core religious indoctrination. The Inquisitors remove all their adversaries and burn the books, which causes group-think. The group think becomes self referential as people compete to be the most pure, and the system eventually colapses because eventually nobody will be pure enough. A good example of this is how Musk is now a natsee according to reddit except even the ADL won’t join in that narrative. So now the ADL, which was some of the most pure of the woke religion are now not pure enough for the wokesters. Religious indoctrination governs websites like reddit through Inquisitor style book burnings. That’s why this book is such a good analogy for understanding internet social systems. It’s the same exact psychology and mechanisms at work. It’s 2025 and mankind is has developed technologically quite a bit since the 1300’s, however, basically nothing has changed in terms of social development in probably thousands of years. Mankind is perpetually stuck in rut when it comes to social development.
