You go into the rank history of literally any GM player and around the same time they have a steep decline in MMR.
Ruff is GM. He just uses the “leave league” button for some reason. It’s not clear why. Avilo was on a hiatus for obvious reasons. I suspect a judge made him take a break from the internet for awhile. That’s purely speculation, but the fact pattern does have that semblance.
I don’t look at the GM index. If you are rank 40 or rank 400 doesn’t matter. It’s very misleading. A better indicator is MMR. MMR has a certain mean/standard deviation so you can calculate if you are in the top 0.2% without having to rely on things that are biased by fluctuations in player activity, smurfing, etc. Loads of pro players play on accounts around the 5.5k mmr level (believe it or not). I run into Kiwian all the time. Sometimes he’s on a 5k account and other times it’s a 6000 mmr account. How are you supposed to calculate who is in the top 200 when one person can take up multiple slots? That’s why you use a Z-test and plug in the mean/variance of MMR.
Yeah but the threshold is as low as 4.8k mmr at times. That’s a complete joke. Back in late HotS, a 5500 mmr player was a low GM. A 5500 player will beat a 4800 mmr player like 90% of the time. Either all players have systematically gotten worse (covid melted their brains) or they changed the mmr algorithm.
The MMR values for GM shouldn’t go down UNLESS Grandmaster level players are quitting the game in droves OR the algorithm was retuned.
Swarm hosts are awful if the terran makes banshees or thors. The terran puts a thor into a medivac and it totally invalidates all locust waves. The thor is free to pelt the locusts their entire travel duration, which kills them, and if you tell some to attack the thor he just lifts into a medivac and the locusts are too far away to accomplish anything. The thor can also chase down the swarm hosts when their cooldown is inactive. Your roaches have to babysit the swarm hosts. That means no multipronged attacks and no counter attacks. That means you do unidirectional attacks periodically. Once the wave is done, he is free to push out and end the game because there is zero counter attack potential and the swarm hosts are deadweight until the next wave. Swarm hosts are awful.
Mech’s greatest vulnerability has always been aggressive tech switch styles. They can’t produce both tanks and thors out of their factories at the same time. That’s always been the case. When a base is hard to defend vs flying units, it doubles the strength of these styles. This weakness is greatest in the early game because he doesn’t have as many factories so he has a more binary option for what units to make.
My ZvZ is strange. I have no issue totally clowning on high ranking zerg players. It’s very easy, in fact. But if you get the low GM standard zergs who just mass roaches and headbutt into you, it’s very hard to deal with. This is because you must take a third to be economically competent, and to do that you must deal with 5 minutes of ling bane wars during which time 2 banelings can kill a whole mineral line.
The way Blizzard designs modern maps, there are a million counter-attack paths in ZvZ. Ling bane is free to roam anywhere it wants to go. You have zero defense except for an exhausting micro war across 15 locations. ZvZ is by far the hardest matchup. It’s much harder than the second hardest matchup which is TvT. This has only been made worse by the queen nerfs because the queen used to stabilize Zerg defense a little bit. The inject nerf, way back when, totally rewrote early game defenses. It used to be you could defend a ling flood with 2 queens on your main’s ramp. It was hard, but doable. Nowadays that’s a complete joke. Transfuse is nerfed, creep is nerfed, queen is nerfed in a variety of other ways. They are nerfing creep even more, which will make ling bane even more oppressive in ZvZ. ZvZ is getting completely screwed in the new patch.
It doesn’t matter to me because I don’t engage in the ling bane wars. I’ve designed my playstyles to completely bypass that meta. It puts you at a severe economic disadvantage, but you can compensate by being a superior player. That’s what happened in this game vs this 5600 player. He had a third, was ahead in every way, but his roaches were out of position and I snuck lings into his main. When he went to deal with that, lings hit his third. It’s simply superior multitasking combined with superior map awareness. I knew where everything was on the map and knew there was a path into his main that he couldn’t see.
That’s another thing that has been nerfed for defensive zerg styles. The 10 billion attack vectors means it’s impossible to place your overlords where you can see everything. ZvZ is entirely a gambling machine. You make drones or lings and you win or not depending on if your opponent made drones or lings and this is totally unknowable information. If you make the wrong thing in the wrong ratio, you just die (instantly).
Because ZvZ is so random, it makes it very easy to beat high level zerg players. You just take big risks and half the time they will work out. It’s a complete joke that a 6k mmr player can clown all over 5k terran/protoss but will die to a 4.5k player who does a ling flood at the right time. ZvZ is the worst matchup in the game, bar-none.
One game I will beat a 6k player, and the next I will die to livibee. I kid you not. ZvZ is awful. It’s a complete sht-show.
