It was a pigsty map so I assume it has decent odds of making it in. I think themap pool should be 45 maps. Each season 9 are added and 9 are removed. This would stop apm spammers from optimizing perfect build orders for each map. Your play would have to be more fluid and dynamic. You’d optimize for maximal options rather than maximal efficiency.
People don’t realize this but in real life tactical options are infinitely more valuable than efficiency. That’s because you don’t know what’s coming next. If you optimize for the wrong thing, you are even less efficient. It’s like a bakery only selling a single type of donut because that’s their best seller.
The only place hyper optimization is more valuable than keeping options open is when a business mass produces the same thing over and over. The process is fixed and repeatable and done many times over and over. Outside of that, businesses will be constantly hiring and firing and rearranging their workforce to do new things. Workers complain it wasn’t in the job description and it’s like ok go find another job.
So one day you’ll be producing 100 units of product X and next month it will be producing 250 units of product Y and the month after that it’s a contract to code an algorithm that makes a virtual hand point at things and a month after that it’s doing epoxy floors for bathrooms in luxury apartments. Why can you do the epoxy flooring cheaper than anyone else? You bought it bulk when it was on sale and kept it in storage until an opportunity to use it came up.
Now if you are optimizing for lowest dollars spent per month then shelling out 5 grand on some epoxy that has no specific use is a bad idea. Bossman will never sign off on it. But once you have it, and at such a great price, you can find ways to use it. Everything from flooring to luxury furniture to the most beautiful front doors you’ll ever lay eyes on.
SC2 builds are a lot like that. Pros don’t create options for themselves. They know exactly what to expect and that allows them to practice 1 build to perfection. They are a donut manufacturing mega corp that cranks out an endless stream of frozen donuts that you reheat in the toaster oven. They are not that cute hole in the wall bakery that has every scrumptious creation under the sun.
I was helping a chick move. This girl lives well below the poverty line and had 4 kids with 2 different dudes. She’s a walking, talking, financial disaster. Well anyway she lives 100 miles away and needs help moving. So I make a fun trip out of it and take my truck up there to give her a hand. On the way home, I stop past a hole in the wall burger shop that advertises homemade ranch salad dressing. I order a salad and a burger and some fries. It was the best gosh darn salad dressing I’ve ever had. I comment on it and the waitress puts her hand on my shoulder and says, very proudly, “We make it in house.” Now I stop there every time I am in the area.
This is the beauty of versatility. We all stop at blizzcon to watch cool builds but instead it’s a garden variety frozen donut that we can buy a pack of 10 for $6.99. That’s how starcraft 2 died.
So yeah they need to make the map pool massive and crazy diverse. We’re talking totally insane maps and at least 30 of them. The number should be so high and the diversity so crazy that it’s literally impossible to have enough practice time, as an individual player, to prep builds for every map. The result is that players will have to buy epoxy in advance and then look for opportunities to use it. Aka they will have to create diverse strategies and look for opportunities to use them. You don’t know what situation you might be in and so you just might need a 1 base hive build.
How do they select maps for best of 7’s? By a roulette wheel. Each player has 3 vetos. After a map is chosen, either player can press a button to veto it. After 10 seconds of no button presses, the map is in the series. This adds a mind game element to the map selection by the way. It makes it way more dramatic. I can’t emphasize just how disappointed I am in the way they handled SC2 and its pro scene.
Pic unrelated: https://i.imgur.com/G6seZkN.jpeg. That’s just such a great vacuum I had to share it with you. Look at all the dust it collected. 10/10 would recommend. In the background is a 6x3 foot curly maple epoxy table. They typically auction off for 6-8 grand but you only put 700 into the wood and 900 into the epoxy. This particular one is part of a 3 piece set that includes a coffee table and an end table. Together, it’s a 12,000 set. This particular photo is before the finishing stages so it still has to be sanded up to 600 grit and then sprayed with a $100 per gallon urethane coat that will make it look like a mirror. The edge has a sterling silver inlay shaped like flowers. I have machinery that does it all for me. Why do the work myself or waste money on employees when you can design and build machines that build things for you. After you’ve had your fun, you sell of the entire process to some company that commercializes it.
It’s interesting selling these things because not many guys are into it. You get to meet tons of well to do chicks. They love the colors and the sterling silver flower pattern on the sides. You should see the way their jaw drops when you show her to the collection and they run around all giddy with their besties and talking about which ones they like the best. You ask her what she’s gonna use it for and she’s just like well I need a new office table. I am a lawyer for blah blah blah or an executive for yada yada and I really need to impress my clients. It’s always fun talking with them and hearing their stories. You know my Grandfather was the worst to go shopping with because he’d get into an hour long conversation with the cashier about something random like the price of lumber and they’d end up swapping stories about the great depression and everything in between. And if you weren’t old enough to have been alive then he’d happily tell you everything about it so you’d better get comfortable. He was a care salesman. You can see where I get it from for sure. Every sunday I tune into a law talk show where two lawyers talk about high profile legal cases. I love the drama and the politics and the mind games and the logic. I love the way they talk and love how you can tell they are about to lie because they shift the way they speak. It’s absolutely fascinating.
Well I learned my grandfather also used to listen to a legal talk show on the radio. We like to think our experiences are our own and that we are unique individuals but that just isn’t accurate. We are reincarnations of our ancestors re experiencing life for the ten thousandth time. Living forever means reproducing and passing on the experience to the next generation. That’s why I absolutely despise the eugenicists and climate alarmists and all these people who try to gaslight you into not having kids. Your ancestors story has been told a thousand times and it all comes to an end the moment you get the surgery done because you decided the carbon cost of kids was too high. Imagine being that dumb. You don’t get to pass on the wonders of life to your son and daughter in the same way your parents did for you because you let a TV gaslight you. Did you reduce the carbon? Nope, somebody else had kid that took your kids spot. The only thing you did was preclude your own children from existing. Crazy stuff dude. Reproduction is the most basic instinct and the TV can make people not do it. Propaganda is absolutely insane that it has that much power over the average person’s psychology. It’s very clear that laws need to be implemented to protect individuals from media gaslighting because it’s absolutely nuts how overpowered it is. They can mass brainwash huge swaths of people into doing totally absurd things. The most recent example is how people are freaking out about setting teslas on fire. I 100% guarantee you that if you put that person on a media blackout that they’d never think to set a tesla on fire on their own. The human brain and its psychology is not well tuned for media gaslighting and that’s absolutely crystal clear.
In the most extreme situations, when a radical ideological group controls the media, you end up with an Iran or a WW2 Germany or a modern day Ukraine. It’s obviously one of the greatest problems that mankind has ever faced. The united states was on its way to becoming exactly that, until Elon bought twitter, because the media had been captured by USAID funding to crank out ideological propaganda. These nuts were trying to get Russia to nuke Ukraine. Elon quite likely saved all of Europe from nuclear winter because he bought twitter. Then these nuts convince themselves that he’s a natsee and so they set teslas on fire. Yeah that kind of extremism is exactly what buying twitter prevented from happening on a global stage. So now you just have localized pockets of extremism where they burn teslas. That is infinity better than nuclear winter. Elon buys twitter. Twitter gets JD vance elected. JD vance calls out all european leaders to their faces that they don’t support free speech. Once again america saves europe from destroying itself. You’d think after ww2 they’d have learned their lesson about idealogical extremism but nope they be locking people up over facebook posts lmao. What can you do. America needs to focus on this continent and let europe do its thing. If they find their own way to the never ending winter then that’s their own fault.
You can extend the analogy of APM spam to ideological extremism. The world is crazy complicated and anybody who says they have all the answers is an idiot, a liar, or both. Ideologies profess not only that they have all the answers, but also that the other side is evil. Well that’s exactly how build orders operate in SC2. The “ideologically captured” elite of SC2 think they have all the answers but what they really have is an ADHD brain that can spam APM faster than the other guy. It’s the same fundamental process. It’s a narrowing of the idea space, reducing the complexity and nuance of real life down to its most basic elements, and then projecting those elements out onto the real world in ways that make no sense. SC2 has been reduced down to clicking faster than the other guy, and mindlessly grinding hundreds of hours to get hone your reaction speed to those levels. It’s reduced the wonderful diversity of SC2 thoughts down to “turtle on creep, max, wait for the opponent to leave.” The solution to this is the same as the solution to ideological extremism in real life: forcing a diversification of thought. In the case of world geopolitics, that means buying twitter. In the case of SC2, that means making the map pool large, crazy, and diverse so that there are no longer one-size-fits-all build orders. To win, you must think creatively and entertain a broad range of ideas.
Pro players retiring from sc2 probably felt like they were hopping on the last chopper out of 'nam. They will be 80 years old and will tell stories about how horrible it was – the sheer repetition, the awful base pay, the lack of benefits, the carpal tunnel, the 0.0% odds of beating Serral at spamming apm, the lights shining in their eyes from all directions on the tournament stage, not to mention dukeing it out with streamers over $2/hour in ad revenue on twitch lmao. Yeah it’s gotta feel like you caught the last chopper out of 'nam. They get their first real paycheck and it’s like utopia. Wow I actually get sunshine every day with this job and driving heavy machinery is exactly like a video game and it pays so much better. It is so funny to imagine what these guys are going to go through in the coming months with no tournament circuits announced, IEM being cancelled, the GSL being cancelled. Yeah, turns out that when you reduce the game to apm spam you make it boring and it tanks esports. Now you get to learn what life is truly like but don’t worry you’re gonna love it. It’s like Dante Alighieri traveling through the 9 layers of hell to save his beloved. They are like Odysseus as he wanders across the world, encountering endless dangers, until finding his way back home. At home, he has the largest challenge yet: his wife remarried and his estate is gone – everything he sought to regain is now lost and his rule as leader is over. He must regain all that he lost. Unfortunately you can never regain the time lost. But at least you can tell stories about how you fought a cyclops.
