I thoroughly enjoyed this GSL which I can’t say has been the case in recent memory. Am I the only one? Is it just coincidental that Artosis was gone? 
Link for people wanting to see the semis/finals:
Byun’s Wrists 
1 Like
Byun was actively trying to end the game against Cure for the sake of his wrists but it went on too long. Probably wouldn’t be different in terms of the winner.
The difference between casters was that every time Tasteless tried to make comparisons to SC1 State just ignored him. 
What caused Byun to lose, in the last game vs Cure, was his over-stimming, which he did because he wasn’t patient. So, yes, Byun’s loss was because he tried to win. The player that attacks, loses. That’s how modern SC2 is designed. To win, you have to actively try to not win. Prolonging the game is the way to win. The exception is light harass, which by definition has almost no impact on the game state. Light harass is a meaningless interaction EXCEPT that it wears your opponent down, aka it maximizes the endurance stress. Cure lost, what, 3 bases, and the game went on? Yeah, SC2 punishes the player that tries to make the game progress.
When losing the command center to an actively mining base isn’t relevant to the game outcome, something is very, very wrong with the game. The game’s preference for stalemates sets a threshold and any damage under that threshold is considered irrelevant to the outcome / a meaningless interaction because the game will continue even after it happens. Losing bases is apparently a meaningless interaction.
Terran’s strength when turtling needs to be addressed. It really does. The siege tank is simply way too powerful in a defensive posture.
And there was no balance whining about the baneling / hellbat / zerg in general. Artosis always seemed like he was out of energy. It looked like he just didn’t like the game anymore. When someone likes something, the little problems don’t matter. When someone doesn’t like something, the little problems are magnified to where they define the whole thing. I got the feeling that he despised SC2 for a lot of the same reasons that I do, e.g. the proclivity to stalemate, but that he attributed the completely wrong cause to the effect.
He thought zerg was OP because top zergs would crash banelings into a turtling terran, when in reality zerg units are such literal garbage that it’s more cost effective to crash banelings in than it is to do anything else. Banelings are the most cost ineffective unit in the game, so that tells you how utterly useless all other zerg units are in that scenario. So it’s an indictment of how awful zerg’s units are vs a turtling terran. Banelings are awful units, and zergs would LOVE to make any other unit.
The problem is that Terran has both ground and air superiority in the late game, as long as he turtles, and that shouldn’t be the case. He should have one and only one. If they buffed the range on lurkers, then they could compete vs tanks but would still be vulnerable to liberators. So, Terran would have the air supremacy and zerg would have the ground supremacy. As is, Terran has all supremacy – the ground supremacy, air supremacy, efficiency supremacy, etc. Anything the zerg makes will be instantly vaporized, so the baneling is the obvious choice because it deals splash damage to its surroundings when it dies. I mean, it’s better than nothing.
The amount that I’ve been playing has definitely gone down and the game’s preference to stalemate is definitely the cause. Zerg in general is played by fewer people & those who play it play fewer games. When you secure a lead, you just can’t do anything with it. It’s like, “I am going to win this game, but is it worth 30 minutes of my time to do?” and the answer to that is no. It’s not worth it.
I don’t like Byun as a player, I have always thought he’s a B-tier terran who abused reapers for his A-tier performance, but I really had to sympathize with him this GSL. He’s an aggressive player who has been absolutely destroyed by TurtleCraft 2. He deserved to win that last game vs Cure, and to move on to the finals, but he got absolutely shafted by the balance team. It’s absolutely unreal how much damage a Terran can take and it just isn’t relevant to the game outcome. It just isn’t. I’ve said it for years. Economic damage is virtually irrelevant to Terran, barring something truly cataclysmic and/or damage in combination with other game problems. Economic damage, in and of itself, is totally irrelevant to the game outcome.
I think the pro scene knows this problem, because they nerfed the sensor tower range in the latest patch. But, I think they are being too timid. The siege tank as is is to powerful when it’s in position. With sensor towers and scans, he’s guaranteed to be in position. So, they either need to reduce the power of the tank or reduce the amount of information that the terran has to where the tank can’t always be in the right spot. The sensor tower nerf helps with that, but it’s nowhere near enough. Honestly they should just delete the sensor tower. Get rid of the sensor tower so that a defending terran doesn’t have perfect information of enemy army movements, and then it’s probably fine to leave the siege tank as is.
If not delete it, then substantially reduce the range (cut it in half) and reduce the cost proportionally. This would require more towers to be built and they would be more exposed, meaning he has to risk resources to get the information. That’s how it works for every other race. If you want vision as zerg, a queen has to go out there and spread creep. Why can terran have perfect vision that is also risk free? That’s fundamental issue here. If you want vision, you have to secure territory out on the map. That’s how it works for every race EXCEPT terran.
Lmao. I just watched the last game of the finals and, holy cow, the number of command centers that cure killed was insane. Economic damage is literally irrelevant to terran. I was watching this and thinking that Cure always has his BCs out of position for every fight and I remembered how perfect Ty’s control was that he beat hero with mass BC in the GSL a couple years back. I get the feeling that cure doesn’t use BCs very often. A unit that can teleport anywhere on the map is the one that’s out of position. Leave it to a terran to throw an unlosable game like that because he forgot to click once.
1 Like
That’s why people make the comparisons between Chess and TvT since both players have perfect vision. This is why TvT is the best mirror and hearing the jealousy of Zerg players is just the icing on the cake.
The sensor tower change you mention is a buff for Terran either way. A cheaper but smaller tower would mean they get it sooner with a far lower opportunity cost. Currently sensor towers are the easiest thing to focus to bankroll the Terran. How many times did Cure/Maru lose their sensor towers and now reduce the cost by half and it’s happy days. Terrans only get sensor towers against Zerg when they take their fourth, In TvT they get it soon after they land their third. It’s much more important in TvT.
Yes, Batz always talks through 2 sides of his mouth when it comes to player appreciation. You hate rote memorization and turtle craft yet Inno is your favourite player. You also want quick and feisty games yet always talks negatively about Byun. You can’t tell me with a straight face that Zerg has a easier time now compared to when Byun was winning championships.
I don’t really agree with that because the difficulty of TvT comes from the control of many different types of units. You have marines, tanks, liberators, vikings, BCs, etc, and the difficulty of production waves (what units to produce and when). In both those categories, Maru was definitely better than Cure. Cure was making BCs while Maru was massing ravens. Cure was massing vikings when Maru was massing marines. Neither of these mechanics are found in chess.
There is a simple fix for this: simply lock the sensor tower behind an upgrade or tech structure. For example, require an upgrade to be researched off the fusion core in order to get access to sensor towers. Terran has the shortest tech tree out of all three races, so adding another tier to it would be a nice improvement to the game. Why is it that Terrans have maxed out their tech tree at the 6 minute mark in TvZ? That’s not an interesting game dynamic because it means terrans always have access to their full tech tree from square 1. There’s no significant tech decisions being made. If terrans had to choose between liberator range and sensor towers, then that’s a big tech decision.
DongRaeGu, PartinG, and Taeja are my favorite players, because their games were very entertaining. I “like” Innovation in the sense that the data is crystal clear that he is the best terran player in history. That’s just an acknowledgement of facts.
Being aggressive isn’t what I like. I like scrappy, strategic games, that come down to the clever use of individual units and have wild variability in their outcome. Byun’s reaper play was simply overpowered, it limited the strategic variety of the game as a result, and the outcomes were highly predictable. It was predictable when he’d use it, and predictable how the games progressed. Imagine if Zerg could have a 90% winrate doing proxy hatch. Well, games would progress but they’d be highly predictable, and there is nothing entertaining about that.
Byun’s modern playstyle is just as predictable. He avoids tech units, makes extra marines, then just stims them into his opponent’s face. That has a very predictable outcome. Do you want to contrast games from 2017 when it was Innovation wrecking Byun’s mass marine styles instead of Cure? That stuff is flipping identical. I remember Byun losing all his marines because he tried to kill some rocks. Contrast that to game 5 of Byun vs Cure where Byun throws the game by stimming into a wall of siege tanks in a territory that was useless. Like, there was no reason to fight there. Why did he fight? Predictable. He is on mass marine. He has to trade. He doesn’t have a choice.
I still remember Taeja’s 3-0 vs Zest during the blink allin era. It was almost impossible to beat stalkers back then. Stalkers were so OP, protoss didn’t even bother to get blink and still got a lot of work done with 8 or so stalkers. Taeja winning 3-0 was not an outcome anyone saw coming given it had been over a year since any Terran had won a premier event. That was entertaining. The casters were trash-talking him, too, saying he isn’t a top player because he doesn’t play in the GSL. Then, he steamrolls loads of GSL players including Zest who had just won a GSL off the back of stalkers which were overpowered. How does that happen? Taeja is in another universe in terms of skill.
2 Likes
Enjoy it while it lasts. The GSL prize pool has been gutted, and the winnings won’t even cover their monthly expenses.
1 Like
Now now we know how you’ve been understimating Maru all the time. The truth is he is if not the one, one of the best players and best 2 Terrans of all time in SC2.
Has he beaten Serral yet? Serral has a 75% match score vs Maru. Innovation on the other hand took WESG from Serral before the brood/infestor/queen/creep nerfs.
He’s definitely #2, but Innovation is definitely #1. You can see that with this statistical test:
This chart also shows why Protoss don’t win tournaments. The best that Protoss has to offer is Zest, and he scores 2.6 compared to Dark’s 5.1, Innovation’s 4.2, and Maru’s 4.0. These are z scores which are exponential, so 2.6 is drastically lower performance than 4+. Zest has an ~8% chance to beat Serral. Yeah, Protoss are going to take a lot of second place trophies, which is exactly what happened the past 5 or so years.
Well, I’d estimate the quality of SC2 pro play to be somewhere around what part-time practice looks like. I think that’s been the case since Kespa disbanded and the region lock was instituted. There was a very steep decline in the talent at those points (at least in the korean scene). If they have to get part time jobs on top of being a SC2 competitor, then I don’t see how that’s any different from the past. Wasn’t Polt winning WCS while, at the same time, going to school?
YOU are arguing with me that Innovation is #1 in SC2 Terran history? I cant hear you over my picture with Innovation on one of the HSCups. I am one of his best fans shown appreciation, subbed, watched and met in person. So, I do not disagree. That is exactly how I put them as #1 and #2,. In early days Maru was too cheesy and I didn’t like his play then. Who knew he would become terran savior to cheese to win in 2018 and right in the face of IMBAtoss in 2018 to win GSLs. He really put it right in their faces against all the buffs toss got and nerfs T got.
I agree with why toss doesn’t have much to show. Reality is Protoss never had that consistently good toss for years. Maybe was Stats or Zest or Trap as third. Classic was very promising to be close to it but with mil service his shape certainly went behind. This is why toss cant win as much. The T and Z too good players they have.
Most of Maru’s wins correlate with balance issues. For example, he won a lot with proxy rax, the cyclone was OP vs protoss, he won a lot with ghost raven, and now he’s won a GSL on a map pool that was extremely terran favored. I don’t find his performance convincing. I think there was ONE code s win that didn’t favor terran in balance in some capacity.
Innovation took WESG from Serral at the peak of the broodlord infestor era that resulted in a long line of zerg nerfs. Innovation’s performance is spread out across a wide range of balance patches, many of which didn’t favor terran.
Do you remember the most recent round of nerfs to blinkstalkers? Innovation won a GSL despite the blinkstalkers. He did it with mass liberator and making no medivacs and avoiding stims. It’s like Dark beating skytoss with ravagers when literally nobody could beat carriers at the time. These people are so flipping good that balance isn’t relevant to them. Balance simply restricts your win conditions. If balanced, the game has a 1:1 win condition ratio, meaning for every 1 scenario that leads to a win there will be 1 that leads to a loss. When there are severe balance issues, that might skew to 1:3 aka 1 win condition for every 3 loss conditions. These guys are so good that they can reliably find those win conditions even when they are rare.
That also means that balance issues create, first and foremost, a restriction in options before a change in win-rate. When balance begins to affect win-rates is when the options for win conditions are so rare that you can’t reliably find them anymore, e.g. altering your play isn’t sufficient to avoid scenarios where the other race is favored.
So, when Terran is restricted to making mass liberator in order to beat stalkers, you know balance is absolutely FUBAR’d. Innovation is definitely the best terran, and I would argue he’s a contender for the GOAT. If the region lock weren’t there, it could’ve been Innovation dominating literally everything instead of Serral.
The race is simpler to play just because it has fewer units to manage, but that also handicaps its peak potential. If you have 1 four-supply unit you just can’t do as much micro / splitting with it as you could 4 one-supply units. It’s just a fact that protoss has less to do and with less to do you get more reaction time to do it, making it easier for newbs, but harder for professionals.
Even Protoss’ lowest supply costing unit has almost zero micro. Zealots get amoved and they are designed to amove. Charge makes them easy for newbs to use, but basically handicaps pro players because they can’t adequately micro vs widow mines.
There is a reason why pro players like high skill expression units like stalkers and warp prisms, but even they just don’t have the same capacity for skill expression as something like a medivac full of marines.
To make Protoss win at the top level, you’d have to do a radical redesign that adds more skill to the race. Remove charge and replace it with an ability that has to be manually casted, for example. Remove amove units like carriers, or rework them to where interceptors don’t auto-deploy. That would give top protoss more control over what the interceptors do. Right now they are good at amoving, but not good at microing. Why not let the interceptors be micro-able directly? The reason is because they’ve designed protoss for the explicit purpose of having no micro. Make the carrier a siege unit. It can’t move while the interceptors are deployed, but once deployed you can micro the interceptors directly.
1 Like