it doesn’t depend on the variation though. He went forge first. Your overlord gets to see every thing he does until he finishes cybernetics core. So, you’ll know if he has done the economical version or the safer version, 100% of the time.
The second overlord can find the tech if its by the cannons. I think you make some good points but you are a little too hyperbolic about your points. Obviously it wasn’t a good cannon rush, but he also scouted it late. So, like all games, both players made mistakes.
I am a coach IRL (like actual sports) and I use data for everything. 90%+ of good volleyball teams from 11-14 use 2 setters. 80% or so of good volleyball teams from 15+ use one. Also, at lower levels of play, a coaches best defender typically plays the middle of the court. At higher levels , she will play the left back side of the court because hits become stronger in that area. At the absolute highest level of play, the premier defenders of each team return to the middle back position of the court.
This is all based on trial and error, decades of collective knowledge and tons of data. All of the data suggests what I have chosen to do this season with my team, and as a result we are crushing everyone.
But still, some variation exists, based on player talents/coaching choices. If I was on contract to coach a professional starcraft player (toss), I’d look at the data on builds and i would tell the player we are playing sg 3nex or adepts every game and its not even close. These are winning strategies. These are the 90% strategies. If i did the equivalent of cannon rush coaching with my team when the stats are sooo bad on this rush at the professional level, I would 100% lose my job unless we were tremendously successful. But after 14 years of games and no ability to “out work” the competition (like, workout and get stronger and hit harder), its unlikely that were to happen.
It is highly dependent on the variation. You see no natural but is it because he’s building gates or a hidden nexus? You see 2 gas, but is it robo or stargate or a twilight? Where on the map is tech hidden? He has map control, and you don’t. Here is a 6k gm caught completely off guard by the follow up, even with vision of the protoss’ main:
Sometimes. You have to find it fast enough to make decisions on time, and if it’s tucked away behind cannons it may take time for the overlord to go around, and that’s just time you don’t have.
The way the meta works, in theory, is that there are no “right” answers / “winning or losing” builds, because what is the winning build depends on what your opponent does, and what your opponent does depends on what you do. So the strategy of the game has a bluffing mechanic where you have to have a good read on your opponent while giving him a bad read. In reality, that’s not how it works because high level SC2 gives such an insane reward for mechanical players to play longer games. The mechanical advantage is so insane that you can go into the mid and late game massively behind and still win through sheer brute force APM.
If strategy is so unimportant to the outcome of each starcraft match, why do you place such an emphasis on Protoss’s followup after the cannon rush?
Everyone has lost games due to a misread, maybe not even bad a bad one. If you played 10 games tonight and were unlucky enough to lose half of them, its likely you will have a misread or two. This happens constantly in pro games (ive been watching off and on since launch). This is a great game bro. Life’s too short to denigrate your opponents and reduce their play to tropes or patterns or game design flaws/quirks.
In my opinion, in competition, when you talk badly about your opponent, you are actually talking badly about yourself, but don’t realize it. It cheapens the effort and time you’ve spent towards reaching that goal or win. Even if the game is very easy, it felt easy because of that work. Like the “oh well this guys really bad” should instead be “i am a lot better than this guy” and thats how the best players ive coached in my career thought about their teammates and opponents typically
the alternative is true. when players say they lost because their 1 on 1 match up is taller than them, or the referee gave them an edge, or were lucky…etc. it obscures whatever reason unique to that exact game caused the loss. While your 1 on 1 matchup might be taller than you, or your play style may be affected in a larger way than other players by a certain strategy, you lost because of concrete reasons related to the rules/strategy choices that may feel invisible to people who have played a long time:
unwilling to take a 60 mineral loss to patrol a drone for cannons in your normal build order to catch it early every time (its rare enough that i dont disagree with this one)
unwilling to go 3 hatch before pool and lose to 3gates/be in a weird game where you have to defend drones with micro vs adepts and his micro
i lost x amount of drones holding the hatchery
etc. theres a billion reasons. i’m not great at this game but i do know how to improve fast at things and help others do the same. if i am coaching a player who gets tilted from cannon rushes or loses to them often, I would encourage them to look at how often it happens in a tournament setting and calculate how much mining exactly they would lose from a drone patrol, and what timing to send it, etc. that kind of stuff can be planned out.
why not pre hotkey drones in groups of 4 instead of mindlessly boxing drones? i never see anyone do this. is it the SC OCD, sending a worker without a gather command on accident? or breaking one’s perfect mining? people are so stubborn. this is my last post. cannon rush is not a pressing balance concern +
Cannon rush is a rare exception that requires a lot of strategical thinking. That sort of thing just isn’t the norm for the current version of sc2.
Those two things really aren’t related at all. I’ve met people who always blamed themselves & took responsibility for things that were totally out of their control. I’ve also met people who refuse to take responsibility for things that only they can control. What you are describing is a personality trait and it will vary from person to person.
What you are trying to get at is that you have to be objective. What you are describing is objectivity. True objectivity can never be attained, but you can come close by changing your motivations. Motivation is the master of reason, so if you change your motivations, and that changes your conclusion, then you’re biased, and it’s exactly when you are biased that you need to stop and evaluate if what you are doing makes any sense. The last thing that you want to do is take actions based on incomplete information or improper reasoning, because it drastically increases the probability of an error and errors undermine your goals. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to be harshly realistic.
If you know anything about me, I am a hyper analytical person, I have absolutely no problem being objective and realistic. In fact, I am terrified of being anything but objective and realistic. The places where I struggle are in scenarios where you will never know what the correct answer is. For example, a cat came home at a friend’s house with a bloody arm, and we will never know what happened. That sort of thing drives me up the wall because I am the guy who has all the answers and I can’t answer the question of what happened to that cat. We can generate a spectrum of possibilities and assign probabilities to it using Baye’s theorem but you will never have a definitive answer.
So when I am saying the protoss in the pro scene are terrible at SC it’s just the objectively correct conclusion to come to. It’s not emotional. It’s not an excuse. It’s not trash talk. It’s simply realistic. The best protoss on Earth were in Korea and Korea’s pro scene took a nose-dive off a cliff after the region lock & kespa scandal and it’s never recovered. The talent pool has been degrading in general. I’ve been in Grandmaster since Grandmaster became a thing, but only recently does it take literally zero effort to achieve. It’s so easy, in fact, that I add artificial restrictions specifically to make it harder. It’s very boring, the players are bad, and it’s particularly so within the protoss grouping in the pro scene. That group in particular has had the most decline, and people blame balance but it’s definitely a skill issue.
Once we know what the correct conclusion is is when you add emotion back into the picture. We know protoss players in the pro scene are bad, so how do you feel about that, and how do I feel about that? Emotions enter the picture only after the truth is established. That’s one strategy you can use to avoid bias in addition to motivated-reasoning. There are other strategies but they are more complex and require a deep understanding of mathematics; this forum probably isn’t the best place to discuss them. We’re talking graduate-level statistics.
So the way I feel about the pro scene is that it’s boring and disapointing. What made SC interesting for me was that it was challenging, but it’s not challenging anymore. Modern SC is so easy it’s practically a sleeping aid. That’s how I feel about it. I wish the talent pool were stronger and I wish it were more difficult to win, because that would make things interesting and fun. Most people get frustrated when they encounter something difficult. I become fascinated by difficult things. I have to understand them and figure them out and solve them. The more difficult they are, the more interesting they are. SC2 used to be very difficult and very interesting, but it isn’t anymore. Modern SC2 is 99% apm spam. Strategy and tactics play a very minor role; the speed and quantity of actions is much more important than the quality. That’s simply an objective and realistic conclusion to come to. SC2 is a game of APM spam.
The cannon rush is rather weak. It’s so weak it’s practically a free win. Even so, its power level is much higher than proxy rax, and proxy rax is drastically stronger than proxy hatchery.
My predictions are so good they are practically prophetic. Hero is a phenomenal player but at those levels even the smallest misstep can cost the game. All it takes is 1 emp on the templar, 1 misrally, and the game is over.
