Starcraft II

Started playing 1v1 again, just some practice games with TLers. All I ahve to say is Phoenixes my friends, Phoenixes.
 
grendel240sx said:
So I got SC2 reinstalled, watched a few vids last night and played some games with a friend this morning (2v2 vs AI). I kept getting lost in my build.

I think I just need to play 1v1 vs the computer and practice the build up to maybe 20-25 and restart... I kept forgetting things like my gas building, forgetting supply depots, letting SCVs idle (friend came over and showed me the shift click after building, that helps a ton).

Kind of a frustrating game...
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It's all about repetition and practice if you want to become good at the game

Intel_Hydralisk said:
You honestly think those were perfect forcefields? It was literally forcefield overload. Make enough sentries with full energy that it doesn't matter. Your average diamond ladder player can pull that off.
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No they werent perfect, effective was probably a better word. You will not win a game going 80%+ sentry full energy sentry. It's not as simple as attack move.

Id like to see platinum players throwing up FF as effectively as MC. Maybe you can show me. Ive never witnessed any platinums doing that. Not even most diamonds use FF effectively. The angles, the placement, the timing, positioning, and also what you do AFTER the FF. MC does all of that (most of the time). You have to learn maps, the terrain, the angles so I disagree it being a simple "F, click, win." There's simply a lot more factors that come into play when placing FF compared to other spells in the game.
 
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ThumperSD said:
No they werent perfect, effective was probably a better word. You will not win a game going 80%+ sentry full energy sentry. It's not as simple as attack move.

Id like to see platinum players throwing up FF as effectively as MC. Maybe you can show me. Ive never witnessed any platinums doing that. Not even most diamonds use FF effectively. The angles, the placement, the timing, positioning, and also what you do AFTER the FF. MC does all of that (most of the time). You have to learn maps, the terrain, the angles so I disagree it being a simple "F, click, win." There's simply a lot more factors that come into play when placing FF compared to other spells in the game.
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It hardly takes any learning, timing, or positioning to overspam forcefields is my point. He just had so many sentries it wasn't an issue anymore. He made about twice as many as he needed in almost all situations.

In most of the fights he simply forcefielded and did nothing afterwards. He even lost a bunch of sentries for no reason multiple times but it didn't matter simply because it was overwhelmingly in his favor at that point. I watched this with 4 of my friends and they all agreed that this was a ridiculously one sided game made ludicrously uninteresting by the gateway / forcefield spam. I only watch the finals / notable games of GSL and they've watched almost all games (including code A) for the past few seasons.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate good forcefields. But the ones MC used were just absolute spam. There's a difference between efficiently forcefielding out of necessity or forcefielding to turn the tide of battle during an otherwise losing endeavor, but this was just flat out stupid spam hands up in the air type of play.
 
In game 4, he used em quite efficiently. At July's natural, 1 at the ramp, 1 between the hatchery and mineral line, 1 between mineral line and southern cliff and 2 between hatchery and northern cliff. He refreshed them as half of the Zerg forces moved past too, so there was clear anticipation on when to refresh them, not just blatant spamming.

He uses force fields liberally, sure. I agree. But it's not his one-trick pony. He absolutely crushed July in the Ro32 with Sentries, Blink Stalkers, HT and Colossi. Perfect Observer placement to anticipate July's every move and great maneuvering to avoid the Baneling drops, even Blinking forward to pick off a couple Overlords full of Banelings before July could retreat/reposition.
 
Masters make the difficult look easy. Athletes do it, artists do it, and yes, professional Starcraft players do it. It doesn't matter how much that FF play looked like FF spam. Some random diamond or plat league player could not have gone into that game, pumped out a whole bunch of sentries and replicated that success. It simply would not happen.

Anyway, is going FF heavy now some sort of cheesy tactic? It's a tricky strategy that requires a gentle touch because while there may be plenty of FF to go around the army is now heavily comprised of sentries that dish out and take shit for damage.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
It hardly takes any learning, timing, or positioning to overspam forcefields is my point. He just had so many sentries it wasn't an issue anymore. He made about twice as many as he needed in almost all situations.
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False. I play Protoss exclusively, am ranked 5 on my diamond ladder, and I still feel like a noob with force fields. Laying down ffs like MC did is very difficult. The sentries don't have great range with them and often get blocked behind your other units. His ramp blocking isn't super hard, but his roach donut is, and he pulled it off perfectly. Also, July responded very poorly in the last game to the ffs MC was laying down. He kept attacking with his hydras and letting MC split his army and destroy it. Very sloppy.

edit: Also, how do you figure he made twice as many sentries as he needed? Looks to me like he built the right number of sentries to go 4 and 1.

Intel_Hydralisk said:
In most of the fights he simply forcefielded and did nothing afterwards. He even lost a bunch of sentries for no reason multiple times but it didn't matter simply because it was overwhelmingly in his favor at that point. I watched this with 4 of my friends and they all agreed that this was a ridiculously one sided game made ludicrously uninteresting by the gateway / forcefield spam.
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MC did nothing after force fielding? It looks to me like in every game he killed hatches, armies, ovies, etc. And for the record, July didn't lose that first game because of ffs on his ramp. He lost because MC tricked him into thinking he was building a nexus and then followed it up with a very strong 4 gate. Also, when someone ffs an army and then attacks that army what is wrong with that? He doesn't need to go hop around with his units because they're already actively occupied killing his opponent. I do agree that it was a completely one sided match. MC > July.

Intel_Hydralisk said:
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate good forcefields. But the ones MC used were just absolute spam. There's a difference between efficiently forcefielding out of necessity or forcefielding to turn the tide of battle during an otherwise losing endeavor, but this was just flat out stupid spam hands up in the air type of play.
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We're not getting you wrong; you don't appreciate good ffs. If you did, you would have appreciated what MC did. And please explain how in the hell MCs ffs were not necessary to him winning. Why should he limit himself to only forcefielding to turn the tide of a battle during a losing endeavor. That sounds like the philosophy of a scrub. Play. To. Win..
 
The entire point of forcefield is to shape the terrain to your advantage. If you only have 3-4 sentries, you can't guarantee you'll have enough forcefields. MC rarely overlaps them and seems to have perfect timing with them, so I'm not sure how people can say any diamond player can do the same thing. If he was being inefficient with that many support units July would have been all over those games.

Besides, the guy has won almost $200,000 because of his tactics. Hard to argue with that.
 
I'm not arguing that MC is a bad player.
I'm not arguing that MC is incapable of doing good forcefields.

My entire point was that the grand finals was a complete shit show because MC literally went in with one goal: To spam as many gateways and forcefields as he can.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
I'm not arguing that MC is a bad player.
I'm not arguing that MC is incapable of doing good forcefields.

My entire point was that the grand finals was a complete shit show because MC literally went in with one goal: To spam as many gateways and forcefields as he can.
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I doubt MC's goal was to spam as many gateways and forcefields as he could. More likely his goal was to go in and win, which he did. Would you be this upset if July had gone mass roach rushes and won 4 games?
 
petertew said:
I doubt MC's goal was to spam as many gateways and forcefields as he could. More likely his goal was to go in and win, which he did. Would you be this upset if July had gone mass roach rushes and won 4 games?
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Yes very. I wanted to see quality games from the grand finals, not the shit show that I witnessed. The whole thing lasted what, less than an hour including all those intermissions? The pop performance / whatever they had going on before the match lasted longer. The last grand finals between MVP and MKP were similar but at least TvT lasts longer...
 
petertew said:
You should be upset with July then; he's the reason the finals sucked.
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My simple statement was that the finals sucked ass because one player literally just spammed gateways and forcefields for every game and the other player apparently couldn't deal with it. Honestly July handled the stargate and DT's very well but none of that mattered since MC's overall plan was the same every game: make gateways and spam forcefield (no they were not 'artistic' or 'perfect'). Game over? What terrible games.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
My simple statement was that the finals sucked ass because one player literally just spammed gateways and forcefields for every game and the other player apparently couldn't deal with it. Honestly July handled the stargate and DT's very well but none of that mattered since MC's overall plan was the same every game: make gateways and spam forcefield (no they were not 'artistic' or 'perfect'). Game over? What terrible games.
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The guy plays to win, not to provide entertainment. He's 200k richer now because of it.

Would you provide entertainment for the crowd if 200k was on the line too? Or would you play to win?
 
Actually I think the 1st place price equates to about 44.5k dollars. But anyway, entertainment can be defined differently. Watching MC is entertaining; he controls Protoss like no other and it shows in just about every game he plays, not just the finals. Watching a high level player destroy another supposedly high level player raises some interesting thoughts on how varied the skill level is, even in the top 0.0000001% (made-up number, btw).
For example, in the team league that's going on atm, MC crushed two players before being taken down. In the PvT, he held off a 3 rax marine/scv all-in while fast expanding and in the PvP, he straight-up crushed the 4gate vs 4gate play. However, he lost to a heavy all-in strategy by Terran (it was definitely something the team cooked up to eke out a win. But it's probably the fault of the oGs clan since they unnecessarily sacrificed a player.
 
Deluded said:
The guy plays to win, not to provide entertainment. He's 200k richer now because of it.

Would you provide entertainment for the crowd if 200k was on the line too? Or would you play to win?
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That doesn't change the fact that the finals was a terrible match. If one team won 72-10 in the super bowl using the same play every single down, would that be an interesting super bowl?
 
Deluded said:
The guy plays to win, not to provide entertainment. He's 200k richer now because of it.

Would you provide entertainment for the crowd if 200k was on the line too? Or would you play to win?
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Both sides have a point. On one hand you have MC whose one and only real goal is to win both for himself and for his team to continue to draw sponsors. How he does it is essentially irrelevant.

On the other you have Gom, whose interests definitely lie more toward providing the most entertaining product possible.

It's kind of a weird and very direct conflict of interests, but neither side is really right or wrong.

For myself, I'd much rather we see competitive games. Watching someone crush through a best of 7 like that is definitely not entertaining. From a consumer/viewer standpoint, and probably from Gom's POV as well, a competitive series is far, far better. The Super Bowl comparison is apt.
 
ThinJ said:
Both sides have a point. On one hand you have MC whose one and only real goal is to win both for himself and for his team to continue to draw sponsors. How he does it is essentially irrelevant.

On the other you have Gom, whose interests definitely lie more toward providing the most entertaining product possible.

It's kind of a weird and very direct conflict of interests, but neither side is really right or wrong.

For myself, I'd much rather we see competitive games. Watching someone crush through a best of 7 like that is definitely not entertaining. From a consumer/viewer standpoint, and probably from Gom's POV as well, a competitive series is far, far better. The Super Bowl comparison is apt.
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The super bowl comparison is apt. Just the same, if you take the Super Bowl analogy and suppose team A beat team B 72-10 by constantly running the same play I guarantee no one would be giving team A shit and saying their tactics were OP or lacked skill to execute. Instead all the casters and fans would be wonder wtf team B was doing not changing their gameplan up to handle what team A was doing.

July had 5 games to force MC to do something other than ff him to death. He failed to do so and made the finals shitty for all of us.
 
i guess some people just don't understand the fact that no matter what these guys say, they're just out to win and if they find some tactic that can get them wins, they will exploit it.

I think given the choice between 1st place and NOT entertaining YOU and winning 1st place price money as opposed to 2nd place and entertaining you, they will choose themeselves first.

Cause seriously who do you think you are to these guys, probably just some random scrub commenting about their games on a forum.

But you have a point that the games may have sucked to watch for you, but again their job is not to entertain YOU, it's to win.
 
petertew said:
July had 5 games to force MC to do something other than ff him to death. He failed to do so and made the finals shitty for all of us.
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I don't disagree at all. It dovetails nicely into the idea that MC's goal is simply to win. If the other player is going to let him win 4 games doing the same cheesy strat, then that's on the other player. In this case it's absolutely on July.

I'm just saying I see the other side of it too. You have to imagine there was an employee or two at Gom somewhere wishing to high heaven that one of them would do something different and not give them a third consecutive crappy final.
 
ThinJ said:
I don't disagree at all. It dovetails nicely into the idea that MC's goal is simply to win. If the other player is going to let him win 4 games doing the same cheesy strat, then that's on the other player. In this case it's absolutely on July.

I'm just saying I see the other side of it too. You have to imagine there was an employee or two at Gom somewhere wishing to high heaven that one of them would do something different and not give them a third consecutive crappy final.
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I get where you're coming from. And even though the finals sucked (though they should have been epic with freaking July in there) I was plenty happy with the season overall. Except for the two new casters. Especially Kelly. Bleh.
 
Aww, now don't start up the Kelly hate here.

The girl worked like crazy trying to please people who were never going to be happy with anything she did. She started speech lessons to improve her english, had big sheets with notes written up about each player...

I think we'd be lucky if we had even a couple more casters that actually worked at it half as hard as she did, regardless of whatever downsides they may have.

They can't all be Artosis and just know everything about everybody :p
 
ThinJ said:
Aww, now don't start up the Kelly hate here.

The girl worked like crazy trying to please people who were never going to be happy with anything she did. She started speech lessons to improve her english, had big sheets with notes written up about each player...

I think we'd be lucky if we had even a couple more casters that actually worked at it half as hard as she did, regardless of whatever downsides they may have.

They can't all be Artosis and just know everything about everybody :p
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I'm not coming down on her as a person (I'm sure she's very nice), and her knowledge of the game was fine. It's her voice. I can't stand it.
 
If an annoying voice should mean condemnation for a caster we should have been rid of Husky's annoying garbage months ago :(
 
petertew said:
I'm not coming down on her as a person (I'm sure she's very nice), and her knowledge of the game was fine. It's her voice. I can't stand it.
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I've always heard it the other way around. People don't have a problem with her accent, but rather her lack of knowledge of the game. I'm sure they were trying to be polite about the accent though, which is abnormal on the internet.

The new casters don't bother me much, but I think I know where people are coming from. It feels uncomfortable to see new faces for a while, especially when you had great entertaining casters that preceded them.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
I've always heard it the other way around. People don't have a problem with her accent, but rather her lack of knowledge of the game. I'm sure they were trying to be polite about the accent though, which is abnormal on the internet.
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Wow. All I saw was week after week of "OMG I CANT UNDERSTAND HER" followed by streams of some of the most misogynistic garbage I've read on the internet in ages.

You won't ever hear me say she was the greatest caster ever, or even a particularly good one. Just ok. I do think she would have gotten much better if she'd been given the time, but it's well beyond too late for that.

Personally, I don't care that people don't like her commentary. No caster is going to please everybody. If I didn't like it I would have complained too. What I found most abhorrent about the community's disapproval of her casting was how that disapproval was expressed. It was shown in the most immature and completely embarrassing ways possible.

It was essentially day after day that made me question why I bother associating myself with these people, even in so thin a way as playing the same game they do.
 
I just played for the first time in a while do they not tell you how many games you have played? Thats so dumb I like knowing how many I won/loss
 
I've got no hatred for Kelly, and I agree the way people tried to bring her down was/is terrible. It's just, if I'm going to be paying these guys 50 to 100 dollars a year to watch their casts then I don't want to be bothered by their casters' voices.
 
darkhunter139 said:
I just played for the first time in a while do they not tell you how many games you have played? Thats so dumb I like knowing how many I won/loss
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You have to be in master league to see your win/loss ratio. They made some arbitrary argument about it, but I'm with you on that one. Either way... no big deal.
 
petertew said:
I've got no hatred for Kelly, and I agree the way people tried to bring her down was/is terrible. It's just, if I'm going to be paying these guys 50 to 100 dollars a year to watch their casts then I don't want to be bothered by their casters' voices.
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I can agree with you there. A qualified caster requires a widely appealing voice, knowledge of the game, and just a personality that the fan base can relate to, especially when paying a premium for the entertainment (but to be honest, 10 bucks a season isn't much of a premium to begin with, whatever).

Voice and knowledge doesn't cut it though. For instance, the other new caster had a nice casting voice, but he really didn't feel as "geeked out" as Tastosis generally do. When exciting things are going on, he still keeps that cool, collected "caster voice" going, which strikes me as awkward. There was another caster like that when Blizz did battle reports back then. And no, it wasn't Dustin Browder. :D
 
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