Commentaries while we wait

I’m kinda bored since the Starcraft II beta went offline. So what did I do? Installed World of Warcraft again and tried it out. Kinda fun, but not really what I was looking for.

AiurAdun and I have talked about doing some dual commentaries for the Danish Starcraft community and suddenly one night we went ahead and did some. Damn, we are amateurs at that, but hopefully it is still fun!

The videos are all in Danish, so they may just be funny for that reason alone, but hopefully other Danes will find them interesting.

The games are from the tournament held by www.starcraftii.dk on May 28th. The players are not that amazing compared to what we see in international tournaments, but probably pretty good representatives of the enthusiasts here.

So here are all the games:

• Game 1, part 1. Game 1, part 2.
• Game 2, part 1. Game 2, part 2.
• Game 3.

We know that there is a lot of issues with the production quality. The first game has the sound up way to high, there is some stuttering here and there in the video and we didn’t research anything about the tournament or the players before we began :-). We will probably improve all that in the future.

50%

This is a comment on the new match making system of Starcraft II. In some ways it is better than what I hoped and in some ways very disappointing.

The good stuff is that it actually does a decent job of protecting players against being smurfed to heavily. The curse of better players either resetting their rank (iccup) just to get series of easy wins, has been efficiently countered by the new Automated Match-Making.

On to the not so good stuff. The stated goal of the AMM is to ensure that players (more or less) always plays people of a similar skill level. This should lead to a win rate for most players around 50%. I think the 50% goal is reached, but the similar skill level is more questionable.

To me it seems that you are never in a situation where you play someone and think: I really think this game can go either way. Either it feels overwhelmingly unfair for you or for your opponent. And it seems to be a streak of games too. For instance you win a game easily and go on to another which you also win easily. At some point you encounter an opponent that is vastly better than you and from experience I can now tell, that the next 5-6 opponents will be of similar caliber too.

I want close games every games. Not a long win streak followed by a long streak of loses.