Beta Waves: Down - Status

What a night and what an end to the Starcraft II: Beta. My phone is broken. I hate IP Telephony. It just doesn’t feel as robust as the old school analog version. I want it back. In sheer frustration I broke my keyboard and had to play my last few games with an extremely wobbly keyboard and a broken S-key. Sigh.

So what is the status of the game. Whether Battle.net 2 is up to par compared to the version that shipped with the original Starcraft is still up for debate. On one hand, the automated matchmaking is extremely nice and just about everything else is worse. Except I do remember the chat room splits and frequent disconnects that plagued Battle.net for the first year of vanilla Starcraft.

Race balance-wise I expect many more play styles to be discovered and patches to come. I primarily play Protoss, but have more than 400 games as random behind me in the beta. I’m not sure that makes me qualified to speak about balance, but I’ll do that anyways.
Protoss vs Zerg is probably slightly in Protoss’ favor. I' like that, but don’t know what to change about the game to fix it. Maybe buff Hydralisks slightly? Protoss vs Terran is just ridiculous in Terrans favor. I expect that once people at large figure out how to play Terran they will have an out-of-this-world win rate against Protoss. Basically too few Terrans at the moment understand when to expand and how to transition from the early harass into a solid mid game. That will change and hopefully there will be a patch :-/ How Zerg vs Terran play out I don’t quite know. I suspect that the early game is more fair than in PvT, but that the mid-to-late game is still in Terran’s favor.

I like the smaller national scenes we have here in Denmark and probably in other small countries too. I especially like how we already have starcraftii.dk and sc2replays.dk, who are active and covering the scene as it is. And of course www.dailyrush.dk, which have been here for 10 years or so. Amazing.

Climbing the Ladder (Again)

I’m massing games this weekend. Okay, that just means that I plan on playing 5 games or more, but just the same: I’m trying to make an effort to climb the ladder that so unjustly placed me in Gold Division.

I play all 1v1 maps (except Desert Oasis) and I am always Protoss. Are the above 6 games a coincidence? All opponents were Terran and at least four of them reaper rushed. Blizzard can’t of course predict  what strategy a given player will employ, but it seems to be a stretch that this is all random.

There are 6 maps I play. The likelihood of getting the same one 6 times in a row is about (1/6)^5 if I remember my math correctly. Or 0.012%. Getting Terran opponents on all matches is even less likely.
My theory is that Blizzard wants more hard data on certain match ups and maps and are deliberately stacking the matches this way.
Tinfoil hat on!

Starcraftii.dk’s 3rd Tournament

I’m eagerly following Starcraftii.dk’s 3rd tournament. I’m not playing myself, but I wish I was as the first couple of rounds definitely looks like a level I could compete in. The most exiting thing is trying to guess who will make it out of which bracket.

Among the obvious favorites are Mywa aka Phobos. Hein has won the first two tournaments and is also a good candidate although I think Mywa is a clear favorite.

And then there are the players “I know”, but where I don’t have any idea of how good they actually are. Combi aka Larry-the-Weird is the one I’m watching the most.

Exiting how it will al turn out.

Placement Matches Gone Crazy?

What has happend to placement matches after beta phase 2 started? They seem to have become seriously harder. In fact Sklent and I managed to go 2-3 in our 2v2 placement matches due to us mostly encountering Diamond league teams. I don’t mind losing, but the end result seems to be a pretty bad indication of our level as a team. Now we are in bronze, and surely we are a lot better than that?
In fact I managed an perfect 5-0 in 1v1 and another 5-0 with Qvist in 2v2. Both landed us in gold. It seems fair that you can’t place into the very best league, but it kind of leaves all those who are truly bad at the game in an awful situation: Stuck in bronze with a ton of players who are actually decent.
I wonder what Blizzard is up to.

Recommended VODs while SC2 on hiatus

There really isn’t that much to write about while we are waiting for us being able to play Starcraft II again.

I watched Husky and HDStarcraft’s 2v2 commentaries here. I’m normally not that excited about the stuff they do, cause I think they are to colorful and not analytical enough, but those games are not that serious anyways.

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.