According to this article here:
“…every game plays out—hit the play button, set your control groups, carry out the game, gg no matter the outcome, repeat; like breathing.”
And then the end picture from my last game:
Well, it can’t be roses all the time :-).
I haven’t posted here in a while, but I thought I would finish of 2012 why some screenshots to demonstrate the Christmas Spirit of the Starcraft community. This is from a game from the the 27th of December.
I’m not really certain that he honestly thought that Zergs have the duty to attack Terran armies head on at all times? It just seems to weird.
I got a link to a VOD where Illusion does a spine crawler/Queen-rush and I just had to try myself. Basically you never build gas and not many drones either. When you have your first queen and a bunch of Zerglings out, you take three drones and go for the Protoss entrance.
Once you get there you plant a hatchery, cancels it and place a creep tumor where its creep was. Then adds spine crawlers and reinforces with Queens and more Zerglings.
With the new Queen speed and range it is remarkably efficient and I quickly got three wins with this cheese. Most players made comments like “Wow, that is a cute strategy” or similar. That is rare when you do a cheese.
In my fifth game I met someone who knew how to counter this. Apparently it is possible to stop, although not necessarily extremely easy.
Check this photo album out! I went to BarCraft Copenhagen for the MLG Providence Final. It felt like an odd experience, but kinda cool too. I wish I could have stayed longer than I could, but unfortunately I only got to see about 10 games at the bar.
Yeah, to some extend that headline is stolen from Day9. It’s where we dick around.
A side effect of the lovely new battle.net 2.0 is a clear lack of community in Starcraft II compared to the old Brood War-days. AiurAdun and I have taken it upon ourselves to do something about it. Step 1 in that plan is to get Danish players to play each other and hang out. For that we have created Casual Monday. A recurring tournament open for all Danish players of all skill levels. People are matched up against those of similar skill levels and no one is “out” of the tournament. We don’t really declare a winner either.
So far we’ve been around 25 players participating which I think is quite a lot. And it seems like people appreciate it.
Seriously! You have friends who play Starcraft and their companionship is huge part of what keeps you interested in the game. And AiurAdun is one of my oldest Starcraft-friends.
Lately he has been traveling a lot. I like that as I too like to travel the world. But the problem of travel is that it disconnects you with the online community of Starcraft and suddenly you feel that getting back on the horse is kinda difficult. People have gotten better and you have lost your skills.
I think AiurAdun is in that spot now and I want the online community to encourage him to get back in the game and become part of the community. In an active form.
I know that you may not personally know AiurAdun, but I am sure that if you are reading this you too have friends who you’d like to share your passion of the game with. Let this be an open invitation to all who find the world of Starcraft hard to keep up with: We want you back on Battle.net!
Battle.net was kinda unstable on Monday, so I suggested to Qvist that we play a custom 2v2 against some random opponents. He warned me that people were pretty bad in custom games and he was right.
So we were Terran and Zerg vs a Terran and Protoss combo. At one point our Protoss opponent complained that his ally was a noob. That was true, but he was not any better and I kinda felt like writing it down. It all descended into funny name calling. Not too serious, but rude and funny as we totally steam rolled our innocent victims.
I was in India and as reported got my account locked from out there. Laughs all around. So what do you do Starcraft related in India when your account is locked?
Well, you can go to a mall to check out the local shops selling Starcraft and to see how the game is promoted there. Unfortunately that quest turned out to be in vain as I simply couldn’t find a game shop. And that got me thinking.
Is Starcraft even viable in India? Most of my co-workers out there are in IT, yet they are not into gaming at all. Why? Because to them software development is more about a good career, than about being nerds. Good for them I assume, but they are missing out on the wonderful world of eSport.
And then there is the common loss of all electricity and network connectivity. At least I experienced a lot of that so I assume it is common all over (I might be wrong). How would the “always online” experience of Starcraft II work out? I assume losing electricity would be bad enough for LANs, even though it is not unheard of in professional tournaments either
If you read any Starcraft II site you’ll find this argument. That Starcraft II is a bad game since it is all about the speed and not about strategy. Even on teamliquid.net the hordes of new-comers to the scene will reason like this.
They will say: “It is so unfair that my opponent won. At this point in the game he had so many units simply because he clicked on stuff faster than me. I should have won, since I was better at strategy than him”.
One some level I follow this line of reasoning. Back in the early days of the original Starcraft I was a huge fan of the faster rather than fastest speed setting. I would argue that no one could execute good strategy at the fastest speed setting and the game became poorer due to the too fast speed. I know better now, but there is an important distinction. I didn’t claim that I lost to an inferior e strategy due to my lack of speed. I claimed that the game became poorer overall. I still sucked back then though!
In the first example the complaining n00b reveals that he does not understand what strategy is. First of all: His opponent is probably not a whole lot faster due to having a set strategy from the start. He who complained had not. Also his opponent had a strategy optimized for getting more units at certain time and the complaining player was looking to overcome that with “tricks”. I.e. doing something sneaky.
The problem with sneaky play is, that they assume that your opponent is bad! He may be, but it is simply not a solid strategy rely on it. I may suck at the game, but I know better than to complain about the game for lacking strategy. Doing so, would only reveal my own lack of understanding for what strategy is.
At the bottom of the Bronze League there is a strange phenomenon. Players can be up against a player who is favorite and win and earn 2 points. Only one of those points are real. The other is taken from said players bonus pool.
It completely baffles me, and I think that Blizzard risk scaring away the players who have still a lot to learn. Its very demoralizing to not get rewarded for the few wins you really do manage to get.
I was on a serious tilt yesterday. I lost a series of 1v1 games against Terrans and was trying out more and more extreme variants of my opening play. It didn’t help and I kept losing.
Suddenly, after one of the game my opponent send me a message: “Are you Fafner the blogger"? I guess I am and that mark the first time I know I have played and lost to a lurker on this site.
So everybody, say Hello to Lambda. He is a Terran, who likes to drop Hellions in you probe line. Just to let you know (and if I remember the game correctly) ;-).
Recently a number of ladder tracking sites like sc2ranks.com have sprung up and that is great, since it allows you to get a better feel for who is good and who is coming up in the scene. Unfortunately there is no obvious way to break it down on a country-by-country basis.
Back in the early days of Warcraft III I ran a similar tracking site just for the Danish Warcraft community. In other words it is obvious for me to do the same now for Starcraft II.
Working on a service like the one above really makes you realize how much more you’d prefer to have the hidden ranking behind the scenes and not the points accumulated due to bonus pools and whatnot. It’s obvious to me, that a top gold player very well can be significantly better than a low platinum player, so it is a bit annoying to put the first, below the second.
On the other hand, this gives an overview over who have done the most to climb, and over time it should all sort itself out.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
I feel related to this guy here. I don’t think I suck quite as badly, but still I share his pain. Check out his videos. He has 7 up so far.
So the comments to the previous posting were hilarious and all, but this is my blog and not the site where people go to flame each other (and more importantly me). In the future I will delete comments I find annoying.
So what do I think is okay?
When offering advice – which is something I do appreciate – try to do so where relevant and in a useful fashion. This basically rules out most of Babytoss’s reviews of my old games. Also, try to notice the date of the posting you are commenting on: I have improved dramatically compared to back when I started this blog.
Hey, Blizzard! Have you been following the TSL2 qualification fallout? Do you learn anything from that? I suddenly feel scared about tournaments being run on battle.net 2. Will you provide sufficient guarantees that no one will cheat in tournaments now that you will own the data that the community can’t check? Or will all data be public (including players IP-addresses) so that we can check it on our own?
Do you already now have tools in place to catch abusers, win-traders and hackers? The old Starcraft ladder on battle.net was a joke from day one. I know you did better in Wacraft III, but it was still a ladder for casual players rather than the basis for an eSport.
How will all this turn out?
