[Megathread] StarCraft 2

[MerinPally]

I'm gona be controversial and say that hacks on the arcade don't matter because it's not competitive. Annoying as fuck sure but not on the same level as on a ranked ladder where there is competition to be the best. Even at lower levels.

[Charge me Doctor]

Oh, i remember some guy losing to me while using MH, i watched replay and laughed how he looked at fog, targeted my units, etc, but still lost because couldn't handle mah carriers... out of ONE BASE! Because i was contained with more than 10 cannons

[May90]

I'm gona be controversial and say that hacks on the arcade don't matter because it's not competitive. Annoying as fuck sure but not on the same level as on a ranked ladder where there is competition to be the best. Even at lower levels.

Well, that's the point. Since it is not ladder, since it is arcade and is intended to have fun, why would anyone hack it? What's the point of ruining the game for everyone else to get a free win which is not registered anywhere anyway, other than in the player's Match History?

I'm not saying such people should be banned for it or anything. I just don't understand why they do it. It is like, I don't know, going to boxing training room and during sparring kicking your opponent below the belt - no one will punish you for it, but why would you go to boxing training room to do stuff like that?

[MerinPally]

So I'm mid to high plat on EU as a protoss but always wanted to try playing the other races. I've played 5 games on NA like 2-3 months ago when servers were down, won 4 and lost 1 to a high diamond so was doing ok. Started playing Terran, got placed in silver and I'm now top gold winning 3 games and losing 4, 2 of which I really shouldn't have lost. It's weird it feels more fun having a variation in the race. Tempted to do the same with zerg, start playing random and take the hit on EU back down to gold league.

Literally my only fear and reason I might not would be because there seems to be a line at top of gold where everyone below that does nothing but cheese and above, it happens less often. Took me ages to break into plat, but then it seems more fun... plus every time I randomed protoss I'd have a free win.

[May90]

I always played Random when I was laddering actively, but I totally hated Terran. They just feel so sluggish... For Protoss, for example, if you want to reposition your army, you just usually hit "1" -> right click, and you're done. As Terran, however... You have to unsiege Tanks, to move them, to siege them again. If you need to constantly reposition your army trying to oppose the opponent's movement, you have to siege and unsiege all the time. It just felt like playing Queens in Monobattle: such a slow and non-mobile race.

[MerinPally]

My terran is appalling though like I've not been using a lot of factory units. Bio feels quite quick to me but then I've only ever played protoss so it would. The only time I've thought hmmrph was playing a TvT and it got into late game and I was watching how slowly the health went down on units during a direct engagement and I just thought christ, was pure marine/marauder with medivac support. Even a bronze leaguer could've microed that.

[Rivera]

Blizzard made so many mistakes with Starcraft 2 though that it's no wonder it's dying, it doesn't deserve to live in the first place.

Once LOTV gets released I give SC2 1 year and after that it'll be gone from the "esports scene" for good as Blizzard drops its support for it. If there's ever a Starcraft 3 I hope they trash any ideas about making a good esports and focus all their efforts in making it a good fucking game.

Having said all that, Blizzard has made exactly the right moves with Hearthstone. They are focusing on making it a good game rather than a good esports and it's already kicking SC2's ass in both viewership and playerbase. Once Hearthstone is released on mobile I wouldn't be surprised if it became bigger than LoL.

Good game -> big playerbase -> big viewer numbers on twitch -> money (sponsors) -> competitive scene -> esports.

[May90]

Starcraft 2 is dying? I don't know, I play arcade games almost every day and the lobbies get filled as fast as never before. Don't care about esports though, it is very possible that it is dying when there are such titans as LoL or Battlefield on the scene.

[MerinPally]

Starcraft has a fraction of the audience of DOTA and LoL and has comparable prize pools and a greater number of tournaments. Sounds pretty alive to me. Sure the number of people is shrinking but those who do follow are very devoted. Hell, most of the good koreans have been playing Starcraft of some form for over 10 years. The core is not going away.

[May90]

Let's also not forget that Starcraft 2 is 4 years old. How was Warcraft 3 doing in 2006? Now that was pretty much dead game indeed. Starcraft 2 is doing incredible, given the number of popular esports games out there.

[MerinPally]

Don't get me wrong it's still a very quiet game but those who have stuck around, are staying.

[Rivera]

Starcraft has a fraction of the audience of DOTA and LoL and has comparable prize pools and a greater number of tournaments. Sounds pretty alive to me. Sure the number of people is shrinking but those who do follow are very devoted. Hell, most of the good koreans have been playing Starcraft of some form for over 10 years. The core is not going away.

Playerbase and audience is everything when it comes to e-sports. The more your game has viewers for tournaments and in general the more likely you're going to attract sponsors for your tournaments, professional players etc.

Currently SC2 is artificially kept alive by Blizzard as they are funneling a lot of money into it. There's a reason why NASL went down and couldn't do WCS AM anymore so ESL literally had to pick it up or Blizzard would stop supporting ESL.

To go into more detail obviously Valve (Dota2) and Riot (LoL) also support their games, but the thing is these 2 games do not rely on the support given by their companies. If Valve and Riot suddenly stopped supporting the professional scene and the tournaments, Dota2 and LoL would still continue thriving as an esports as there is a massive playerbase and audience (relatively speaking) for the games which means the game will always attract sponsors whom will fund the tournaments, the professional teams and players.

If Blizzard stopped funding the SC2 scene, I don't think there would be an SC2 scene left anymore. Once the money goes away, so do the professional players. In other words once Blizzard stops supporting it, SC2 as esports dies off (which isn't necessarily a bad thing anyway).

About the koreans though, an interesting thing is that Starcraft Brood War is still more popular than Starcraft 2 in South Korea. Just goes to show how incompetent Blizzard has been with Starcraft 2 (or how good BW was and still is).

As a game though Starcraft 2 will continue going on as you rightly pointed out the players who play the game are quite devoted indeed and the arcade is also pretty damn good.

Anyway I'm probably bringing too much negativity into this thread right now. There's still a good chance LOTV will turn out good and it'll probably have a very good campaign as well. It's definitely something to get hyped about .

[Charge me Doctor]

Starcraft has a fraction of the audience of DOTA and LoL and has comparable prize pools and a greater number of tournaments. Sounds pretty alive to me. Sure the number of people is shrinking but those who do follow are very devoted. Hell, most of the good koreans have been playing Starcraft of some form for over 10 years. The core is not going away.

Also, Starcraft tournaments are more accessible for players, i don't see how is starcraft dying.

@Rivera, you compare too different games with different business models. Off course free to play games will have more players, and off course team games will have more audience. And Korean SC:BW scene is bigger than SC2 mainly because of investment players have put into levering their SC:BW skill (people won't just drop off the game that they were training for years to start everything from a scratch in new game) and much higher skillcap on SC:BW due to intense micro (which is a consequence of poorly coded movement-resolver or w.e. its called) leading to more room for improvement.

Actually, i, personally, don't know many people watching LoL tournaments, they watch the big one that is supported by riot, but i haven't heard much about others. Same with dota 2, TI is very big event, but it happens only once in a year, other tournaments are not that "vocal" about themselves. And, in my opinion, watching SC2 tournament is more appealing due to amount of action happening on the screen, the only game that is more boring to watch than LoL (again, it's just my opinion) is WoT (how about 7 minute stand-off by both teams without making any move or shot after reaching passive positions in 30 seconds?), while dota has intense character draft phase, which makes it more interesting (for me) and SC2, overall, usually, has more action going on in game, but game length is quite low (30 minutes in-game time != actual 30 minutes in real life).

[Wass]

Blizzard made so many mistakes with Starcraft 2 though that it's no wonder it's dying, it doesn't deserve to live in the first place.

Once LOTV gets released I give SC2 1 year and after that it'll be gone from the "esports scene" for good as Blizzard drops its support for it. If there's ever a Starcraft 3 I hope they trash any ideas about making a good esports and focus all their efforts in making it a good fucking game.

Having said all that, Blizzard has made exactly the right moves with Hearthstone. They are focusing on making it a good game rather than a good esports and it's already kicking SC2's ass in both viewership and playerbase. Once Hearthstone is released on mobile I wouldn't be surprised if it became bigger than LoL.

Good game -> big playerbase -> big viewer numbers on twitch -> money (sponsors) -> competitive scene -> esports.

Why would you even compare a free to play cardgame with an RTS where you have to buy the game to play ranked... I agree SC2 isn't in the best shape but your argument seems dumb and falls utterly flat because of that.

On furter note, most of the die-hard competitive gamers (who push their limit) moved away from Blizzard and went on to play any kind of Moba or CS. Meaning hearthstone gets a lot more love because it's so casual to play.

[Migey]

I honestly cannot understand how in hell Hearthstone is seen as better then SC2...

I have played both quite a bit, and no longer play either. But SC2 is a very well designed and balanced game where mechanical skill trumps all and there is carefully structured interplay between the different strategies, units, etc etc. Hearthstone, on the other hand, is a game where you pray to the RNG gods for 15 minutes and if you have a carefully constructed deck, and play well, you have roughly a 50% chance of winning, regardless ofthe skill of either party.

[Nerraw]

I honestly cannot understand how in hell Hearthstone is seen as better then SC2...

I have played both quite a bit, and no longer play either. But SC2 is a very well designed and balanced game where mechanical skill trumps all and there is carefully structured interplay between the different strategies, units, etc etc. Hearthstone, on the other hand, is a game where you pray to the RNG gods for 15 minutes and if you have a carefully constructed deck, and play well, you have roughly a 50% chance of winning, regardless ofthe skill of either party.

It's probably because of how accessible that game is. With Hearthstone you can just jump in and play whenever. Starcraft requires a lot more effort.

[MerinPally]

So I'm an idiot. Was having 50% winrate as protoss like normal but I've always wanted to play as the other races so decided to start playing random. Went to a 33% winrate because I was losing all terran/zerg games, won a few as toss. Then decided that I didn't want to lose my ladder ranking or mmr, took me ages to get to plat so then I was conflicted as I'm like a magpie, I really really want the Random portraits I think they look so good.

And then I remembered unranked ladder. And proceeded to feel like a complete fucking idiot.

[May90]

One of the great advantages of playing Random is that you get to see all the matchups from both sides. For example, if you always play Toss, you may be great in PvT. But if you play Toss AND Terran, then in PvT you understand your opponent much better because you have been in his shoes many times and know better what problems he is going to face, down to such tricky things as situations in which it is hard for him to simultaneously micro and macro, or in which he has a high chance to miss something happening on the minimap.

[MerinPally]

Definitely, like my Terran and Zerg are woeful I've looked at a few terran builds and I've only ever won 2 games on EU - both against Protoss. On AM I won 4 out of 7 and they were all TvT which seemed weird. Put no effort into learning zerg so I'm not surprised but I should have won a ZvP. I'd say what it's helping on most is not the responding to situations but rather learning the amount of time between potential tech switches and how best to adapt to that.

Also helping me think of things that I should have done but never did, such as when playing Terran mainly I've seen how useful Dark Templars can be and prior to this I never really used them, was always a building I chucked down around the 17minute mark when I had quite a spare bit of money and was maxed out on a pretty decent arm. Never used them to the extent of causing huge SCV damage like happens against me but that's only because I suck, good for finding ninja bases (Which seems to happen a lot against me) and occasionally in defense.

Edit: Really want to get a new keyboard. Had some cheap crappy wireless mouse and keyboard before then I bought a razer abyssus and a mousemat and there was a noticeable improvement. With my keyboard (same one) I occasionally find selecting groups and adding them to others, shift click and a move and ctrl click to not function correctly. If I'm going to get one I'd want to get a proper one but goddamn it's all so expensive! See how much money I earn over summer.

[Wass]

Alive gaem

I started playing again, like, seriously, yesterday.

I am so bad compared to how I used to be, but it's getting better quickly again. My clan is as alive as ever atm, so it's kinda fun. I missed to play a competitive game that I'm actually "decent" at...

There's no better feeling than stomping your opponent into the dirt.