Heart of the Swarm

**Gredival** · 2013-06-13 16:53

To be fair, in Korea they have progamers exercise daily as part of the playing/training regimen.

**geno** · 2013-06-13 17:58

Not to mention, I'm sure it's less about showing off atheltic potential and more showing off style. The stars of big teams like SKT1 are basically idols to a lot of teenagers and 20-somethings, I'm sure Nike is super happy to get a chance to put their stuff front and center for that age group in Korea.

**Matthias** · 2013-06-13 19:02

Originally Posted by Gredival

To be fair, in Korea they have progamers exercise daily as part of the playing/training regimen.

ahh ok didn't know about that. but yeah still, funny.

**Matthias** · 2013-06-17 13:52

rain lost two games last night, including the match-deciding 7th "ace" game. guy looked so distraught afterwards. poor guy. pvp really does seem to be his weakness.

**geno** · 2013-06-17 18:13

Used to be one of his biggest strengths too. Something about the way it plays out now in HotS though that he just isn't getting right.

Bisu did better than him against Jangbi, which as unfortunate as that is for Rain, is fucking awesome for Bisu. I love both Jangbi and Bisu, so I'm pretty hyped for both of them starting to get really good in SC2 finally.

**Matthias** · 2013-06-17 20:43

that was the first time i'd seen bisu play (in person i mean) since that crazy pvz game i posted about earlier. and yeah he did great.

rain is still probably the overall best player in skt1 as he still wins the most, far more often than he loses, and always in spectacular fashion but... yeah i dunno pvp is just his achilles' heel i guess. seriously he looked so heartbroken last night, and later i saw him downstairs in the mall area as they were leaving and he still looked devastated. poor guy.

**Matthias** · 2013-06-24 08:08

rough night for skt1; 4-1 loss to woongjin stars. bisu was the only one who won.

question... so woongjin is the #1 rated team and has already won the proleague 2012-2013 season. their ranking points (or whatever that number is called) is 40+ where as the next three teams are in the mid 10's. how are they so dominant? do they have an incredible coaching staff? or perhaps are they the richest team, and have the money to buy the best players? winning by 40+ when the next teams are in the 10's is a little ridiculous.

**geno** · 2013-06-24 22:55

I think it's in part because they were among the earliest to transition from BW to SC2. There were rumors of them practicing SC2 months before any of the other major teams, and it was basically common knowledge that Soulkey took to the game rather naturally before we ever saw a single game of SC2 played by any of the KeSPA players. This gave them a huge head-start in the beginning of the season and is a large part of how they managed to build a pretty spectacular lead. KT, SKT, Samsung Khan, and to a lesser extent CJ entus were pretty much the star teams of BW, and thus were forced to make a transition to the game much later as they were all still majorly competitive for the last BW title matches.

Woongjin's decision to focus so much on SC2 was pretty evident during the mixed-game season. They started well, but were eventually dragged down by poor BW results. CJ, SKT, and Samsung all did very well that season by having some players who were fairly good at SC2 and other players who were still in top form in BW. When it went full-SC2, SKT brought in a lot of SC2-coaching and player talent to help fill out the roster which is why they've stayed pretty competitive. Samsung just brute forced their success riding on the backs of their SC2 stars while BW-gods like Jangbi and Stork caught up. The strategy wholly backfired for CJ though as their SC2 players could only carry them so far and many of their BW talents either quit or otherwise didn't take to the game (Movie and Snow, for instance).

Of course, even disregarding that early advantage of focusing so heavily on SC2, they've done a lot to maintain their position over the season. I do believe they brought in some SC2 coaching (though many teams did), but mostly their team was just extremely motivated and excited with the game. Several of their players took to the playstyle of SC2 very natrually, particularly their Protoss line-up which to this day seems to be playing a different game than any other Protosses out there (they love some wacky builds and seem to use more air timings than anyone else).

Historically speaking, the "rich" teams so-to-speak, are KT Rolster and SKT T1, the two owned by telecoms. They've had the longest history of being able to afford the biggest name players, while most of the other teams had a more focus on developing less prominent names. They've each certainly raised talents of their own as well, but you'd be surprised how many big names had their starts on other teams (Bisu had much of his success on MBC game, and Flash was originally a practice partner for WeMadeFox for instance). Even longer back, there was a period where they were even more explicitly buying out talent and forming dream-teams, which is a large part of why those two teams hold a vast majority of proleague titles. This is also why both teams, despite having such a BW focus until late, seem to be transitioning very well. They've purchased many good players to fill out their roster and be practice partners for their star players, as well as coaches to assist in the process. SKT1 in particular I believe has picked up at least 3 players (Parting, Brown, Dark) and a head coach (Boxer!) that were all intimately familiar with SC2, just off the top of my head.

Finally, about relative skill between the teams. I'm not sure how much credit I'd put in any of the rankings or graphs you see from much of the KeSPA scene. They have a tendancy to overhype past results and not give as much credit to recent ones. This is why the KeSPA rankings often feel quite out of touch, and is part of why it seems like Woongjin has such a big lead right now. The truth is, they don't anymore.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft...2013_Proleague

Take a look at each round's statistics. Woongjin has the lead they do because they performed ridiculously well and on a consistent basis in each of the early rounds, but have actually faltered fairly badly in the last three. They were second in Round 5, but only by game score, similar to round 4, their match score of 4-3 was actually their worst of the season and was actually in a 3 way tie at that position. Hell, the rankings of that round were ridiculously competitive all-around, one or two matches go a different way and that entire list is shaken up. Round 6 has been even worse for them, sitting convincingly in the middle of the pack. Don't get me wrong, they are obviously still a great team, they just seem to be falling a bit behind when compared to the rate of improvement for much of their competition these days. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them fall in the playoff finals to any of the qualified teams.

**Matthias** · 2013-06-26 19:39

well i guess that makes sense.

when i came to korea i didn't really know about any of the teams, knew very few individual players' names, i was just a big boxer fanboy as i mentioned earlier. so i saw he was skt1's team and just figured ok they'll be my team then, and have cheered for them ever since. good choice though, i found out later bisu was there as well which was a bonus, and rain and fantasy have become two of my favorite active players.

finally got to play the HotS campaign, story was so disappointing.

**Fireal** · 2013-06-29 16:38

Hey dudes,
Just started playing SC2 again recently. I was high plat/low diamond in WoL, but I'm finding myself struggling hard in platinum HotS. I got placed in silver and plowed through silver and gold in 28 games, got into platinum and now I'm losing 70%. Anyone wanna practice? :D Fireal#1158

**Matthias** · 2013-07-08 01:59

One thing I'm finding interesting watching all these pro games lately is that programers hardly ever use much static defense. I guess I'm still stuck in the brood wars mindset of the first thing I do being setting up a perimeter, but I have seen numerous close calls that required them to recall their army or something where I couldn't help but think a missile turret/sunken crawler/spore crawler/photon cannon or two could have prevented that whole issue. But then again I'm certainly in no position to critique since even the lowest ranked kespa player could go to town on me.

**geno** · 2013-07-08 07:04

Brood War wasn't that different really. It's pretty common for pros to skimp on defense, and always has been. You don't want to prevent what isn't going to happen, top-tier pros walk a very fine line between just barely holding something off and outright losing for a good reason. They try to scrape together every advantage they can get, and static defense isn't cheap. At least, not at their level.

I found that as SC2 developed from the beta, games tended to get longer and longer. Pros do anything they can to win, and usually that starts with the cheesiest and cheapest tactics in the book. Early SC2 games were mostly 1 base vs 1 base and there were a WHOLE lotta worker pulls and the like. Eventually though, people figured out the minimum required defense to get past that stage of the game and then auto-win with better tech/economy/army. So now, games have shifted to the other end of spectrum, where each side is trying to cut more corners than their opponent, doing the absolute bare minimum with their defense and putting all that focus into other avenues. And some people take that even further, assuming their opponent is going to skimp on defense, they ignore it entirely. While also doing the greediest build imaginable.

Then they get punished by some cheese and end up looking like they don't know what defense even is, coming full circle. Which is probably what you end up seeing a lot of the time. Mind games. Kind of why pro-games are often poor things to emulate in actual play.

Static is extraordinarily effective at lower levels though, because players tend to be floating tons of extra money and are usually far less crisp with their builds and timings anyways. The difference in army/tech is thus usually negligible, but the effectiveness of anti-harass is amazing.

**Not Kuno** · 2013-07-08 07:21

It also depends on the matchup, and what you scout. Scouting a Spire going down is going to prompt some sort of defense. Usually just something to give the army enough time to push things away. Also verses terran it is common now to see a spore and spine at each expansion for a Zerg.

**Kuishen** · 2013-08-06 04:24

I'm trying to get back into the game as I just bought HotS, playing through the campaign and all that.

Been met with some weird situations in matchmaking though cause I have like a general idea what the new units are used for but nothing really specific cause I watch various SC2 related stuff.

Is there any place I could find some decent starter builds to practice? Most of the stuff in the TL wiki seems dated and/or super cheesy. I know builds aren't everything but it would be nice to have a place to start as I'm completely out of practice and with the new units I don't know how the meta has changed.

I /was/ high gold a long time ago but I'm probably low gold/high silver now, if it matters. I play Zerg, but would like to start doing random occasionally. The only concrete thing I know is that ZvZ is basically the exact same crap: ling/baneling into muta or roach all-ins.

Also what maps should I veto on zerg, some of them look retarded but at the same time could potentially be good.

EDIT: I'm retarded and didn't even look at the TL forums, I'll browse those but feel free to link me to specific things.

**Misuicide** · 2013-08-06 22:01

I've been picking up my SC2 a lot lately, and it feels good. My skill is coming back, yet its almost impossible to get out of gold. win after win after win and no promotion, kind of embarrassing. This is 2v2s. 1s Will be a different story as soon as I am comfortable enough to do it.

**Kuishen** · 2013-08-06 22:06

Originally Posted by Misuicide

I've been picking up my SC2 a lot lately, and it feels good. My skill is coming back, yet its almost impossible to get out of gold. win after win after win and no promotion, kind of embarrassing. This is 2v2s. 1s Will be a different story as soon as I am comfortable enough to do it.

If it makes you feel any better I won all 5 of my placement matches in under 15 mins and got placed into Silver. lol 3 of them in under 10.

**Misuicide** · 2013-08-07 15:57

It really doesn't lol Kuishen

**Kuishen** · 2013-08-09 23:34

Super late to the party but I just beat the campaign and overall I think they did a better job than with WoL.

It had a way better build up and more satisfying ending, and all of the missions had a common thread, whereas in WoL each mission set was disconnected from the rest. I generally dislike the Warcraft 3 model of heroes in an RTS but I felt it was ok here. You got the sense of how powerful Kerrigan was as you progressed. The evolution missions were pretty cool as in WoL I would have liked the ability to test the unit upgrades before choosing them, and some of them were broken as hell. Reaper lings and banelings? Dear god. The poison ultralisk one was fantastic too. Overall the dialogue and storyline were more cohesive.

That being said there were a couple of things that annoyed me:

-Mixing in utility things like the auto-extractors and 25% more gas thing in with her abilities was lame because it's obviously way better to choose that stuff than abilities for Kerrigan.
-Removing the basic unit upgrades in lieu of choosing one of the 3 things. I liked that you could switch them at will but putting the hydra range and zergling speed on those was retarded because I had to choose those anyways because those units are worthless without them. No Roach speed was also retarded.
-No larvae injects... that bugged the hell out of me. I don't know if the larvae per minute was higher or the same but completely changing a mechanic for no reason was irritating.
-You got some of the evolution missions WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too late. And some were useless. As much as I love Lurkers I did not even have a reason to use them or like the swarm host one because by the time you get the swarm host one you have ultras and those are a far better investment than swarm hosts. Muta one was disappointing too. Iunno, maybe some of that will be rectified when I play on a higher difficulty.

Story related gripes:

Spoiler: show

Does choosing to side with Nova in WoL have any effects on the way certain scenes played out?

EDIT: Forgot the most important gripe:

No Radio Free Zerg song at the end of the credits. Terran Up the Night was awesome and I expected at the very least a new version of Radio Free Zerg. C'mon son.

**Misuicide** · 2013-08-11 21:11

Anyone watching WCS: America? Fantasic games between Polt and Jaedong right now

**Kuishen** · 2013-08-12 21:29

Ok is the MMR system broken? I'm in silver and I just went up against a diamond player, and I've lost 3/5 games that I've played today. He just insta-quit so now the system is going to think I can beat diamond level players. >_>

ZVZ is the worst btw, I hate it so much.

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