And I suppose I'm strawmanning a bit since now I realize no one ever said stephano was a top 5 player or anything

Dude, how about most of his matches? You are asking me to pick specific games out of a careers worth.

Put it this way, he had over a 50% win rate on stream vs GM terrans in korea going ling only at the end of WoL. Literally only lings. Thats how talented he was.

This is a guy who just took advantage of the meta or imbalances? Man he made the meta. He revolutionised ZvP with roach ling maxes and ZvT with infestor ling when everyone else was going ling bling muta. He was one of the very first to go infestor BL in ZvP as well (see vs Kiwikaki at IPL 3 for example).

You obviously don;t follow the game, and that's fine, but please don't pretend to have a legitimate opinion on it without knowing anything.

LaShawnda-At his utter peak he probably was top 1 ZvP and top 5 ZvT. His ZvZ was not as strong and probably meant he was never quite a top 5 player overall. But he wasn't far away. He wasn't going to win a GSL but again, at his peak he could have gone very deep. Pity we never got to see it.

i dont get how me not having watching hours of him streaming or games vs kiwikaki means that i dont know anything about the game...

so the first person to do hellbat drops or switch widow mines for tanks created the meta too? living off the build that loses the least hardly seems revolutionary.

its absolutely ludicrous if you think his mechanics were the reason for being top 5 in any matchup and not that he just exploited a broken race the most.

didnt he complain that mothership was op? lol

Suppy could probably take a game off theognis though.

Spore crawler change (3x damage instead of 2x damage vs bio, aka mutas) is now live. I look forward to trying out roach/hydra/infestor compositions now and still losing

Yes, that's actually exactly how it works. Whoever creates (or more often popularizes) a build gets the credit. Stephano popularized both infestor/ling in ZvT and roach max all-ins in ZvP. Both of those styles completely revolutionized their respective match-ups. It doesn't really matter whether they were broken strategies or not, because the entire evolution of the metagame has revolved around discovering broken strategies and exploiting them. Cherry-picking Stephano and saying "hurr durr he just abused broken **** all day" isn't fair when literally every single pro player does the same thing. It just so happens Stephano actually innovated those strategies on more occasions than possibly any other player in the game.

And if you want matches where he didn't go infestor/BL, you could start with every single ZvT he played at IPL3 and probably for several months after that. He got famous by smashing Terrans with the aforementioned infestor/ling into ultra style.

It's fine that you don't like him, but don't spread blatently wrong facts to discredit him because of your opinion on him. I mean, the fact that you think his ZvZ is decent shows how much you actually know. It's complete trash btw.

ok, i will readily admit my understanding of the evolution of the game is sub par, sorry stephano and crew. i thought you had to keep evolving to be able to be the head of the meta. didnt fruitdealer do that first?

i also dont think i said anything was fact, i asked repeatedly for examples even.

since, from what i have seen, he played pretty soft tournies, beating other subpar zergs that could win in wol doesnt seem far fetched to call his zvz decent. i would say he was horrible vs the best zergs, but he was also far less skilled than the best of any race.

anyway, i am happy to see him quit like he did, sorry for getting this thread heated, just seems weak to leave in the time where his innovation was needed most.

I respect the decision by Stephano. He made some money playing a game that he was good at, but he definitely knew from the start that it wasn't something he could do for the rest of his life. Probably the right timing too

nada respectfully disagrees

wow, this. just fired up meta on my computer (instead of my phone where i usually just listen) and man his glasses look rly stupid

lol @ you first saying he's quitting because he's not winning anymore then making this post ignoring 4+ ppl telling you this was not out of the blue and he'd stated long ago that he was gonna quit sooner rather than later

flash didn't look like he was in danger of falling from code s at any time during that .

MKP vs Life coming up now, MKP hasn't done anything in forever but I'm still excited!

EDIT: should have been in the GSL topic, but I guess it's fine here too.

just played a tvz where he did a weak, late ass roach push that did more damage than it should have, but i held it off. Then he went for a mass hydra push, then mass roaches, then mass swarm hosts, then mass corruptors, then mass zerglings, then mass infestors.....then i think he ran out of resources.

Given that the most popular TvZ build atm (at least, that I've seen) is reaper opening into fast 3 CCs into biomine - how do I exploit this to my maximum benefit since I can usually tell pretty fast that a Terran is going into a defensive + economical turtling mode for awhile in the midgame? Fast 4 bases? Superfast lair? (if the latter, then what tech? I'm more hesitant to go mutas vs bio since you can never engage their army or pick stuff off really with marines everywhere)

Banelingbust

not to restart an argument, but if someone starts out by saying they'll only play for a year then keep pushing back retiring til they cant win, maybe even a full year extra, thats not exactly a planned move. its just a free excuse out.

that's the thing though- he is quitting because he's not winning. sure, he talked about quitting at some point, but if you think his quitting doesn't have a lot to do with him not doing well lately, you're crazy.

they had idra on meta the other night and he basically said the exact same thing.

hes quitting because its the best decision for him at this point in his life, i dont see what the arguement is....

this argument is dumb.

please tell me all of the elite e-sport pros who quit/retired when they were absolutely crushing everything. most completely fade into oblivion or are pretty much useless competitively before you hear some blurb about them retiring.

if stephano leaves as planned, he'll probably still be retiring at the highest level out of anyone i can remember.

the argument is basically about how much his recent failures have contributed to him retiring

obviously quitting now might be the best decision for him (we have no idea if the kid has any future potential in another career), but people like gambonee and I seem to think the fact that he sucks now has a lot to do with why he decided to stop and jahonion/rayzboy seem to think this was a preplanned thing that wasn't going to be delayed

there's probably some middle ground where he was going to quit unless he made $X and had $Y predicted future outcome. in that sense, we're both right- he both planned to leave, and ended up leaving because he started sucking. I have a feeling though that variables X and Y aren't that high, and he probably wanted to keep playing but wasn't reasonably able to predict that for himself.

i don't understand why you think that. everything i've witnessed via stream or interviews or whatever made me think that he wanted to quit because he doesn't really enjoy it that much anymore but figured it'd be dumb to walk away from all that free $$$.

lack of desire and results are pretty highly correlated. anyone thinking that he is giving 110%, but is choosing to retire because he just doesn't have what it takes anymore is insane imo.

yea this is a stupid argument because it's basically a game of "what is a 20 year old kid thinking"

who knows

I've been opening with gas before pool for early speed and pressuring with 20ish lings. The build looks like:

15 hatch
17 gas
16 pool
17 ovie
queens
start speed @ 100 gas, pull two out
injects with both queens
drone till 30ish
ovie
pure lings up to and including your first injects
take a 3rd behind + drones

I've had a lot of success so far doing this. People usually have a widow mine out, I think, so watch for that. Otherwise, unless it's a map like Derelict Watcher where they can wall super easily, it's pretty easy to get damage done. A lot of the time the game is just over after I attack, whether or not they leave. If they don't, I drone up to full 3 base saturation + gasses for free and kill them with large amounts of muta/ling/bling

I think this is the best option. I guess the quick muta build I was doing at the end of WoL might do okay too, but mines make that more difficult I think.
I've only been doing this vs gas openings, though. Against gasless builds (so basically 1rax expo), I just do the same thing without the ling pressure and use the speed to defend hellions instead of relying on queens, since that's more my style.

I suppose you could also try the Life 1/1 baneling bust, but I think you can get to that from my build anyway as a follow-up. Basically just watch Life play and do that. That's what I do.

Assuming you mean walling the natural? Does making them lift the natural + killing a bunker and some marines and a few workers basically win?

Basically. This is how all but a couple of my ZvTs thusfar have gone:

-I do damage with my lings, sometimes I just win right there (even won a game where I only sent 8 lings because they were mistakenly made lol).
-Even if I don't end the game, I have complete map control for basically forever if I play it out correctly. That allows me to get up to 70 drones completely uncontested.
-Another product of my map control is that Terran cannot take their 3rd without first taking back map control. However, because I jumped out to such an economic lead, it's impossible for them to build up a big enough army to do so because I have the econ to build up faster than them. When you combine that with already having map control, the Terran cannot ever outstrip you enough to regain map control unless you mess up.
-So, they're forced into a 2base AI, which is simple enough to hold with maxed muta/ling/bane

Even if you don't do damage, you still retain (or at least can fight for) map control, as long as you don't throw away those lings. 20 lings can kill 4 hellions pretty easily if the Terran mismicros (and they typically do, both at your level and mine). If that happens, we're back to where we were above, though maybe not in quite a nice position. The biggest thing is denying the Terran 3rd. If you can deny it once comfortably (meaning you actually force a lift and retreat and not just running the SCVs or a quick lift), you should be able to deny it indefinitely assuming you got your economy in order.

One thing to note is not to get too greedy. For instance, I haven't once droned up a 4th base, and haven't even planted the hatchery sometimes. It's just unnecessary once you deny the 3rd base of Terran, and probably one of the few ways to die to the 2base AI if you try to drone it.

Edit: Sheth made a great post a long time ago about that concept. Basically there are levels of income (1base, 2 base part sat, 2 base full, etc), and the idea is that you don't need to go more than one or two levels above what your opponent is doing. Any more than that and you risk getting punished for being too greedy.

So, in our case, we're containing our opponent to a 2 base economy (maybe even equivalent to a 2.5 base saturation, or 3 not fully saturated bases, because of MULEs). Knowing that, we're fine staying at 3 fully saturated bases, or maybe taking a 4th and sending a few drones. Any further than that, and we start getting "too far ahead" of our opponent and leave ourselves vulnerable to AIs.