i only just started watching gsl/ssl/spl again a couple of months ago bc i didn't like the changes lotv made at first, but i def recommend the newer games
also brood war tournamen started last week i think, asl or something. tastosis catching, effort, flash and some others playing
Generally it's a lot more tier-1-focused. Not in the sense of all games being 5-minute all-ins, but generally it's not possible or good for Protoss to sit back, get 8 colossus and storm and then faceroll everything. It's mostly big gateway/bio/roach-ravager armies with a few tech units rolled in running around all over the map.
I bought LOTV and haven't even installed. Damn, memories were good.
Yeah, this seems fine
Day 3 of ASL tomorrow, highlights being Effort/Free and Zero/Mind, the Effort game being particularly important given he lost his first game ZvP to Shuttle somehow
very cool day of games, would recommend all of them. if you've never watched BW before it's a good place to start, there's no mirrors and we see all matchups, tasteless and rapid (some lol commentator covering while artosis is on holiday) do a decent job of explaining the differences between bw and sc2. links
effort/free:
Spoiler:
great back and forth game with a lot of pressure coming from both sides, nice tactics by effort to keep trying to hold free to 3 bases while at the same time just about holding off counters
sharp/larva:
Spoiler:
sharp looked better, but larva at least tried some cool stuff like guardians/queens, but had sloppy control/not enough defilers/let a bunch of stuff die to erasers
zero/mind:
Spoiler:
mind pulling out some hilarious old school builds (proxy factory lifted into the main, two port wraith) which don't really work
last/best:
Spoiler:
weird one, last bunker rushes and gets best down to about four probes before goon range finishes, it then goes somewhat into an ordinary game before best fakes arbiters into carriers, best then can't do enough damage before last masses goliaths and wins
final set of group games for asl will be sunday/tuesday, the situations are:
group a - everyone is 1-1 so shuttle/free and effort/ssak are straight games to advance
group c - same situation, zero/sea and flash/mind being the final games
group d - last and hero have already advanced
group b - ends up in tiebreakers half the time, sharp (2-0) plays jaehoon (1-1), while piano (1-1) plays larva (0-2), although i'm thinking that sharp and piano win which would avoid this
Male-dominated video games become spectator e-sports for predominantly male viewers because they sustain a different project than celebrating physical excellence. They don’t showcase a specific form of male-bodied performance so much as support a specific sort of male spectator: a straight middle-class boy full of resentment and patriarchal rage. This is and has been the sports fan par excellence.
EDIT: Hee hee!
Quote:
E-sports prefigure new modes of xenophobia for a new type of globalized man, who sees the world divided not by national borders and politics but by corporate brands, voluntary interests and investments, and technological necessity. These are sports for a world where money faces no borders but the poor face nothing but borders, a world where competition is unbounded by culture and unmoored from history. Fully mediated by expensive technologies requiring supply chains stretching around the globe, fully divorced from any precedent reaching back beyond neoliberalism, fully alienated from human bodies and the ethic they demand, e-sports are spectacles forged to suit this historical moment, an emergent and novel solution to the age-old problem of shoring up the commitment of bourgeois subjects in the face of destabilizing crisis.
This where the most successful foreign player of recent years is probably scarlett
The author has this figured out too:
Quote:
Or maybe as someone who increasingly doesn’t recognize themselves in the gender position of “man,” e-sports have provided my ego with regular injections of toxic masculinity to keep me from facing the full implications of my femme genderqueerness.
final set of group games for asl will be sunday/tuesday, the situations are:
group a - everyone is 1-1 so shuttle/free and effort/ssak are straight games to advance
group c - same situation, zero/sea and flash/mind being the final games
group d - last and hero have already advanced
group b - ends up in tiebreakers half the time, sharp (2-0) plays jaehoon (1-1), while piano (1-1) plays larva (0-2), although i'm thinking that sharp and piano win which would avoid this
jesus christ at today's games, just awful. watch jaehoon's game but ignore the rest
Spoiler:
effort seemed to be doing quite well, multitasking like a pro, sniping off tons of stuff with scourge/parasite, then just lost as he switched back to mutas with no upgrades which got torn apart obv
jaehoon actually played kind of well to beat sharp and force himself into at least playoffs, had some very touch and go reaver drop play before finishing it off with carriers, this despite forgetting zealot speed and not getting the interceptor upgrade until he's already won
zero also out, sea just blind guessed that it'd be mutas and preemptively got turrets, zero could do no harrassment and failed to snipe the academy before stim researched, then just lost
last went fast ebay and hit a +1 timing that simply ended the game really early
so i guess if you like tvt you'll love the rest of the tournament, 5 already through to the quarters with the possibility of six if (when) piano beats larva which'd make a sharp/piano/jaehoon playoff for two places
I've been watching the BW thing here and there, just caught effort vs free last night, that game was sick.
It does make me wonder though - wouldn't proper observer panels (supply counts, income/resources, etc) contribute a lot to the game? It seems puzzling that after BW started to take off as an esport, Blizzard never thought to help it out by making it easier to watch.
Part of it might be "lol1998" but 5-10 years after the game came out it would be seriously easy to broadcast this sort of data over a network to an observing PC or whatever.
In some way I think it adds to the unknown that it's incomplete information. I don't know if you ever watched the original series of late night poker, but while they basically invented the whole camera for cards concept, they didn't give you the information immediately, which added a bunch to the broadcast, i.e. "what does he have?"
I did not watch the original one. I can see how that would be somewhat interesting, like watching the main event final table live when you have no hole card info whatsoever - but forced to choose one I think I prefer having more complete information as a viewer, which gives me more insight into each player's perspective and thought process on the game.
free neglects observers as shuttle goes DT's, doesn't end the game but free's too far behind
piano/larva is a must see
Spoiler:
because piano goes into full troll mode with battlecruisers and mass firebat drops
flash/mind is also pretty good
Spoiler:
mind tries 2 fact all-in, flash is somehow able to hold, not lose his cc, then takes out all of mind's tanks/marines for an auto gg
best/mong is meh
Spoiler:
best basically outplays mong the whole game, pretty poor to start then he recalls with his first arb and does a lot of damage, is able to macro streamroll from there (heck, he had 2 gate arbs ffs)
so quarter finals are:
Spoiler:
ssak/2nd in tiebreakers on 14th, sea/hero on 16th, shuttle/1st in tiebreakers on 21st, last/flash on 23rd. piano/jaehoon/sharp playoff on sunday
asl tiebreakers went on for a while. first three games weren't good at all, and ended up 1-1-1 so we went again. if you have time watch the second round
game 4 is good:
Spoiler:
jaehoon finally makes arbs into carriers work, mainly because he's able to mass enough of them, and back it up with ground army plus templars/archons, really pretty protoss play
game 5 features super rare strategies and is a must see:
Spoiler:
piano goes for some sort of midas-style 6 marine plus tank/vulture pressure (although he forgets the vulture obviously), when that doesn't work he goes bio, and demonstrates why nobody goes bio vs protoss
game 6 don't bother:
Spoiler:
piano goes cc first, which ends up being too greedy