Life is the one who was caught throwing games, right?

Random ZvP observation after an SSL game: I do not understand the baneling-heavy ling-hydra-bane style against Protosses on immortal-archon armies. I routinely see Zergs stick with this composition trying to grind down the Protoss while ignoring that banelings cannot be considered cost effective against either of those units.

(honestly, I'm not sure where the conventional wisdom of baneling-heavy comps against anything other than zealot or adept-heavy armies came from)

So I thought Starcraft Anthology was supposed to be free now but I can't for the life of me figure out how to download it. It says "Sold Out" for some reason

It's not free yet until they release the 1.18 patch.

I think it's just Zergs being behind in the meta atm. It sounds ok against the "lol i maek prism and spam adept" harass that was popular recently, but Protosses have evolved past it and Zerg haven't yet caught up. Could just be variance too since Zergs were crushing the first two weeks of SSL and maybe regressed to the mean a little this week.

Another random observation: I think this is the most passive era in the history of the game. And not even just Zergs, but all races. A hilarious side-effect of this that I've noticed while playing is how complacent everyone has become. I win an astounding amount of games by using my first injects on lings and walking into their base. And I'm doing this on reaction, not even blindly. It's amusing to see Protosses not even wall in and just assume their MSC with one overcharge will save them from 24 speedings. Or Terrans who think a single bunker without a wall is enough. Back in HotS I used to do this and be surprised when I straight up won the game off of it. Now I'm surprised when I don't.

god dammit blizzard jesus

in the meantime i found an old download client which just immediately shut down upon trying to use it but is seemingly now working by running in compatibility mode? so, lol?

ASL 3 groups (Flash, Sea, Jaedong, Best seeded to round of 16), starting next Tuesday:

A: Shuttle/Purpose (amateur zerg)/Soulkey/Mong
B: Effort/Snow/Shine/Free
C: Bisu/Mini/Light/Jaehoon
D: herO/Lazy/Rain/sSak
E: Guemchi/ggaemo/Pusan/Stork
F: Last/HyuN/Movie/Larva

Group B looks like it should be fun, although Snow was never that great against non-T, group C is brutal for Light. Sadly ggaemo is in a group with three P so we cannot repeat this classic moment (be careful with sound levels):

Poor light

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N920A using Tapatalk

Not sure why SC2 died such a death in Korea. Or never caught on at all with the public. Whilst a lot hate it compared to Brood War it's mainly the success of overwatch and LoL that makes it puzzling. Dota 2 never catching on at all is also strange. The Korean gaming public are weird as **** is my conclusion and just follow trends so whichever games snowballs first wins.

Yeah, maybe, it's just surprising to me how long they stick with this composition and keep remaking this composition against units it performs very, very badly against. Like, morph a ****ing lurker den and spend your gas there ffs.

TL had an article recently about how less polarized is cheese is now (12 pool vs 18 hatch/18 pool is a smaller difference than 6 pool vs 15 hatch/15 pool) and the effect that has on the metagame; probably the same cause of the kind of behavior you're seeing. I'm not as well versed in other matchups but in ZvP as an example, a Protoss who undertakes the most basic defenses should be fine against early Zerg cheese; stargate units kill everything Zerg can attack with until hydras and a few adepts with a wall can kill basically infinite zerglings. So why the hell would Zerg cheese (except in the case where, as you note, Protoss fails hard at even this most basic level of defense) and hurt their economy when it's so easy for their opponent to defend against it?

Solar vs Bunny from GSL this morning

For the old ones among us, GoRush is hosting an old people four team double elimination team league with >5m won as a prize pool

Teams:

NaDa/HyuN/Rock
Zeus/PianO/FBH
Nal_rA/ggaemo/ClouD
Pusan/Iris/GoRush

Think only Zeus is old enough for me to not know who he is, as he last played Proleague ten years ago that's before I paid attention to the scene

Also SC2 will soon be balanced as David Kim has moved on to other things

The old starcraft anthology is still not available yet

Good god blizzard

GSL Super Tournament ro8 spoiler:

After many, many times losing to 3 base turtle Protoss into mass carrier, I finally found a good counter:
- take lots of bases
- double spire upgrades
- build a crapton of corruptors and a few vipers
- abduct the mship, then just target down carriers one by one while the interceptors tickle you with your upgraded armor

I've tried going hydras against this and it always loses. It kinda sucks because this should only win against bad players (good players, while doing this, would also do zealot harass/**** around with warp prisms/etc and not let you get away with skimping on ground army so hard) but it feels good to finally beat such a cheesy build.

re: ^

Nothing really worth while watching in group A of ASL apart from Mong/Soulkey and then the winner's match if you have time

Any of you guys wanna play some BW sometimes?

Is it live now? Also yes.

Group B wasn't too great, the first two games can be ignored as they're just one player not making enough stuff to hold an early rush and losing. Winners game was OK:



Loser's game wasn't good either, player with the tech didn't do enough with it and then lost to better econ/upgrades/flanks. Final game is the only one really worth watching, an awful lot of base denial/unorthodox play/tech switching into a tight low econ but army vs better econ but getting it denied enough that he can't make an army which is in the balance for a while

I enjoyed that last game

Blizzard decided not to release custom hotkeys with BW 1.18. lol BW purists doing everything they can to stop more people from getting into it

that's pretty dumb

if someone really wanted to customize their hotkeys, they could use a custom keyboard layout and it would be worth it for someone really serious about the game to do that

but there's no reason they should have to do that

the p hotkey for making probes is pretty dumb

at least zerg has sd which is right where you want it