That is pretty funny

that's sad but I'm pretty sure it goes a lot deeper than that. Pretty much any non top tier player has an incentive to fix a game here and there. There just isn't enough money in the scene to justify throwing away an education.

Bad week for SC2, great week for SC2 jokes

Potentially interesting struggle brewing - Twitch and Azubu both said they're banning match fixers from streaming on their platforms. Afreeca, who is now running the GSL, said they will NOT ban them, and it seems like Afreeca is kinda shady in general (like, they advertise illegal betting sites for SC and stuff like that too, or something). There's growing resentment at Afreeca for not doing more to help clean up the e-sports scene, especially now that they have a somewhat official position in it via broadcasting GSL.

I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard eventually steps in and takes GSL away from them, although who knows who it goes to at that point.

I saw on reddit there is a rumor that GSL players may go on strike if GomTV (now Afreeca) allows suspended players to stream. Blizzard is going to need to step up anyway, it's partially their fault for not subsidizing the scene enough.

Apparently Afreeca has also banned some popular streamers simply because they moved to another platform.

Personally, I don't care if they allow match fixers to stream or not. They should absolutely be banned from legitimate competition, but trying to prevent them from running a personal stream seems over the top to me. If people want to watch, they will, and if they don't want to watch, then they won't.

I guess this is what passes for a platinum Terran these days:

- ZvT on Coda
- I hatch first, go look at his base, see a late rax, I'm thinking gas first, I poke at the SCV while I make some extra drones, then go into his base and see...no gas. I realize that either he's terrible or I'm being proxied.
- I scout around and see a completed barracks and an in-progress bunker at my natural.
- Panicking, I cancel my natural, and with the gas I've mined so far start a baneling nest, spines, lings, queens when my pool finishes
- With no clue what to do, I decide to blindly hope he's overcommitting at my natural, and run by his bunker with lings to bane bust his wall. Maybe I'll get lucky and he has nothing home...
- ...and with that, when my banes get to the top of his ramp, they see two bunkers, a high ground CC, and a tech lab factory. Needless to say, my bane bust does not do much.

So, I'm basically as behind as someone can possibly be in this situation. His defense at home meant that he had basically not committed anything at my natural, and right after this he removed his one set of marines and salvaged his bunker. I double expand.

Anyway, here's where LOL plat Terrans comes into play: somehow I'm ahead in workers after the bane bust when looking at the replay - 22 to 20, though down 34-29 in supply. But I basically keep up with him in supply despite doing my typical awful macro, until losing like 12 drones to a double medivac marine drop (but still keep the worker lead). I keep waiting for the killshot to come figuring I have to be so insanely behind, but he's too timid to ever attack, and I have lings out that see he's taking a super late third and I start to wonder if I can actually win.

I wind up maxing out and getting 2/2 without him ever attacking (he has 1/1 lol) besides drops and reducing creep spread, and by the time we finally take an engagement, it turns out he can't split at all and we go from 200-150 in supply to 160-75, as I kill his 3rd and cancel the 4th he was trying to take, and then it's game over for him. Naturally I made swarm hosts to troll.

Cliffs: platinum players are really bad now.

pretty standard for someone who cheeses like that and probably expects you to panic all-in

the money's there, it's just so top heavy (>40% to winner in gsl, >50% to winner in ssl) that unless you're right at the top of the food chain you'd be better off at mcdonalds

Afreeca gave in and said they'll ban the streams of match fixers.

I agree but even then, the tournament prizepool is just a bonus, players can't rely on that to earn a decent living. Truth is, when I see an ad for kingston RAM, I don't give a ****ing **** because if I'm watching a twitch stream, I at least know how to google "best ram 2015" and I won't pay the extra money for having kingston engraved onto my memory sticks. Do you see what the issue is here? Brands have no incentive to advertise anymore.

I'm not trying to be the pessimistic guy here but the whole eSport business model is just bull**** to me. I may as well give my money to unicef or whatever charity. Say what you want but to tweet "thanks for supporting x team, here I bought 20 euros worth of peripherals" is nothing but charity.

The only thing I can see is game designers providing the money for a healthy eSport scene just because it gives them exposure.

how many teams actually have decent sponsors nowadays to provide salaries? i mean you've still got skt/kt/cj/samsung that have been around since the dawn of time, but it's not like any of the others are putting in decent cash. jin air maybe. i can't imagine that foreign teams are rolling in it either. this isn't the halcyon days of brood war where you had 12 teams that went very deep and were all (bar ace) bankrolled by major companies. can't imagine the foreign scene is any better either although i've paid next to zero attention to that after wcs destroyed everything else.

obv some may actually be making money from lol/dota etc and are running sc2 teams just because they can

It feels like time has gone by so fast this year, lol me being old I guess:
- Day 1 of the WCS Finals is this Sunday, where they're playing the full ro16, followed by the ro8 onwards in two weeks on the 6th and 7th. Go LIFE! I've got my bracket filled out!
- LotV comes out two weeks from tomorrow, hard to believe we're this close to this PoS game being retail and killing SC2 forever, at least building Protoss deathballs in the campaign will be fun

In other news, I played that same plat Terran twice last night. Games were hilarious, both because of how bad I was and the fact that I still won:
1: he does a big marine-marauder push off 2 bases with a couple hellbats and mines. I'm not prepared enough (no bane speed yet, for one) so I sac my 3rd, he kills it and walks away without a big fight or anything, build some units, retake my third when I'm more ready for resistance but by that point he's basically turtling on 2 bases or something. Like, I plant lings at his 3rd/4th and I'm on 4 bases by the time he even tries to take a third. Eventually I max out on ling/bling/ultra/muta and attack, kill his 3rd, lift his natural, then start trolling with swarm hosts while taking 7 more bases. I laugh to myself every time he does a drop at a base while I'm pinning him in on 2 bases because the cost of him losing his two medivacs + the units in them (which he does, to my muta flock, every time) is absolutely catastrophic when he isn't mining, like, what does he think he's accomplishing?

2: he does the one-rax-at-home-one-proxy-rax build again, and I scout it early, but plan poorly and make my spine too far forward like a goddamn noob (or like a KR GM, all Zergs do that :/) and while I kill all his marines that he had attacking my natural, I barely lose the hatch, so obviously I'm super behind, except that I'm playing someone terrible. I rebuild the hatch and it gets a little dicey when he pushes early on 2 bases with MMMM, but I barely have enough banes to force him back without him really committing too hard. Since this guy is terrible, though, that gives me the freedom to just start macroing while he doesn't attack and doesn't expand, and this time I elect to start trolling with brood lords. This forces him into a poorly thought out base trade when he decides he can't fight my army and the game ends with him stimming like twice and just straight running away from my banes with 0 splits attempted and this not working out so well for him.

In short, I love playing against this dude.

Patch updates for 3.0.3, most notably including:

- new individual servers added within the Americas and Asia region, so you can connect to a more local server, and matchmaking will prefer faster servers for your games
- without specifying the mechanism, they say it should be less likely for players w/ a large skill difference (e.g. grandmaster vs bronze) to match up - hopefully this means my bronze smurf will get more bad kids to play against, when I win too much in unranked I start getting diamonds
- you will get a "silence penalty" if you're reported for chat abuse too often, starting with 24 hours of being unable to chat, and doubling in length each time you get successive penalties

TY for bolded.

Also insane the guy throws one match then doesn't get paid for throwing other matches due to blackmail about him throwing the first match...lolol

So, this is annoying as **** and wasn't in the patch notes: if you try to add someone as a friend now, it sends them a friend request. WTF? So you can't add people to see when they're online anymore??

BLIZZCON DAY 1 BOYS

I woke up at 10am for this ****, now WHO'S WITH ME?

Man, I can't believe they're using this garbage map pool for ****ing BLIZZCON. We live in a world where someone might win or lose $100k in a game played on Bridgehead or Dash and Terminal.

I may have just beaten zest on ladder.

I just played games against accounts named innovation and zest back. I think they have were warming up for wcs. innovation was playing random and had wayyyyyy better macro than the players I usually play. I got rekt bad. The account is 18-0 this season and has custom games against hydra in the match history so I'm pretty sure this was the real innovation.

The Zest account was playing zerg and lost to my 10 pool speedling all in. The account hasn't played much on NA, but has games in match history from over a year ago against players like life and yoda that were observed by take and infeza (probably iem toronto games), so I think it's probably really zest.

Hahahaha that's awesome, you very well may have. bsball had a chance to beat Scarlett's Protoss on ladder (before she used it to beat DRG) when she was warming up at MLG Anaheim, but he threw the game pretty hard.

Fantasy gonna Fantasy, opening game 1 of a TvP by making a raven and some siege tanks. Why? Who knows.

What a weird game. I don't watch a lot of TvP so I'm not up to date on this stuff, but I would have guessed that Protosses would be better at defending against heavy drop play by now? The stats showed Iron Fortress to be pretty even TvP. Crazy that Hero could still win.

what a crazy first game SC2 GOAT

LOLOL this game slays me