A lot has happened over the last month or so. The WCS R32 groups were drawn, once again without the drama of season one. On the whole we have interesting groups, granted that most of the marque names wound up in Europe. In terms of competitive balance, there doesn't seem to be any group where it's obvious who will get both R16 spots, although I'll save specific analysis for my prediction posts. This time only two groups (F and H) will feature just one non-mirrored match-up, which is excellent for the sake of variety.
The groups for Dreamhack have also been announced and hopefully the tournament will remain competitive all the way through (unlike Gfinity this past weekend).
Troy Pavlek addresses the perception of SC2 and see's plenty of signs of life. I agree with him, although I do think more opportunities for growth need to exist and that the NA scene needs help.
Speaking of NA, on Remax Rotterdam talked about a desire to see an EPS-like system instituted for NA. He has a plan for how it would work, but doesn't have the 10-15k required to fund it. I think it's a good idea and hope that in the future something like it will appear, allowing space for NA players to truly develop and grow.
A few weeks ago Blizzard talked about the possibility of buffing the recently nerfed swarmhost (!), Snute offered some thoughts and the one thing I want to point to is this:
if Zerg starts underperformingThat's the real question, because we haven't seen that yet (on Remax the sentiment was that the current map pool is Zerg-favoured, which you can take with a grain of salt from five non-Zerg players). One interesting note to all of this was Destiny saying he didn't think the swarmhost change would impact ZvP meaningfully and that he was much more concerned with ZvT versus mech--what's funny about this is that the swarmhost was most problematic in the former match-up, which is a good illustration in how a unit designed to do counter one thing can cause all sorts of problems when it does something else.
I've never seen so much ink spilled over the economy in SC2 before. qxc made a post responding to the initial TL suggestion, then David Kim talked about it, and TL responded to the latter. As interesting as it all is, I agree with Nathanias (via The Late Game) that until there's a good competitive sample we really won't know if there's a better way to do it than LOTV does now. I also agree with Nate that the issues in Legacy are much more about balance than they are about the economy.
Speaking of LOTV, there's an interesting thread on TL about giving the zealot a small buff to make it more useful. It's unlikely to happen, but it's an interesting idea. The most recent balance patch still hasn't resolved the problems Protoss has in the beta, although ZvT might be more balanced now.
BaseTradetv's live event was posted on Kickstarter and has gone well past achieving its goal. I think they did a good job with the various tiers they posted and I'm looking forward to the event.
Breaking Out wrapped up on the weekend with Canadian Bioice winning Feardragon's tournament (he hasn't posted the replays yet, but they are available on Twitch). I enjoyed what I was able to watch and having player cams used while games were being played was a good innovation.
I caught some of a gold/platinum tournament casted by DBReaper and others a week or two ago and while I think it's great that there are tournaments for lower leagues, it would be nice if at least one of the casters brought some analytical knowledge to the game (watching chat having to explain the importance of combat shields in TvT was a little painful).
The top-50 streamers for April were posted on TL (with apparently a few errors judging from the comments), but for those interested, there it is.
There's also this:
And for some funny ABomB stories, check out the latest StarCraft Jeopardy.
A bit tangential, but The Daily Dot talked to Destiny about how exactly Twitch streamers make a living.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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