StarCraft News & Notes

According to Game Informer (reporting on Mike Morhaime's statement to Activision) Legacy of the Void will come out this year (2015).  This isn't a surprise--there was never going to be a lame duck WCS season of HOTS in 2016.  While no specific date was mentioned, at or after BlizzCon (November 6-7) makes the most sense.

Speaking of LOTV, Allied Commanders was officially announced (along with a video about it), and latter demoed at IEM Gamescom.  It's another interesting angle on the game and I'll be interested to see how it's received.

I had an idle thought while watching ASUS ROG: I wonder how successful HOTS would have been if the initial release was as it was now (no old school hellbats, no unnerfed swarmhosts, along with nerfed blink/msc/tempest)--not good enough to prevent the decline in SC2, but perhaps that decline would have been less severe.  As for the tourney itself, PtitDrogo had an excellent run to the final before running into Losira.  Because of the prize pool, the tournament is not a Premier event, so the French player doesn't become only the second foreign Premier finalist this year.

Speaking of tournaments, IEM Gamescom ended with an occasionally exciting finale between soO and INnoVation (won by the latter), while poor Gfinity was stuck with two B-grade Koreans in First and DeParture--I can't help but think how much better things would have gone for the latter if they'd made it a foreigner-only event (much love to Gfinity for running SC2 events, but I don't see the point in having Koreans involved unless you are going to bring the best).

Apparently the TeSL has cut SC2 without a formal announcement, but given they'd run nothing in 2015 it's not a surprise.

Feardragon's first NA Ladder Heroes tournament is in the books as JonSnow beat Drunkenboi to win (the latter inexplicably race-switching to Protoss one game and got crushed).  There were a couple of late no-shows for the tourney, but I think that was more a case of bad luck than a worrying sign.

Speaking of the ladder, SC2 unmasked "debuted" (Rotterdam and others remind people it's been around forever, but it's the first time I've ever heard of it), and among other things I was curious how many hackers/boosted accounts would be revealed (only NA ones are identified):
Hackers: 18 (5 in the top-50, 7 in the top-100, 13 in the top-200)
Boosted: 5 (3 in the top-50, all boosted by European pro Krr, who fans might remember was banned from season three of WCS in 2014 for account sharing; 3 in the top-100, 5 in the top-200)
BsK has also launched a similar site whose purpose is simply identifying smurfs/barcodes, but he seems focussed on EU from what I can tell.

JaKaTaK talked about the possible changes to Protoss suggested by the SC2 devs (including giving the nexus warp-in power), I thought he made the more radical suggestion that warpgate should no longer be required (the only requirement being building a pylon initially), but I apparently misheard him--that concept (just thinking about it) would require compensation for the other races as well, but it's an interesting idea.  He also talked about the proposed changes to the macro mechanics (something he's onboard with)--he was attacked by avilo about this on Twitter, but subsequently joined him on his channel to discuss the issue (not the most valuable discussion, but good on him for entering that space with his opinion).

There has been a ton written and said about the macro elements of SC2; with David Kim announcing their removal from the beta what has been theoretical discussion will be put into practice.  Let's briefly recap the two sides of the argument.  Stuchiu (TL) addresses the macro elements (bringing up my point that "fun" is not an argument), talking about how eliminating these elements would impact Zerg:

First, all units come from the hatchery. Second, you do not need to make a building to unlock supply; you make an overlord from a hatchery so you never have to do the extra actions of selecting a worker, pressing the hotkeys, selecting a location, and shift-queuing back. Finally, there is no end point to creep spread and inject. Those two mechanics can be done throughout the game ad infinitum with decreasing importance. To cut or put inject larvae on autocast is to simplify zerg macro beyond comparison. The inject larvae forces zerg to imitate the macro requirements of the other races (where they have to make production and pylons/depots). Additionally there is no end state for zerg. Eventually, a protoss/terran gets the maximum amount of production feasible. Zerg’s macro mechanics of inject and creep spread must be done for however long the game lasts, whether it’s 5 minutes or 2 hours. But in return zerg gets a larger strategical advantage the more larvae they bank and the more creep they spread.

It's an excellent point, although Stuchiu isn't arguing that macro changes shouldn't be made (you can read more about that in his article).  The most popular argument against this comes from a Reddit post by BigWiggly1 (which is perhaps even longer than the above), but boils down to this:

A fundamental to game design is to make the experience exciting for the player. Every interaction that the player has with a game should be exciting in some way. You'll notice that the term "exciting" will get thrown around a lot. I'm not talking christmas-morning-presents excitement or fireworks over the bay. I'm talking about small things that excite and encourage your brain and your decision making abilities. It doesn't take much, and it's one of the reasons that art styles are important to game design (I won't bring up art again).

He goes on to talk about "value added" (the popular business expression) and I think that's a better way to make his argument, although I don't find it particularly persuasive.  The idea of changing macro mechanics in the game is fine with me, albeit we have to see how it goes.  TotalBiscuit actually weighed in on this (an infrequent thing for him to do with SC2 of late); he thinks the experiment is worth trying and that overall eliminating the macro has more benefits than minuses to the scene.

I don't understand iNcontroL's hostility to tracking macro mechanics (ala injects) for broadcasts.  His argument was that it would make players look bad which would hurt selling them as good players.  I find this bizarre--it's simply a metric like any other, so even if a player isn't perfect (and none are) it's all relative and I don't see how someone looks "bad" unless they are far below the average.  If you look at other competitive enterprises, more information, more stats are always a good thing for the coverage of competitive play and the fanbase (look at the explosion of fantasy sports which thrives on this kind of data).  If you follow his argument to its logical extreme it becomes even more absurd.  Maybe I'm missing something, but on the surface it's an odd complaint and not very convincing.

I don't typically delve into the drama in the scene, but occasionally it reaches a fever pitch where it has to be mentioned at least--something former SC2 personalities always want to comment on as well(ala DJ Wheat this time around--any chance to talk about how negative the community is can't be missed).  I won't get into the specifics, but Destiny did a stream discussing it and desRow made a post about it, so you can indulge if you wish.  The best thing to come out of it was this from Day9.

Speaking of drama, some of you may recall the hubbub when it was claimed back in January that Kaitlyn and LiviBee (among others) got their accounts boosted into GM (if memory serves only the latter accusation was serious).  Interestingly, with SC2 unmasked we can see the former has three legit GM accounts in NA while the latter has one.

Also on the streaming front, another ex-SC2 player rose from the dead on Twitch as XlorD streamed for the first time since last October (he hasn't played competitively since 2013).  On the flipside, BlinG has decided to retire--if this had happened last year I would have been shocked, but in 2015 his performance has dramatically declined so it's an understandable decision.

Returning to DJ Wheat, he discussed eSports in the context of DOTA 2's International and not surprisingly believed that an online delivery system (ala Twitch) is the best one for it (as opposed to a more traditional medium like TV).  As self-serving as that is (he works for Twitch), for the most part I think he's correct that eSports doesn't translate that well to television (this doesn't mean it couldn't be rearranged to suit TV's format, but traditional media seems to be on the way out so there may not be a point to it).

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)