News & Notes

Some news and notes from this week:

 

-WCS Europe's challenger matches are nearly over (they'll be updated thoroughly when completed).  The first two days have been disappointing as most of the matches have been very one-sided (only Kas vs Zanster were truly entertaining), and we've seen no real upsets.  Hopefully day three will be better.  I'm not a big fan of the Madals/Pengwin caster team (the latter in particular--I wonder how much they impact Twitch numbers), but at least that ends once Premier begins.

 

-The MLG Ender's Game matches started last night and were fantastic--hilarious cheese mixed with fantastic play (I hope the Catz/HuK match gets posted somewhere); Nathanias (who casted) called them weird and many weren't standard, but not in a bad way.

 

-Can someone explain Destiny's popularity to me?  I don't know much about the guy, but whenever I see him he comes across as extremely negative (amusingly, he disses his own product for reasons that must make sense at least to him while on ChanV's show).

 

-David Kim addressed some fan questions and some of his answers are worth looking at (and it's clear, for those who haven't noticed, that the design team takes their data primarily from Korea to assess what is or isn't working):

> a poster (avilo?) asked about changing warp gate and force fields and David's answer is excellent: We feel Warp Gates are very race defining for Protoss. It's a completely different way to produce units. Because we want every race to feel unique and asymmetric, we like the design of Warp Gates. Warp Gates were problematic in the past when 1 base or 2 base all ins were too common. We've addressed this a lot in past years.  We've talked about our stance on Force Fields in the past, and it still remains unchanged. We feel like we get a lot of feedback from forums saying there's no micro anyone can do against Force Fields. However, we just don't see this. For example, why do Zerglings or roaches try to bait out Force Fields if micro against them is not possible? Terran players picking off units on one side of Force Fields and dropping them on the more favorable side is another good example. We believe Force Fields are a very unique ability that sometimes feel there was nothing you could do, but that is okay because there are varying degrees of successes and failures. That is just StarCraft: If DTs come in when I have no detectors I'm dead, but that doesn't mean there was nothing I could have done.

I agree with this entirely--it's sad that a few players (like Ret recently, who wanted the Immortal changed) are asking to change elements that have been part of SC2 forever or most of the time.  It's a cry in the wilderness as they (apparently) can no longer keep up with the game.

> he was asked about improving/changing capital ships and his answer hinted they might (I have a feeling carriers will finally be fixed in Legacy of the Void (probably with the simple change that interceptors will be free, possibly with a damage adjustment to suit that)

> he was asked about improving tanks, but apparently they are being used more in Korea indicating that their slight tweak in the fall has made them more viable (albeit not in PvT)

> the silly hydralisk buff they suggested a few weeks ago is aimed at improving ZvZ, which I sort of understand, but they clearly weren't thinking about how much that could impact the other match-ups

> there were a number of swarm host questions and this was the best answer: We'd really love to come up with an awesome solution to this problem [Zerg turtle-style] without hurting the good uses of Swarm Hosts. The good use of Swarm Hosts: games that we see where there's constant action due to Swarm Hosts. For example, it's not uncommon to see games where Protoss players perform amazing multi-pronged attacks. Sometimes, they are really successful and just win the game, other times the Zerg player defends so well, and anywhere in between. Games where Swarm Hosts are used and there's constant action everywhere including Swarm Hosts aggressively moving around often after spawning locusts leading into each side's victory are really fun to watch. We don't generally do unit design changes with patches (only exception here I can think of off the top of my head was when we added the Phoenix range upgrade back in Wings), but for the Swarm Host in the long term, we are also internally discussing if it's a bad thing that locusts keep spawning automatically. The main reason being often times Zerg players just leave Swarm Hosts rally pointed at a location, and it's very common for the observer to go and watch nothing happening because there are no units to attack.

I think they are correct to note that problem with the turtle-style is the difficulty for Protoss to deal with the Zerg static defence that protects the unit, but forcing the Zerg to target with his locusts (ala Brood Lords) rather than just rallying the units might help--requiring much more babysitting along with vision--although I'm not sure if it's enough to get through forests of spine and spore crawlers.

 

-Rogue qualified for IEM Katowice via the Asian qualifier (beating Soulkey, but otherwise avoiding heavyweights--Soulkey had to defeat PartinG and INnoVation among others to get to the final match).

 

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)