StarCraft News & Notes

Legacy of the Void pre-order has been posted, including a kind-of, sort-of release date:

Game is due for release before March 20, 2016

HOTS was released March 12th (2013), but given that the information includes a range of release dates (including 2015), it's impossible to guess the official release--I'd like to think before season one of WCS in 2016, however.  Regardless, with orders now available the true hype can begin for the game itself.  I've played the three prologue missions and I enjoyed them; it's also been entertaining to watch much better players have to work to get through them on brutal (a difficulty that should be a challenge)--for those who missed it, both Nathanias (yesterday) and Fenner had fun runs (Lowko's is good as well).

The latest LOTV balance update featured small changes to Protoss and Zerg (disruptor tweaking continues and the Ravager has partially been brought back from the dead), and quite a few to Terran (armor upgrades combined for mech and broader changes to the liberator and raven).

With more and more streamers playing LOTV it's interesting seeing a wide variety of responses to the units.  To pick just one example, avilo hated the Liberator when he started using it, but it's now one of his favourite units.

David Kim's latest feedback (discussing the recent community summit) included this little nugget:

New Terran/Zerg units are a bit easier to use than Protoss because Protoss is currently the slightly easier race to master.

This lead to Fenix making a long post about that topic which is worth going through (although I'd be more hesitant than he is in suggesting he's expressing the expectations of the community; maybe a little less ALL CAPS as well--italics are for emphasis, CAPS are for shouting).  His ideas for forcefields and warp-ins seem overly convoluted to me, but they are a lot more sensible than the usual hyperbole against Protoss design--and that's the real problem for Blizzard, there just aren't many good suggestions for fixing Protoss that don't involve completely changing the race (the last one I can think of was Nathanias vaguely suggesting they buff gateway units), something we know isn't going to happen.  Even now in LOTV where Protoss is the third wheel people still whine about it (perhaps it's just that ingrained).

Zergs dominated the KeSPA-Cup, the only Korean tournament using the current WCS map pool (SoO beat Dark 4-1 in the final).  It's hardly the only tournament since my last post, as we had a lacklustre DreamHack (Valencia, where a humdrum group of B-grade Koreans lined up to get demolished by Curious).  I've never been a fan of the oft-used formula of top foreigners vs mostly Code A (or worse) Koreans.  IEM Shenzhen had a slightly better mix, but with arguably the four best Protoss players included it was simply a matter of which of them (in this case Classic) was going to win.  Having the IEM and DreamHack at the same time is silly, but with one in China it's the least impactful collision.  In terms of notable foreign performances at both: Arium beat Symbol, MorroW beat Pigbaby, and Snute beat both Rain and Classic (granted, both of the Norwegian's wins were non-elimination games for the Koreans).  I've said this before, but I really think SC2 would benefit from mostly region-locked tournaments (ie, all-Korean or all-foreigner) with just two or three a year where top foreigners face top Koreans--sure they'll get annihilated, but at least fans will see the best players.

Speaking of tournaments, ShoutCraft is returning to replace Clan Wars (with a 5k prize pool).  I'd like TotalBiscuit to make it a foreigner-only event, but I don't think that will be the case.  It's great that this is coming soon as desRow's weekly is apparently defunct (the last was played in May).

There was an interesting comment by Rotterdam on his stream awhile ago (the 9th I think; a recent Thursday) in discussing the PvT match-up.  He said that a Protoss who plays passively and defensively against Terran is at a disadvantage, bringing up the SSL final between Classic vs Dream (where the latter's only loss on Deadwing was him playing exactly that style).  It's an interesting line of thought given that aggressive Protoss play (aggressive macro play, as Scarlett puts it) is what tilts so many people.

Speaking of match-ups, while TLO doesn't like ZvP, he does think the new maps are good for Zerg.

Petraeus has announced a Kane-like school "break" from pro gaming; I'm not sure what (if any) impact this will have on his participation in Premier.

JaKaTaK talking about misunderstandings and criticisms of the sandbox and him personally.  I think he does a good job of both addressing the impression that he was demonizing the ladder, the cult-like feeling some had about the sandbox, as well as a perception of a holier-than-thou attitude from he himself (I feel like the latter informs the middle point, wherein the sandbox group came across as inflexible in its opinions about how to do things--clearly not their intention, but for those who saw them on The Late Game it did come across that way).

Speaking of JaKaTaK, he mentioned a fact (via Blizzard) I hadn't heard before, which is that the current SC2 player base is at 2 million--this is higher than other numbers bandied about in various SC2 talk shows (500k is usually the given figure given).  While it's much smaller than LOL, DOTA, etc, it's still quite significant.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)