StarCraft News & Notes

Last week's community feedback focussed on Protoss design, but as nothing concrete was put forward as being tested it remains food for thought.  In terms of specifics David Kim did acknowledge the zealot's role being heavily reduced in LOTV and needing a fix (something to keep in mind when I get to JaKaTaK below).

Qxc had an interesting idea for making photon overcharge more interesting (shared on The Late Game), where he suggested making it cost less mana, but have a much shorter duration and a longer cooldown, making its use strategic.

Speaking of qxc, he made another blog about the state of LOTV (which is well worth reading) and at the tail end of it commented about the never-ending debate over the economy in the upcoming expansion:

One of the most talked about topics of LoTV is the economy, which has not changed significantly for a long time. At this point, it seems likely that Blizzard will not be implementing any additional economy changes. LoTV’s current economy does what it needs to do well enough and I’m glad that Blizzard is spending their resources elsewhere rather than endlessly trying to test and tweak new economies. A new economy unhinges everything regarding balance, timings and the general flow of the game. Ensuring that a new economy is good for the game would require a tremendous amount of time and energy that I’d rather Blizzard put toward other issues. The current economy alreadyfixes many of the gameplay frustrations from HoTS regarding turtling and stagnant play. Due to the incredible complexity of this issue and varied stances, no matter what economy LoTV ends up using, a group of people will be unhappy with it. As the current LoTV economy addresses the major issues from HoTS already, the time that could be spent experimenting and testing new economies is time that can be better spent on quality of life improvements, additional balance and so forth.

I completely agree with him--no matter what Blizzard did with the economy someone was going to be upset about it and I'm glad they're moving on to the other complexities of the game.

Day9 briefly talked about his impressions of LOTV thus far (around 46:00-50:00 into the video), where he likes the idea of the new units, but is concerned that the increased starting economy will be too intimidating for newbies.  The latter concern is a bit puzzling for me, since HOTS already has a slower economy and that's done nothing to halt SC2's decline in popularity.

I watched most of the NA Gauntlet Cup 2 (Jaedong was "NA"--just part of the weird wacky world of how WCS orients things), which I enjoyed.  I do wish the casters were a more consistent in upkeeping their scoreboards and overlays, but otherwise did a solid job (it was nice to see actual players from the Americas succeed in the tournament--Kelazhur won it over JonSnow).

Speaking of money, WCS is increasingly the only premier tournament where foreigners can win prize money.  In 2015, other than WCS, there have been three IEM's, two DreamHack's, and a HomeStory Cup among the premier tourneys, and here's how little impact it's had for non-Koreans:

IEM Taipai: Harstem (9th-12th, $400), Sen (13th-16th, $350)
IEM World Championship: none
DreamHack Tours: Harstem (5th-8th, $1,000), MaNa/Snute/Lilbow (9th-16th, $0)
HomeStory: Lilbow/MarineLorD/PtitDrogo (5th-8th, $875)
DreamHack Valencia: MarineLorD (5th-8th, $1,000), Ret/Verdi/Serral/Arium/MorroW/Harstem (9th-16th, $0)
IEM Shenzhen: XY/Snute/uThermal (5th-8th, $1,000), Kelazhur/Jim (9th-12th, $400), Cyan/Bistork (13th-16th, $350)

The highest earning foreigner above is MarineLorD at $1,875; to put that in perspective, that's less than he earns for losing in Challenger.  Granted, this is a somewhat thin slice of what's available to foreigners, as the local Chinese scene is quite robust (keeping Chinese players near the top of the foreigner money list), but I bring this up because it didn't used to be this slanted towards WCS (current leader Bunny has made $20,000 of his $31,983 via WCS, 62% of his earnings).  It's only been two years since NaNiwa topped the charts for foreigners with only $12,400 of his $84,331 earnings coming from WCS (14%, similar to 2014 top earner Snute who won $10,000 of his $66,591 via WCS, 15%).  With the amount of prize money available shrinking, I think it'll be incumbent on Blizzard to pump even more money into the WCS system to make the game viable for pros to play fulltime.

A number of tournament organisers are taking measures to track and punish pros who don't show up to their events.  This quite sensible step has rustled the jimmies of a few pros/personalities, but so long as its done sensibly it serves a useful purpose.

Speaking of tournaments, Lycan is considering running a HomeStory Cup-style event and went over some of the details/ideas on the latest TLG.  It has a lot of potential and I hope he follows through with it.

Oooophidian has launched a successful kickstarter to unmask all the GM/Master barcodes, which I think is fantastic.

DuSt has started an NA team league, something much less ambitious than TotalBiscuit's now defunct Clan Wars.  I like the idea and hope it succeeds.  If nothing else it provides a venue for players who don't get much competitive experience to test their mettle and make a name for themselves.

Another retired SC2 pro came out of the woodwork to stream, as Machine reappeared after being absent since last 2013.  I don't think this marks a return to either regular streaming or competitive play, but it's interesting seeing old school SC2 pros reappear after such long absences.

JaKaTaK doesn't like the mothership core (his Twitch stream for Tea Time was called "The MSC Must Die"), but rather than make a Reddit post talking about the specifics of that and seeking opinions, he asked how fun the unit is.  Later in the thread he clarified what he was after:

The purpose of this question is to promote discussion and to learn more about arguments for and against certain changes.

It's a laudable goal, but a very odd way to approach it.  "Fun" is a relative term and not the best barometer of design.  He subsequently posted a video arguing that the zealot should be buffed in LOTV (with NXZ noting some potential flaws in the data presented--and why only show limited PvZ interactions?).  Presumably his idea is to strengthen gateway units so that Protoss don't need the MSC to defend in the early game, but if so it's a roundabout way to get to his main point.  JaKaTaK has good intentions, but the point he was trying to make hasn't come through coherently.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)