StarCraft News & Notes

I was happy to see that Copa America has finally settled on an English caster after their falling out with Basetradetv long ago.  Wardi is covering it for them--I'm not sure how much attention he can attract to the scene, but not having an English cast was pointlessly limiting.  I think it's a fun tournament, even if MajOr and Kelazhur win it every time.  Incidentally, I've watched both the Spanish and Portuguese streams and both seem pretty fun.  My hope is that we'll get a breakout performance from someone in the scene to challenge the two dominant players (perhaps Pacomike?).

Speaking of English casts, I'm happy ESL is casting the EPS (Meisterschaft).  I've long been a fan of the tournament (it's a bit Protoss heavy, but not overwhelmingly so), and I think regional tournaments like this are the lifeblood of the scene.  TLO actually played in Cup #4 (losing to HaNfy), although he did not participate in the following Cup.

Stuchiu wrote a long piece about maps that's well worth reading (keeping in mind his biases--his list of creative players is 100% Korean and his solutions seem invariably linked to old ideas).  It's an interesting trip through SC2 map history, especially for those who weren't there at the beginning (one thing I wish he'd done is link all the games he thought were interesting instead of embedding just a few).  I suspect a lot of his reasoning for liking or disliking maps were sacrificed for the sake of keeping the piece from being even longer, but it would be nice if he'd attempted to justify his opinions thoroughly (LinksYouEDM on the Reddit thread goes into this more thoroughly).  I've picked out a few quotes:

It is hard to distinguish between core gameplay and the maps and there are examples of maps influencing the game play (Blink Era), gameplay superseding anything a map can do (BL/infestor) and parts where both contribute (SH and Mech).

[T]here is another contributing factor as to why Blizzard might feel there was a lot of staleness in the game ...  all pro players [refine] build orders that deal with a majority of what anyone can throw at them in one way or another.

As for standard maps contributing to the staleness of the game: I can see it to some extent, but I think a majority of the great games come from the standard maps.

[P]ros will be vetoing the non-standard maps as much as possible so the amount of times a map is played also leads to that, so take all of this with a grain of salt.

I've talked to pros, mapmakers and read all of Blizzard’s postings. No one has come out with an actual definition of what they believe the standard to be beyond the map that players like to play the most. "Standard" is an ever changing concept so trying to define what you want as standard is incredibly problematic when trying to design a map as no one has a set definition for it.

His suggestion that I agree with is freeing up some of the restrictions on the mapmakers--if Blizzard wants more diversity then that's one way to do it.  However, his old school idea of going back to having separate maps for casuals and pros is a complete non-starter: fans want to play on the same maps as their favourite players (one commenter wrote, "Locking out 95% of the player base from advanced maps doesn't seem like a good idea").  I do think he could have tried a little harder to identify what "standard" could mean--reading through the TL thread a couple of people have tried:

(tokinho) Usually can take 2 bases with a relatively small choke and a third with a much larger one. Usually there is a positional high ground outside the third base and a place inside the main where a drop could occur. ... Since +1 and +2 upgrades are huge for terran bio, and Tech comes into full force around the same time. TvP will always like maps that have those timings thus having 2 base play with a risky third is more effective. The only one that remains is PvZ. Which usually does well with a large open area and then chokes on either side of the map. Usually there is almost no fights PvZ until one big battle which usually the zerg is trying to prepare for in the open are and the protoss is trying to find ways to push across that space.

(Big J) On any HotS map zerg had to open 3 hatch against Protoss. Terran had to open 3 CC/hellions against Zerg. Protoss had to open 2 base colossus on any map against Terran and so on. The variations you are talking about are adjustments or metagames to these builds that come after you have studied them for months or years and that will naturally arise in any strategy.  "3 rax reaper" is not the end of the build order evolution if this build stays good. At some point it may split into variations like "2 rax 5 reaper" or "3rax 8 reaper" or "3 rax reaper until you die". In the same manner that 3 CC/hellion evovled into various builds like 3CC hellion/banshee-->Mech or Bio or 3CC hellion double ebay or even the metagaming "he won't baneling bust me because it's bad against 3CC/hellion" gasless 3CC Bomber build. But the skeleton opening was always the same and very similar. Radically new maps have the potential to spawn radically new builds to call standard on these maps. The prerequisite for this is a robust balance and design of the races so that you don't have to rely on the gimmicks-that-have-become-standard like a 9-wide ramps and X-rush distance. 

This isn't to say the above is necessarily correct, but it's the kind of thing that could have appeared in the piece.  As a fan I like to see a variety of strategies--even fun ones like HOTS muta-ling-bane vs bio-mine eventually got tired.  My preference would be to ensure all units are viable giving them a place in the game and so far LOTV has done that better than any previous iterations of the game, but there's always room for improvement.

More fundamentally related to this question is a much more interesting one: is gameplay diversity what attracts fans?  Clearly skill alone isn't particularly important.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)