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First I'd like to say that I tune in to State of the Game every week, and think it's great. If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend it: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=145494
There were a couple of topics that came up on this week's cast that I wanted to chime in on (for anyone who's reading this).
First, there's this ongoing myth in any type of competitive environment, including Starcraft 2, that only the top pros have anything relevant to say about the game, and anyone who has a differing opinion is literally automatically wrong based purely on the fact that they aren't as good at the game. This is, at best, elitist and at worst a flat out incorrect assumption. This is the case across all competitive environments but it is even more valid in Starcraft 2 based on what it takes to be a top level player. There are many people who watch endless tournaments, analyze endless replays and spend more time spectating the sport than playing it. One could almost argue that people with that type of diverse information gathering actually have a more objective view of the Starcraft 2 landscape than a player who simply plays their race 12 hours a day and watches the odd tournament. This is obviously an oversimplification, but I believe the core argument to be sound. Secondly, the physical dexterity and muscle memory required to execute top-level mechanics are likely the limiting factors for a lot of people reaching the highest level of play. I would hypothesize that there are actually a lot of very strategic and insightful players/spectators who just physically cannot master the mechanics at such a level that allows them to actually focus on their strategies and the more "big picture" aspects of the game. I believe these people have just as much to contribute to a discussion about Starcraft 2, but can be automatically disregarded as "shitty players".
My second point is around the idea of TeamLiquid changes around allowing a way for top level players to communicate with other top level players without the general masses. I know the hosts on SOTG had differing opinions on how this should take place, but it sounds like there will be some changes rolled out (top level players being highlighted in posts etc). There are also a lot of suggestions for a private board specifically for these people.
In theory I get it. It makes sense that these folks want to be able to communicate with each other unencumbered by the relentless noise that comes with being the best Starcraft forum on the Internet. However, I'd like to ask that the people considering these changes please please please try to keep a couple of things in mind. First, if you're looking, there are many constructive and thought provoking posts from non pros. The one that comes to mind is the ladder analysis posts by Excalibur. I know he's a staff member, but I really think there are fantastic posts by non pros that it would be an absolute shame to disregard or lose in the shuffle of garbage. Secondly I'd argue that there are many top players who make terrible posts as well, and I think the relationship between game skill and post relevancy really isn't as closely tied as we would be lead to believe. Third and most important, please try to remember what it was like being a new gamer who is extremely interested in the game, and follows pros/watches tournaments, tries to contribute constructively to conversation. People like us (I'm one of these people) don't like being grouped into the same group as the terrible posters on TL, and unfortunately this is what happens when these discussions surface.
In conclusion, I hope that any TL changes that are made going forward allow non pro players (like myself) to earn the ability to participate in real, thought provoking conversation on TeamLiquid along with the pros and admins. I think the goal should be to allow quality posters to converse in a meaningful manner, rather than allowing pros/admins to do it. If you're still reading, thanks, and I appreciate any comments you may have.
Can't wait for SOTG 2011!!!!
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
Rest assured TL has been working on things for a long time  I know a lot of you are new to TL but we work at an incredibly slow pace since when we want to change something or improve the site in some way, we absolutely want to do it right.
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Yeah, but there's so much crap to skip through that it makes anyone with a solid suggestion gets drowned out by so much stupid shit that they get overlooked. I don't even think about browsing the strategy section for this reason. When I did I would read some posts then get completely discouraged by NightHawk0420's post. I'd then look for posts by people that I know are quality players but they began to become few and far between.
I don't know if having a private forum or highlighted names will even work. In theory it's a great idea, but by now I don't know if good players would even want to waste their time. They'll just be flamed by people like IceTiger84 to no end (unless it's on the private forum). But, TL rarely fucks up, so who knows. <3 .
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TBH I wouldn't mind at all if there were invite only topics, as long as every one can read them.
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On December 16 2010 09:40 Plexa wrote:Rest assured TL has been working on things for a long time I know a lot of you are new to TL but we work at an incredibly slow pace since when we want to change something or improve the site in some way, we absolutely want to do it right.
Kind of like ents, in an entmoot.
+ Show Spoiler +
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Secondly, the physical dexterity and muscle memory required to execute top-level mechanics are likely the limiting factors for a lot of people reaching the highest level of play.
This is a really big misconception. In BW the koreans alway talk about young people having faster hands; this isn't really true. Look up piano pieces on youtube, there's some 80 year old with faster hands then jaedong playing a piano.
In SC2 and SC:BW, your hand speed is limited by your brain . Muscle memory and physical dexerity are developed VERY quickly and don't really require much talent at all.
What most people view as "mechanics" is actually this basic ability to spend your money and keep workers building. It also involved basic micro skills in sc:bw like unit positioning burrowing lurkers vessel cloning etc. These were basic things that occurred in a game to game basis.
But mechanics is a combination of two things:
1: Training your brain to repeat a series of repetitive actions that you do frequently in between unique situations that you encounter in game.
2: Understanding the basic nature of macro and micro in starcraft two and how economic growth and unit advantage both translate to huge advantages in that one big battle. Savior dominated the korean pro scene by making rounds of drones from every hatch and maynarding whenever he possibly could. It seemed like something that was good, but not that important, but I guarantee you if he made drones from expo hatches and units from main hatches he would not have dominated. He also made units from every hatch, so it culminated into a pretty significant unit lead that can turn literally a bad loss into an easy win. Test same unit vs same unit in the unit tester, and add advantages to one player, laugh how a 1-2 unit advantage turns into a 4-5 unit advantage at the end of a battle. Then realize you are a fucking idiot for QQing in the forums about marauders imba when 5 less marauders and 5 more zealots and you would end up in you fucking raping him.
Also, note that in order to have good mechanics, you need to
a: Be smart enough to make the decision to stop whatever you are doing to go back and macro, or to delay it to preform higher priority actions, i.e micro or other
b: You need to have a presence of mind over the whole game that is, when you're in a situation you've never faced, even slightly, your brain needs to evaluate how or when to engage etc, but you also need to be aware of the game as a whole so you start to think about where he might have a dropship, when your inject larva is finished, put up more creep tumours etc.
Now, I'd like to point how, YOU CAN WATCH STREAMS FOR A YEAR AND BE TOTALLY OBLIVIOUS TO ALL OF THIS. Honestly; from playing and reaching a decently high level I have come to realize some of these subtleties and sometimes when nony is describing something, I understand. Like, when he lost to Azz, he was talking about to expand earlier, when he expanded and lost to a 3 colossus attack with only warpgate units. I get now that even though he got totally owned if he expanded a little quicker got more minerals and probes faster he could have made and extra 5-6 gateway units and totally owned the guy, or at least whittled him down enough to kill him with 6 gates of reinforcements. Or watching TTone in Xelnaga just macro and beat jinro with basically 1a in xelnaga caverns, I can see where the macro and unit advantage culminated in an easy win. The nony that says all the mid high diamond level guys are bad and he doesn't read their posts I can totally understand. The 14 year old Slayer91 broodwar strategy forum poster who eventually got bw strat banned for a shitty rant because I don't know what I was talking about and was confused would have been kinda pissed at that.
In Broodwar, there were "smart players" and there were "mechanical players" and it turns out mechanical players fucking dominated "smart players". What "smart players" did was cancel buildings, make sneaky builds, do cute harass, stuff like that. Now what people claimed was that mechanics just won, but when iloveoov had more units that everyone else, IT WASNT >JUST< BECAUSE HE SPENT 500 MINERALS. It's because he had a deep understanding of macro and how to build up his economy perfectly including things like 2nd geyser timings and production facility and expansion timings. iloveoov was a macro player but also known for sloppy play like idle scvs.
Notice, in this post, I haven't yet mentioned anything to do with strategy, and this post is totally independent of current starcraft 2 strategy, so why, you ask, is this relevant to strategy forum discussion?
Because these things make such a huge fucking difference that we as the non pros are essentially totally blind to really is going on.
Knowing unit counters isn't all that relevant, it needs to be put into context. It it easily countered if he scouts it? Can he scout it? Can he overcome it with micro? Does it leave me slightly weak so that he can attack or expand while I tech to unit X? Can I be caught in transition, i.e, do I need a lot or gas, or extra minerals, that I can't properly support?
Although we do see pro games decided by nice transitions to thors, or siege tanks, or hive tech, or storm or whatever, this is in games where mechanically these guys are dead even, and it takes something small to switch things to one guys favour. This is equivalent to grandmasters out manoevering one other. Now, you can try to talk strategy with a chess grandmaster but in a game he'll just take all your shit without a single deep thought.
Any experiences we have are clouded. To a varying degree based on skill, but still, you can't know what is truly good without having the ability to have a game played with very good mechanics.
You need to remember pro gamers
1: Must be in a very good mental state to play well
2: Are very self conscious to understand and train their brains to keep the focus on the whole game even when there is to much to deliberate on in what's going in strategy wise. The whole "newbs don't macro" is not because their hands are slow it's because they get lost in thought in a single battle or distracted in a similar way even with scouting info and they don't process the information while keeping track of the minimap, supply count, resources, macro cycles. etc.
3: They still know 10x more about real strategy than non pro's.
I don't want to sound too elitist, but to be honest, I tend to skip through most posts because even if there is some truth in what you guys know, a lot of it is totally clouded and is either wrong or doesn't work in context. I'm not even a pro, but high enough level to be able to see 95% of strategy posts and discard them totally. And if you guys are posting clouded information, if your average joe reads it, he can get a good understanding but also lots of wrong things as well to process, and ultimately confuse him if he doesn't understand the basics of the game.
As a broodwar player I really viewed the game like a strategy forum reader. (which I was) It was very shallow, very "strategy" based. I only got to a C+ max mostly with relatively good macro and micro (but piss poor "mechanics" in retrospect), and even then it was probably a lucky streak of beating non koreans.
If a zerg player has trouble with stalker colossus, I can tell you 5 different ways I've had success dealing with it.
-Hydra/roach with a good ling flank
-Mass muta/ling, or muta switch if you built enough money up
-Hydra/roach/ling infestor with neural
-Hydra/roach/corruptor
-Ultra, or broodlords with your normal army
Now, the poster who is having trouble with this; I guarantee that the biggest help they'll get from that post is having a clear idea of what they should do. As I said, new situations baffle newbs and they forget their macro and expanding and droning. Sometimes having a clear plan is much more important than correct play. Sometimes I've lost to stalker colossus thought damn this is so hard. Then I watched the replay and it was like 2 colossus and mostly stalkers but I didn't have enough shit, probably would have lost to just the stalkers. I played the guy again and raped him straight up. (He did the same thing, same map too, but different positions if I recall)
Sorry if this is really insulting to you, maybe I went a little overboard in spots, but people need to stop viewing mechanics as some robotic thing and realize that the players that are good are generally really smart people and don't just have "good muscle memory". They understand the game far more than both you what actually know and you think you do.
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Thanks for the contribution Slayer91. I can tell you put a lot of thought into that post and I understand/agree with almost everything you're saying. I didn't mean to say that I'm one of these people who watches a ton of streams and assumes I know as much as a top pro who has been playing for years. That's far from the truth. I'm still very new to this game both from a player perspective and an understanding perspective. I'm still struggling to understand a couple of things though:
1. Are you saying that it's not possible to understand mechanics but not be able to execute them? This seems strange to me. I believe my understanding of the game to be at a slightly higher level than my actual execution. I know what I should be doing, and at what time, but I still struggle with tunnel vision, and the ability to multitask effectively once the number of tasks reaches a certain ceiling.
2. If what you're saying is 100% accurate, and what the top pros all say about lower level players ideas being irrelevant, then wouldn't it follow that the best player in the world would always be right? Why can Incontrol argue with Idra, or Nony argue with Huk? (This is purely an example to explain the concept of winning tournaments/showing results vs knowledge of the game, all the players I just mentioned are fantastic)
I'm also assuming when you say "you guys" you mean people who aren't pros? Again, I don't think everyone can be lumped into one group of "shitty posters" just like all pros can't be lumped into "great posters".
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On December 16 2010 10:22 hifriend wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2010 09:40 Plexa wrote:Rest assured TL has been working on things for a long time I know a lot of you are new to TL but we work at an incredibly slow pace since when we want to change something or improve the site in some way, we absolutely want to do it right. Kind of like ents, in an entmoot. + Show Spoiler +
LOL wow what an awesome representation. Mani looks so sad though :/
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No. There are good posters and bad posters. Good players and bad players. Excellent posters like yourself might be good players or bad players its not that much connected.
Idra for example, recently has been a pretty terrible poster but a fantastic player; he never bothers to explain his ideas and often just rages on TL.net.
TL.net strategy forum has a range of posters from good to bad and a range of skill levels from good to bad but unfortunately only cream of the crop sometimes is relevant to real strategy, but you can help out players far better than you. Reviewing your replays is a big help, reviewing others even if you're not as good as them provides an objective state of mind and is often even more helpful. Reviewing worse players provides the most insight.
As I said, mechanics is 50% execution, and 50% understanding/decision making. Also, its very, very, possible for "bad players" to come up with very good strategies that are better than what pros are doing, based on solid theory, but a lot of the time it can't work out at all. It needs to be tested in an environment with good mechanics, and good players who scout and attempt to exploit it. (One poster mentioned that Jaedong probably practiced his 3 hat muta 5 hatch hydra build until his fingers nearly fell off. How many theoretical builds have been practiced for weeks or more and discarded? If the timing was slightly off 3 hat muta 5 hat hydra would fail horribly) As I said, looking at it from a clouded window it's so much harder to know for certain if your strat is good or not. In my games I do lots of offbeat stuff like taking 2 geysers until I have like 60 drones and 3-4+bases and I have no real idea if its good or not, or situational or just bad, its just a stylistic preference for me, and it wins games that I was behind in and its overall very enjoyable for me.
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On December 16 2010 10:45 babolatt wrote:
1. Are you saying that it's not possible to understand mechanics but not be able to execute them? This seems strange to me. I believe my understanding of the game to be at a slightly higher level than my actual execution. I know what I should be doing, and at what time, but I still struggle with tunnel vision, and the ability to multitask effectively once the number of tasks reaches a certain ceiling.
I'm pretty sure that I know the strategy behind playing basketball, but I only play at school. Can I say that I really understand basketball? It's one thing to know what strategy pros use, and another to understand why; and understanding why is crucial when discussing strategy. It could be that one build seems nigh-unstoppable, but for one timing that only top-level players can hit. Or maybe a unit seems to be very useful, but when playing against players with very good micro its abilities are negated. There's all sorts of potential intricacies that you may not be able to see simply by looking at replays (at least without looking at all the replays).
I don't play SC2, by the way, so at least I'm not elitist
I'm also assuming when you say "you guys" you mean people who aren't pros? Again, I don't think everyone can be lumped into one group of "shitty posters" just like all pros can't be lumped into "great posters".
If a pro says something that's trolling or outright wrong he is more likely to get called out for it, I think. If a pro says something that's not either of those it's usually very useful, or at least a discussion sparker.
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The reason that a professionals word is taken as if they come from the words of gods themselves is because they live in a world of evidence, where tried-and-true things are proven at the level and setting at which they play in, after very careful consideration, before being published.
Professionals use critical thinking to back up a claim with enough support and tested reasoning wherein their words can hold merit. It is not that the top players are the only ones who hold relevant information- they are simply, more often than not, the most mindful ones in regards to determining the state of the game.
The majority of players don't live in a world of evidence, but rather a world of emotion. Where a progamer can articulate the finer points of balance within a game, often based on much practice and the collective mind of their peers, John Doe tries to back up his argument with "I, personally, cannot perform this action and thus it is possible for all people."
Where IdrA can claim that the [now reverted] change to Fungal Growth would cause issues in the current Zerg arsenal, backed up with the knowledge and experience of himself and his teammates, John Doe (Zerg player) might share the same opinion. The problem is the word "opinion".
Opinions are irrelevant. They mean nothing. 1+1=2 is not an opinion, it's a fact, based on the evidence that by adding 1 to 1, you create the sum of 2. John Doe, whether he is a 2600+ Diamond Player or not, is often a man driven by emotions, where his opinions get the best of him. His personal success (not professional success) a driven social environment wherein strategies and build orders are optimized and discussed at a high level. By being competent enough to spend his mass amounts of bonus points, he has only proven to be a patient man.
I wager that my 1000+ diamond-cutter of a penis is more knowledgeable about the state of the game as a whole than the average 2600+ John Doe, based on my critical thinking alone. I, however, do not have enough evidence to back up any claims I may make in regards to my thoughts on balance. Therefore, I keep my mouth shut, and listen to the words of those who employ critical thinking in the professional setting to show me the way.
There will occasionally be a non-professional worth listening to who discovers something noteworthy, such as the man who discovered 9overlord was more economical than 10overlord, or the person who discovered than 3/3 splitting was equal in effectiveness to to the perfect split and no split at all. These people come few and far between, but the one common denominator is that they all provide hard evidence to back their claims.
Very few of these people exist, which is a determent to the quality of the forums as a whole. Frankly, that's why it's easier to just listen to the progamers. More often than not, they'll know better.
Edit: Also, I don't quite understand this conversation regarding game mechanics, or rather how it is relevant to the topic. I'm sure there's plenty of smart people who don't have the hand/eye coordination and speed to keep up with the professional environment, but being smart and thinking critically are two different things. My IQ is in the 95th percentile but that doesn't mean that I can invent facts.
Similarly, if your mechanics aren't up to par, you likely aren't playing at a high enough level to even be able to devise proper factual evidence. I can say that 1base Ultralisk rushing is a viable strategy in Bronze league, and I could write many pages of evidence to support the truth of it. That is obviously a dramatization, but given that the 5th percentile of diamond players are wildly better than the 50th percentile, wherein cheese is one of the only ways to change the result of a game, I believe it to be an accurate one. By having worse mechanics, whether you're smart or not, you are in a lower category to professional gamers and will literally not even get matched up against anyone of note on Battle.net. Therefore the evidence you supply will be flawed, via not being practiced and proven in the same setting. "This works against bad zergs" and "This works against top zergs" are sentences that are not compatible with one another, whether you like it or not.
Edit2: I also didn't mean to imply that opinions don't have their place. For example, qhen I critique someone elses' artwork or they critique mine, we share opinions. Art is a very subjective field, wherein the goal is either to provoke a response or to explore the varied responses of other people. Art cannot be defined by fact or fiction. What one person may enjoy, another may despise. Neither opinion, no matter how widely shared, can define a movie, book, t-shirt or video game as "good" or "bad"- it's simply a matter of opinion.
In the case of Starcraft, though, where questions are asked academically for the purpose of maximizing/optimizing success, there is simply no room for opinions. They are irrelevant.
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Thanks for this thread, interesting thoughts.
I take your first point, in principle there is no reason why as you say, a person who makes it a habit to study games with serious application may have a sound grasp of the game and have something to contribute to a "bleeding edge strategy" conversation, despite the fact that they are not a fulltime player with the mechanical/muscle skills of a professional SC2 gamer. I guess the point is in practice, there are very very few such people. Players who play for money, spend a lot of time with the game, in or out of it. There are many serious devotees of SC2 who play less but study and watch a lot a lot a lotta games - but there are very few (I'd contend) who spend as much of their day/week/month studying the game as a pro player does. And certainy, the vast bulk of posts here on TL are not by such rare individuals.
As regards the second issue of how TL might impliment a "pro conversations" system. I discovered TL when the buzz for SC2 was building but before the beta was out ie. when it was basically a SC/BW space. My impression of it then was my opportunity to evesdrop on professional players - like I was a fly on the wall of a Korean teamhouse. I didn't want to or need to post anything because it would have been pointless. I didn't want to read other people like me - there are plenty of places for that. I wanted to read what these people who ate drank and slept with my game thought. I liked that a lot. (That, plus TL's responsive and responsible system of moderation are the two things that bought my undying affection for this place.)
With the swell in population post-SC2, obviously the atmosphere has changed a lot. That doesn't have to per se be a bad thing; but I can't say I don't miss the TL forums I stumbled upon back then.
For both these reasons, I would support a or a number of resticted forums, where "pro" players could post, and everyone could read.
After all there is no reason the topics the pro players raised there couldn't be discussed by the unwashed masses like myself in the regular forums, with links and suchlike as necessary. It's not like we couldn't comment, it would just be in a different place.
I heard some of the SC2 "celebrities" like Day[9] comment recently on a cast that they don't read or write in TL forums any more because there just isn't any point. That makes me a sad pandabeargirl. In my own personal particular case, if I had to choose, I would rather have a forum where I could listen to Artosis and Day and their ilk discuss high strategy, that a forum where I and people like me could complain about our last bnet game.
2c
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On December 16 2010 11:22 Nokarot wrote:
Edit: Also, I don't quite understand this conversation regarding game mechanics, or rather how it is relevant to the topic. I'm sure there's plenty of smart people who don't have the hand/eye coordination and speed to keep up with the professional environment, but being smart and thinking critically are two different things. My IQ is in the 95th percentile but that doesn't mean that I can invent facts.
As I said, anyone can spam 300 apm on a keyboard no problem which is far more than is necessary. Hand-eye coordination is almost a moot point if you can touch type and you can accurately click things with a mouse i.e, the post button, that's hand-eye coordination.
Mechanics is 100% mental and it's not just all repetition.
I don't care how high your IQ is, if you have more than 60 apm and you aren't high rated in diamond you don't understand the game well at all.
(1000+ points doesn't mean a whole lot now, the bonus pool is something like 1800 or so, if you remove the artificial inflation it doesn't sound as good. -800+ diamond rated?)
Even though pro gamer's play a lot, any veteran like Nony and 'Ret can and will come off of 3 months+ of break and have better mechanics than your average high diamond joe playing 3 hours a night within a week. Once you reach certain understandings and you know how you should be thinking and how to train yourself to think it doesn't go away, it just gets a little rusty. However if you only think about game strategy your mechanics comes with practice and goes away with practice, if you're not "thinking critically" about your mechanics then any improvement is just going to be automated.
Similarly, if your mechanics aren't up to par, you likely aren't playing at a high enough level to even be able to devise proper factual evidence.
Yep. This is my point about the cloudy window. You're looking at the game without a pure persepective.
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I personally love the idea of pro-poster's being highlighted in the forum. It's similar to the blue post situation in the Bnet forums, and whenever I go there (rarely ever) I always skip to blue posts and ignore the bullshit. That kind of system put into place here would be a welcome addition, AND it won't leave anyone out. For people that want to be super involved they can read every post, and for people who want to read what the pros say they can skip to their posts. Win-win. The question is if it's enough, and I think that's a discussion we can get into later. One step at a time.
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Zurich15324 Posts
On December 16 2010 09:32 babolatt wrote:
First, there's this ongoing myth in any type of competitive environment, including Starcraft 2, that only the top pros have anything relevant to say about the game, and anyone who has a differing opinion is literally automatically wrong based purely on the fact that they aren't as good at the game. This is, at best, elitist and at worst a flat out incorrect assumption. This is the case across all competitive environments but it is even more valid in Starcraft 2 based on what it takes to be a top level player. There are many people who watch endless tournaments, analyze endless replays and spend more time spectating the sport than playing it. One could almost argue that people with that type of diverse information gathering actually have a more objective view of the Starcraft 2 landscape than a player who simply plays their race 12 hours a day and watches the odd tournament. This is obviously an oversimplification, but I believe the core argument to be sound.
Categorically disagree with this. The important part is that it doesn't even matter what is holding you back from playing at the top level. As long as you don't play there you can't have the same level of understanding about the game. Unfortunately, you also don't have the ability to realize that you don't have that understanding, because from your perspective everything about the game makes sense.
As long as you don't play at the pro level, you can't recognize the disparity from your grasp of the game vs someone's who does play at that level.
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On December 16 2010 19:51 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2010 09:32 babolatt wrote:
First, there's this ongoing myth in any type of competitive environment, including Starcraft 2, that only the top pros have anything relevant to say about the game, and anyone who has a differing opinion is literally automatically wrong based purely on the fact that they aren't as good at the game. This is, at best, elitist and at worst a flat out incorrect assumption. This is the case across all competitive environments but it is even more valid in Starcraft 2 based on what it takes to be a top level player. There are many people who watch endless tournaments, analyze endless replays and spend more time spectating the sport than playing it. One could almost argue that people with that type of diverse information gathering actually have a more objective view of the Starcraft 2 landscape than a player who simply plays their race 12 hours a day and watches the odd tournament. This is obviously an oversimplification, but I believe the core argument to be sound. Categorically disagree with this. The important part is that it doesn't even matter what is holding you back from playing at the top level. As long as you don't play there you can't have the same level of understanding about the game. Unfortunately, you also don't have the ability to realize that you don't have that understanding, because from your perspective everything about the game makes sense. As long as you don't play at the pro level, you can't recognize the disparity from your grasp of the game vs someone's who does play at that level.
This. No matter how many games you watch. Unless you are a pro gamer or a pro in any sport or an ex-pro you cannot discuss specific details about a strategy or anything relevant without being a pro yourself in one time.
Because of details which can not be seen from a spectator view but by a players point of view.
In other words, why don't you see an unknown gamer casting/commentating at a professional tournament?
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So based on the clear opposition to my point, I'm still hoping someone is able to explain why lower level pros can argue with higher level pros. If results and skill level automatically make you the single authority on the game, isn't the best player always right? Where is the cutoff that says "everyone under this line's opinion is irrelevant"?
I really disagree with this. To be clear, I'm not saying that lower level players are going to be schooling pros on how to play starcraft 2, that's just silly. My point is that there's absolutely no reason why non-pro starcraft 2 players can't engage in meaningful and insightful discussion with pro gamers in my opinion.
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On December 16 2010 22:03 shannn wrote:
Because of details which can not be seen from a spectator view but by a players point of view.
In other words, why don't you see an unknown gamer casting/commentating at a professional tournament?
Really? I think it's pretty clear that there is a massive group of people at TL who could beat HD, Husky, DJ Wheat, JP etc.
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On December 16 2010 23:30 babolatt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2010 22:03 shannn wrote:
Because of details which can not be seen from a spectator view but by a players point of view.
In other words, why don't you see an unknown gamer casting/commentating at a professional tournament? Really? I think it's pretty clear that there is a massive group of people at TL who could beat HD, Husky, DJ Wheat, JP etc.
Are those people you mentioned considered a progamer? They are known as well so I don't see the reason why they are mentioned at all.
Tell me if the majority of TL can beat qxc/painuser/haypro/sjow. These players aren't the very best of the world (my opinion and no offense to them but making a point here) but they are still knowledgable in the sense that they have the knowledge to go into a discussion with let's say a IdrA/ret/jinro because of their same understanding of the game.
a quote from zatic
The important part is that it doesn't even matter what is holding you back from playing at the top level. As long as you don't play there you can't have the same level of understanding about the game. Unfortunately, you also don't have the ability to realize that you don't have that understanding, because from your perspective everything about the game makes sense.
As long as you don't play at the pro level, you can't recognize the disparity from your grasp of the game vs someone's who does play at that level.
Edit:
An example of similar kind which you would see often in the sc2 strategy (I don't read sc2 strategy at all so don't know what they are saying nowadays)
A gold player would say immortals are OP and no unit is strong against it.
A diamond player would say they are good but depending on the circumstances or what unit composition the opponent has it may be very weak or very strong in having an immortal.
Now replace gold with any division low rating of any division and replace diamond player with a pro and they would arguably have for 99% of the cases the same talk.
There could be cases however a lower level player can be right with a certain strategy but have the wrong arguments on whether it's good or bad because of their inexperience.
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The way I see it this is a silly discussion because;
What we have right now = strategy forum where mostly gold-plat-diamond players discuss strategy, you rarely ever see any big names showing up in the discussions and if they do it's mostly to tell everyone how false they are.
What we could have = strategy forum where mostly gold-plat-diamond players discuss strategy, you rarely ever see any big names showing up in the discussions and if they do it's mostly to tell everyone how false they are. Additionally, strategy forum where good players discuss strategy that is actually relevant to their level of play in which worse players can partake of the insights but not fuck up the discussion.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/q9Siu.jpg)
