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Like anyone else here, I want to see E-sports grow. I want stadiums with giant screens. I want CSL scholarships. When kids talk about role models in grade school, I want HuK to be up there with Michael Jordan.
Then I watch a PvZ and often ask, “who ordered the no-rush 20?” My dreams dim each time.
Us players love us some macro game. The complexity of gameplay, the the multitasking, the micro, it all feels awesome. We know how hard it is, and we love watching every piece perfectly fall into place when MVP executes it. It’s inspiring…if you’ve been at this for a bit. But we want E-sports to grow. At some point, we’ll saturate the gamer-verse. We’ll need outsiders - normal, unsophisticated people. We need Starcraft to offer something to the uninitiated. They won’t appreciate the glory of Thorzain’s tank positioning, or the crisp timing of Idra’s 2-2 Roach-Infestor push. What will they appreciate?
Let’s ask that about another sport, say American football. I don’t know a damn thing about football, but I get vigorous action every time the ball gets hiked. I get constant, obvious progress just by following the ball. “It’s getting closer to the other end of the field! The Jets are getting closer to winning!”
The two key things: measurable progress and constant action (or at least dramatic tension).
Starcraft offers the food count and casters tallying bases, so there’s quantifiable progress. But as far as the uninformed care, the player got that by playing patty-cake all alone.
The key here is action.
Starcraft, more than any other video game, promises large-scale action, violence and glory in a fashion that can be intuitively grasped. Follow the giant army! Red army meets Blue army, lazers scorch the earth, bullets rain from the sky and vicious claws tear flesh asunder! The smoke clears...Blue has dudes left! He’s winning!
The bigger the army, the greater the glory, but we can’t expect a non-gamer to wait 20 minutes for gratification. Yet hear how constantly the “macro game” is glorified. That no-rush 20 was absolutely a “macro game”, but with less action me sweeping the kitchen. No, the uninitiated need action up-front. Obviously there’s a happy medium between 1-base all-ins and no-rush 20s, but at least the cheese includes action.
For the sake of E-sports, we need to work on this.
As fans, let’s stop calling aggressive players like Qxc “gimmicky.” Let’s give these players the respect they deserve for winning games, even if it takes them less than ten minutes. After all, if Naniwa wants to be called one of the best players in the world, he better be able to hold off a roach-ling all-in.
Then let’s exalt what we REALLY enjoy: active and aggressive long games. Think Boxer v. Sen at TSL3. For every 30-minute game, someone was always poised to attack, something was always about to die. Oh the glory!
Maybe tournament organizers can factor this into map pool choice. Calm Before The Storm and Terminus beg the no-rush-20. We don’t need to banish large maps, but let’s be cognizant of how maps affect the entertainment value of the gameplay.
Maybe, and this is my biggest maybe, teams can think about whether or not to put effort into cultivating aggressive players, and turning them into great streamers. For E-sports to flourish, teams need to be money-making machines. Winning comes first, but aggressive winners will drive more stream viewership than passive ones.
I’m not one of them, but I want the brightest minds driving the business of E-sports to start thinking, “how do we get fresh blood in the scene? How can we make this a more aggressive, active game?” We all want E-sports to grow. Let’s be aggressive about it.
  
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You must be from new york lol
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Pretty much.
A big problem a lot of I think newer (or at least stupider) players is that they tend to judge a players quality by how many Command Centres he builds.
Bad idea. There's a fucking art to timings. It's just hard to see and for some to appreciate (to be fair though, some timings are genuinely moronic).
But I do have a theory. As the general level of player skill increases, so will the amount of engagements. I'm no BW historian but from the older games I've seen there are huge periods of inactivity before shit happens and games tend to finish as soon as one player successfully shanks the other. And look at Broodwar now.
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Well I believe you get either full out timings and cheese or long passive play from players because those are the simplest things to execute.
I think as players get better and figure out the game a little more they will learn how to more effectively use much more spread out and well positioned armies as well as force more frequent engagements when they have even a small advantage. In turn the players will also learn to defend these pressures with as small a force as possible so they can get their own advantage.
Finally, even in the case of large army clashes, I think players will learn how set up reliable defenses when needed, use units to create powerful defensive stalls, and/or use the speed of their units to retreat before they reach the point where they won't be able to stop the enemy at all.
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I don't like the title's implication that 'macro' equals 'passive'.
In any case, I can't help but feel it's simply too easy to die in SC2 and this drives a lot of the passivity. As people get better at not dying, they're going to be more comfortable being aggressive with the units they do have - so long as the game provides them with units that can fill this role.
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Lol if you go for too much aggression in ZvP or PvZ the one who defends well will always win. If you make major engagements in that match up you will either win or lose. There aren't many small scale engagements like in TvZ because Protoss units suck in small numbers.
I think HotS will give toss more aggressive options with the recall ability on the nexus.
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Calgary26004 Posts
I don't really see your point. We like something so let's celebrate it while being respectful of things we don't like so much?
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Re: Chill
In my drive to compose something with a narrative flow, I guess I didn't really do a good job of explicitly stating the fundamental point of my argument. It lacks a "thesis statement," as it were.
If I had to condense my point into a few sentences, it would be this:
E-sports will continue to grow only if it can entertain non-gamers, and Stacraft 2 has the potential to be that entertaining. But, while we glorify "the macro game," plenty of high-level "macro games" are down-right boring because of the lack of intermittent aggression. We need to stop exalting games for their length (implicit in the glorification of the "macro game") and find ways to encourage and support aggressive play in games of all lengths so that we can watch games that are not only played at the highest level, but are also downright entertaining to someone with minimal gaming background.
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Well, I get what you're saying and I'd rather not watch an NR 20 SC2 match. And I concede that, in America, football is hugely popular. But I think football is boring as fuck. I can't stand the action on the field and it seems that networks, in appealing to advertisers, chop the game up in a way that hardly does justice to your action thesis.
So what I'm more fascinated by is how football continues to be so popular when the game is so saturated with interruptions. One SC2 match that lasts 30 Blizzard minutes might not have action for 15 on those minutes. I would argue that there are plenty of 15 Blizzard-minute stretches in most football games (and definitely in the broadcast of those games).
tl;dr I'm already biased against football because it is boring to me. But I think the correct response here is to take a lesson from how the broadcasting of sports routinely and successfully interrupts the action (for advertisers, time outs/huddles, etc.) of the game and still maintains the attention of the audience.
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That's why casters hype the food counter when things are slow. Amateurs don't need to know 120 supply zerg often isn't ahead of 100 supply terran. In fact, it's better sometimes that they don't because then the game was a "comeback"
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if you want an aggressive action game with multitasking, micro, and complex strategies, i recommend watching a game called starcraft: brood war. it's great!
right now sc2 isn't pursuing the "complex rts with action everywhere" design philosophy. it's exactly what you said, lots of games just seem like no rush 20. i think a lot of it is because players are hesitant to engage since battles last like 3 seconds and it's hard to come back if you lose that defining battle.
i think a lot of teh responsibility is on the the sc2 developers to take a look at what makes an entertaining esport and change sc2 that way.
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I don't like the idea of the fans trying to dictate how the professionals play. Let them do their job (winning games) in whatever style they choose. The game type should flow naturally from the map, matchup, player temperaments etc., not from what style is "glorified" by low skill spectators.
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In football, defense win you games. In StarCraft, micro win you fans, but its macro that win you games.
I'd argue that macro players are like the SEC. Their games never got more than 13 points, but damn they know how to win. It's boring as hell to watch though, until you really get into it.
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Such dreamers.
Gave me a good chuckle though. HuK in the same breath as M.J.?
That would never happen. Even if a man like Bill Gates invested a billionaire dollars into competitive gaming. It still wouldn't happen and HuK started winning practically everything.
With that said, half your audience (the vocal ones on this website at least) don't even understand what the fuck is going on in the games. If you check the LR threads you would know this.
It's baffling at how little some people know when it comes to the game.
Thank God this isn't as much of a problem in the BW these days. The guys who stuck around know their shit and the game has been studied to death due as part. We know what's happening. Whereas a lot of people are still trying to figure out WoL. Doesn't help either when we're about to get two expansion packs dropped on us soon.
Competitive gaming will grow at it's own rate. Don't try to force it. -_-
My message to you is to be a good contributor to represent the community. That is all.
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EPT
