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So, historically I have used my blog to bitch about the Marine and Terran in general.
Historically, Blizzard has been nerfing Terran since release.
While they frustratingly refuse to touch the Marine, I think they have done a good job of bringing Terran down to mere mortal levels.
Now, I want to move on to another topic.
You probably clicked on this ready to agree with me how horrible those people who cheese you on ladder are.
They are doing themselves a disservice by not learning how to play the game properly as well as wasting your time doing bullshit strategies.
I am one of those people, and I want to try to explain why.
First off, I want to explain the difference between good cheese and bad cheese.
Bad cheese is all in. Completely all in.
You have a single attack to either kill or at least severely cripple your opponent or you have lost the game.
6 pool is bad cheese.
11/11 rax with all SCVs pulled is bad cheese.
proxy 2 gate is bad cheese.
If any of these builds don't kill your opponent, you have lost the average game.
I do not do bad cheese.
Good cheese is a build that forces your opponent into a lose/lose situation. While generally not as strong as bad cheese builds, they are significantly more economical and the required damage to stay in the game on a failed attack is significantly lower.
7 pool vs Protoss is generally good cheese.
11/11 rax with 2 SCVs pulled vs zerg is good cheese.
Cannon rushes vs Zerg is good cheese.
All of these builds involve significant investment, but it is rather easy to cause an equal amount of damage to your opponents economy and possible to do much better than that.
Now that we've defined the difference between good cheese and bad cheese, let's talk attitude, the core of this post.
Western Starcraft scoffs at the idea of cheese. There is no differentiating between good and bad cheese for 99% of posters on TL or people playing on the American ladder.
While this isn't going to stop eSports from succeeding as a spectator sport, it DOES cause the western ladders (American and European) to be... easy...
Everybody who has a Korean account complains about the massive amount of allins you see when you play on the Korean server.
The thing is... allins are good for you as a player.
Cheesy play requires an incredible amount of game knowledge, or it ends up being a flimsy attack guaranteed to take you out of the game. You are generally trying to secure a game-winning advantage with 3 marines and 3 SCVs or some sort of equivalent. If everybody tries stuff like this on the ladder, it causes two things to happen.
1) Everybody tightens up their play. The reason Korean ladder is so far ahead of the western ladder is that they know how not to die to bullshit. Every single person playing on the Korean server is constantly exposed to the most insane allin attacks and through trial-by-fire, the average Korean develops micro equivalent to many western pros.
2) Everybody learns their units more intimately. If you think holding off cheese is hard, try coming up with a brand new cheese on your own! Creating your own cheese, or modifying an existing cheese to fit your style is hard work and requires a lot of game knowledge. A bad 2 rax is laughable. A good 2 rax wins games in the GSL.
When executing a 7 pool, how many drones should you have before the lings pop out?
When do you stop probe production for a 4-gate?
how many SCVs do you pull for a 1-1-1?
If you don't have answers to these questions, I have to ask you why not? You think by skipping the first 10 minutes of the game you're making yourself a better player? Solid macro does not exist in a bubble. Solid macro, when done by good players, is a beautiful thing because it is nearly impenetrable to cheese (or he just took a huge risk and it paid off, also beautiful).
So i say to you, Westerners. Why do you think cheese is a bad thing?
Cheese is the very thing that makes good players good.
Enjoy the delicious cheese!
For those who insist that cheese will never work at the higher levels on ladder, I play in master league and frequently beat GMs of all caliber.
http://sc2ranks.com/us/806684/RevJerm
After reading a lot of the responses, I feel I should clarify. 'Bad cheese' is not weak cheese, it's generally stronger than 'good cheese' but I am calling it bad for the learning mentality.
If you proxy 2-gate and it doesn't work, there is really no way for you recover. Sure you can try it and maybe it works in that particular game, but generally, if your opponent does everything right, you are already out of the game.
I am not trying to say nobody should ever do 'bad cheese', just that it isn't going to teach you the in-depth game knowledge I'm talking about. Let the pros and the scrubs do bad cheese. You are here to learn and have fun, and good cheese does that.
Many of you are already doing this stuff, but you don't consider it cheese (which is completely mind boggling to me). 2 rax and pylon blocking a natural hatchery are both cheesy attacks. They rely on Zerg not knowing, or not being able to stop what you're doing. That second part is really important because there are limitations in the game forced upon your opponent (ie: probes must be mining to collect resources, if you keep probes from mining, you are dealing economic damage). Even if he knows you're doing various early attacks, he HAS to take losses because he doesn't have the resources to stop it perfectly. This is the entire basis of what I am calling 'good cheese' for this thread.
 
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Cheese has always been there for the mental/mind games aspect. It's meant to piss people off and put them on tilt.
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Good cheese? Bad cheese?
Call it what you like, you're not going to improve when you cheese. Keep doing it for all I care, and after I face it enough, I'll crush it and be better than you.
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On December 30 2011 15:25 ClysmiC wrote:
Good cheese? Bad cheese?
Call it what you like, you're not going to improve when you cheese. Keep doing it for all I care, and after I face it enough, I'll crush it and be better than you.
Exactly the attitude that I'm calling out.
What makes you think that you're going to be the better opponent when I am the one learning the game on a more intimate level, coming up with new builds, and tightening up my macro to shave that 1 or 2 seconds off my build time?
All the things that go in to making good cheese are all the things one needs to become a good player.
Do more cheese, it gives you more intense practice and challenges you mentally to come up with a better way to execute it!
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People hate losing. If people lose because they easily could of countered the strategy had they known about it, then they go berserk more than had it been defeated because the opponent is more skillful. I don't think it's ruining esports, but I strongly believe that people are really whinny lately.
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I think you are seriously mistaken.
I don't think you're defining cheese properly. The whole "good cheese" vs "bad cheese" "all-in" vs "semi-all-in".
Cheese is something that works in a BO1 scenario. It's gimmicky. Cannon rushes are bad.
"The thing is... allins are good for you as a player."
No. They may be good to play against because when you hold them you win, but they are not good to do. If you want to know why, look up Day9's article about marginal advantage.
"Cheesy play requires an incredible amount of game knowledge,"
This is simply not true. There is obviously less knowledge involved in playing with one tier of units then there is with 3+ tiers of units.
As for your 2 points...
Number 1 is definitely true, cheese makes your opponent tighten up their play.
Number 2 is not true. It is harder to come up with a macro build that has to account for multiple tech paths of the enemy in a 25+ minute game than it is to come up with a build that either works in the first 10 minutes or doesn't.
Just a quick question: What league are you in? If you're in gold or silver, go ahead and cheese but know that it is not the best way to improve.
Once you're in diamond or higher, your cheese will simply not have the same win rate because we've seen it before and know how to respond after we scout it. All my builds crush early pools,, 4 gates, and can do well against 1-1-1 all ins.
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In my opinion cheese must exploit your knowledge of the opponent, as well as the current metagame.
In BW, Flash is the best cheeser. The most amazing example is his Hana Daetoo MSL run. 3-0 free in semis thanks to perfect bunker rushes vs 12 nex. Then 3-0 Jaedong thanks to 14cc three times in a row.
Bad cheese is the cheese is the cheese that doesn't exploit those.
To do a poker analogy, if you can get a good estimation of the opponent's build order panel and their frequency based on maps / metagame, and your chances of winning the game if you guess properly/wrong, then you can calculate your EV.
EV > 0 good cheese, EV < 0 bad cheese. Just like in poker, if you only count on luck to win money/cheese successfully, then you suck.
It's not by chance that SC players are good at poker actually.
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people care too much about winning or losing
in the end, you forget about the specific wins and losses, so what's really important is just improvement.
cheesing teaches you a lot about the game, more so than macro unless you're talking about mechanics. But most of the time people don't win purely because of mechanics. It lets you understand how to optimize something you're doing. Some 6poolers are better than others, and some people who pull all their SCVs are better than other people who pull all their SCVs, etcetc. Obviously it's frustrating because sometimes doing a certain thing as the opponent of the cheese will automatically make you lose. But honestly, it's your own fault.
just my thoughts on it :/
also, there's no point in distinguishing good cheese or bad cheese, the only thing important is that there is a degree of skill to everything.
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On December 30 2011 15:35 endy wrote:
In my opinion cheese must exploit your knowledge of the opponent, as well as the current metagame.
In BW, Flash is the best cheeser. The most amazing example is his Hana Daetoo MSL run. 3-0 free in semis thanks to perfect bunker rushes vs 12 nex. Then 3-0 Jaedong thanks to 14cc three times in a row.
Bad cheese is the cheese is the cheese that doesn't exploit those.
To do a poker analogy, if you can get a good estimation of the opponent's build order panel and their frequency based on maps / metagame, and your chances of winning the game if you guess properly/wrong, then you can calculate your EV.
EV > 0 good cheese, EV < 0 bad cheese. Just like in poker, if you only count on luck to win money/cheese successfully, then you suck.
It's not by chance that SC players are good at poker actually.
100% agreed with this. There's a difference between someone whose only strategy is cheese, and then someone who uses cheese often because he's a good player and the other player knows it.
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Ripps, cheese doesn't only work in a Bo1 scenario. In fact, it's probably a good idea to have more builds than just long, standard, macro strategies in a Bo3 or Bo5. Keep the opponent guessing and on his feet- make him know you're capable of pulling off an interesting cheese or all-in.
Which means it's important to point out (to OP or whoever equivocated the two): Cheese =/= All-in.
Also, it's good to practice everything, so you know how to defend everything. Duh.
And cheese/ all-in attacks are absolutely part of the game- you can QQ about them, but they're absolutely valid.
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There's no such thing as bad cheese.
There is such a thing as bad players who only know how to cheese.
I mostly go for standardy expandy type openings but with blizzard's love affair for small easy-to-cheese on maps, I would be silly not to throw in a proxy 2gate every now and then.
At my level of play a bit of cheese helps to tighten my play but sometimes I wonder what the lower leagues are like. Whether Bronze League really is the 7th Circle of Hell where sufferers endure an eternity of poorly executed 6 pools, 6raxes, 2gates and cannon cheeses.
I can only imagine there's some interesting cheese metagames going on down there too, like tossers who skip probes after 6 to get an early forge to fend off a 6pool. Or zergs who do their own 6pool just to put down a spine to defend themselves (rather than rush).
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I think if a probe wouldn't die to a marine (in BW you need more than 1 to kill the scouting probe), or a zergling (at least off creep, come on... and again, in BW they either needed to have great zergling control, you f up, or they needed speed to deny your scout), then cheese would be a lot easier to see coming, and thus not make it so annoying - at least at the higher levels.
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lack of cheese is ruining esports is more accurate. I remember my friend used to 6 pools me 6 times in a row on steppes of war in beta so that i stop doing greedy builds. He is now GM NA for the last 2 season and im top 8 master.
In korea most of the game are cheese: 6 pools, proxy, cannon rush, you call it. They cheese you from bronze to GM and hell people still call it the best sever in the world. Being aggressive such as July zerg in NA would just be called a cheesy mofo instead of 'god of war' in korea.
The problem is that you have to be smart about cheese. Did you know combatEx has such knowledge in probe acceleration and AI pathing while he learn how to cannon rush? Pretty sure he remember all the mineral line design in every base on every maps on ladder in order to execute his cannon rush perfectly. He even put his probe between 2 potential pylon positions so that he could build them as the same time if needed.
Cheese is just that you are taking a chance of your enemy making a mistake. As the skill level raise higher, less and less likely people will make mistake and lose to cheese but at the current state, we need more cheese than what we already have so people could actually practice against it. The cheeser will save his time and the defender could raise his skill level, both gain valuable lesson/resources post game.
Personally i have encounter countless of people who 6 pools and still have a legit transition into late game. Also proxy gates or cannon rush... you name it.
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There's this misconception that cheese is this evil thing in Starcraft. Pro players cheese all the time and they do it well; Boxer, the man that EVERYONE loves, is known for doing stupid cheesy stuff all the time...like bunker rushing Yellow three times in a row in the finals 
Despite what some people may complain about, cheese and the ability to do it is what makes a great player. Flash is a cheesy player sometimes. Jaedong? + Show Spoiler +
If you are playing a build that can't deal with cheese, then you're probably playing greedy. You have to respect that your opponent can just 6-pool, and you can't just nexus first on every map to your heart's content because that's what you envision to being "real" Starcraft.
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Without cheese we may as well play no-rush 20. Cheese is an important part of balancing the games and creating greater risk/reward payoffs in early game builds (ie expanding early is supposed to be risky, with great reward).
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Oh cheese, you mean strong attacks that happen before 20 minutes
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What exactly is playing properly again?
-looks again, complaint about terran being OP, complaint about cheese, complaint about 'proper play' and cheesing having no place in esports unless it's 'good cheese'-
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I just switched to terran and don't have the skills to hold off all the most common cheeses yet. Tonight I lost to a few cannon rushes. The only time I got mad was when the opposing player preemptively gg'ed me, right before I left the game. I really hate that.
I prefer to play standard, but if you want to attack asap every game, that's your prerogative. I think it's bad for you as a player if you get mad at cheesy/rush/whatever play because you have to learn to beat it if you want to play standard. I also think playing 6pool/cannon rush/scv pull all-in, etc. isn't going to develop your skills as a player, but I can understand the counter-arguments.
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cheese is one thing that makes SC2 interesting. I don't cheese/allin myself, instead I just enjoy the tension created by the possibility of cheese; the thrill when I scout there's nothing in my opponents base; the satisfaction when I hold it off. if there were no cheese, then every game would be a much less interesting. its just more variation.the only problem with cheese/allin (or indeed also very greedy builds) is that they narrow my own options considerably, and therefore i usually cant do what I initially was thinking. another problem is that on my level of play, cheese/all in strats force me to play safe, as i lack the skill to counter them with greedy builds.
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What is cheese anyway?
It seems like everybody has their own definition on what cheese is so it's really hard to know what people are talking about when they talk about cheese strategies and how they supposedly suck and that kind of jazz.
I have seen way too many variations on people telling what cheese is and then arguing that their definition is somehow more right than somebody elses when the whole term seems to have been pulled out of thin air. Both Liquipedia I and II say that cheese is based on the element of surprise and exploiting opposing scouting. Yet I see that cheese is defined more as just an all-in.
"Cheesy play requires an incredible amount of game knowledge,"
This is simply not true. There is obviously less knowledge involved in playing with one tier of units then there is with 3+ tiers of units.
There are multiple examples of cheeses that actually require an insane amount of game(and opponent) knowledge. From BW, Savior vs Bisu in EVER 2007 OSL, game one. Bisu went FE and tried to go for his trademark Corsair/DT. Savior anticipated this and went 2hatch Hydra in order to bust it. To not get absolutely killed by DTs, Savior needed Overlords to provide vision. Bisu had Corsairs to kill the Overlords because Savior didn't have time to get speed.
What did Savior do? Proxy a hatch in Bisu's 3rd, make Overlords from that hatch and kill the DTs that way.
If that's not cheese, what is?
In SC2 it's pretty common to hide expansions, tech and sometimes even production. In PvZ people "hide" their Stargate right behind their Cannons and Forge(FFE) because nobody in their right mind would hide an important tech building and more importantly, a way to harass Zerg, right behind his front line. It doesn't get scouted even though running 2 lings at the cannons would do the job and reveal the Stargate, making the Protoss be behind because his Stargate harass would be already nullified by the time it gets there.
In ZvZ people try to hide their Spire for example so that their Mutalisks are more effective. Once scouted, it's pretty easy to counter the Mutas and win depending on how completed the Spire is. If not scouted, Mutalisks are very good. ZvZ is a very intense matchup where if somebody gets away with hiding something beneficial, he gets a very big advantage.
In TvT you see mostly hidden Barracks in early game and hidden expansions in mid- and late-game. Blindly hiding an expansion is very suicidal. You must know your opponents state of game in order to safely hide an expansion without outright dying half a minute later. There are also very risky(and cheesy) unit movement plays in TvT, for example doom drops. If a doom drop gets scouted and caught, you lose almost immediately. Avoiding watch towers while pushing the opponent is also very risky because most of the time you can get into a situation where there is an opposing army between your army and your bases rendering your army useless.
I think there is more to cheesing than just 6pool, cannon rush, raxes and common all-ins.
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Complex things like faking your upgrades on cyber core even. Or remember the infamous forum post on here about damaging your own spire to make it look less complete.
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While I know deep down that cheese is good for me and will improve my skill as a player much more than turtling to 200/200 colossus deathballs all day, I still rage whenever I die to proxy buildings, cannon rush, 6 pool, etc. I hope to eventually purge my mindset of these Western influences so I can improve faster when laddering, but it will be hard.
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I agree with the OP - I've been playing on the Chinese server the last couple of weeks, and wow, I see more cheeses there each day than in a whole week of playing on the NA server. Sure, at first, it would bug me a bit. But now, I feel like it's actually helping me to improve. My early-game awareness is being sharpened and my willingness to use my own cheese against opponents has increased as well. As I'm adjusting my play style, I'm starting to believe that the general consensus of "cheese doesn't help you improve" is wrong.
Think back to the early days of GSL - most games were won off of one base timing attacks, sometimes they would go up to two base timing attacks (a lot of times these "timing attacks" were just funky cheeses), but very rarely would we ever see a true macro game. Why? Because the pros weren't yet capable of playing a perfect early game. Against a player who doesn't know all of the in's and out's of the early game, you can use aggressive play to capitalize on their mistakes and get a free win. Only after thousands of hours of experimentation have professional players moved beyond that point to where they can play a "standard macro game" - but that's because they first learned how to cheese and how to counter cheese.
That's the way I see it. If I want to improve at sc2, then I need to first concentrate on the early game. If I'm still losing to cheeses on a regular basis, then it's because I need to improve that aspect of my game. And if I want to be a player that can execute a late-game macro strategy, I'd better be able to execute the simpler early-game strategies first. As a player who has always heavily preferred macro games over rushes, I think I'm noticing this flaw in my ability to play the game. A pro wouldn't have this flaw, because before that pro became a pro, that pro had to learn how to cheese. Trying to skip ahead into being a "macro player" without first ever learning how to play the early game is just cheating yourself.
On December 30 2011 15:34 Ripps wrote:
Just a quick question: What league are you in? If you're in gold or silver, go ahead and cheese but know that it is not the best way to improve.
Once you're in diamond or higher, your cheese will simply not have the same win rate because we've seen it before and know how to respond after we scout it. All my builds crush early pools,, 4 gates, and can do well against 1-1-1 all ins.
I'm Diamond in both the NA and Chinese servers. And I'm telling you, there's a cheese out there to beat every build you can come up with. It's actually amazing to me how many low level masters players still get smashed by a proxy void ray or a 7 roach rush, not to mention proxy factories and simple 2 rax play. And I think cheesing does help you to improve the most because it forces you to make quick decisions and have to fall back on plan B when you fail, which can often teach you the most about the game and improve your crisis management skills. Plus, having good mechanics while executing a cheese strat is ten times more difficult than having good mechanics while both players just sit in their bases and macro. Being a reactionary cheeser who can voluntarily fall back into a "standard macro game" is the way to go - and that's actually how I would classify most pros.
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I have no respect towards cheesy players whatsoever or at least not when they depend on it. If I see someone doing a 6 pool, I just can't be arsed continuing the game & I tell them that as well, that if they really think that cheesing is an equivalent to skill then they'll hit a big brick wall sooner than later but I give them the game as I just can't be bothered with those kind of players.
I just don't waste my time on those kind of players but then again I hardly play ladder & I hardly play sc2 to begin with as it's far from being better than bw.
and just for the record, I'm very capable of stopping cheeses and it just makes me pull the legendary "-_-" face behind my screen so.. I just don't think people should get too obsessed with it as I think cheesing (at least for me) is rather easy to pull off but then again, since I have no respect for cheesy all-in players, I don't cheese, ever. Unless it's a guy who's tried to cheese before, then I just show him how it's done but being smart enough to be able to continue the game without getting too far behind if it would fail, unlike A LOT of cheesy players. (bw & sc2, though sc2 is a game I only play when I really don't have anything better to do).
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Cheese >>> Boring ball vs ball which happens more often anyway.
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Funny how people are bringing up the cheese & ball vs ball discussion... It's not like when it's not a cheese game that it's automaticly going to be a ball vs ball game, unless you really don't know any better like..
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United States22883 Posts
On December 30 2011 21:40 CakeSauc3 wrote:
I agree with the OP - I've been playing on the Chinese server the last couple of weeks, and wow, I see more cheeses there each day than in a whole week of playing on the NA server. Sure, at first, it would bug me a bit. But now, I feel like it's actually helping me to improve. My early-game awareness is being sharpened and my willingness to use my own cheese against opponents has increased as well. As I'm adjusting my play style, I'm starting to believe that the general consensus of "cheese doesn't help you improve" is wrong.
Think back to the early days of GSL - most games were won off of one base timing attacks, sometimes they would go up to two base timing attacks (a lot of times these "timing attacks" were just funky cheeses), but very rarely would we ever see a true macro game. Why? Because the pros weren't yet capable of playing a perfect early game. Against a player who doesn't know all of the in's and out's of the early game, you can use aggressive play to capitalize on their mistakes and get a free win. Only after thousands of hours of experimentation have professional players moved beyond that point to where they can play a "standard macro game" - but that's because they first learned how to cheese and how to counter cheese.
That's the way I see it. If I want to improve at sc2, then I need to first concentrate on the early game. If I'm still losing to cheeses on a regular basis, then it's because I need to improve that aspect of my game. And if I want to be a player that can execute a late-game macro strategy, I'd better be able to execute the simpler early-game strategies first. As a player who has always heavily preferred macro games over rushes, I think I'm noticing this flaw in my ability to play the game. A pro wouldn't have this flaw, because before that pro became a pro, that pro had to learn how to cheese. Trying to skip ahead into being a "macro player" without first ever learning how to play the early game is just cheating yourself.
This is exactly how it should be, and largely how it was around D on iCCup (at least for me.) I don't think anyone has said cheese doesn't help you improve. It's that while building up your skill, performing it yourself won't help you very much. The people who cheese largely do it just for wins, which is the wrong mentality for practice, and they'll eventually hit a wall where that cheese doesn't work anymore. Of course they can practice it further and further (and many end up cheating in order to make it work) but eventually they'll hit a skill level where opponents can deflect it, and because they had only practiced cheesing up to that point, they have no regular game skill/awareness to fall back on.
It's monumentally important to practice against, however, for becoming a well rounded player. If I were serious about training and had those two accounts, I would use the Chinese one mostly to practice defending cheese and use the NA one to practice performing it myself.
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Cheeses, while frustrating can be worthwhile if you are the victim of the cheese. If you are able to fend off a cheese, whether it be cannon rush, 6 Pool or all in, it makes taking down the opponent worthwhile.
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Estonia4644 Posts
we actually need MORE cheese, based on the responses, and i kind of agree
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EPT
