EPThydra won against JYP on Neo Caldeum with a slow-ling attack to break down the back rocks and continued into brilliant muta -> roach -> infestor tech switches to win the game with good micro
It lead me to a retrospective, what is it about SC2 that has made the community completely lose its way of understanding spectacle and cheering for players instead of arguing over statistics? Flaming the maps and blizzard / tournament organizers instead of anticipating what kinds of crazy strategies the players have prepared? Why do people want to achieve this mythical state of "perfect map balance" so we can have the exact same stale strategies played out time and time again with out any variation where to win two players go into a game doing the same thing over and over again and test who executes that same strategy better?
BW is a game that's riddled with questionable design decisions, obvious bugs and unintentional unit and structure behaviors, strange ai tendencies, and a mechanically obtuse interface of control that Blizzard has never bothered to readjust or patch since 2001. Anything from allied mines, lifted buildings crushing interceptors, glitching units through solid mineral patches and neutral structures, stacking units on top of each other, things that would on the surface make a game seem completely unplayable and broken by today's standards. A worker being able to phase through a mineral patch by making a building behind it? A hellion being able to phase through a pylon wall? Banelings stacking on top of each other when burrowed? It would be ridiculous and the community would cry out for immediate fixes. But instead what happened?
The community adapted and created the meta-game and strategies around the inherent design decisions of the game. Anything from lack of smart casting / firing making protoss players manually drop reavers after all the sieged tanks have volleyed simultaneously knowing it's safe, stacking mutalisks / wraiths with a slower unit to micro, patrol micro to fire with out losing turning velocity, stacking lurkers and stop commanding them to not attack until the marine ball is on top of them, mineral "walking" vultures and even lurkers through neutral structures for back stabs.... Everything that was created was organic and the community instead imposed sanctions on designs that were deemed to ruin the game's balance, such as allied mines, while keeping everything else and ADAPTING the map making and tournament structures around an evolving metagame.
The reason why BW was able to do it for more than a decade is not because it had perfect map balance and perfect racial balance. The reason was that the community and its player-base were compassionate about the game, about the competition, about creating an enjoyable show for the audience, about creating interesting and new strategies revolving around designs which are imbalanced. Because the understanding and consensus was simply that "if usage of this specific form of micro or trick was universal and could be used by all players then it is balanced, even if the micro or trick itself lends an incredible advantage to the person using it". The greatest players and those who remain in our memory are those who defied norms, who embraces imbalances and tackled them head on, always attempting new strategies and creating unique situations. In the end it didn't matter who won or lost, what mattered was that the audience were entertained by their favorite players clashing against each other, making the impossible possible, making come backs in the most desperate of situations.
Map making was just one aspect of how BW's community adapted and learned from its mistakes to continually perpetuate itself and keep strategies and metagames from becoming stale and boring. True revolutionaries (
Flash, 
Bisu, iloveoov, 
sAviOr, Midas, BoxeR, Nal_rA, Stork, Jaedong, SoulKey etc etc etc) didn't cared one bit or complained about the inherent map inconsistencies or asymmetrical balance, what they did was create new builds in accordance to the specific maps and prevailing metagame in question, using the fact that their race isn't sent out on those maps to their advantage by using crazy builds that people don't have a big sample size of games to prepare for. And even though fans might be upset that their favorite player lost on a map that was unbalanced for their race or situation, we knew that what mattered were the players, not the map pool, what mattered were the quality of the games, not the statistics on the map. We never boiled our appreciation of players down to statistics and numbers when it comes to what map they were playing on.From the inception of BW to its twilight, there have been tens if not hundreds of maps that were considered completely imbalanced in their current meta-game. Anything from Reverse Temple and Longinus 2, to Peaks of Baekdu and Destination, to Central Plains and Neo Chain Reaction, the list goes on and on and on. But if you ever asked a BW fan what they thought of when
Flash ingeniously rushed Bisu on Monty Hall with a vespene geyser to continue mining minerals so he could walk marines into the main, or when Bisu used the map to proxy gate right in the open (in the super ace match of the proleague finals no less) on Neo Chain reaction where there was a reverse ramp from the main to the natural, or when sAviOr managed to beat top terrans on extremely zerg unfavored maps, and so on and so on, would the community outcry be "THE MAP IS IMBALANCED, THE DESIGNER NEED TO CHANGE IT NOW"? Fuck no, the response was always "THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME, HE FUCKING ROCKS, RECOMMENDED".BoxeR said it best, that every game, every practice session, he was trying to find new and innovative ways to play out an entertaining match for the fans, and often that was a much more important factor than simply winning. Even if he lost he wanted to lose in an entertaining way so that it would be memorable for the fans. The most memorable games in my mind being a Flash fan-boy aren't simply the ones that he won, but the ones that were entertaining (often ones where he lost), where the players duked it out in tense micro situations and used creative solutions to overcome obstacles, abusing the terrain of the maps in any way possible to win the game. So this is a personal pledge for everyone who might be reading this, don't boil your appreciation of games down to who won or lost, on whether or not a map or statistic is perfectly balanced, and remember what we are all here for. To cheer on our favorite players and watch or actively participate in something we are compassionate about that has provided us with entertainment and comradery. Learn from the past experiences and lessons of BW, where anything can happen at anytime, any underdog can use a one in a billion chance cheese or all-in to win over a fan favorite, where we cheered for players when we watched the games and left statistics out of our experience.
Thank you.
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Yes I will get back to writing BW articles eventually.
