On August 29 2013 01:57 a176 wrote: People always seem to mention "how badly BW ended", because of the match fixing and sponsorship issues.
I have never viewed it like that.
For me, it was a non stop ride on the OSL championship train. From 2008 to the very last tving osl, Stork, July, Flash all winning in 2008. To the tyrant's reign in 2009. Fantasy's first championship in 2010. Effort's amazing battle against Flash in 2010 and his first championship.
But it was the final two OSLs that would prove to be the best, and forever be etched in my memory.
Jangbi's storyline in the Jin Air OSL is the stuff of legends. Coming back from abysmal proleague performances, fighting through the wildcard to earn a spot in the ODT. Making it to the final brackets, and removing Flash from the tournament in one of the greatest series in BW history ever. To finally fulfilling the legend of the fall to become OSL champion.
He returned the next season as a repeat championship, playing a dominating protoss style we havent seen in ages. Carriers. Storms. The quintessential definition of what it means to be protoss. And especially Jangbi vs Zero, the greatest PvZ series ever.
This is what I choose to remember of BW and the final OSLs.
I didn't even watch that pvt vs flash live, i assumed it would be an ez win. imagine my surprise when i woke up and saw that flash lost to JANGBI of all people
Wait what? What do you mean Jangbi of all people??
He has like one of the best PvTs OF ALL TIME. One would think Jangbi would be near the top of the short list of people who might have beaten Flash at the time.
On August 29 2013 01:57 a176 wrote: People always seem to mention "how badly BW ended", because of the match fixing and sponsorship issues.
I have never viewed it like that.
For me, it was a non stop ride on the OSL championship train. From 2008 to the very last tving osl, Stork, July, Flash all winning in 2008. To the tyrant's reign in 2009. Fantasy's first championship in 2010. Effort's amazing battle against Flash in 2010 and his first championship.
But it was the final two OSLs that would prove to be the best, and forever be etched in my memory.
Jangbi's storyline in the Jin Air OSL is the stuff of legends. Coming back from abysmal proleague performances, fighting through the wildcard to earn a spot in the ODT. Making it to the final brackets, and removing Flash from the tournament in one of the greatest series in BW history ever. To finally fulfilling the legend of the fall to become OSL champion.
He returned the next season as a repeat championship, playing a dominating protoss style we havent seen in ages. Carriers. Storms. The quintessential definition of what it means to be protoss. And especially Jangbi vs Zero, the greatest PvZ series ever.
This is what I choose to remember of BW and the final OSLs.
I didn't even watch that pvt vs flash live, i assumed it would be an ez win. imagine my surprise when i woke up and saw that flash lost to JANGBI of all people
Wait what? What do you mean Jangbi of all people??
He has like one of the best PvTs OF ALL TIME. One would think Jangbi would be near the top of the short list of people who might have beaten Flash at the time.
Well at the time Jangbi was in his massive slump and Flash had 70%+ TvP...
On August 30 2013 12:40 doubleupgradeobbies! wrote:
On August 30 2013 12:32 aRyuujin wrote:
On August 29 2013 01:57 a176 wrote: People always seem to mention "how badly BW ended", because of the match fixing and sponsorship issues.
I have never viewed it like that.
For me, it was a non stop ride on the OSL championship train. From 2008 to the very last tving osl, Stork, July, Flash all winning in 2008. To the tyrant's reign in 2009. Fantasy's first championship in 2010. Effort's amazing battle against Flash in 2010 and his first championship.
But it was the final two OSLs that would prove to be the best, and forever be etched in my memory.
Jangbi's storyline in the Jin Air OSL is the stuff of legends. Coming back from abysmal proleague performances, fighting through the wildcard to earn a spot in the ODT. Making it to the final brackets, and removing Flash from the tournament in one of the greatest series in BW history ever. To finally fulfilling the legend of the fall to become OSL champion.
He returned the next season as a repeat championship, playing a dominating protoss style we havent seen in ages. Carriers. Storms. The quintessential definition of what it means to be protoss. And especially Jangbi vs Zero, the greatest PvZ series ever.
This is what I choose to remember of BW and the final OSLs.
I didn't even watch that pvt vs flash live, i assumed it would be an ez win. imagine my surprise when i woke up and saw that flash lost to JANGBI of all people
Wait what? What do you mean Jangbi of all people??
He has like one of the best PvTs OF ALL TIME. One would think Jangbi would be near the top of the short list of people who might have beaten Flash at the time.
Well at the time Jangbi was in his massive slump and Flash had 70%+ TvP...
To be fair, Flash had close to 70% win rate in every MU at the time (and still had at the end of bw).
Well noone said it was going to be easy, or that Jangbi was going to be the favourite, but as far as I remember, that slump Jangbi was in never really affected his pvt much (well except that really really bad slump around the start of 2011 where he was so bad it was impressive).
I mean I'm not saying people were expecting to Jangbi to win, surely Flash was still a favourite over everyone at the time. But if you were given the information Flash was going to lose, surely Jangbi would be on the shortlist of potential candidates to beat him.
Flash was playing pretty uninspiring (for him) bw when he lost to Jangbi so I don't remember people being all that surprised. Yes he still had solid win ratios but he looked very beatable in almost all of his games.
I played/followed SC2 for a while, trying to convince myself that it was what BW was to me updated for a newer audience. Eventually i just gave up that delusion, and some of the feelings you wrote about in this blog hit home for me. I've picked up Dota mostly since, but it's good to hear that BW is starting to come back a bit, as it's the first eSport I fell in love with and in my eyes still the best there ever was. 5/5
I was watching some old proleague videos the other day, sometimes i forget how much of a monster jaedong was after watching him play sc2 and looking good but so generic, for lack of a better word.
The emotions that just went into the previous years of Brood War, with Oz and MBC Game disbanding in August '11 and the last OSL in '12. I personally was extremely shocked at the abrupt decision to cancel pro BW.
BW will always be something I will be proud that I enjoyed. It's just you and the other person fighting it out with your minds and your speed. Obviously there are other sorts of 1v1 competitive games out there but I don't think any other game will be able to recreate something like that to the caliber of BW for a while.
I wasn't sure I wanted to weigh in on the go-back-in-time discussion, but I guess I'll put it like this:
I got to high C winning pretty much all my games with hydra ZvZ, proxy hat (letting the Terran see it most of the time) ZvT into sloverlurker drop and 2base economy focused satanik style ZvP with drops and whatever dumb stuff I felt like doing. It was after SC2 came out so the ladder could arguably said to have been a lot weaker, but it was not that long after SC2 came out.
I stopped playing because the wall I saw coming up was B, where just doing the same strategy in each matchup wasn't going to cut it, and I didn't feel like investing the time it would take to learn some more new strats thoroughly. I had never really laddered before and I did this in the space of a week just to see if I could and because it was the first time in like 12 years that I'd bothered to fix my router settings (which promptly reverted a month later because my ISP is really annoying). The thing about B, obviously, is that you're going to be seeing the same players again and again, so you're not going to have as much surprise factor on your side and they're going to figure you out if you don't keep things fresh.
All that to say C is not nearly as strong as you think. C players tend to be one-trick ponies who learn one build or opening very well (something fairly standard), and get thrown way off their game if anything irregular happens. I mean they play like D if you don't give them the game they wanna play, maybe even worse at times. C players survive the poorly practiced cheeses of D players, but they usually don't have that great game sense.
That said, if you sent me back in time to 2002 and I practiced as much as the Koreans, I could probably make a splash. If I didn't practice like the Koreans, I think I'd still get slaughtered by stuff just catching me off guard constantly. 2002 is a really long way back, and I actually have played a lot on maps from that era, so I might be more suited than a lot of C players, but I think if a C player really practiced like the Koreans and was decently intelligent to adapt and invent strats that work in that time, there's a lot of stuff we take for granted now that would surprise the pros of 2002 as well. If you save muta stack or vulture patrol for the semi or finals and look like a huge cheater, you could probably take out a pretty top Korean too, since they just did not have to prepare for that kind of aggression as much back then, and some maps really lend themselves to it.
Almost all C players, I think, would just get crushed if they didn't practice properly tho, and some would never be able to handle the old tactics because they still don't scout that well or prepare for all possibilities properly.
This basically comes from someone whose skill has only developed by playing games with friends and has never really played hardcore or laddered at all other than this one session. The knowledge and supposed mechanic advantage would have to be backed up with dedication and learning to concentrate properly, play in front of a live audience, defend against difficult to predict 1-base strats without letting macro slip and losing too much... etc... Hell, there's a lot of C players who don't even adjust their play style when they come up against 1 base and get punished for being way too greedy and not defending right... That's something they'd have to work out.
The biggest thing about pro BW that I miss is that it was still developing. There were still unreasonably dominant players (Flash especially) despite all pros practicing full-time; new strategy developments; and somewhat fresh new maps. I don't get the same feeling from watching the SSL. SC2 has these aspects of course but the game itself is a lot less watchable.
I guess it's inevitable for any computer game to die eventually, because it's tied to a particular era of technology. It's hard to imagine that, a few decades from now, most people will even use an OS capable of playing Brood War. For that matter, mice might become uncommon. And the game rules are limited in their ability to evolve, because they are controlled by a single entity (Blizzard)--an important exception being maps, which is how BW lasted as long as it did. Games like Chess and Go experienced rule tweaks over their history, which contributes to their longevity.
So maybe pro BW couldn't have lived on forever, even if it weren't for the match-fixing, SC2, and so on. Yet its death feels untimely because it hadn't been fully explored.
On August 31 2013 23:32 Chef wrote: I wasn't sure I wanted to weigh in on the go-back-in-time discussion, but I guess I'll put it like this:
I got to high C winning pretty much all my games with hydra ZvZ, proxy hat (letting the Terran see it most of the time) ZvT into sloverlurker drop and 2base economy focused satanik style ZvP with drops and whatever dumb stuff I felt like doing. It was after SC2 came out so the ladder could arguably said to have been a lot weaker, but it was not that long after SC2 came out.
I stopped playing because the wall I saw coming up was B, where just doing the same strategy in each matchup wasn't going to cut it, and I didn't feel like investing the time it would take to learn some more new strats thoroughly. I had never really laddered before and I did this in the space of a week just to see if I could and because it was the first time in like 12 years that I'd bothered to fix my router settings (which promptly reverted a month later because my ISP is really annoying). The thing about B, obviously, is that you're going to be seeing the same players again and again, so you're not going to have as much surprise factor on your side and they're going to figure you out if you don't keep things fresh.
All that to say C is not nearly as strong as you think. C players tend to be one-trick ponies who learn one build or opening very well (something fairly standard), and get thrown way off their game if anything irregular happens. I mean they play like D if you don't give them the game they wanna play, maybe even worse at times. C players survive the poorly practiced cheeses of D players, but they usually don't have that great game sense.
That said, if you sent me back in time to 2002 and I practiced as much as the Koreans, I could probably make a splash. If I didn't practice like the Koreans, I think I'd still get slaughtered by stuff just catching me off guard constantly. 2002 is a really long way back, and I actually have played a lot on maps from that era, so I might be more suited than a lot of C players, but I think if a C player really practiced like the Koreans and was decently intelligent to adapt and invent strats that work in that time, there's a lot of stuff we take for granted now that would surprise the pros of 2002 as well. If you save muta stack or vulture patrol for the semi or finals and look like a huge cheater, you could probably take out a pretty top Korean too, since they just did not have to prepare for that kind of aggression as much back then, and some maps really lend themselves to it.
Almost all C players, I think, would just get crushed if they didn't practice properly tho, and some would never be able to handle the old tactics because they still don't scout that well or prepare for all possibilities properly.
This basically comes from someone whose skill has only developed by playing games with friends and has never really played hardcore or laddered at all other than this one session. The knowledge and supposed mechanic advantage would have to be backed up with dedication and learning to concentrate properly, play in front of a live audience, defend against difficult to predict 1-base strats without letting macro slip and losing too much... etc... Hell, there's a lot of C players who don't even adjust their play style when they come up against 1 base and get punished for being way too greedy and not defending right... That's something they'd have to work out.
as a pretty recent C who has taken games off c+ and b- players, i don't think 2013 C+ players would stand any kind of chance vs old pros. micro hasn't really changed besides muta micro, and c/c+ just doesn't have it. add to that a lack of experience on old maps and i think most c+s would get crushed. probably a b or b+ player would do fine, but i remember discussing this sort of thing back in 2009 with players from my CSL team who were B+ and better and their opinion was that pros from 2002 would still be A/A+ on iccup
Never got into SC2. I can't help to find the game uninteresting and messy compared to Brood War. I used to watch BW every single day.
I have to say, I have a lot of time to invest in more useful activities (such as practice, I'm a musician ) since it's gone, but I have huge nostagia for the old days when I think about it.
I don't watch too many old school game. It feels lonely. I loved to think that we were many people watching at something that was really alive. You felt part of it. Now it's just plain history.
On August 29 2013 16:36 shaftofpleasure wrote: With SC2 falling apart, I'm having these thoughts of a possible BW Reniassance .. I dunno .. it's just me and it will always be there. Koreans will still be following the BW scene. People having been doing this for more than 10 years so why would they stop? I think I maybe far off but BW can become what Chess is today.
I'd almost rather not, the pain of watching it all disintegrate again would be too much.
Watching old proleague and MSL/OSL intros brings a tear to my eye... Such a shame how it ended. For a while it was producing the most impressive, storied gamers in the world.
I got caught up in Dota2, so I don't think I've watched much BW since the last OSL ended. After reading this blog, I definitely think I should do so again.
EPT
) since it's gone, but I have huge nostagia for the old days when I think about it.
