On February 15 2012 11:45 Spekulatius wrote: *Sunset*
*Game lights the campfire and gathers the children around the soothing source of warmth*
"Listen well, kids. I shall tell you a story of the old days..."
More!
I really only know things from 98-00 and 05-06 progamer wise. Although, from 98-00 most of it is about irrelevant non-Koreans who were the first pros, or potentially could've been.
That doesn't mean we don't want to hear your stories.
That is extremely interesting to know. For some stupid reason, I always thought they were just badly programmed and blizzard decided to leave them like that. I didn't know they were intentionally stupid from the beginning.
On February 15 2012 13:26 PetitCrabe wrote: That is extremely interesting to know. For some stupid reason, I always thought they were just badly programmed and blizzard decided to leave them like that. I didn't know they were intentionally stupid from the beginning.
It is something of a concept, making something more difficult to use as opposed to just lowering it's damage. Reavers are a glorious unit. Viable in all match-ups, always powerful, yet they are arguably the most temperamental unit in the game. That doesn't really happen anymore.
On February 15 2012 11:26 Spekulatius wrote: The "following without exploding on a unit" symptom is mostly caused by a congo line of fleeing units. For example, when you have an SCV train running away from a scarab and the reaver targeted one of the SCVs in the middle, it will get stuck on the last SCV in the line and then explode without doing anything. This sucks on the one hand but is reasonable: you don't want your scarab to explode on the first unit/building it encounters but rather hit the unit/building it was destined to. That's just how it was designed and that's hard to change imo. Aside from that, it makes for the most exciting moments in a match.
And the "move even when in range" thing is hardly relevant imo.
Sometimes though scarabs will completely miss their target and fly into open space and blow up. Its pretty funny.
Or we have masterful Bisu reavers, whose scarabs go crazy... (i know there was one game where a scarab bugged over terrain, but i'll have to find it... for now, this will do~ :D)
On February 15 2012 13:12 Mortality wrote: Wait, you just noticed this?
But TBH, this is also one of the good things about SC. Yes, it's true that no matter how good you get your reavers will still do stupid things, but if you look at the elite users of reavers throughout history dating all the way back to Zileas, it's always been said that their reavers were "different." Somehow they bug less frequently and score big kills more often. Reavers are a unit that require huge star sense, similar to muta vs scourge except even higher.
In other words, this is yet another case of Starcraft favoring the better player who practices harder to perfect his usage of a unit.
I wanted to make a post about this and I agree.
Stupid reaver AI making BW a more exciting game and creating a broader skill range is but one reason why BW is BW today. If every soccer player was given the ability to laser the ball into the net with the help of a computer, or if every soccer player was given the ability to run at 30 mph equally, who would want to watch soccer anymore when things start to become standardized? Same goes for competitive gaming.
The problem I have with this is that it's way too "random" than "difficult". PvP in particular, often seems to me particularly random even at the highest level.
On February 15 2012 11:13 FlaShFTW wrote: They were originally too good with their ai. think of it, then everyone would go for reavers and kill like a billion scvs. so blizzard nerfed the ai of it so it would become "retarded" and have "dud" scarabs.
fun fact: did you know boxer loved reavers that he was protoss back in the day? then blizzard nerfed the reaver so boxer became the famous terran dropship maniac today.
Thing is, pros will know which worker to target so that scarabs don't get stuck. You really cannot drop your reaver and not micro it. You have to pick your shots and aim very well. Sometimes you have to move a little and get the correct angle first before you shoot. Choices like: do you aim a shot at the scv in the middle and hope for a big splash and more kills but risk the player running away and getting no kills or do you aim for the scv closer to you and only getting a few kills but with a higher chance of success. Also other things like attacking so your opponent has to micro somewhere else giving you a small window to target his center scv clumps etc.
A lot of things seem like they are random but they're not. Elite players are elite for a reason.
On February 15 2012 14:32 Jragon wrote: More stories from ye olde days of BW please Game!
Fun fact #3: Maynard, whom I shared a relationship with outside of what is coming next, believed the strongest early game build would cover any lategame mishaps, and 2facted everybody. Not only did he go for early pushes, but he copied a lot of players, he was one of the first voyeurs of his time. Two things resulted from this, as he was a prominent 2v2 player of his time, the "cheesy" metagame of 2v2 (not fully to credit him with obviously), and the East mentality. He is one of the original founders, or rather, he had enough notoriety and was good enough to be taken seriously with his attitude, aka the USEast mentality. The BM, squandering of opponents, and super gay gameplay alike defined this. + Show Spoiler +
Do note that most gameplay was cheesy and not well planned at this point in BW anyhow, he just took it to an entirely different level
On February 15 2012 14:32 Jragon wrote: More stories from ye olde days of BW please Game!
Fun fact #3: Maynard, whom I shared a relationship with outside of what is coming next, believed the strongest early game build would cover any lategame mishaps, and 2facted everybody. Not only did he go for early pushes, but he copied a lot of players, he was one of the first voyeurs of his time. Two things resulted from this, as he was a prominent 2v2 player of his time, the "cheesy" metagame of 2v2 (not fully to credit him with obviously), and the East mentality. He is one of the original founders, or rather, he had enough notoriety and was good enough to be taken seriously with his attitude, aka the USEast mentality. The BM, squandering of opponents, and super gay gameplay alike defined this. + Show Spoiler +
Do note that most gameplay was cheesy and not well planned at this point in BW anyhow, he just took it to an entirely different level
I was expecting worse, especially back then 2 fact can't have been that bad. Although interesting because I originally assumed he was the master of macro.
Fun fact #4: {][)K} and HG|{, 2 notorious clans filled with pre-age (and still some) hackers and programmers had a 6 year channel war on battle.net, as well as other places. It was the definition of online trench warfare of its day. I don't remember the leader of HG|{'s name, but {][)K}'s leader was JoYKiLLaH. They would camp each others channels for months at a time, hoping to gain OPs after crashing their bots. The wars were technically won by HG|{, despite their channel falling victim to {][)K} at a significantly larger margin. That is because {][)K}'s channel, op dk187 fell to HG|{ for a little over a month, forcing them to move to op dk420. During this period, JoYKiLLaH and his #2 (started with a "M") took over op HG|{ for a week or so, but still lost the battle. The war continued on until they both could securely maintain their channels on all servers of all types, and all games in 2004. Toyland was the original op ToT) after the server split into East, West, Europe, and Asia. -=^un4given^=-'s channel (leader: Psychotic, now a professional programmer with a wife, who still dabbles in older games like Ultima Online) was the prerequisite to this, when Battle.net was a single server.
On February 15 2012 11:13 FlaShFTW wrote: They were originally too good with their ai. think of it, then everyone would go for reavers and kill like a billion scvs. so blizzard nerfed the ai of it so it would become "retarded" and have "dud" scarabs.
fun fact: did you know boxer loved reavers that he was protoss back in the day? then blizzard nerfed the reaver so boxer became the famous terran dropship maniac today.
This fun fact needs to be highlighted/thrown into his fan club. What a baller BoxeR is
On February 15 2012 11:13 FlaShFTW wrote: They were originally too good with their ai. think of it, then everyone would go for reavers and kill like a billion scvs. so blizzard nerfed the ai of it so it would become "retarded" and have "dud" scarabs.
fun fact: did you know boxer loved reavers that he was protoss back in the day? then blizzard nerfed the reaver so boxer became the famous terran dropship maniac today.
Just to clarify, blizz didn't make the reaver ai more stupid, they just changed the cooldown of reavers that were dropped from shuttles. Originally they were zero, like tanks that shoot when dropped. So if you hotkeyed your reaver you could instantly pop it back in and make it look like your shuttle was firing scarabs. This was incredibly overpowered. Then boxer switched to terran and the rest is history.
): the biography is gone. But I remember reading it; it was quite funny. I remember specifically because he mentioned that the reaver was very strong and that blizzard "patched it and it became unintelligent".
There's also a certain angle where Reavers fire considerably worse than all other angles .. can't remember if it's up or down.
Also if you issue the stop command for the Reaver while the scarab is out on the field, the scarab will instantly dud and explode. Useful if the scarab is acting retarded and just bugging out around some terrain/building, and you want to refire right away.
I just love all the awesome intricacies that BW has, really gives the game so much depth and skill differentiation :D
On February 15 2012 14:39 figq wrote: The problem I have with this is that it's way too "random" than "difficult". PvP in particular, often seems to me particularly random even at the highest level.
I disagree with this notion, PvP is one of my favorite matchups, which I find to be largely determined by skill. The only "randomness" occurs with builds, which is mostly build advantages and disadvantages, instead of outright build victories and losses. If you're smart and good at mindgaming/reading your opponent, you can achieve a very high winrate in PvP (I feel that Brave and Horang2 in particular are very good at the psychology part of PvP)
wait, link / source to the "AI on the reaver being nerfed" ??? wtf really?? ummm what? the Reaver nerf cited as the reason boxer switched from P to T was the shuttle cooldown timing change.
ok i got ninjad but idk how O_O
the reason the reaver and scarab AI (which are different) is bad, is because it was made bad.
they probably have some sort of "min step amount" that means they can't turn fast.
On February 15 2012 11:13 FlaShFTW wrote: They were originally too good with their ai. think of it, then everyone would go for reavers and kill like a billion scvs. so blizzard nerfed the ai of it so it would become "retarded" and have "dud" scarabs.
fun fact: did you know boxer loved reavers that he was protoss back in the day? then blizzard nerfed the reaver so boxer became the famous terran dropship maniac today.
Just to clarify, blizz didn't make the reaver ai more stupid, they just changed the cooldown of reavers that were dropped from shuttles. Originally they were zero, like tanks that shoot when dropped. So if you hotkeyed your reaver you could instantly pop it back in and make it look like your shuttle was firing scarabs. This was incredibly overpowered. Then boxer switched to terran and the rest is history.