ASL S7 to start 13th January - Page 3

On December 27 2018 18:41 ShloobeR wrote:
Sea went to military service on Christmas Eve I think it was

his last stream was on the day of the MPL 2nd set (23rd)

MPL spoilers
+ Show Spoiler +

On December 27 2018 18:41 ShloobeR wrote:
Sea went to military service on Christmas Eve I think it was

his last stream was on the day of the MPL 2nd set (23rd)

MPL spoilers
+ Show Spoiler +

Jaedong: Dude got his legacy through impossibly high levels of fundamentals and mechanics. They're gone, and the state of his body and current practice regime means that we will never see the likes of it ever again. If you are familiar with football, think of the Brazilian Ronaldo after his knee injuries.

EffOrt: The player that understands the essence of the zerg race the best (doesn't mean the best ability necessarily, but the best approach). EffOrt does not have the absolute best raw fundamentals, nor does he have the best gaming understanding under orthodox situations. However, he draws everything from the zerg arsenal to gain leads, in every possible manner you can think of including multi-tasking, decision making, micro-management, and on the spot mind games. On his best days, EffOrt's games are pure art. However, he really isn't good enough as a player to sustain that level of execution, mind games, and gaming theory all the time to provide results in a reliable way like Jaedong once managed to.

Larva: The greatest beneficiary of the current streaming ecosystem out of the four. Larva is young, hungry to prove himself, and has played the greatest number of online sponsored games out of the four players. He has by far the best late game macro-management and fundamentals (for example, keeping the cycle of zerg production flowing without skipping a beat), and is capable of the highest levels of execution if no curve balls and is allowed to play within his comfort zone. While he never would have amounted to anything if the professional scene had continued (meaning I actually don't rate him highly as a pure gaming talent), the current set of circumstances, including physical state of the various gamers, their levels of drive, and u[coming military duties, means that Larva's stock as a player is on the rise.

Soulkey: If Larva has the greatest fundamentals on orthodox games as of today, Soulkey has the greatest decision making within the confines of orthodox matches. Given his low APM numbers, you'd think he sucks ass at multi-tasking, but his speed of thought and the order in which he manages his screens and attentions in frequently occuring situations are unmatched. He is almost Flash-esque in this regard, in that he makes the 9 out of 10 decisions given the available information throughout the entire game without fail, whereas EffOrt is more the type to go for the 10 out of 10 decision without the necessary information or skill to pull it off reliably, but hoping that he guesses his opponents right, or can sometimes pull off the impossibly hard levels execution required for the 10 out of 10 gaming decision. The texbook zerg as of today is Soulkey.

SnOw is not a macro-management player, he wins through tactical maneuvers, heroic usage of key units such as reavers and carriers, and his games tend to be won and lost off what happens on a single screen.

He is not somebody who pays extreme detail to probe count optimization, adding additional gateways at just the right moments, and constantly switching screeens to manage multiple bases.

CJ Entus protoss players such as Much, Movie, and SnOw had a tendency to play a more tactical game as opposed to the more optimization-based, solid macro-management style that was enjoyed by the SK Telecom T1 protoss players. Words such as abusive, and infuriating may suit how these players utilized protoss units to create their chances.

Rain has a much cleaner, more optimization based game that has incredibly well thought out flow-charty feel to it. He is basically the post-Bisu everybody was looking for (both have good multi-tasking skills, although Bisu's multi-tasking has a much more innate feel to it), while SnOw creates opportunities and capitalizes on them in his own unique manner.

SnOw will never be someone like Bisu (stylistically speaking Rain is a much better candidate, and while Mini is fast he reminds me more of Kal than Bisu), but I think he has the potential in him to become the next Stork (although Stork was a much more well rounded player during his prime).

If watching CJ Entus protoss players gave me the feeling that these players were abusing specific certain protoss units, compositions, and techniques, watching Samsung Khan protosses (more specifically Stork and JangBi) personally gave me a feeling that these players mastered all available techniques and tactics regarding protoss warfare (ranging from guerrilla warfare to epic large scale battles).

SnOw's play-style isn't necessarily flawed, he just needs to build on his already potent repertoire of skill-sets. Of course, SnOw does have one of the worst multiple screen management I've seen from a top flight protoss player, which explains his sub-par macro-management. However, his play-making ability with reavers alone make him one of the most feared protoss-versus-terran players in the game. Such mastery over a unit cannot be ignored. I think it is not a coincidence that SnOw holds the title for the most recorded kills from a single unit (72 kills from a single reaver) in a televised match.

JangBi during his prime is the most gifted protoss player I've seen thus far, in terms of his ability to make something out of nothing within a single screen, with nothing but his raw execution of play-making to fall back on. SnOw isn't there yet, but his play-making with units such as reavers and carriers have always been top notch, and if he builds on that, his approach to the game may not be a limiting factor.

While Stork's macro-management decisions weren't picture perfect, his attention to the minute details would often be water-tight during his prime. It is something that is severely lacking from him in his current form, and to pretend all of it is muscle memory that can be mastered by even the novice players is an over-statement.

Take a look at the second game of his quarter-finals match against Bisu, Stork is preparing for a two reaver timing push against Bisu, and Bisu scouts the first reaver with his observer.

Stork starts to unload then load his first reaver in an off-beat manner with Bisu's observer watching, and this is just one of the finer attentions to detail Stork possessed that others lacked. By having his first reaver sometimes visible, and sometimes not visible from the map, Stork was attempting to obfuscate the timing of the second reaver, by making it not clear whether the reaver being loaded was the first reaver being unloaded then loaded, or the second reaver being loaded with the first reaver already being inside the shuttle.

When Stork defeated FanTaSy on Flight-Dreamliner with perfect carrier utilization, he mentioned in an interview that he control grouped his carriers separately so that his DPS would be maximized. Not only was the actual execution of carrier micro-management a cut above the rest, Stork knew when to target goliaths, and when to target siege tanks, when to spread the terran army thin with his ground troops, which terrain to abuse, and when to ignore the terran army entirely. All these things add up, and Stork during his prime handled the protoss units with more care and precision than any other protoss players I've seen.

Despite having played more games of televised Brood War matches than any protoss player in history, it was quite rare to find matches where Stork lost solely due to a severe mishandling of his units. He was an artisan of protoss units, and while players have their signature units such as SnOw with his reavers, or Bisu with his corsairs, Stork probably had the broadest, as well as the deepest knowledge of how to handle the entire arsenal of protoss units.

It is a matter of player preference. Some players like to bring their units to life. Some players focus more on their bases and optimize their infrastructure to perfection. Some players like to perform more tasks within a given time-frame, and try to multi-task the opponent to death. There are so many dimensions to this game that no player can be perfect in everything, and we will never see a perfect game of Brood War unless there is an AI capable of issuing infinite commands working with an algorithm of the highest calibre. Everyone has their own unique philosophy on how to approach the game, and the proving grounds are the competitive platforms. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but nothing can take away competitive results.