2 new polls on the Blizzard Remastered forum - Page 6

Given our great success as an investigative team in the past, I thought the time was right to again combine your initial interest in a case with my weaponized autism sleuthing prowess.



First and foremost, it makes sense to map out a behavioral pattern for the poster in question. Due to the chief complaint seeming to be "stale meta" or "stale map pool," I have taken the liberty of searching for every time Dazed has used the word to try and capture a trend for the usage of the term.

The first appearance of the term as used by Dazed in reference to Brood War was in April, 2008. It should be noted that Dazed had only been a member of TL for a month and change, and was already complaining about the staleness of the competitive map pool.

This provides us with three possible pieces of information:

1. If nothing else, Dazed's opinion of the map pool/meta is consistent. His opinion that the map pool is stale predates the first pro-level game played on Fighting Spirit by well over a year. As this was the first ever usage of the term by Dazed, is it safe to say that Dazed's opinion is proven to be staler than Fighting Spirit? We'll explore this more below.

2. The first professional game played on Python was on June 10th, 2007, meaning that within the scope of less than a year, Dazed had already determined that Python is "stale." This hypothetically puts the shelf life of any given map at around ten months before it goes "stale."

3. Dazed has been unhappy with the state of competitive Brood War for years before the match-fixing scandal, the hybrid league, post-KeSPA lack of new maps, etc. He was hinting at his unhappiness within two months of joining TL in 2008. This equates to over 11 years of playing and watching a game in which you are fundamentally unhappy with the community consensus on core elements and its general direction. Misattributed quotes about insanity aside, one has to question whether the feeling of staleness that Dazed has experienced throughout the years grew exponentially over time, whether each new map did anything to allay those issues (for 10 months or so), so on and so forth. One thing can be said for certain, however, is that Dazed's decision to stay despite a seemingly perpetual state of discontent means that he must be pretty comfortable with misery, which explains his lack of inhibition in sharing it with others through his posts - or, he is an addict, and Brood War is his drug of choice. Could be both. This is actually turning into a pretty tragic case. New title.



To address the earlier quandary about whether or not the "staleness" of the game (along with the nature of his posts) according to Dazed is exponential, the above graph demonstrates that it is indeed the case. Perhaps this stands to logic that as a piece of bread stays out on the counter longer and longer, it becomes more and more stale, until it is eventually moldy and inedible. When will Dazed reach that level with Brood War, after over 11 years of nibbling on ever-staler bread? When will the TL community reach that level with Dazed's posts about staleness? When will the staleception become too much?

The outlook isn't good. My brief dive into Dazed's post history has unearthed what can only be described as a descent into madness combined with a caustic grumpy war veteran getting more and more fed up with his wife, to the point where civility has begun to elude him. Take a look at the progression (or regression?) of the rhetoric Dazed uses to cushion his claims of Brood War "staleness:"

+ Show Spoiler [The Descent] +

If Dazed's posting habits are to be seen as caused by his perception of the game's/map pool's staleness, then that presents us with an undeniable proof:

1. The longer FS and CB are in the map pool, the exponentially more stale they are according to Dazed.
2. The more stale they are according to Dazed, the exponentially greater quantity and lower quality of posts will be made by Dazed about their staleness.
3. The more Dazed posts about their staleness, his posts grow exponentially more stale as a result.

What we have here is a doubly exponential process. This gives us the following series of equations, and an alarming conclusion:



For those of you not operating on near-Dazed levels of insight, this means that we will be rapidly approaching a singularity of staleness on TL as a result of Dazed's posts, unless FS and CB (and other "standard" "macro" maps) are expressly removed from the map pool. Considering this is entirely outside of our control, we have no option but to be idle observers of this catastrophe.



We have already addressed the fact that Dazed's opinion, since pre-FS times, has been unwavering. One thing we are missing from our current calculations, however, are all of the posts that allude to the deplorable state of affairs in the game that do not mention the word "stale." I have looked at Dazed's post history over the past 100 posts (~4 months), and have come up with an alarming statistic: If we exclude posts made in the Game of Thrones thread and the SC2 section, 53.75% of Dazed's posts allude to staleness in one way or another - 43 posts in total.



The number of posts he made alluding to the staleness of the game FAR outpace any non-Brood War content, and outpace the non-staleness discussion too. This includes throw-away posts like signing up for leagues, or simply saying "thank you," in response to someone as well.

We are past the half-way point. The only question is whether Dazed will increase the ratio of stale to non-stale posts, divert more attention to making stale posts in favor of Game of Thrones posts, make more posts overall, or all three? As we determined above, the staleness has shown no signs of stopping, so at least one of the above are on our radar in the near future. Keep your eyes peeled.

Let's take a breather for a moment and examine what happens when Dazed does make his stale posts. Do many of them go unanswered? Yes. I believe many posters have accepted that this is the natural state of things, that every topic that is even tangentially related to the state of Brood War will have a stale Dazed post in it, and that it is best to just ignore it. However, there have been times when people decided to call Dazed out on his assertions. Nina's post above is one example. At times, he has been addressed by numerous people (read on in the thread). One thing that has remained consistent about Dazed throughout these encounters where he gets btfo by players more knowledgeable than him, is that he just stops answering - he slithers away from whence he came, only to resurface a while later in a different thread, repeating the same things. He has done this when in other situations as well. I have personally asked him numerous times why he subjects himself to an environment in which he is unhappy, to no avail. In short, I think that given Dazed's consistency, Nina's queries will go unanswered.

More specifically to the content of Nina's post and initial inquiry in to this case: Nina suggests that Dazed make a thread with specific changes that he would suggest that would cure the staleness of Brood War. Of course, he has never done so. In fact, he has never made any thread at all. So, to those who are waiting for Dazed to explain how to deal with the staleness of Brood War (and thus, offer us an escape from the inevitable staleness armageddon), I would say do not hold your breath.

Finally, I would like to address a perplexing element of Dazed's remarkable consistency. Despite his statements claiming that the map pool hasn't significantly changed in 10 years, the options for Zerg have all been the same, and that the game is just generally stale, Dazed has not actually improved by any noticeable margin. This is evidenced by his continued participation in noob-oriented leagues for the vast majority of the past 10 years. This is by no means to shame any low level players out there - there is no shame in being a noob, even if you're a noob for 10 years. The main purpose is to raise a question. If everything is so stale, and we have determined that Dazed's staleness increases exponentially over time, shouldn't he be perfectly suited to this environment which he deplores? Is it perhaps the internal struggle of being stale but hating staleness that prevents him from unlocking his true powers and dominating the stale meta? Dare I say that this could all be borne of frustration from the staleness of his skill - losing in (seemingly) the same way every time for over a decade? Or is that the conundrum of staleness - that being more stale is equivalent to approaching a sort of baseline of staleness from which one can never escape? These are questions that unfortunately I do not have the qualifications to answer, but it is interesting to muse them nonetheless.





TL;DR: The "Stale" Apocalypse is coming, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. And it's Dazed's fault.