Hi I am a newbie and I don't even know much about the esports scene. I was wondering if anyone thinks it would be a good help to watch pro matches and if they had any recommendations on what matches to watch in the past or in the future. Unless you think it would be too hard to process for me who is quite new. I am not too familiar with many of the tournaments but I did hear this World Cyber Games event is having a Starcraft II match, is that a good place to start?

Russano

United States339 Posts

April 15 2019 03:50 GMT

If you want to get good at the game? Absolutely watch. For every game in existance, what you learn playing purely by yourself in a vacuum is going to be far less than the sum total of an online community. Even seeing what bad players are doing is useful. Watching what pros do shows you what you "should" be doing. You will get signifcantly better if you had watching/studying games to your activities.

TL has a "best games of the month" serial that is a good place to see entertaining and great games.

https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/545568-the-mega-best-games-of-march-2019 - is the link to last months.
You can go back and find older ones. if you like, but older games are weird because of patches so the game is fundamentally different. (Unlike old BW games which only have stylistic changes over time). The games in the past year or so are fairly close. You can still learn some things from old games but builds and units behave differently.

The other thing you can do is find a good streamer to watch. Either find an English speaker with analysis who you enjoy, or watch some top Koreans play.

pvilanoma

6 Posts

April 15 2019 07:59 GMT

Thanks so much Russano I'll keep an eye out for the best games of the month. That makes sense about older games and older patches, I'll definitely pay more attention to current games and current matches.

Are there any streamers you can recommend?

SamirDuran

Philippines322 Posts

April 15 2019 14:34 GMT

On April 15 2019 16:59 pvilanoma wrote:

Are there any streamers you can recommend?

Probably the watch the race you are playing. Then pick a favorite style then pick your favorite pro player to watch.

Wombat_NI

Northern Ireland10143 Posts

April 15 2019 20:15 GMT

Unless a streamer on Twitch or Youtube actively commentates I would not recommend this for a new player.

It’s a waste of time if you don’t know what to look for, or why they’re doing what they do in response to information.

How new are you exactly?

I’d recommend moving from YouTube basic tutorials, to watching educational/commentary player content and tournaments, plus browse strategy forums like Team Liquid, Reddit has some good subforums

TL’s Terran and Protoss Help me Threads are good, as are the reddit forums AllThingsTerrans and AllThingsProtoss

Lambo and PigStarcraft are very good, they’re on both YT and Twitch. Artosis has some great content on YouTube too.

I only have ever played Protoss and Terran so I’m sure there are Zerg equivalents to what I’ve mentioned.

Apologies for the lack of URLs, they’re easily findable on google or whatever search engine you use, it’s just super unwieldy for me to get them at present with what I’m doing.

Starcraft reminds me a lot of playing guitar. The hardest jump is from total novice to being able to do anything, once you overcome that hurdle it gets easier and easier to improve as you can start to identify flaws or what you need improve on yourself.

Happy hunting, always good to have some new blood.

Wombat_NI

Northern Ireland10143 Posts

April 15 2019 20:18 GMT

I eventually got to a point where I could play some Yngwie Malmsteen stuff, no amount of watching Yngwie Malmsteen play would have helped me learn anything about guitar playing initially.

A somewhat crude analogy I guess, but that to me is what watching Korean first person streams for a novice to learn Starcraft would be like.

aleph_two

2 Posts

April 16 2019 00:42 GMT

Good help? Eh.
Good idea? Yes.

As someone who watched the European scene for an entire year before ever attempting to play, I have some bias here. But my experience is that watching pro SC2 has kept up my love for the game, and connection to the community, both when I was burned out on playing, and when I just plain didn't have enough time to keep my skills up.

As Russano said, I'd be wary of going back too far in the past. I pretty much only watch live tournaments. There's enough content there to keep your schedule more than full, as long as you're not overly picky about who's playing. Personally, I rarely watch VODs... but if my schedule were less flexible I probably would.

If you want to watch practice streamers you should probably take someone else's advice. For tournaments, you should probably also take someone else's advice, but FWIW I follow (twitch dot tv slash):
starcraft [shocking, I'm sure]
gsl [the big Korean league happens here]
basetradetv
zombiegrub
feardragon64
temp0
proxytempest
gravity620

Like Wombat, I don't really think that streams are terribly useful for learning the game, but with effort and intentionality, they can work for that purpose as well.

Drake

Germany6125 Posts

April 16 2019 13:05 GMT

for me it helped more to watch people with a rank 1 level higher then people who were SO much higher

Russano

United States339 Posts

April 16 2019 22:49 GMT

I also recommend following the live events calendar here on TL as it will keep you up to date with most games. I also use SC2casts as sometimes there are games I missed on the calendar there.

For streams it depends on what race you are into, and your own personal preferences. I'm a protoss player. I personally prefer seeing the absolute tip top levels of play, so I generally prefer watching the top Koreans play. Obvously most of these streams are at late/odd hours. Almost all the korean streamers require a sub to watch VODs, so live is your best bet probably.

Protoss -

Stats - Consistently the best protoss player and streamer as well. https://www.twitch.tv/kimdaeyeob3

Zest - Zest has been streaming a ton very recently and tearing up the KR ladder. He and Stats both go through periods where they stream a crap ton then disappear for a while dependong on schedules. https://www.twitch.tv/sc2_zest

Classic - was streaming a good deal last month before he began prepping for GSL. https://www.twitch.tv/kimclassic

Parting - Easily streams more than most people, much less Koreans. He's also very...unique. https://www.twitch.tv/partingthebigboy

Some other Koreans who stream relatively rarely -

Creator - https://www.twitch.tv/sc2creator - Doesn't require a subscription like everyone else.

herO - https://www.twitch.tv/dmadkr0818

Trap - https://www.twitch.tv/trap321

SoS - https://www.twitch.tv/jinairsos1

Every once and a while I will watch some non-Korean action when I'm more hard up.

Showtime - https://www.twitch.tv/sc2showtime
Mana - https://www.twitch.tv/liquidmana

Sometimes I'll watch Rotterdam, Mcanning, or some of the other euro Protoss, but rarely.

Unfortunately Neeb doesn't seem to stream, neither does Dear.

Terran -

Innovation - Consistent stream and at a high level. https://www.twitch.tv/innovation_s2

TY - Not as consitent but the best terran you will get to see as Maru doesn't seem to stream. https://www.twitch.tv/sc2tyty

Polt - Just came back from military service so not at his old level yet, but he streams all the time, in English, and has excellent commentary. https://www.twitch.tv/polt

Sometimes you'll get some others like Gumiho but not all that often.

Zerg -

Dark - Not alot of consistent streaming from the top zergs. Dark is probably the best. https://www.twitch.tv/qkrfuddn0

soO - Streams occaisionally https://www.twitch.tv/sc2soo

Serral streams on a rare occaision.

Anyways, those are the streams I dip into it. There are some other ones that you may like depending on the streamers personality themselves. Every has different tastes and one persons "I love his music and he's so chill" is another persons "OMG that stream is so boring and why is he yelling into his mic randomly." My Dad has been watching SC2 since my playing days, even after I had quit previously and his favorite SC to watch his Beastyqt's stream and videos. He puts it on all the fucking time. Explore a bit and find people you like.

Majick

Poland308 Posts

April 20 2019 11:04 GMT

#10

Watching pros is cool, it helps you increase your game knowledge and stuff... BUT as a newbie I would not recommend trying to imitate their strategies. You don't have the multi tasking and game sense required to execute pro-level strategies.

Pros rely a lot on micro units, harassment etc... and they can do it without harm to their economy, because they have the multitasking for it. Unless you are mid-Diamond or higher league, if you try to imitate their play, your economy will suffer because you don't have the skills to keep producing and microing at the same time.

So just focus on building stuff all the time. And don't choose units that require constant micro or babysitting. Make armies that you can A-move so you can focus fully on your macro. You will be progressing 100x faster this way. You can start focusing on micro and imitating pro strategies when you are at least Diamond level. Below that there is really no benefit.

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