Official State of the Game Podcast Thread - Page 215

On November 11 2010 05:30 nzb wrote:
Yo iNcontrol,

You said you train for powerlifting. Do you compete? Raw, single or multi? What are your lifts? Weight class?

Peace.

- Another SC2 powerlifter

On November 11 2010 05:34 {88}iNcontroL wrote:


I have competed. I am not now but I want to get back into it. I use a jean multi shirt for bench. I have no squat/deadlift gear atm.

I am 260lbs so I can't remember if that qualifies just below the heavy weight or not... I remember being close enough to cutting for that slightly lower class.

My bench (highest) was 700lbs but I am down to a bit over 500 now I am sure... haven't maxed in a long while.

Squat/deadlift not that amazing at like 600lbs/350lbs respectively. I am obviously a bencher who wants to do all 3 My short arms hurt me in the deadlift for sure.

On November 11 2010 05:10 NoXious90 wrote:


Are you satisfied then that jinro and TTOne are the absolute two best players in North America? Because I'm not, and I don't think many others would be either. It is so unbelievably unreasonable and unrealistic to attempt to infer perfect or even approximate rankings from a tournament that took place over three days, regardless of whether the extended rule is in place or not. This fact is, the tournament that took place in dallas over the weekend was an isolated incident, the circumstances of which will never be able to be perfectly replicated again, therefore you cannot reasonably suggest that you would get the same results if you held another 128 man tournament with the same players. This is a logical fact which something so immaterial as having an extended series rule in place could never under any circumstances hope to overcome. Therefore, by that fact alone, any attempts to strive at some universal settlement regarding a precise hierarchy of the skill levels of a group of players is futile and pointless, especially when pursuing such a thing involves sacrificing the entertainment value of the competition, which is THE REAL 'purpose' of a tournament such as this.

On November 11 2010 06:04 maliceee wrote:
With the tournaments becoming like that, they could resemble something like tennis.

On November 11 2010 06:11 dcemuser wrote:


When Tennis tournaments use double elimination, they don't use extended series.

Nobody does.

Every sport in the history of mankind has gotten popular without extended series. To say that Starcraft 2 REQUIRES extended series to become popular is just asinine.

On November 11 2010 06:14 maliceee wrote:


Its because they can't? starcraft can, and that is a good thing it should take advantage of.

On November 11 2010 06:16 dcemuser wrote:


70+% of TL.net disagrees with you.

I'd even argue (as many here have) that it lowers spectator interest by leading to boring and one-sided matchups, especially for the finals.

On November 11 2010 06:14 maliceee wrote:


Its because they can't? starcraft can, and that is a good thing it should take advantage of.

On November 11 2010 06:20 maliceee wrote:


um cool? Yet many have said mlg was one of the best tournaments so far, and watching it you would have to lie to say there weren't plenty of amazing series and games.

On November 11 2010 06:30 WhO wrote:


please explain why tennis can't and why starcraft can? enlighten us

On November 11 2010 06:32 DGMavn wrote:
I'm gonna take a weird view on this and say that the extended series is another one of those rules that is good for Halo and bad for SC2.

In Halo, you have map-specific strategies, but at the end of the day you know a BO5 is going to contain 2 Team Slayer games, 2 Multi Flag games, and 1 Team King/Team Oddball game. The strategies for each game type vary differently and don't really change - you can't really "mindgame" an opponent with your strategy because the strategies for one game type don't affect the strategies for another game type. There is no "cheese" in Halo.

In Starcraft 2, there's only one game type. This means that if I walk into a matchup, my builds are going to vary and adjust based on what my opponent does in previous games. I can come into a BO3 with a plan for games 1, 2 and 3. For example:

Let's say I'm a Protoss player playing a BO3 with IdrA. The first game, I lose a standard macro-based game because IdrA is better than me. The second game I pull out my counterpick: a stupidly abusive blink stalker build on Kulas Ravine, with which I win. The third game, IdrA picks his counterpick (Metalopolis). However, I notice that each game, IdrA has chosen to 14hatch. I abuse this by proxying two gateways and winning with cheese.

If I play IdrA straight up 100 games in a row with this cheese, I will win maybe twice before his better mechanics and foreknowledge of my cheese beat me. This cheese is not a tactic that is designed to win me many games in the long run, but is a high-variance tactic that is designed to win me one game.

However, I've now used up both of my good pieces of strategy: my counterpick map and my proxy gateway build. If I meet IdrA again in the loser's bracket, I will have an advantage in games, but I will not have two of my tools available to me (because I can't pick Kulas Ravine again).

The point is this: a best-of-three gameplan is different than a best-of-seven gameplan, and it's difficult to play a best-of-three like a potential best-of-seven. Do I use my best build now, on game 3, or should I save it because I might meet this guy again in Loser's Bracket Finals?

I think that Tyler's reasoning about a player losing only because of the order of the games played in is flawed. If two players go 1-1 in sets, the player that gets knocked out is the player that has already lost another set to someone else. That's the criteria of the double-elimination tournament. For games where the outcome of each individual match is unrelated, like Halo, extending the series will give us a better idea of who the better team is by increasing the sample size of games. However, games of Starcraft aren't independent occurrences - game 1 affects game 2, and so on. In this case, I think telling the players that they will only ever have to prepare strategies to win Bo3 matches outweighs the potential problem of a player getting knocked out by a player they've beaten more times than they've lost to.

On November 11 2010 06:39 maliceee wrote:


That would require lengthening tournament days. A tennis player cannot play twice in one day, for multiple obvious reasons. A double elimination tournament in tennis could take a month. For time constraints and physical constraints they can't do it. A starcraft player can play 50 games in a day, and they do it almost 5 times a week.