Soe's Corner - Page 10

It's not all based on sarcastic remarks.


You're the only person that cares about this. And you're probably offended by me saying that even though that's ridiculous.


I also label the community a lot of positive things. More often than negative things.


Your all-or-nothing statement makes this either obvious or ridiculous. Did you think that I think every individual making up the community is a "stereotypical idiot troll"? That's absurd. But on the other hand, you are being equally absurd if you think there isn't an individual in the community that is a stereotypical idiot troll. It's easy to provide a counterexample to disprove the former and an example to disprove the latter.


Not a slump. My results never got significantly worse. In BW, I was rapidly improving and destined for Proleague when I was in Korea. I quit playing and then briefly resumed about a year later to win TSL2. Then I switched games. I've never properly practiced SC2 and I've never gotten good at SC2. My results reflect that. If you want to compare my relative standing among non-Koreans between BW and SC2, then you can technically call it a slump. But that's just a useless technicality. Practically speaking, I've never slumped.

Thanks for the support.


How do you know I have no reason? I have lots of reasons. What do you mean by reason? Is a reason a justification or an explanation? Do things with no benefit have reasons for existing? If your only point here is that I've done something wrong it's useless because everyone has. You may as well dislike someone because you saw them sneeze once.

If you've got a particular gripe with arrogance and rudeness, then you should consider how much more time and attention I give to random community members than other pro players. Some of it is in a rude tone and even less of it is actually rude and arrogant. But that's nothing compared to the pros who are disgusted by TL.net discussions and are completely uninterested in interacting with any members of the community that way.

Also consider that you get only a tiny glimpse of the personalities of the people you are judging. There are many situations partially reported to the public of which I have known the full story and all the facts. There are always a ton of people (often a very strong majority) who get it wrong. It is fine to enjoy the bliss of ignorance but it is not helpful to be ignorantly indignant. The fact is that you don't know a person unless you know the person and even then you are seeing only one side of them. Know the limitations of your limited data. Learn when it is wise to truly reserve judgment (as opposed to judging and not telling anyone).


Why do you say a random remark and then state that it doesn't matter? You're raving.


Condemning isn't a very time consuming activity. But I didn't condemn the community. I just told MrBitter that he shouldn't tell the community that they're bigger fans of stuff outside the game than the game itself. That is one hypothesis for explaining the data he pointed out. But he shouldn't say it even if it's true. But even if he did say it, he still wouldn't be condemning. It's just a neutral observation and description.


Wow three times perhaps. This is quite a contrast with some other bold statements you've made. Now it's all perhaps. It's funny though because you're advising that I spend more time practicing to get better. That's common knowledge. But you hide behind three times perhaps now. I agree that I should invest my time into the game itself. I do it on occasion already!


If you aren't going to stand behind the things you say at all then you shouldn't say them. If you changed a few things without changing the meaning, like put this statement at the beginning and state it more simply, "I don't know what I'm talking about", then it's easier to see how ridiculous it is.

I think Soe did an appropriate job w/ her presentation, but I understand how you might have apprehension. Fortunately, in answering your question, I can shed some light on the problems that commentators have to solve w/ their word choice!

In commentary, you have to be super aware of what you're actually trying to do in any cast, or at any moment within that cast. This will greatly color the way the commentator speaks. For example:

Situation A Terran player opens with an aggressive attacking play vs an early expoing protoss. He needs to finish his warpgate research so his 3gates can get an extra warpin of 3 stalkers to defend the push. Suppose that, with this particular build, if Protoss chronos 4 times on his warp gate, he'll finish the warpgates just in time to defend the push. In the game, warpgate is half done, Protoss has already spent 2 chronos on the warpgate, and Protoss sees the push gathering at the Terran front.

Case 1 - I'm doing an educational daily: My goal is to be educating people. As someone who's played StarCraft competitively for 12 years, I know that a 5 second window can actually be plenty of time. I want my viewers to know that so they can feel comfortable doing it too.

In this circumstance, I can say "Ok Protoss needs to spend 4 chrono on warpgate total to defend this push. So, as long as he uses this stalker to delay the push by 10 seconds, he'll get the warpgate finished + stalkers warped in with 5 seconds to spare." If I can point out this particular issue (the 4chrono on the warpgate), tons of players who chrono probes too much are now able to defend early pushes. Moreover, they'll be able to spot situations where they can devote that chrono to probes instead. Huzzah!

Case 2 - I'm casting a major tournament: My goal is to be a storyteller and to build excitement. A 5 second window might be enough for a pro to feel safe, but 5 seconds is a REALLY short amount of time!!! It would be a HUGE error to say "oh this is going to be no problem at all. He just chrono boosts twice and warps in with 5 seconds to spare." That would kill all tension immediately. If Protoss lands the 2 chrono boosts, nobody would ever realize it was a close call. Worse, in the circumstance that Protoss misses the 2 chronos and loses, I'm now in a weird corner. The only thing that makes sense is to say "well Protoss messed that up." Though true, that makes the Protoss look bad, doesn't give due credit to the Terran, and the viewer is left kinda going "oh I guess that guy made a dumb mistake."

A much smarter play is to say "Oh man this is going to be razor close. He needs to get that warp gate chronoboosting NOW if he wants to hold up in time!!" Suddenly, the audience can sense that tension. They may have never known that there's a 5 second window with 4 chronos on the warpgate, but they feel excitement with me saying things like "It's going to come down to seconds!!"

I could share that information about the 4 chrono boosts on the warpgate and look knowledgeable, but that's not my job. The cast isn't about me dropping knowledge bombs at every opportunity. Sure dropping SOME knowledge helps make for a cleaner show, but you have to consider the case you're in.



Relating back to Soe's bit, consider what she's producing and where it's being placed. It's clearly a bit more broadly focused. Should she be going into heavy in depth information? Probably not. The content that flanks her show is game casting, content littered with in depth information from Gretorp, FrodaN, Bitterdam etc. If she did too much in depth stuff, the overall NASL look would be fairly one dimensional. So, it seems pretty reasonable to say it's more broad, introductory SC2 type stuff, or just "miscellaneous" type content. Moreover, with the time limitation, there can only be so much that's stated. What to do now?

Soe smartly accounts for this by having a simple topic "the sentry," and then breaks it into two halves: history + gameplay. I think anyone would appreciate the history stuff (I didn't know any of the info she mentioned). So, let's examine the gameplay stuff (I'll pick just the PvZ portion n' whatnot) in the same way I did before.

Situation: Soe wants to present the basic idea that immortal+sentry is a key core composition in PvZ midgame. Stalkers + upgrades round off the mixture to be pretty deadly, particularly vs roaches. Our target is the non-core SC2 players.

Possibility 1 - Speak in generalities: I could say "a few immortals" and "a lot of sentries" but a non-core player might not have any clue what this means. Sure, most players know that "a few immortals" is 2-4 and "a lot of sentries" is ~7-12 for a normal midgame, but the non-core player might not know that. He might only play 4v4 games and might attack with 15 immortals at a time. It's not clear enough.

Possibility 2 - Speak in ranges: I could say "2-4 immortals" and "7-12 sentries" and it may work pretty decently. But, if you use too many numbers/ranges, it distracts from the core goal. You're trying to highlight immortal+sentry as a strong composition, not nail down the exact ranges. It can sound clunky. Just say this sentence out loud: "2 to 3 potatoes, 4 to 6 leeks, 1 to 5 sticks of celery, 1 to 2 cups of creme." Now say "2 potatoes, 4 leeks, 3 sticks of celery, and 1 cup of creme." Notice how in the first instance, you can hear how much more emphasis is on the numbers and in the second case, it ends up being on the ingredients (for potato leek soup no less xD). I'm not saying that the "range way" is bad, but I have a personal preference to steer clear from it unless it's super relevant.

Possibility 3 - Give some exact(ish) numbers: It sounds the cleanest to say "3 immortals and 10 sentries," but does this break our goal? We want a non-core player to understand the basic composition of immortal+sentry in approximately the correct proportions. I would argue that this does satisfy our original goal by considering the different possibilities. If Naniwa performed a 2 immortal, 8 sentry push, would the non-core player think to himself "This must be a completely different attack than Soe was talking about" ?? Probably not. The non-core player would probably think "Oh, this must be kinda like what that Soe girl was talking about." I mean, hell, think about how YOU first got into StarCraft. You probably heard all kinds of stuff that you processed, thought about, considered when you saw slightly different spots etc. The average viewer is pretty damn smart about translating and building understanding.

So, all in all, I really commend Soe for how she presented it. Nothing she said was particularly deep from a "oh shit I didn't know that" perspective. But, consider how brilliantly it's stated to both be true to core strategy, but also be understandable to someone who is a non-core player. It's funny to remember that Soe has been commentating for about 3 years longer than I have. And, she's done a huge variety of games to a huge variety of audiences. Cool to see her apply her knowledge to SC2!

Oh and her drawings are cute xD