Lings of Liberty: The Rise of the Patchzergs - Page 74

On December 10 2012 01:48 Drowsy wrote:
This is basically a balance whine with a fake conspiracy theory thrown in at the end so that when people respond to the first part you can be like "DUDE LOL YOU OBVIOUSLY JUST DON'T GET IT, TARDBOY IT'S TONGUE IN CHEEK BRO".


That being said I still agree with the conclusions of the first part on balance. and even think there's a grain of truth to the 2nd part. And it was entertaining I suppose.

On December 10 2012 02:09 MiThiK wrote:
did you guys watch the proleague games? finally games are looking more watchable again =) like flash vs Zenio , bbyong vs soulkey, skyhigh vs zero, and sacsri vs last?

those games were fun to watch
I think kespa players will make sc2 fun to watch again =D

On December 09 2012 21:56 PerryHooter wrote:
Quite a waste of time reading this. Can't understand why someone would spend this much time on an article when all it contains is pointless whining. I agree that the game is somewhat broken now (or was before the recent patch at least), but if you don't have anything constructive to say you better remain silent.

Btw, TvZ isn't really broken from a balance perspective, but the design is. A terran playins his A-game and makes no mistakes will win vs pretty much any zerg, while a terran not playing perfectly will lose even to mid-tier foreigners.
What's really broken is PvZ, broken in every was possible. Again, talking about pre-patch.

On December 10 2012 02:52 Moochlol wrote:
This mentality is a virus. Fanning the flames of ignorant balance whine. The people of this community are a disgrace. Teamliquid is becoming a cesspool for idiots, and trolls. Nay it IS a cesspool for idiots and trolls. Something needs to be done about it. I for one wish our 1v1 history was displayed in our posts, much like arena junkies from WOW. There is no accountability on this site. I am so fed up with the SC2 scene and it's flagrant whine. OP is doing a disservice to us all by presenting such a sensational post. Yes there is a design flaw in WOL, we all know it. However this is not the way to highlight it. The phrase patch Zerg is a fucking joke.

On December 09 2012 16:29 Wombat_NI wrote:
As a piece on why there's a lot of disenfranchisement with the game from the spectator's point of view I do feel it's got a lot of validity.

References some classic games, describing a dynamic and micro-filled matchup from bothsides. Things like the foreigner v Korean stats are kind of presupposing that all three races have equivalent players, may not necessarily be true. Obviously these are cherry-picked examples, by both the author and me and are relatively subjective I do realise this. Tried to pick out the examples that weren't bashing Z players or foreigners, jokingly or otherwise. Many of the old examples highlight both the skill of the Terran, but also the skill and micro required on the Zerg's part as well!

Patchzerg is a pretty unfair stick used to beat some players with, imo:
'The Patchzerg Myth'

Anyway, if you could be bothered reading that or not, onto the article quotes I figured worth looking at.

'Good' Starcraft for the Spectator
'A fight where in-battle micro actually can occur: a concept anathema to today's games. sC has to split his marines continuously and target fire with tanks, while Nestea has to control his banelings and set up proper flanks to limit the micro potential sC has.'

'Here, Jjakji kills Leenock's 4th base, so Leenock maneuvers to interpose between Jjakji's main army and reinforcements. Then, he can envelop JJakji's isolated main army and win a crushing victory. In order to forestall such a plan, Jjakji drops Leenock's natural and forces him to rescue it, thus disrupting the planned concentration and allowing Jjakji to safely link up forces. Tactical Depth in SC2? What is this! '

Bad
'Now, if you say, made the infestor off limits, and put Life/Leenock/DRG in a group with any number of foreigner Zergs, could you pick out the former three in a ZvT? Without question: muta/ling/bling play actually lets Zerg players differentiate themselves precisely because it is difficult to execute and contains a lot of tactical depth. Turtle rushing to infestor/broodlord does not.'

'Once upon a time (pre March 22nd 2011, the true origin of the patchzerg) Zerg was actually a very difficult race to play against Terran, as muta/ling/bling, was at least as demanding as playing as Terran if not harder.

PvZ was of course still stupid and ill-conceived, and here Zergs had no way to just auto win once it got to lategame. If it was decided Zerg needed an improvement, Blizzard could have simply made the mutalisk, baneling, or zergling stronger. Another option would be to enhance multitasking tools such as drops or nydus, or weaken their counters (thor/colossus, sensor tower, etc).

Then we could have kept the same dynamic and chaotic TvZ, riveting to spectate and play. Who knows, maybe PvZ would have even been watchable and featured something other than turtling lategame, 1a clashes midgame, or 2 base allins; I'm sure this is hard to imagine, but keep trying to picture it: you might see it eventually''

'Instead of a Zerg army racing in circles around its opponent, picking off units piece by piece and winning with well-timed backstabs or grand envelopments, Zergs now simply have to make some infestors, f-click occasionally from massive range, and later attack with an unstoppable army. Blizzard has made broodlord/infestor/queen/corruptor so utterly powerful that Zergs have now adopted the highly innovative tactic of sacrificing all of their bases just in order to buy enough time to make one broodlord army, which then wins the game on its own; sadly, this is not an exaggeration. Outside of the egregious Scarlett vs Hero game already mentioned, other examples include: Vibe vs San from MLG Dallas on Cloud Kingdom, where Vibe loses every base but his main, Leenock vs Hero on Antiga in GSL where Leenock voluntarily forfeits expansions to harass just to ensure the creation of one army that auto wins the game after casting neural parasite, and Leenock vs Bomber, where Leenock only retains his natural and main. In the end, their loss of bases is was irrelevant because they made 1 broodlord/infestor army,'

'When it looked like Terran was winning too many lategames with ghost turtling in a 3 month period, far less than Zergs are now in the past 6 months, the ghost got immediately axed to the point of uselessness. The patch was a great idea, as watching turtle terrans make 30 ghosts and snipe hive blobs or die to fungal +broodlings was hardly the most exciting play to watch; so long as it wasn't done in isolation. Unfortunately it was a straight nerf to Terran, with no other changes. Here, Blizzard had a chance to retool lategame TvZ and make it as enjoyable to watch and play as the midgame'

On December 10 2012 03:18 noddy wrote:


This is funny considering AJ is 20 times worse than TL when it comes to balance whine

On December 09 2012 03:06 cari-kira wrote:


you say spreading the picture of "koreans swarming foreign tourneys to rip of our beloved foreign players" is no racism?
do you see the analogy to right-wing politicians saying "foreigners take the workplaces from our people"?

On December 10 2012 02:13 monkybone wrote:


Is it a balance whine to say that the game were more entertaining before? That's basically the gist of it, the main point is not that fungal is imbalanced, but that it makes for worse games.

On December 10 2012 03:42 alhazrel wrote:

That was one of the things I felt had the least substance to it. I think viewer numbers have been dropping for a really long time, it isn't as if that started with the infestor patch. There are a lot of reasons people don't watch as much now with the biggest being how long SC2 has been out. The idea that the play-style of 1 of 3 races could have the impact on viewers that this suggests is staggeringly exaggerated.

The sad truth is that if people aren't playing a game then they're generally less interested in the pro scene and, like many others, me and my friends cut down playing it when we realised our dreams of going pro were standing behind a wall of time and effort.

Old Z micro pretty much started and ended with the surround. Click past enemy army, then attack, rather than just a-moving. Then mutas became popular and it was magic-boxing and swinging the mutas around and that was all. Positional awareness has never been as important as it is at the moment and the standard of today's games makes old ones look clumsy. Even terran micro has improved by an incredible amount and although I kind of miss the days when mvp could make 3 tanks and then march a route 1 into any zergs base and take them out I think it's improved the quality of games now that isn't viable.

This used to be the exception but now in every TvZ Zerg players are splitting their army and swarming spread out, well-positioned armies from all directions. The reason these games are even getting as far as lategame is because that terran timing push is no longer ending the game.

Again, this kind of simple tactical interplay is still a regular occurrence. Terrans are always attacking in multiple locations to take advantage of the immobility of a Z army relying on infestors. Z keeps pools of lings to act as a sweeping defensive force to chase away drops while T tries to sneak in and pick off bases and drone lines and escape before the infestor can appear. Those kind of cat and mouse games used to be unheard of, if a terran used drop play it was some kind of bombshell. 'MMA is going for drop play', it was like and endgame strategy, now you use drop plays to support a more complex strategy.

This is silly, because of course you could. Life didn't coincidentally win GSL and then MLG, his so-called 'standard' play was the combination of quickly expanding, protecting your economic spine, maintaining map control and managing the opposition army while also using ling run-bys to inflict damage that has only recently come into existence. Especially in his ZvZ you could really see Life's strength, the same way Leenock and Stephano have both shown their ability while they were at the top.

lol, while Terran could choose to either go banshee and do massive damage, or go blue flame hellion and do massive damage. Terran used to have huge unit advantages over zerg at a time when top level zergs were struggling to keep on top of their injects and weren't using creep spread. The fact that you can't get away with that now isn't because zerg has become easier to play it's because Z players have realised the importance of increasing production early and maintaining map vision at all times.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see what he means, I too think fungal is an ill-conceived and boring spell. It's worth mentioning in response to his ideas, that his beloved combination of ling/bling/muta is nowhere near as effective if you split it up, so offering tools to split the zerg army around the map might be a bit like buffing something that has too many other drawbacks to make it worthwhile (*cough* seeker missile*cough). If you're talking about boring 1a vs 1a battle it's strange that you'd choose a composition that relies so much on splash damage that running it into a massive army is just about the best possible use for it.

The only thing that made it interesting was that things were moving and dying instead of standing still and dying. That was for like 10 seconds until one player had a bit more left than the other and marched up their ramp to win. There's a lot more tactical depth now. That didn't make games more watchable for the other 15mins where nothing was happening.

Wow! This sounds very exciting; however, with the redeeming factor of a few well-chosen examples, this is rubbish. Zerg only ever picked off units like that with mutas and watching a Z tech up to mutas, make 30 and then fly them around while a Terran or Protoss player did nothing was quite frustrating and only lasted until mvp realised while they were doing that you could march into their base and force a big engagement. I don't get why this guy loves watching a hundred supply of ling bling crash into a hundred supply of marine tank, or stalker colossus so much.

It wasn't 'too many' lategames, it was just one. Nestea vs mvp at blizzcon. Right in front of the dev teams eyes, mvp pulled back an insurmountable disadvantage with an army made entirely of ghosts. It was ridiculous and I can see why it made them nerf ghost snipe. Funnily enough that was in the early days of infestor/brood-lord and it was one of the most puzzling games ever. Nestea sacrificed his ling bling army by sending them one-by-one into mvps tanks and then caught an unlucky emp on his infestors when he switched to inf/bl that allowed mvp to snipe all the brood lords.

In that case location is the most important thing and suggesting that the reason terran took a faster and harder nerf than zerg has is because of Z bias is short-sighted to say the least. That was 'see-it-with-your-own-eyes' evidence of the two best players in the world at a place staged to show off the RTS jewel in Blizzard's crown and it was laughable, it demanded a reaction. Of course, really it was just nestea having a bad day, or maybe taking one for the Zerg team.

I think all of this stuff is way off the mark tinged with nostalgic 'I used to really enjoy watching, so there must be a reason'. That's why I thought he had to be sending up Terran whiners. I couldn't take any of his criticism seriously because I hardly agree with any of the things he says.