GSL Finals to be held on April 5th from GOM eXP studio

On March 31 2014 08:47 pure.Wasted wrote:


Which makes it even more impressive when players manage to win utilizing a signature style that others aren't able to pull off, ie. Life's lings, Kangho's Queens, Soulkey's aggressive Swarm Host, Scarlett's creep, Jaedong's Mutas, hyvaa's sOs-like insanity, DRG's eternal Lair tech and Roro's eternal turtle-mode in metas that don't favor them. Although I might hate Roro anyway just because.



I didn't say soO's not a good player, I said he doesn't appear to be playing at a world class level. Obviously he is a good player. He might even be world class (though I seriously doubt it). But because he doesn't do anything flashy (like use micro-intensive units in a way that makes our heads spin, which is kind of a pre-req for world-class skill in my book), and because apparently the English commentators are fundamentally incapable of pointing out all of the right unflashy moves that he makes often enough to get to Code S finals twice, I won't have any way to know until he proves it with Soulkey-esque consistency.

The only way this is controversial is if you go into the game assuming both that it's perfectly balanced, and perfectly rewarding of skill, at all times. Both of those seem like faulty assumptions to me. There's a reason we have patches, and some units/strats inherently take more mechanical skill to pull off than their counter-strats, or vice versa. Or if you think that making it to two GSL finals during the same meta is hard proof of "world class skill" in and of itself. But unless your world class is big enough to include like 50 players (in which case that's not world class, that's just Koreans), I disagree.



Every single thing you said about soO was true of Roro when he won his GSL at the end of WOL. Good team (less good than soO's), hardest league, playing best players (harder vs. lineup than soO's). And WOL was a lot more figured out then than HOTS is now. So I guess it's just an inarguable fact that Roro had world class skill and deserved to win a GSL...?

edit: let's bring some RL sports into this. If you followed Sochi Olympics hockey, you'd know that there was a lot of controversy around the way the subpar teams were playing. They played very defensive, boring hockey, because they knew they could never win a straight up game. Sound familiar? (In SC it's usually the opposite, inferior players play very aggressive games; but the idea is the same) These teams' hope was keeping the score 0-0 until the shootout, and in a shootout anything is possible. Viewers hated it and talked about changes the rules of the game to disencourage this style of play. Seriously. Changing the rules of hockey. They wanted to see manly macro hockey games where the inferior team lost in a way that demonstrated their inferiority.

And the inferior teams did lose. But if they had won, nobody would have said they were good teams. Winning is a lot, but it isn't everything.