EPTThe Myth of Expectations - Page 3
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phodacbiet
United States1738 Posts
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DSh1
292 Posts
On May 02 2017 22:50 TeamLiquid ESPORTS wrote: All of that changed with the release of LotV. ByuN started to build up steam from the get-go. His results in online tournaments captured the attention of foreign fans, just as his relatability and outgoing, everyman personality won over reluctant Korean fans. He gathered momentum as the year went on, picking up a larger and larger following as the results improved. By the time he seized GSL and BlizzCon as spoils of war, one would think he was the second coming of MVP. Scratch that, MVP wasn’t even worthy of fetching ByuN’s coffee. For me what made ByuN so great was not his GSL, BlizzCon wins alone it is incredible win rate in online cups and ladder. I consider him the absolute best from about start of second GSL season until the new patch changes and here is why its so impressive. I know a lot of people say only tournaments count, online games have no meaning etc., but if you have a 80% win rate it is a different story. I think people don't realize how incredible that is, but 80% win rate means you lose one game in five. This means you are actually invincible (100% win rate) and you occasionally make one mistake. Basically Byun had the game, in the version at that time, figured out mostly. (There were times he looked shaky, when he encountered people with different playstyles, he did not often encounter though. But in the end it didn't matter.) Actually for me it is more impressive if you have figured a game out than if you win a tournament. If you win in tournaments it means you are performing great (like playing at the upper limit of our potential performance distribution). If you win on ladder in addition it means your base skill is high. And in case of ByuN I think his base skill was so high back then, that performance didn't matter any more. That's actually what I would legitimately call domination and why its so impressive. I believe if there were no patches his domination would have lasted maybe forever. For me it's not an exaggeration to think of ByuN as greatest of all time. Of course this is debatable. My point is you are acting in your article as if you were talking indisputable facts and this is just not true. There are legitimate reason why ByuN was considered as "greatest Terran in game history". People give too much credit and add too much hindsight bias when analyzing tournament wins. Right now it seems to me that the base skill level of the top players are really close. So there is a lot more luck involved in winning tournaments: Imagine if you have 5 equally skilled players and let them play. Than the probability to win is 20%. Pretty low. I think it's pretty clear that ByuN is still good. He is surely not the absolute best right now, but I would say his chances to win a tournament aren't much lower than for anyone else. The reason for the lack of tournament wins is just that he isn't dominant anymore in this version of the game and he didn't get lucky enough yet. And in my opinion you need a lot of luck to win a tournament against many equally skilled players. | ||
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Corvuuss
Austria354 Posts
On May 03 2017 03:33 ZertoN wrote: correct me if im wrong, but shouldnt writers at least try to hide their biases and write an objective article? In papers there are two kind of articles, reports and opinions. opinionated articles (like this one) are important because they shed some light on how others see something and are able to let you see the opinions of other people. It is less a news article and more of a very long comment on an article which expresses the writers opinion. | ||
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Hyvaaa
Germany2 Posts
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pvsnp
7676 Posts
Players peak and slump, this is nothing new. Zest has had both unbelievable highs and shocking lows, but he's weathered them before and he can endure them now. He's carrying a huge legacy of greatness (the only other current pro holding multiple GSL Code S titles is INnoVation) and the impossibly high expectations of that burden are crushingly heavy. 2016 started amazingly well for Zest, and trailed off as the year went on. 2017 has started appallingly poorly, but there's still plenty of time and tournaments left to reverse the trend. ByuN on the other hand, hasn't slumped nearly as hard as Zest. Sure, his Ro32 exit from GSL Season 1 was disappointing, to say the least, but other than that he's been doing respectably well. Semifinals at Gyeonggi, Ro8 at Katowice, and the people he's losing to are not huge underdogs. Dark and Stats are very much championship contenders in their own right, and it's hardly a mark of shame to fall in a Bo5 against such illustrious opponents. TvT definitely seems to be a weak spot for him, but his TvZ is still top-class. His current form might not be at the level of TY or INnoVation, but it would be quite a stretch to say he's not among the second-tier Terrans. With greatness comes great expectations, and it's inevitable that sooner of later these progamers slip up. Nobody is perfect. | ||
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Fango
United Kingdom8974 Posts
---------------------------------------------- MVP "dominated" when it was easiest to win tournaments. The level of play wasn't close to the years after, there were countless more tournaments to compete in, and more importantly there were less "godlike" players to compete with. Yes he's one of the greats. But it's not enough to call him the absolute GOAT. It's so hard to compare his run to that of Zest. Zest won a Code S, 2 korean majors, got 2nd at IEM, fell to the eventual champ at blizzcon, got close ro8/ro4 finishes in pretty much every other league. He also destroyed proleague, it's worth noting that beyond all-killing SKT, he was captain of KT when he lead them to win 2014 SPL. Zest dominated in an era where winning cups was a lot harder than in MVP's. You can argue for hours about which is more impressive. ---------------------------------------------- Now ByuN. I'll keep this one short. Yes he dominated late 2016 and won blizzcon, but tbh I dunno how I feel about calling him a GOAT terran. When he won GSl and BC it almost looked too easy. I feel like everyone else was slumping for those months, it seemed like for GSL and BC there were only 2 or 3 players that legit contested him. Compare the competitiveness of late 2016 to now. Guys like TY, Inno, Maru, soO, aLive, herO, byuL, Classic are all big deals now. They could take a tournament, that couldn't have been said last year (yh ik TY was a threat but he choked in every ro8/4/final he got to). Maybe they were lacking motivation due to KeSPA closing and ByuN was immune to that. idk. But byuN is still in form at least, he's not like Zest who just can't play anymore. But winning this year is just gonna be a harder. | ||
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Paljas
Germany6926 Posts
On May 03 2017 01:42 Shellshock wrote: TL trying to prop up TaeJa again with his 0 korean titles. will probably get another terran of the year award implying there will be TL awards this year, lel | ||
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Phredxor
New Zealand15075 Posts
On May 03 2017 07:22 Paljas wrote: implying there will be TL awards this year, lel There will be if Taeja is able to win one. | ||
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tantalus
69 Posts
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Mangemongen
Sweden125 Posts
On May 02 2017 23:24 terran4lyfe wrote: TL writers are trash, always fawning over the same player and bashing others and viewing the SC2 fanbase as flithy know-nothing plebians. User was temp banned for this post. Way to overreact, mods. | ||
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JudeauTV
Germany262 Posts
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MLuneth
Australia557 Posts
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Oalfredo77
35 Posts
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JackONeill
861 Posts
By the time BlizzCon rolled around, every single caster of note banded together to systematically erase all memory of StarCraft 2 prior to that moment. The agreed upon tagline was “highest skill era”. They had an unspoken contract to be as relentlessly optimistic as possible, and that involved praising all aspects of the game at a breathless pace. Since ByuN was the latest Terran champion he had to be the greatest Terran in the game’s history. Maru's micro against Protoss was irrelevant. GuMiho's drop harass was too boring to remember. TaeJa’s reactionary prowess was left unmentioned; beyond early ravager pushes, Terran didn’t even bother to defend anymore. The casters drilled this rhetoric into the minds of the community every chance they got. Whether it was a proper reaction to events was besides the point. It culminated in a Dada-esque scene where Tasteless and Artosis were transformed into gushing cheerleaders over ByuN target-firing slow banes off creep. Listening to their praise alone you’d think it was the epitome of TvZ fights. What bothers me the most isn't that casters are overselling a player, since they're pretty much forced to do so to induce hype and excitement. I'm not annoyed by Tastosis screaming about Byun's micro, since he is probably the best terran micro ATM. On the other hand, i'm much more bothered by casters to repeat over and over again the liturgy about how "this is the best state SC2's always been". It may come from my personal beef with HOTS and LOTV, but throughout terrible states of design or balance hearing casters chanting about how great the game "is right now" was especially infuriating. But it also has a direct repercution on what's described here. Because HOTS and then LOTV traded off much of WOL's strategic components for execution and micro ones, the best players in the game are mostly very good at execution, not at being a good strategist. I was already scoffing at casters shouting "great forcefields !", "huge storm !", "massive fungal !" and so on during WOL. But now, the players being hyped are mostly very good at execution, and seeing casters praising that while mostly dissmissing other aspects of the play is very annoying. However, i do admit that because LOTV is LOTV, there's often not much to talk about or praise than the execution. When every TvZ is a double medivac marine drop with stim, you can't really talk about the build, strategic decisions, or gameplan. Only about "oh he focus fired 4 banes in a row how amazing !". Also, what we have to notice is that the level of analysis by casters dropped hugely since WOL. I've seen Dark rolling over every single terran during HOTS with banes/roaches/corruptors because everyone was going biomine because marine/tanks sucked against mutas, and i've never heard a single caster mention that. Only that "Dark is the best TvZ in the world !". And with LOTV, it's even worse. I've heard casters say countless time that gateball can't beat bio with medivacs and stim, and act baffled when a protoss player did, praising him in a general way with no explanation whatsoever. More specifically, i've never heard any caster talk about the huge influence of guardian shield, the 1 native armor on the adept the marauder nerf. How bio vs gateball fights usually revolved around guardian shield heavily lowering marauder attacks, or how some terran players manually position the marauders in front against adept heavy compositions to protect the marines. I've seen Maru destroy adept/sentries army with that, but without the casters even mentionning it. It'd be like WOL casters commentating bio/vikings vs gate/colossi fight without explaning mentionning how did the vikings perform against the colossi. I guess it's because casters don't really play the game as much as before? Or that they're less interested in the game? I dunno, and maybe i missed some good analysis during casts, but to conclude i'd say players are praised mainly on their execution and not the other components of their play, and that both those aspects and the execution are often not analysed at all, with casters only chanting the "Byun/Zest/Dark/etc is sooooo gooooood". The state of the game, the players, everything is dumbed down to being "sooo goood". | ||
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Thaniri
1264 Posts
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FrostedMiniWheats
United States30730 Posts
On May 03 2017 11:36 Thaniri wrote: Calling Zest manly is pretty funny. Reminds me of how I would be the most muscular guy at any LAN I went to, but otherwise completely insignificant. Finally someone says it :p Now Slivko...that mfer was JACKED. Guy would kill you with BL/Infestor imbalance and dare you to whine. | ||
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baiesradu
Romania150 Posts
I can only speak for myself : I have favorite players all the time. They tend to be zerg, usually as that is the only race I play. I loved Idra for example and I was crushed every time I saw him fail, especially since I thought the only thing standing in his way was himself. I root for Scarlett every time I see her play, and it pains me when she doesn't win or when she seems to loose interest in the game. Snute earned my respect a long time ago, and with his stream he won my admiration and I cheer for him every time he plays. I used to love Life but he disappointed me completely. Dark is starting to grow on me, but we'll see. There might be a lot of truth in your article but for me, the players that do nothing for me personally , I watch them for the games and judge them by their results. I am not invested that much in the artificial narrative created around them. If they play well and win I enjoy the games, if they loose , they loose , better luck next time. People love winners, but whether you're number one or 200 in the world, for any other sport , you can still make a living. In all sports you will be remembered if you were good, but if you were really good your results will talk for you over time. And maybe the perception will not be the actual reality , but that happens with any sport. | ||
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BronzeKnee
United States5211 Posts
On May 02 2017 22:50 TeamLiquid ESPORTS wrote: The StarCraft community has a nasty habit of dissecting everything of value to them. Be it professional players, teams, organizations or scenes, they place their objects of affection under a microscope to scrutinize, analyze, criticize and question them from every angle... Every good article always begins with making fun of the intended audience. Thus, I've never completely read a good article... this one is no different. | ||
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Thaniri
1264 Posts
On May 03 2017 13:05 BronzeKnee wrote: Every good article always begins with making fun of the intended audience. Thus, I've never completely read a good article... this one is no different. Don't take yourself so seriously. | ||
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pvsnp
7676 Posts
Every good article always begins with making fun of the intended audience. Thus, I've never completely read a good article... this one is no different. You must avoid enormous swathes of the Internet, if something so mild as that offends you. | ||
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