With only four spots yet to be determined in the GSL Season 2 Round of 16, Classic, Scarlett, Stats and KeeN met to determine who two of those final four would be.
After a quick loss in game one, Scarlett evened the series with patient ling/bane/hydra play. Scarlett got off to a great start in game three by deflecting Stats’ immortal aggression, but Stats recovered and teched into a storm heavy army. She sniped Stats' fourth with swarm hosts, but was unable to summon enough on defense and fell 2-1.
Game one of the second series went KeeN's way. He won in the late game after capitalizing on Classic's indecisive response to a doom drop. The next two games were eerily similar, however, with Classic gaining an early advantage before closing them out with colossus based armies.
The winner's match was defined by one unit; carriers. Classic and Stats were unable to make much headway with ground units so they moved into carrier tech. Classic won the series 2-0 by assembling skytoss compositions better suited for the extreme late game than his opponent.
After winning the first game of the losers' match with bio/mine play, KeeN closed out the match with a hard fought victory on Newkirk Precinct. Both he and Scarlett reached tier three tech, but after a number of trades and a devastating nuke, Keen’s surviving ghosts were able to overcome the remains of Scarlett’s brood lord/infestor/ultralisk army.
The final match of the day saw Stats take out KeeN 2-0 and join Classic in the Round of 16. The first game was tight until a massive warp in KeeN’s main in tandem with phoenixes undid the Terran. Stats favored a more straightforward gateway army and prism harass on Abyssal Reef, eventually wiping KeeN out in a fight on open ground.
The highlight of the day was what is undeniably one of the most effective nukes in professional StarCraft 2 history.
On May 11 2017 05:24 ilikeredheads wrote: Scarlett opting to play the game without sounds was such a big gamble... sigh
I've played without sounds for years (that includes thousands of games) and have never gotten nuked like that. People who never played without sounds are making a bigger deal out of this than it should be because they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
I've brought this up before, but a simple low tech solution to spoilers is to have a generic title: GSL RO16 Results
It takes no additional time to do and is guaranteed to work 100% of the time. why they still don't do something so simple is beyond me, as people complain about spoilers every single time. Me I don't care but its funny how they still keep having spoilers in the titles when such a non technical simple solution exists.
on topic: foreigner lost to korean is this really surprising? the only time foreigners could consistently beat koreans was during the gglord winfestor era when all of a sudden foreign zergs could magically beat korean terrans. aside from a few huge upsets during blizzcon and neeb going god mode, its to be expected in the current day.
On May 11 2017 03:54 Charoisaur wrote: Can't wait to watch those games, sounds really interesting. Well... maybe not the pvp
The most boring two professional games I have seen in a very long time. Definitely would not recommend unless you love watching a Protoss macro contest.
And while it is mildly regrettable that Scarlett didn't make it out of the group (would be a good storyline) I doubt many people are genuinely surprised that Stats+Classic advanced. Personally, I'm glad to see foreigners swiftly eliminated from a Korean tournament, almost as early as Koreans are "eliminated" from foreign ones.
On May 11 2017 05:24 ilikeredheads wrote: Scarlett opting to play the game without sounds was such a big gamble... sigh
I've played without sounds for years (that includes thousands of games) and have never gotten nuked like that. People who never played without sounds are making a bigger deal out of this than it should be because they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
The thing is though Scarlett hasn't played without sound for years, and Keen played into that perfectly
On May 11 2017 02:48 ruypture wrote: scarlett did not play her best at all.... made me really sad because she easily could have taken game 3 against stats
Totally agree. Feels like she really tilted quickly while playing Stats. Gotta work on that confidence. That nuke though in the losers match was rough. Sucks they have to have those crazy headphones that were so bad she didn't bother with the sound. If they had booths that prevented some of the sound, maybe the headphones wouldn't need to be so loud and she could use sound. Overall though she really seemed to lose because she wasn't playing her best. It felt more like she was trying to survive than win most of the time. One compliment is that her creep spread was on point.
On May 11 2017 02:48 ruypture wrote: scarlett did not play her best at all.... made me really sad because she easily could have taken game 3 against stats
Totally agree. Feels like she really tilted quickly while playing Stats. Gotta work on that confidence. That nuke though in the losers match was rough. Sucks they have to have those crazy headphones that were so bad she didn't bother with the sound. If they had booths that prevented some of the sound, maybe the headphones wouldn't need to be so loud and she could use sound. Overall though she really seemed to lose because she wasn't playing her best. It felt more like she was trying to survive than win most of the time. One compliment is that her creep spread was on point.
The sound/no-sound thing is mostly an issue of familiarity though. I mean, all the Koreans have to deal with the same exact problem and afaik all of them just use earbuds under their headphones. Booths aren't the solution either, just go back and watch the old vods and you'll see the players sitting in booths, with the same big white-noise headphones as they use now.
Might be an obstacle, but it's a fair one that affects all the players. Also, do they not use these headphones in foreign tournaments? Seems like they do to me, what's the difference?
Went back and double-checked to be certain, and yes, at IEM Katowice, DH Austin, etc, all the players there (both foreign and Korean) are wearing the usual headphone-over-earbud setup just like they do in GSL. Scarlett has played in many tournaments before, what's so special about GSL's noise-cancelling headphones that Scarlett has not encountered before?
On May 11 2017 07:20 fishjie wrote: I've brought this up before, but a simple low tech solution to spoilers is to have a generic title: GSL RO16 Results
It takes no additional time to do and is guaranteed to work 100% of the time. why they still don't do something so simple is beyond me, as people complain about spoilers every single time. Me I don't care but its funny how they still keep having spoilers in the titles when such a non technical simple solution exists.
During the GSL season or any tournament I am actively watching, I intentionally avoid browsing TL.net for this very reason. I am unable to casually click my bookmarks toolbar for some SC2 reading because of the headlines on this site. TL.net is one of my most visited sites, but I intentionally avoid it now because of the spoilers in the article titles that I cannot help but read because they are literally headlines. I just check SC2Links.com each day for new vods. I cannot come to TL.net's main page to then navigate to the schedules to find out when the VODs ought to be available because of the goddamned spoilers on the front page.
'm only here posting because I just watched the VODs. Still, the SSL results regarding Innovation have now been spoiled.
TL.net's headline titles have significantly reduced my interaction with the site.
I guess noone really expected Scarlett to advance from the group that contains Stats and Classic, but I personaly at least expected her to get into Decider's match. Honestly, she played a good game 2 against Stats and that's it, everything else was just under her capabilities and usual standard. And (to me) she looked constantly depressed and bored, like she didn't even want to be there and play, no excitement, no passion, nothing. Game 3 against Stats was a magnificent example of a throw. When she held that Stats' push on her third, was ahead in supply and started to make swarm hosts, me and my friends watching stream were like "hell yeah, she got it, amazing story!", but then she did nothing with swarm hosts for like eternity before she finally managed to at least snipe Stats' fourth base, but beside that she accomplished nothing, slowly but steadily lost her supply lead and in the end even lost those swarm hosts at a random meeting with protoss army in the middle of the map. Like she didn't want to win that game at all. Loser's match was even worse and that nuke from Keen was absolutely ridiculous, but I admit that I didn't know that she was playing without sound... On the other hand, that's solely her problem. Conditions in studio are just the same for every player and she participated in the previous season of GSL, so she must have known very well what to expect. It's just no excuse. And like was mentioned in some post above, even out of Korea players are always wearing those noise-cancelling headphones over ear buds, so it's nothing uncommon. Overall very dissapointed with yesterday's games. Hope at least MajOr (or Special or whatever) will show some good games, although everyone gave him even lesser chances to advance than Scarlett (me included).
And for the neverending bitching about spoilers/no-spoilers - I actually agree with the post above saying that simple and purely non-technical (and therefore reliable) solution is to change titles to "GSL Code G group results" etc. We don't need those everything telling headlines on the front page. I don't even know why TL do them, is it for the clickbait reasons or why? Because it doesn't make sense, if everything that matters is spoiled right in the headline, many users won't even bother to read that article. I personally doesn't use that no-spoiler feature (as I do not care about spoiled results) but it is obvious from reactions in comments that it is not working perfectly (be it technical problem or writer's mistake to tag something as a spoiler).
On May 11 2017 05:24 ilikeredheads wrote: Scarlett opting to play the game without sounds was such a big gamble... sigh
I've played without sounds for years (that includes thousands of games) and have never gotten nuked like that. People who never played without sounds are making a bigger deal out of this than it should be because they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Kind of ironic you are talking about people not knowing what they are talking about, when you make a comment like this. If you watched the bunker, NoRegreT (who lives with Scarlett) said she only started playing without game sounds a few days ago. On top of that, he said in those few days, she had gotten her entire army nuked in practice as well. Perhaps this scenario in GSL occurred because she wasn't completely comfortable playing without game sounds yet. Maybe nerves came into play and not having game sounds made it increasingly hard for her to focus and be aware of tactics like this. When there are 100 things going on the entire game, and you are playing at 300+ apm, it is easy to get distracted or tunnel visioned in which case an audio queue is crucial.
There is a reason not a single pro gamer in StarCraft 2 plays GSL/SSL/VSL without game sounds.
On May 11 2017 07:20 fishjie wrote: I've brought this up before, but a simple low tech solution to spoilers is to have a generic title: GSL RO16 Results
It takes no additional time to do and is guaranteed to work 100% of the time. why they still don't do something so simple is beyond me, as people complain about spoilers every single time. Me I don't care but its funny how they still keep having spoilers in the titles when such a non technical simple solution exists.
on topic: foreigner lost to korean is this really surprising? the only time foreigners could consistently beat koreans was during the gglord winfestor era when all of a sudden foreign zergs could magically beat korean terrans. aside from a few huge upsets during blizzcon and neeb going god mode, its to be expected in the current day.
We did have generic titles before. Nobody read them, to the point where recaps were not worth the time and effort that went into producing them. It's not a matter of clickbaiting for profit, screw that. It's a matter of our writers having no incentive to write because nobody reads their work. That results in you getting no recaps at all.
Nowadays we get a lot of people commenting that they're happy we're doing these recaps. Well we did them before and stopped, because nobody read them. And the recaps we did then were much fancier and more indepth. What kept people from discovering them was generic titles.
We have a spoiler function that works when the publisher tags correctly (this is where the mistake happened, but I've corrected it since) and nobody gets spoiled for 24 hours. We've also receiced your feedback that longer time frames for that function may be desireable, so we're working on a solution there too. So in the meantime I'll ask you guys to stop complaining about spoilers, because A) a lot of you commenting aren't even using the spoiler function apparently and so probably don't actually know whether it has the desired effect or not, and B) you should realize that the only difference between every other recap over the past few weeks, where there have been no complaints, and this one is a human error in ticking a checkbox, which was corrected the second we saw from your reactions that spoilers weren't tagged.
With all the people talking about how the lack of sound (and by extension, Scarlett's mistakes) factored into KeeN's landing that insane nuke, I think it's important to note that KeeN himself did absolutely everything within his power to both land the nuke and maximize the value he got from it landing.
1. Immediately after targeting the nuke (with a cloaked Ghost), he cloaks two other Ghosts and sends them forward. Obviously there's no way of knowing whether KeeN himself realized Scarlett was playing without sound, but the point is that he anticipates Scarlett will see/hear the inbound nuke and react by searching for the Ghost who cast it. Scarlett sees the two decoy Ghosts and swiftly fungals them so the broodlings can kill them, which they do in short order.
2. KeeN sees his trick worked but unfortunately for him there are now a bunch of broodlings heading for the rest of his army–and his cloaked nuke-casting Ghost is right in their way. To distract Scarlett from this fact, he sends out another (uncloaked) Ghost to draw her attention and aggro the broodlings before more of them keep bumping into his cloaked Ghost.
3. KeeN now knows that his nuke will probably land but he realizes that its ground zero will only include about half of the BLs and two queens. He therefore brings up all his Vikings, to force Scarlett to pull her BLs back and bring up her Infestors to deal with them, which she does; this concentrates all the Infestors and most of the BLs into the nuke's ground zero as they pass each other. Moving the Vikings up has the secondary effect of reinforcing the idea in Scarlett's mind that the time for nukes is over and KeeN is trying to begin a regular engagement.
Sacrificing Ghosts, moving Vikings, mindgaming Scarlett, all in real-time (literally 11 seconds). And all that painstaking effort paid off tenfold for KeeN. By my count, 8 Infestors, 5 Brood Lords, 2 Queens, and 1 Viper were killed by the nuke, making it one hell of a cost-effective trade and a huge reason why he defeated Scarlett 2-0.
On May 11 2017 02:48 ruypture wrote: scarlett did not play her best at all.... made me really sad because she easily could have taken game 3 against stats
Totally agree. Feels like she really tilted quickly while playing Stats. Gotta work on that confidence. That nuke though in the losers match was rough. Sucks they have to have those crazy headphones that were so bad she didn't bother with the sound. If they had booths that prevented some of the sound, maybe the headphones wouldn't need to be so loud and she could use sound. Overall though she really seemed to lose because she wasn't playing her best. It felt more like she was trying to survive than win most of the time. One compliment is that her creep spread was on point.
The sound/no-sound thing is mostly an issue of familiarity though. I mean, all the Koreans have to deal with the same exact problem and afaik all of them just use earbuds under their headphones. Booths aren't the solution either, just go back and watch the old vods and you'll see the players sitting in booths, with the same big white-noise headphones as they use now.
Might be an obstacle, but it's a fair one that affects all the players. Also, do they not use these headphones in foreign tournaments? Seems like they do to me, what's the difference?
Went back and double-checked to be certain, and yes, at IEM Katowice, DH Austin, etc, all the players there (both foreign and Korean) are wearing the usual headphone-over-earbud setup just like they do in GSL. Scarlett has played in many tournaments before, what's so special about GSL's noise-cancelling headphones that Scarlett has not encountered before?
I think they were saying the ones in GSL were much louder than what she was used to in other tournaments before the match (the bunker). Her inability to hear game sounds in her first GSL when using ear buds (noise level overpowered it) brought her to the decision to not use game sounds at all. It's totally fine and fair for them to run it like that; I just was saying the volume level on them seems like a lot, and it seems like she didn't adapt to that part of the situation and it impacted her performance. We all want to see players feeling comfortable and able to give their best showings in GSL. That's what was disappointing about it.
With all this talking about the headphones, I feel like someone is going to comment that we are using it as an excuse for her. So let me be clear: the responsibility for the result is on her, and I never said anything about the gsl setup was unfair.
On May 11 2017 15:57 QuinnTheEskimo wrote: Another anchor for the discussion on how weak P actually is.
Lol crybabies just can't stop whinning, Stats and Classic are absolute top tier players, you cant even compare keen and scarlett to them, what would you expect from this group? Still protoss have only one playable style against terran which is adept pheonix.
On May 11 2017 14:27 maitiky wrote: I guess noone really expected Scarlett to advance from the group that contains Stats and Classic, but I personaly at least expected her to get into Decider's match. Honestly, she played a good game 2 against Stats and that's it, everything else was just under her capabilities and usual standard. And (to me) she looked constantly depressed and bored, like she didn't even want to be there and play, no excitement, no passion, nothing. Game 3 against Stats was a magnificent example of a throw. When she held that Stats' push on her third, was ahead in supply and started to make swarm hosts, me and my friends watching stream were like "hell yeah, she got it, amazing story!", but then she did nothing with swarm hosts for like eternity before she finally managed to at least snipe Stats' fourth base, but beside that she accomplished nothing, slowly but steadily lost her supply lead and in the end even lost those swarm hosts at a random meeting with protoss army in the middle of the map. Like she didn't want to win that game at all. Loser's match was even worse and that nuke from Keen was absolutely ridiculous, but I admit that I didn't know that she was playing without sound... On the other hand, that's solely her problem. Conditions in studio are just the same for every player and she participated in the previous season of GSL, so she must have known very well what to expect. It's just no excuse. And like was mentioned in some post above, even out of Korea players are always wearing those noise-cancelling headphones over ear buds, so it's nothing uncommon. Overall very dissapointed with yesterday's games. Hope at least MajOr (or Special or whatever) will show some good games, although everyone gave him even lesser chances to advance than Scarlett (me included).
And for the neverending bitching about spoilers/no-spoilers - I actually agree with the post above saying that simple and purely non-technical (and therefore reliable) solution is to change titles to "GSL Code G group results" etc. We don't need those everything telling headlines on the front page. I don't even know why TL do them, is it for the clickbait reasons or why? Because it doesn't make sense, if everything that matters is spoiled right in the headline, many users won't even bother to read that article. I personally doesn't use that no-spoiler feature (as I do not care about spoiled results) but it is obvious from reactions in comments that it is not working perfectly (be it technical problem or writer's mistake to tag something as a spoiler).
absolutely agree, man she basically had this game, but instead she just was walking around with sh's for like THREE MINUTES with doing only one locust spawn on zealots. Man if only she would just thought the army with those free locusts since she build'em, not speaking about sniping nexi.
On May 11 2017 14:27 maitiky wrote: And (to me) she looked constantly depressed and bored, like she didn't even want to be there and play, no excitement, no passion, nothing.
This is how we, introverts, normally look xD Actually she was extremely nervious from the very start and seemed about to cry after adepts.
On May 11 2017 14:27 maitiky wrote: And (to me) she looked constantly depressed and bored, like she didn't even want to be there and play, no excitement, no passion, nothing.
This is how we, introverts, normally look xD Actually she was extremely nervious from the very start and seemed about to cry after adepts.
Well, I know quite a few introverts and none of them looks so demolished and unhappy as Scarlett was yesterday :D But I can understand that tilt from adepts, some games with mass adepts really are frustrating to play and/or watch. And I'm saying that as a protoss main player.
I hope Major surprises us by advancing to the Ro16. While I seriously doubt he will, we've barely seen him play in LotV and for all we know, he might be really good.
On May 11 2017 22:59 Clbull wrote: I hope Major surprises us by advancing to the Ro16. While I seriously doubt he will, we've barely seen him play in LotV and for all we know, he might be really good.
On May 11 2017 14:27 maitiky wrote: And (to me) she looked constantly depressed and bored, like she didn't even want to be there and play, no excitement, no passion, nothing.
This is how we, introverts, normally look xD Actually she was extremely nervious from the very start and seemed about to cry after adepts.
Well, I know quite a few introverts and none of them looks so demolished and unhappy as Scarlett was yesterday :D But I can understand that tilt from adepts, some games with mass adepts really are frustrating to play and/or watch. And I'm saying that as a protoss main player.
In my opinion, you are mistaking her expression of focus and deep thought about what she needs to do to win for depression, complete unhappiness, etc.
No doubt that losing against Adepts the way she did feels bad, but plenty of players have similar expressions during a tournament, win and lose, but nobody says they look depressed until it's her on stage. Well, I do remember people saying it about Grubby off and on for years, but I think a lot of people recently have just done so as part of the joke about his expressions, and with him I don't remember it being nearly as frequent.
On May 11 2017 22:59 Clbull wrote: I hope Major surprises us by advancing to the Ro16. While I seriously doubt he will, we've barely seen him play in LotV and for all we know, he might be really good.
He is! Didn't you watch the last Dreamhack?
Major was very impressive at DH Austin. He's very good, no doubt about that, and has a strong case for being the best foreign Terran.
But "best foreign Terran" is a long, long way from "best Terran" and he'd have to be INnoVation/TY in order to be confident about making it out of his GSL group. As good as Major is, herO and ByuN are quite simply better. Which is nothing to be ashamed of, those guys are among the best in the world. Still, it means that Major is definitely not the favorite to advance.
KeeN proved yesterday that even second-tier Koreans can defeat foreign hopes, and KeeN isn't even at the top of tier 2 like aLive/Gumiho are. Best of luck to Major, because he will most certainly need it tomorrow.
On May 11 2017 22:59 Clbull wrote: I hope Major surprises us by advancing to the Ro16. While I seriously doubt he will, we've barely seen him play in LotV and for all we know, he might be really good.
He is! Didn't you watch the last Dreamhack?
Major was very impressive at DH Austin. He's very good, no doubt about that, and has a strong case for being the best foreign Terran.
But "best foreign Terran" is a long, long way from "best Terran" and he'd have to be INnoVation/TY in order to be confident about making it out of his GSL group. As good as Major is, herO and ByuN are quite simply better. Which is nothing to be ashamed of, those guys are among the best in the world. Still, it means that Major is definitely not the favorite to advance.
KeeN proved yesterday that even second-tier Koreans can defeat foreign hopes, and KeeN isn't even at the top of tier 2 like aLive/Gumiho are. Best of luck to Major, because he will most certainly need it tomorrow.
well I still feel that in the last game neeb somehow pulled out a miracle, dunno how it happened that he was able to break terran's siege. I think if everything went by a bit better in that 5th set Major might've won the whole thing. I was rly impressed with his performance and cheered for him, even though I play protoss, well never rly liked neeb also.
EPT
Classic, 
Scarlett, 
KeeN met to determine who two of those final four would be.
