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showstealer1829
Australia3123 Posts
On June 26 2018 14:21 ScrappyRabbit wrote: BitByBit was a GSL player. That's all I have to add to this discussion. I have no real dog in this fight, I just want us all to realize that this was a thing that happened. And his GSL victories are STILL the best GSL games ever  | ||
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Charoisaur
Germany15914 Posts
On June 27 2018 04:19 Nebuchad wrote: Early SC2 in Korea doesn't contain the best RTS players cause they were all playing Broodwar still. The people who tried their luck in SC2 at the start were the people who couldn't make it in Broodwar cause they didn't have enough skill. That's not the whole story but it's a major chapter. Even the BW B - teamers should be WAY beyond the skill of todays average master player so that doesn't seem like a sufficient reason. I think it's mostly the maps + imbalances which made the players look bad. You couldn't just spam your standard build order every game like today and were forced into unfamiliar situations much more often which made the players seem so unrefined. | ||
Poopi
France12771 Posts
On June 28 2018 21:56 Charoisaur wrote: Even the BW B - teamers should be WAY beyond the skill of todays average master player so that doesn't seem like a sufficient reason. I think it's mostly the maps + imbalances which made the players look bad. You couldn't just spam your standard build order every game like today and were forced into unfamiliar situations much more often which made the players seem so unrefined. Spot on. Nowadays players look good because LotV is multitask fest with almost braindead strategy behind it, the game put too much emphasis on mechanics | ||
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Gomas
Poland311 Posts
On June 28 2018 01:27 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: -111 marine tank banshee push vs Protoss (one of the most broken BOs ever before it got nerfed) -going mech in TvT back when people thought it wasn't viable but actually it was busted and got nerfed later (because Blue Flame was disgusting back then and mech terrans literally won early-mid game just with mass hellions vs Bio) -beating Zergs early game just by churning out 1 marine and 1 hellion at a time and kiting and killing all their Queens because they had 3.5 range, and following up with Banshees to contain them on 2 base if they didn't outright die while you took 3 bases and maxed out, etc. -doing 11/11 2 rax rush vs zerg and containing them with 2 bunkers at the bottom of their main ramp I can confirm this. I was top50 EU GM in 2011 just doing: -111 marine tank banshee vs Protoss (70%+ wins) -11/12 rax vs Zerg or the 4 marine + 1 hellion push followed by cloak banshee contain on 2 bases, followed by marine tank -cloak banshee or Polt's combat shield fast expand versus Terran (this was by far my weakest matchup but I constantly got beat by mech which proves your point) I played like 4000 games in total in my career by mid 2011 when I quit, even won some money. Now that I tried playing LotV for around 500 games I can barely beat high level diamond players. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12142 Posts
On June 28 2018 21:56 Charoisaur wrote: Even the BW B - teamers should be WAY beyond the skill of todays average master player so that doesn't seem like a sufficient reason. It's not sufficient but it also shouldn't be understated, it's a major part of it. If you put Jaedong instead of Cella in that game, he may not know what he should be doing but it won't look as bad as this. And we say Jaedong cause that's the name we think of but we could say hyvaa or Modesty and it would still work. Also note that Cella is not even the best example, as he has some kind of a career. There were people in these GSL like DAVIT and RenieHour. LiveForever made the fkin Ro4, and about half of the people who lost their Ro64 in Open Season 1 have only that line on Aligulac. In season 2 a journalist that was covering the event decided to play the qualifier for fun and qualified. | ||
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ggrrg
Bulgaria2716 Posts
On June 28 2018 20:58 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: It sounds like you were gone for a majority of WoL and HotS? I pretty much only played a notable amount of 1v1s during very early WoL and then again when I tried to hit master league in 2011. I don't even own HotS. However, I have been following and watching sc2 throughout its existence. You can find several NASL LR threads I made and updated. My liquipedia contributions are in a large part due to score updates of sc2 tournaments. While I did not play much sc2 I have been watching a ton. You didn't really have to "follow" a build order for those builds, they were completely broken. The timings were very loose and you would still hit with something very powerful, especially the TvP 111 attack. The tvz bunker rush would end the game once the 2 bunkers start being built at the bottom. Killing the zerg straight up with marine/hellion/banshee, or just containing them with hellion banshee, was very easy to do as long as you didn't die to a roach all-in as the roaches marched across the map trying to survive the banshees shooting them down as they went across the map. I'll give you that going mech tvt would require a little more macro and mechanics, but mech was still incredibly powerful and no one knew. Knowledge is key. I vividly remember the TvP 111 build and how Puma was crushing with it during NASL. I remember reading a ton of complaints about it. I also remember that despite of people learning about how ridiculously strong it was, PvT win rate was significantly above 0% and somehow strong protoss players were still consistently beating ladder hero terrans. So either the 111 was not as imba as you claim (personally I believe that this build was very high up on the bullshit scale) or execution did in fact matter. Knowledge alone does not help much when your mechanics are noticeably worse than those of your opponents. And knowledge alone is useless when your mechanics are plain atrocious as are those of diamond players and even a lot of master players nowadays. Throughout sc2 there have been a lot of really strong strategies that were later nerfed significantly and during every period the better players - even just a league or two above their opponents, never mind pro players - kept destroying the weaker players trying to abuse the advantage of those strategies, showing that the suggestion of knowledge of imbalance helping bad players to win against good ones (never mind pro players) is plain wrong. I'm not saying a diamond player of back then competing with GSL players... I'm saying a diamond player of today, with knowledge of what was broken and what players did back then that was bad, could easily win. Look at Fruitdealer vs Rainbow, and look at how terrible whatever Rainbow is doing. It was an ugly mix of bio and mech, they didn't even know at the time that it was bad. He had so many different units and never used a single one of them well, he would have been better off stream lining his composition. I understand very well what you are saying and it is still absolutely ridiculous. 1. Fruitdealer was only relevant in the beta and the first two GSL open season, which were Summer/Fall 2010. The Cella game shown in the thread is also from the first open season. All of those are just a few months after sc2's release (July 2010). It has already been established in this thread that players at the start of the game were mechanically lacking (no wonder after only 2-3 months of playing) and were facing issues with imbalance, unstable meta, no build orders, etc. Additionally, the preliminaries of the open seasons were set up in such a way that allowed some genuinely terrible players to reach GSL. However, the imba strategies you talk about came much later (e.g. 111 became a thing in the summer of 2011). At that point, build orders were fairly refined, top players had a year of practice behind them (+ team support) and were mechanically spot on. If you said that current high diamond players with the knowledge of today could do well in the first GSL open season if warped back in time, then there may be some merit to it. I still doubt that they would do well, but who knows, we would be talking about players with years of practice and knowledge advantage matching up against ones with a month of practice... Mechanical skill as well as strategies improved rapidly in early WoL. By mid-2011 the difference between pros and even middling GMs was night and day. Pros had teams, coaches, were practicing non-stop, and were playing for a living. Any notion that they were even remotely comparable in mechanics as some diamond player from today is absurd. 2. Actually, some diamond players in the past could very well compete with GSL players during the open season. Nobody was above diamond back then... Master league was only introduced after the 3 open season (Jan 2011)... 3. From a purely anecdotal point of view. I reached master with the same ease in 2018 as I did in 2011 and hit a wall the same way. Mechanically, I am probably even worse than I used to be (I switched races and I do not even know most hotkeys...). Diamond players simply have no ability to execute even a simple rush properly, never mind any bo that does not involve a proxy... They couldn't do it in 2011 and they can't do it now. Even a simple pressure with a few units on the back of a macro bo, delays their timing attack by a minute or two, and even kills them outright sometimes... I do have a really hard time imagining you came back with almost literally no serious 1v1 practice, and hit masters. But maybe you are naturally very good at RTS, good for you. There are various reasons to explain why you could hit masters today though with little practice, but also believe that you wouldn't be able to beat WoL players of back then. It could be that you have good game sense for example and thus thrive in LotV's current meta (which is quite diverse and active even in the early game, and the game can go in many directions quickly that players may be unfamiliar with), but are weaker when it comes to following BOs or being knowledgeable about all the timings to defend against back then (which would obviously put you at a disadvantage in the WoL meta which was less macro-favored and had rushes and cheeses running rampant). There's such a thing as people being good at different things, not all diamond players are alike and not all masters players are alike. Fair enough. Take a look: + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/TFWxxYu.jpg) ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/LZrJifU.jpg) ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/tVwC1p7.jpg) ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/9vhZJwt.jpg) ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/GdKhn8j.jpg) Besides that, I only had a short stint of around 6 months of playing bw in the second half of 2013. I was just about able to compete in lowest levels tournaments organized on the forums here. All of those are documented in liquipedia. 1. Now you can choose to trust me that I needed around 40 games to hit master in 2011 or not, but as you can see I do not have many WoL games anyway. 2. The 2016 WoL master placement was only because I wanted to have the shiny icon. I only played the placement matches + 2-3 more games to get it. 3. I can't prove that it took me ~80 games in LotV to reach master but it really does not matter much considering that I only have 150 1v1s in LotV... The majority of current diamond players cannot follow a build order if you put them in a sandbox games, and none of them can when the enemy puts even the slightest pressure on them. A single reaper harassing breaks their build order... I didn't play LotV until a month ago, so I don't know what the ladder was like back then, maybe it was different, but anyway... That doesn't mean that diamond players don't follow build orders with at least some decency though just because you were successful without following BOs. I for sure do follow BOs and I'm in high diamond right now. I did follow strict macro build orders back in WoL and HotS as well, even if my macro would fall apart more as the game went on. But I also could beat GM zergs with Mech in HotS since it was so powerful until they nerfed mass Ravens so you can't just sit home and defend all game. If I keep playing I could probably improve fast and get into masters soon (went 18-1 in the last 19 games on ladder), but right now I'm still learning the basic naunces of what certain compositions are good and bad in what situations, since I'm still really unfamiliar with the new units and race changes. My weakness is knowing the basic responses to early cheese and timings, and composition switches. This is especially true because I'm a mech player. My macro, mechanics, micro, and multitasking are pretty decent. We could easily be good and bad at different things. Players get worse after not playing for a long time. You missed years of LotV. Of course, you will not be able to get back to competing with GMs. Of course, different players have different strengths and weaknesses. The issue is that by mid-2011, pros were already the complete package. Just because some casual player would magically have inside knowledge of an imba strat does not mean that he would have any chance against a robot that has practiced the game for 8h/day for an year... Look at the games they played back then, their macro was often terrible outside of following short cheese builds, and they had no idea what they were doing. Their game sense was very different and lacking, and so many broken builds and strategies weren't known about until they came about. Someone from now going back in time would have an easy time. Maybe you wouldn't be able to, if you weren't playing or watching for a long time between WoL and LotV (not sure if you were or weren't watching SC2 over the years). But I do not see how someone going back with full knowledge of how the meta evolved and what builds were broken and why, would not be able to beat some GSL players. Maybe not stomp with 100% winrate, but with some preparation time for each GSL round, they could potentially get pretty far. There would not be enough time for the opponents to learn on the fly how to defend against those builds or strategies, especially because many of them required actual balance changes and players could not come up with any decent answer (basically all 4 things I listed earlier). Or drastic map pool changes (main ramps needing neutral lowered depots at the bottom to prevent bunker rushes, naturals no longer having huge cliffs to defend against, map size increasing by a ton, main base size reduction to nerf drops and hidden proxies, etc.) What is "back then"? You are giving me examples of games that were played less than 2 months upon sc2's release in a tournament environment when even terrible players could qualify for the GSL proper with some bracket luck in the preliminaries. At the same time, you give examples of imba strategies that came to be a year or so after sc2's release when Korean pros were coached and lived in a team environment with strict training regimen. At that time, pros had no issue to wipe the floor with decent ladder players trying to abuse those strategies. Why would they have any issues smashing current bad players if they were warped back in time is beyond me. | ||
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gTank
Austria2557 Posts
The game just came out back then, the people that played GSL and won stuff were the best at that time. Ofc the meta evolves and people get better, its the same with almost every sport! If you think about it for a minute you can answer the question yourself... | ||
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Charoisaur
Germany15914 Posts
On June 28 2018 23:47 gTank wrote: This whole threat makes no sense? The game just came out back then, the people that played GSL and won stuff were the best at that time. Ofc the meta evolves and people get better, its the same with almost every sport! If you think about it for a minute you can answer the question yourself... Yeah but a lot of the players back then had already a lot of RTS experience and with the knowledge we have today it seems they SHOULD have been playing at a higher level back then. | ||
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gTank
Austria2557 Posts
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Poopi
France12771 Posts
On June 28 2018 22:23 Gomas wrote: I can confirm this. I was top50 EU GM in 2011 just doing: -111 marine tank banshee vs Protoss (70%+ wins) -11/12 rax vs Zerg or the 4 marine + 1 hellion push followed by cloak banshee contain on 2 bases, followed by marine tank -cloak banshee or Polt's combat shield fast expand versus Terran (this was by far my weakest matchup but I constantly got beat by mech which proves your point) I played like 4000 games in total in my career by mid 2011 when I quit, even won some money. Now that I tried playing LotV for around 500 games I can barely beat high level diamond players. Thing is sc2 requires time to properly digest the games you played. Chances are that your life in 2018 doesn't really allow you to improve as much as your life in 2011 | ||
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VengefulTree
Canada637 Posts
On June 28 2018 10:12 ggrrg wrote: A diamond player nowadays (just like back then) can not follow a build order if his life depended on it, never mind bring any acceptable level of multitasking to pull of even the most simple rushes in a decent manner. That seems unnecessarily harsh lol, I'm a diamond and while I can recognize my own mediocrity, I can follow a build without too much hassle. Anyway, thanks for all the answers, I've learned a lot. Seems I didn't take into account the broken maps and the nature of the very early sc2 scene. However, the most interesting things I think I've seen in this thread are the accounts of meta progress as incremental, never making leaps but always trying simply to be a little bit better than what was present at a time. | ||
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Geo.Rion
7377 Posts
Anyone who says current master players are comparable to the level of WOL pros is a complete idiot. Right now everyone below very-high masters is utter shit, myself included there on M2 (and M3 with my offrace with which i havent learnt a BO or most of the hotkeys yet). In a way, when the first season of SC2 GM was introduced, that set of GM players is better than the current set of GM players. You didnt have any chance of making the cut unless you were spamming games non stop. Right now there are lots of casual players, streamers etc in GM. The level of competition back in early WOL was way higher than it is now, the player base was way bigger. The game was shit. The maps were shit, and consequently the meta was shit, and rewarded a lot of bad habits (And yes, the game hasnt been figured out, true, but that s a very small impact, most things were figured out on the respective patch). 4 gate was the go-to protoss build in all 3 match-ups for like a year and a half. Maps were small and badly laid out, so training lots of things like late game macro and tech switches were counter-productive, you either needed to be very good at allining or holding allins, and kinda just take it from there. Or finding the one new build or comp that could net you some free wins for a week or two, i will concede there was some of that as well. Yes, some of the games were bad, some people who made it very far in the tournaments were bad, cuz they found one allin or one composition that worked for them and they got to like code S ro 16 or ro 8. Some people who made it far in the first few big tournaments didnt have stage experience, so they choked and shown shit games. The competition was fierce, even before the Kespa pros started to switch, and from there on it was very fierce. You seem to pinpoint an exact game where the zerg was late with the spire or just messed up in a number of ways. I could easily find you games right now from any tournament, where one pro makes total nub mistakes. TLDR: just NO, WOL pros werent bad. The game was and the maps were a lot worse. Current diamond and plat is shit (and master). | ||
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crbox
Canada1180 Posts
That being said they still had the capacity to micro two groups of units at once and handle crisis (ling run-bys, harass of any kind, etc.) which low level players today don't have. Actually even high masters have terrible multitasking in NA. "Strong" players in Starcraft 2 are players who know the meta and what unit comp is the most OP nowadays. Back then it was more about throwing your opponent off his game. Now everyone get at least free 3 bases in 95%+ of their games. Totally different set of skills! | ||
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ggrrg
Bulgaria2716 Posts
On June 29 2018 01:27 VengefulTree wrote: That seems unnecessarily harsh lol, I'm a diamond and while I can recognize my own mediocrity, I can follow a build without too much hassle. To be fair, the difference I noticed between 2011 and 2018 is that nowadays the general player is more aware of what they have to do to win. The first few months of WoL were like the Wild West - you could get away with any shit you did. In mid-2011 the overall skill had greatly increases and while pros were mechanical monsters and utilized fine-tuned strategies, the normal sc2 player was mostly winging it. Even in low-/mid-master league many players were not using anything specific build orders, instead relying on better mechanics and/or superior decision making. When I played LotV I noticed that nearly all opponents were trying to adhere to a build order, often enough even 4-5 minutes into the game. Even the few gold and plat players I met were playing the first few minutes of the game following a specific build order both for macro games as well as timing attacks. Well, just because everybody tried to do a build order does not mean that they did it particularly well... Even the slightest pressure during the early game threw even low-master players off their build. I won a bunch of games right away by pressuring with 4 units while double expanding against a variety of theoretically safe openings from my opponents. Pressure was not even neccessarily required for all my opponents to mess up their build orders in one way or another... You think that you are pulling of build orders without much hassle, but this cannot possibly be true. If you were actually able to do so, you should just learn a timing attack for each matchup and then cruise to low GM or at least high masters without much trouble. When I was a lot in bw during late 2013, I practiced a ton and tried to emulate many build orders I saw from the top players. I remember learning a specific simple timing attack in PvZ and utilizing it with decent success in my games. I had written down the whole build order, memorized it and practiced against AI a few times before unleashing it in multiplayer games. While often successful, I was still losing some games even though I felt that I did everything pretty well, not perfect, but with no major mistakes. This made no sense to me since pros were destroying other pros with it while I was failing even against my weak opponents. So I compared a replay of what I felt was my best execution with the pro replays I had... Color me surprised when I noticed that the 5:30 push of the Korean bw pro hit only at 6:20 when I did it... and it hit with 4 less units... Never mind that I was reinforcing much slower during the push and made a gazillion macro mistakes as soon as my units reached the opponent. This is the same thing happening to players in LotV currently - be they plat, dia, or masters. They know build orders, they try to follow them, and they keep executing them in a poor manner unaware of how impactful their compounding small mistakes are. You delay your first production building by a few seconds because you microed your scouting worker, you missed constant worker production for a tiny bit a few times, got 2-3 short supply blocks, built your T2 production building 10 sec later than you could have (and thats after already delaying the prerequisite), had small gaps between unit production rounds, etc. And 6 minutes into the game, you are already 1 minute behind on your build order both on eco and infrastructure with a whole production cycle missed. Additionally, diamond players are in general very inflexible responding to specific situations requiring a change in approach. They would continue (poorly) following their build order even after seeing that their opponent is about to get a big advatage due to their opening - be it not responding to strong timings, or just letting opponents get away with unsafe eco builds. edit: On June 29 2018 02:00 Geo.Rion wrote: Anyone who says current Diamonds are comparable to pros in WOL is a complete idiot. Anyone who says current master players are comparable to the level of WOL pros is a complete idiot. Right now everyone below very-high masters is utter shit, myself included there on M2 (and M3 with my offrace with which i havent learnt a BO or most of the hotkeys yet). In a way, when the first season of SC2 GM was introduced, that set of GM players is better than the current set of GM players. You didnt have any chance of making the cut unless you were spamming games non stop. Right now there are lots of casual players, streamers etc in GM. The level of competition back in early WOL was way higher than it is now, the player base was way bigger. The game was shit. The maps were shit, and consequently the meta was shit, and rewarded a lot of bad habits (And yes, the game hasnt been figured out, true, but that s a very small impact, most things were figured out on the respective patch). 4 gate was the go-to protoss build in all 3 match-ups for like a year and a half. Maps were small and badly laid out, so training lots of things like late game macro and tech switches were counter-productive, you either needed to be very good at allining or holding allins, and kinda just take it from there. Or finding the one new build or comp that could net you some free wins for a week or two, i will concede there was some of that as well. Yes, some of the games were bad, some people who made it very far in the tournaments were bad, cuz they found one allin or one composition that worked for them and they got to like code S ro 16 or ro 8. Some people who made it far in the first few big tournaments didnt have stage experience, so they choked and shown shit games. The competition was fierce, even before the Kespa pros started to switch, and from there on it was very fierce. You seem to pinpoint an exact game where the zerg was late with the spire or just messed up in a number of ways. I could easily find you games right now from any tournament, where one pro makes total nub mistakes. TLDR: just NO, WOL pros werent bad. The game was and the maps were a lot worse. Current diamond and plat is shit (and master). I would not have phrased it this way, but I agree with all the sentiments to a large degree. The competition was indeed very fierce during everything that came after the open seasons. And certainly for everything beyond mid-2011 when pros had already benefited from several months of team house practice, coaching, and an enormous pool of very motivated players. | ||
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DieuCure
France3713 Posts
On June 29 2018 02:02 crbox wrote: Diamonds / Masters of today would probably win on most maps just because strategy is more important than mechanics in Starcraft 2. Rofl, good joke! | ||
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rauk
United States2228 Posts
On June 28 2018 01:27 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: High diamond in LotV feels like mid masters in HotS, at LEAST. this is completely wrong. i was high masters in wol and got to high masters in lotv after taking a 4 year break | ||
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Gomas
Poland311 Posts
On June 29 2018 00:13 Poopi wrote: Thing is sc2 requires time to properly digest the games you played. Chances are that your life in 2018 doesn't really allow you to improve as much as your life in 2011 true | ||
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Ej_
47656 Posts
On June 29 2018 04:58 rauk wrote: this is completely wrong. i was high masters in wol and got to high masters in lotv after taking a 4 year break It's actually the other way around, master 3 treshold dropped in 2018 to measly 4500mmr :D | ||
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KalWarkov
Germany4126 Posts
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EnderSword
Canada669 Posts
On June 29 2018 05:44 Ej_ wrote: It's actually the other way around, master 3 treshold dropped in 2018 to measly 4500mmr :D MMR is still a measure of how you compare to people at the time though. I think the idea that high Diamond in LotV is mid masters is at least true based on percentages, maybe Masters 3, not Masters 2. I think the first 4-5 seasons in the HotS era Masters had drifted close to 8% of the population | ||
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