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Criticizing pros / pro "mistakes"

Forum Index > SC2 General
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MatteDaemon
Profile Joined October 2015
8 Posts
August 07 2020 02:44 GMT
#1
"What [league are you in | is your MMR]?" are common responses to non-pros' criticisms or recommendations in a pro's chat. (And for some reason, it's rarely the pro asking . . .) Unfortunately, it's oftentimes implicitly understood that if you aren't in or above a given league or MMR, your criticisms / recommendations are invalidated by that alone. (That's a silly way to view things and isn't an argument, but to each their own.)

For example, I'm sure many past chatters mentioned how exploitative Nydus play could be, yet for (many!) years pros didn't use them to great effect. Eventually they caught on and for a while Nyduses were responsible for some pretty broken matchups, predictably resulting in it being severely nerfed, thank [Allah | Crom | Cthulhu | God | Morgan Freeman].

Pros aren't always right nor all that creative, they sometimes do stupid things, and being lesser rank than them, or anyone else, shouldn't necessarily default-invalidate criticisms or recommendations from relatively lower-level players.

The highest rank I've achieved is M2, I'm a low-APM Terran. This post is long yet not exhaustive, and many of the points could've probably been articulated better. I look forward to all thoughts / feedback, even if it isn't constructive. :-)

Zergs:

+ still don't utilize Nyduses all that well, especially late game—I'd love to see them used for taking ninja expos, camping production, etc. It's such a relatively low cost-vs-reward ratio.

+ rarely research burrow, even if for only the sake of being able to save economy, especially in ZvZs.

+ early spines / spores. I'm not sure how "early" they should be, but man, there are a lot of games where Zs take so much avoidable damage. Sacrifice a few drones on early static defense—it won't wreck your economy, but a few sneaky Hellions (still?) often do.

+ more bane drops. It literally took until Serral to see them really utilized. Pretty pathetic.

Terrans:

+ lose some SCVs to run-by / banes, and don't resume SCV production. Instead they oftentimes go all-in. In certain situations, I suppose they have to. In others, especially late-game, they probably don't have to and actually increase the likelihood of losing by thinking they must go all-in, then do so into a defensive Z or P. We know how that usually works out.

+ tank-push against Ps and clump their tanks up. Jesus Christ, spread out your tanks! They should never take Colossus splash, nor should multiple tanks be damaged per friendly-tank shot. (For example, X clumped tanks, Zealots / Stalkers on them, and a one-off tank firing on Zealots / Stalkers, consequently damaging all X clumped tanks.

+ vs Z, widow mine play should always include at least one siege tank to mess with the AI of lings / banes. Additional splash of course helps. The only player I saw do this was Last, who if he had stuck with SC2, probably would've been a world champ. (He's the only player I ever saw completely clown TY, had some of the best vs Z-micro I've ever seen, as demonstrated vs Life, where he had no stim or shields vs speed banes—Day9 was completely amazed, and to date, is the most amazing SC2 micro I've ever seen)

+ not enough factories. Why 3 mines at a time in late game TvZ? Is 3-factory, 4 mine + 1 tank or Thor at a time sustainable? More mech needs integrated with bio if bio is going to work. Alone, it seems the best Zergs have figured out how to utterly crush pure bio.

+ Turrets. Guys, come on. If they go muta, put up a lot of turrets. So many games seem to be lost simply to inability to deal with mutas, and most the time mutas aren't dealt with well early on simply from lack of turrets. Same for warp prisms.

Protosses

+ Dark Templar usage in all matchups. Use them. It's a (potentially) permanently cloaked unit. Why did it take until Zest for them to be utilized more? They're a broken unit early and late game, and awesome in many base trade scenarios. Just get a Shrine every reasonably-long game.

+ Big-eco play styles. Why don't more Ps have 80+ probes in long games? Giant economy -> massive bank -> sneak in a warp prism -> "Zerg" the Hell outta Ts and Zs -> "Look ma, meza winner!"
A serious programmer's aspiration, though, is to write faultless programs. [...] There are programmers in abundance whom I would gladly trade for teams of trained fanatical terrorists; at least the police would be looking for the terrorists. - Bob W Floyd
Blitzzz
Profile Joined June 2019
Costa Rica4 Posts
August 07 2020 03:21 GMT
#2
I'm probably wrong but I'm curious about this:
Pulling workers away from 2-3 hellions or even using them to attack (assuming they have a couple of units chasing the hellions) For what I have seen, it tends to make things worst:
-Usually 3 or 4 workers get stacked and get one shot, and then they get another shot and kill 2 more workers
-Plus lost mining time

On the years I've been playing, I noticed that I take less damage from not trying to split the workers and just focusing on chasing and killing the hellions.
dbRic1203
Profile Joined July 2019
Germany2655 Posts
August 07 2020 06:57 GMT
#3
I have the feeling, that a lot of your points are quite valid.
But attention and EPM is also a resource and a lot you re mentioning is realy attention/epm haevy.
For example the Nydus network in Z lategame. If there where 3-4 Nydus up, spread over the map, where Z could rotate the army almost instantly, that sounds completly broken. Problem is (I think at least) that in those late game situations the pros are allready handling 3-5 other different things and when you have to pull back to deal with a runby, it s just way easier to take some lings and attackmove them to the pressured base, instead of select lings | put them in nydus | unload in nearest nydus | defend the runby.
Kind of the same is with tank spread, you would need to set up each tank seperatly to get a decent spread, wich takes just to long for 6+ Tanks.
Maybe one day we ll see those plays, when the level of player increases even further. But today the pros are just not fast enough. In the end they have to prioritise their actions.
With a lot of the other stuff you mentioned, most of it is a balance between economic greed and safety. Generally speaking the pros try to get away with as much greed as possible in a macro game. Obviously it s easy for us viewers with full information or after the helions/ Zerglings/Zealot runby killed 8+ Worker to say, why didn t he did X/ invested more in defence. But if the runby doesn t come or come later, they wasted resources and are already behind.

With all that sayed, I agree with you, that you don t allways have to be Top 20 in the world, to have good idears.
The Magery was invented by a high Master/ low GM player (who beat Lambo with it).
TY was flying 4 Barracks into the enemy Main in a GSL Match. He died against that build, when playing offrace Z in mid Masters.
MaxPax was a no-name Ladder Hero, when he invented the MaxPax and it became actuall meta for a few weeks and is still mixed in from time to time today.
MaxPax
Charoisaur
Profile Joined August 2014
Germany15925 Posts
August 07 2020 07:02 GMT
#4
more bane drops. It literally took until Serral to see them really utilized. Pretty pathetic.

I assume you didn't watch Dark in 2016?
Many of the coolest moments in sc2 happen due to worker harassment
Shuffleblade
Profile Joined February 2012
Sweden1903 Posts
August 07 2020 08:27 GMT
#5
On August 07 2020 11:44 MatteDaemon wrote:
Zergs:
+ still don't utilize Nyduses all that well, especially late game—I'd love to see them used for taking ninja expos, camping production, etc. It's such a relatively low cost-vs-reward ratio.

+ rarely research burrow, even if for only the sake of being able to save economy, especially in ZvZs.

+ early spines / spores. I'm not sure how "early" they should be, but man, there are a lot of games where Zs take so much avoidable damage. Sacrifice a few drones on early static defense—it won't wreck your economy, but a few sneaky Hellions (still?) often do.

+ more bane drops. It literally took until Serral to see them really utilized. Pretty pathetic.

Terrans:

+ lose some SCVs to run-by / banes, and don't resume SCV production. Instead they oftentimes go all-in. In certain situations, I suppose they have to. In others, especially late-game, they probably don't have to and actually increase the likelihood of losing by thinking they must go all-in, then do so into a defensive Z or P. We know how that usually works out.

+ tank-push against Ps and clump their tanks up. Jesus Christ, spread out your tanks! They should never take Colossus splash, nor should multiple tanks be damaged per friendly-tank shot. (For example, X clumped tanks, Zealots / Stalkers on them, and a one-off tank firing on Zealots / Stalkers, consequently damaging all X clumped tanks.

+ vs Z, widow mine play should always include at least one siege tank to mess with the AI of lings / banes. Additional splash of course helps. The only player I saw do this was Last, who if he had stuck with SC2, probably would've been a world champ. (He's the only player I ever saw completely clown TY, had some of the best vs Z-micro I've ever seen, as demonstrated vs Life, where he had no stim or shields vs speed banes—Day9 was completely amazed, and to date, is the most amazing SC2 micro I've ever seen)

+ not enough factories. Why 3 mines at a time in late game TvZ? Is 3-factory, 4 mine + 1 tank or Thor at a time sustainable? More mech needs integrated with bio if bio is going to work. Alone, it seems the best Zergs have figured out how to utterly crush pure bio.

+ Turrets. Guys, come on. If they go muta, put up a lot of turrets. So many games seem to be lost simply to inability to deal with mutas, and most the time mutas aren't dealt with well early on simply from lack of turrets. Same for warp prisms.

Protosses

+ Dark Templar usage in all matchups. Use them. It's a (potentially) permanently cloaked unit. Why did it take until Zest for them to be utilized more? They're a broken unit early and late game, and awesome in many base trade scenarios. Just get a Shrine every reasonably-long game.

+ Big-eco play styles. Why don't more Ps have 80+ probes in long games? Giant economy -> massive bank -> sneak in a warp prism -> "Zerg" the Hell outta Ts and Zs -> "Look ma, meza winner!"

Well as others have said many of your ideas are very apm heavy and takes a lot of invested time to do, time that takes away from other things. If we could all program our own perfect AI with limitless apm/eapm then yes most of what you said would be in there.

The main question the pros are asking themselves is what can I do with my amount of apm that is most important. The problem I have with critizing pros is that we theorycrafters often have no respect for how many games the pros have played against the top players and tried different stuff out.

I remember one thread recently were posters were discussing how T should make liberators against heavy muta composition and Heromarine posted (not literal quote) "Build thors vs muta zergs, not liberators, it will save you a lot of time thank me later".

The pros play against eachother constantly, they try a lot of different approaces and they use what works, we theorycrafters can of course have good ideas but we also need to respect the insane amount of knowledge and experience the pros have from actually trying different things for real which is much more valuable than having an idea in your head that you think is good. Even if something works for us in scrub league (anything below top 100 aligulac) that doesn't mean it works at all when you meet a top 20 Z/T/P.

I really like you post because you do mention a lot of things that I think are actually good ideas that have merits. God knows how many times I've read horrible ideas on these forums but yours are actually great. The one thing I feel you are missing is how brittle the economy is early game and how things snowball economically. If zerg builds two spores/spines relatively early that is three drones lost plus 150 minerals lost. It literally is two less drones mining and 3 drones worth of minerals lost. So you basically lose two mining drones and three additional potential drones. So you invest 5 drones to build 2 spores this means that the defensive structures need to minimize damage with at least 5 less lost drones just to recoup cost. Defensive strucutres gives value throughout the game so there is that but also consider that the two drones lost to build them (and 3 drones that could have benen made with the 150 minerals) also could have added continous value throughout the game.

Additionally, sure on your level a few spores/spines might not completely ruin a zergs economy early on at your or my level but when you are playing a pro players with insanely tight build orders and pro level macro that small disadvantage might actually be what makes the difference between holding a timing push and not. Don't underestimate how big diference small disadvantages can make for pros.

Similarly in your exampel about terran all ining if they lose too many workers vs baneling runbys. Zerg can rebuild an army in a second if they have larvae, if the terran plays defensive the z will take the whole map and get a bank so they can rrebuild their army at least twice. In many situations if the option is stay defensive for 3+ minutes and rebuild economy or attack now when the zerg has invested a lot of army before he/she has the whole map and enough bank to remax instantly is actually many times the better choice.
Maru, Bomber, TY, Dear, Classic, DeParture and Rogue!
dbRic1203
Profile Joined July 2019
Germany2655 Posts
August 07 2020 09:22 GMT
#6
On August 07 2020 17:27 Shuffleblade wrote:
Show nested quote +
On August 07 2020 11:44 MatteDaemon wrote:
Zergs:
+ still don't utilize Nyduses all that well, especially late game—I'd love to see them used for taking ninja expos, camping production, etc. It's such a relatively low cost-vs-reward ratio.

+ rarely research burrow, even if for only the sake of being able to save economy, especially in ZvZs.

+ early spines / spores. I'm not sure how "early" they should be, but man, there are a lot of games where Zs take so much avoidable damage. Sacrifice a few drones on early static defense—it won't wreck your economy, but a few sneaky Hellions (still?) often do.

+ more bane drops. It literally took until Serral to see them really utilized. Pretty pathetic.

Terrans:

+ lose some SCVs to run-by / banes, and don't resume SCV production. Instead they oftentimes go all-in. In certain situations, I suppose they have to. In others, especially late-game, they probably don't have to and actually increase the likelihood of losing by thinking they must go all-in, then do so into a defensive Z or P. We know how that usually works out.

+ tank-push against Ps and clump their tanks up. Jesus Christ, spread out your tanks! They should never take Colossus splash, nor should multiple tanks be damaged per friendly-tank shot. (For example, X clumped tanks, Zealots / Stalkers on them, and a one-off tank firing on Zealots / Stalkers, consequently damaging all X clumped tanks.

+ vs Z, widow mine play should always include at least one siege tank to mess with the AI of lings / banes. Additional splash of course helps. The only player I saw do this was Last, who if he had stuck with SC2, probably would've been a world champ. (He's the only player I ever saw completely clown TY, had some of the best vs Z-micro I've ever seen, as demonstrated vs Life, where he had no stim or shields vs speed banes—Day9 was completely amazed, and to date, is the most amazing SC2 micro I've ever seen)

+ not enough factories. Why 3 mines at a time in late game TvZ? Is 3-factory, 4 mine + 1 tank or Thor at a time sustainable? More mech needs integrated with bio if bio is going to work. Alone, it seems the best Zergs have figured out how to utterly crush pure bio.

+ Turrets. Guys, come on. If they go muta, put up a lot of turrets. So many games seem to be lost simply to inability to deal with mutas, and most the time mutas aren't dealt with well early on simply from lack of turrets. Same for warp prisms.

Protosses

+ Dark Templar usage in all matchups. Use them. It's a (potentially) permanently cloaked unit. Why did it take until Zest for them to be utilized more? They're a broken unit early and late game, and awesome in many base trade scenarios. Just get a Shrine every reasonably-long game.

+ Big-eco play styles. Why don't more Ps have 80+ probes in long games? Giant economy -> massive bank -> sneak in a warp prism -> "Zerg" the Hell outta Ts and Zs -> "Look ma, meza winner!"

Well as others have said many of your ideas are very apm heavy and takes a lot of invested time to do, time that takes away from other things. If we could all program our own perfect AI with limitless apm/eapm then yes most of what you said would be in there.

The main question the pros are asking themselves is what can I do with my amount of apm that is most important. The problem I have with critizing pros is that we theorycrafters often have no respect for how many games the pros have played against the top players and tried different stuff out.

I remember one thread recently were posters were discussing how T should make liberators against heavy muta composition and Heromarine posted (not literal quote) "Build thors vs muta zergs, not liberators, it will save you a lot of time thank me later".

The pros play against eachother constantly, they try a lot of different approaces and they use what works, we theorycrafters can of course have good ideas but we also need to respect the insane amount of knowledge and experience the pros have from actually trying different things for real which is much more valuable than having an idea in your head that you think is good. Even if something works for us in scrub league (anything below top 100 aligulac) that doesn't mean it works at all when you meet a top 20 Z/T/P.

I really like you post because you do mention a lot of things that I think are actually good ideas that have merits. God knows how many times I've read horrible ideas on these forums but yours are actually great. The one thing I feel you are missing is how brittle the economy is early game and how things snowball economically. If zerg builds two spores/spines relatively early that is three drones lost plus 150 minerals lost. It literally is two less drones mining and 3 drones worth of minerals lost. So you basically lose two mining drones and three additional potential drones. So you invest 5 drones to build 2 spores this means that the defensive structures need to minimize damage with at least 5 less lost drones just to recoup cost. Defensive strucutres gives value throughout the game so there is that but also consider that the two drones lost to build them (and 3 drones that could have benen made with the 150 minerals) also could have added continous value throughout the game.

Additionally, sure on your level a few spores/spines might not completely ruin a zergs economy early on at your or my level but when you are playing a pro players with insanely tight build orders and pro level macro that small disadvantage might actually be what makes the difference between holding a timing push and not. Don't underestimate how big diference small disadvantages can make for pros.

Similarly in your exampel about terran all ining if they lose too many workers vs baneling runbys. Zerg can rebuild an army in a second if they have larvae, if the terran plays defensive the z will take the whole map and get a bank so they can rrebuild their army at least twice. In many situations if the option is stay defensive for 3+ minutes and rebuild economy or attack now when the zerg has invested a lot of army before he/she has the whole map and enough bank to remax instantly is actually many times the better choice.

Pretty much what I tried to say, but worded better
MaxPax
Justinian
Profile Joined August 2012
United Kingdom158 Posts
August 07 2020 09:29 GMT
#7
One thing that repeatedly triggers me is pro Terrans forgetting their armory and massively delaying their bio upgrades. C'mon guys, if you know from experience that you'll never reliably remember it, just get it a bit earlier when you're still thinking about it. There's a tiny opportunity cost in spending the resources slightly early, but that is far outweighed by the benefit of timely upgrades.
Scarlett`
Profile Joined April 2011
Canada2385 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-08-07 10:26:22
August 07 2020 09:36 GMT
#8
You're not at all considering what you would have to not do in order to add some of these things to your play; both in terms of attention and in terms of cost
Progamer
neptunusfisk
Profile Blog Joined July 2012
2286 Posts
August 07 2020 09:47 GMT
#9
Even though I really liked Last and agree that he would probably have won something big in SC2 (if he hadn't left for BW where he won ASL) I think the game vs TY you provided doesn't really qualify as "completely clowning" him even if the way he slowly outplays him is impressive. :p
maru G5L pls
WombaT
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Northern Ireland25085 Posts
August 07 2020 12:28 GMT
#10
It is my solemn and firmly held belief that you don’t need to be a good player to have good ideas about the game. For reasons completely unrelated to my own personal level...

Even great players can have terrible ideas because their bias towards their own race and preferred style can come into play.

Most ideas coming from us plebs are pretty bad though, because they’re very reactive and don’t consider how the game is at a pro level. So Twitch chat will go ‘why didn’t they build spores, that’s good against Banshees’ or whatever it is. The seemingly obvious solution to an obvious problem in the here and now.

It’s a different beast at that level. The pros are playing against other pros who can control multiple groups of units well while macroing on point, and who make good reads about what they’re doing. It’s an extremely fast game and you cannot really defend everywhere while being aggressive, so the pros don’t try.

How many pushes do we see, especially from Protoss and Terran that are barely successful, or barely defended and a few units may have swayed the battle?

The timings are razor thin either way and it is harder and harder the longer the game goes to read what little things impact that.

Maybe a game day, TY took two SCVs off mining to make 2 extra turrets is the game his 1:1 gets deflected due to having a few fewer units with the turret investment + SCVs off mining. Plus 2 SCVs off mining early/mid-game has a bigger proportionate impact than in super late game, where people do spam more static D.

Anyway just one aside, but Mutas smack you in one game you skimp turrets and everyone says you should have built turrets. Rarely do you get the ‘man that 1:1 timing sucked because he didn’t commit to it and built too man early turrets’.

In reality both absolutely equal a loss but the tendency is to see one as a factor as it’s more obvious and not pick up on the other.
'You'll always be the cuddly marsupial of my heart, despite the inherent flaws of your ancestry' - Squat
WombaT
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Northern Ireland25085 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-08-07 12:54:14
August 07 2020 12:53 GMT
#11
At OP: Most of what you point out are just mistakes made under pressure in a hard game, so I’ll ignore a few of them.

Zerg:
Nyduses are still underused. Not really sure why as Zergs had started to really make good use. Serral played a great game against TIME’s bio I believe in WCS last season where he had Nyduses at each side of the map and kept trying to get into production and just kept rotating around too quickly for time to keep up and transition into Ghost/Lib.

Not saying he was the only one to experiment but it looked potent and was showing its viability outside of allins or in combination with swarmhosts against P or T mech.

I 100% agree it’s still not fully explored. Honestly I think it would be more if Zergs weren’t winning quite so much with their current styles. A lot of stuff gets figured out in racial troughs where players have to really ditch what isn’t working, so perhaps down the line! Different games of course but I don’t see why SC2 players don’t learn from how the Nydus is used in Brood War!

Terran:
Terran is the tempo race that has to stop the opponents growing and buy space for its own transitions that tend to be slower. If you drop 20 workers, depending when you’re still on 40+ mules, so you have to weigh up dropping your gameplan and stalling vs pushing out with a really strong max with the extra supply freed up.

Depends what you want to do and your composition. If you’re going bio/tank, the 2:2 upgrade timing is probably the strongest upgrade-related in timing in the game. It’s probably around this that you see the cut SCV replenishment and attack the most from Terrans and it’s all about that gameplan.

Protoss:
I’d like it to be good I think it’d be fun to play, this style is garbage against good Zergs. Protoss units are trash against Zergs split up and to get your own 80+ eco up you’re going to give the Zerg a hell of a lot of room to do the same and creep up.

Versus Terran is another thing entirely. Chargelots especially with an upgrade advantage, Archons, Stalkers in smaller engagements etc are all at least decent roaming around. We’re seeing attempts to play vaguely this way from Zest and Parting and it’s looking pretty promising and a fun style.

A key difference is creep and the ability to actually retreat against Terran as well. You can also set up Templars in all sorts of flanking spots, whereas against a Zerg they’d just be sitting on creep waiting to be devoured by Zerglings.
'You'll always be the cuddly marsupial of my heart, despite the inherent flaws of your ancestry' - Squat
MatteDaemon
Profile Joined October 2015
8 Posts
August 07 2020 15:36 GMT
#12
On August 07 2020 18:36 Scarlett` wrote:
You're not at all considering what you would have to not do in order to add some of these things to your play; both in terms of attention and in terms of cost


For example . . . ?
A serious programmer's aspiration, though, is to write faultless programs. [...] There are programmers in abundance whom I would gladly trade for teams of trained fanatical terrorists; at least the police would be looking for the terrorists. - Bob W Floyd
MatteDaemon
Profile Joined October 2015
8 Posts
August 07 2020 15:43 GMT
#13
On August 07 2020 12:21 Blitzzz wrote:
I'm probably wrong but I'm curious about this:
Pulling workers away from 2-3 hellions or even using them to attack (assuming they have a couple of units chasing the hellions) For what I have seen, it tends to make things worst:
-Usually 3 or 4 workers get stacked and get one shot, and then they get another shot and kill 2 more workers
-Plus lost mining time

On the years I've been playing, I noticed that I take less damage from not trying to split the workers and just focusing on chasing and killing the hellions.


Idk, most the ways they deal with Hellions is dumb: remove most / all workers from mining, try splitting them (which we all know the majority of Zs, pros or otherwise, can't split to save their lives), drones still get roasted. I agree, I think they'd be better off not splitting or halting mining.
A serious programmer's aspiration, though, is to write faultless programs. [...] There are programmers in abundance whom I would gladly trade for teams of trained fanatical terrorists; at least the police would be looking for the terrorists. - Bob W Floyd
algue
Profile Joined July 2011
France1436 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-08-07 16:09:12
August 07 2020 16:00 GMT
#14
Late game mass overseer contaminate. Surprised it has never been done as a troll, tbh.

Step 1) Wait for the late game
Step 2) Transform a bunch of overlord into overseers
Step 3) Shift click them around the map to the enemy base when a big fight is about to happen
Step 4) Shift click contaminate the enemy's production facilities once the big fight is over

Outcome : Enemy reprod is crippled while yours is still perfectly fine ; Overseers don't take any supply away from your main army and can still be used in later fights ; The enemy is encouraged to waste money in static defenses in their main base.

Whats not to love?
rly ?
Zzzapper
Profile Joined September 2011
1793 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-08-07 16:13:01
August 07 2020 16:12 GMT
#15
On August 08 2020 01:00 algue wrote:
Late game mass overseer contaminate. Surprised it has never been done even as a troll, tbh.

Step 1) Wait for the late game
Step 2) Transform a bunch of overlord into overseers
Step 3) Shift click them around the map to the enemy base when a big fight is about to happen
Step 4) Shift click contaminate the enemy's production facilities once the big fight is over

Outcome : Enemy reprod is crippled while yours is still perfectly fine ; Overseers don't take any supply away from your main army and can still be used in later fights ; The enemy is encouraged to waste money in static defenses in their main base.

Whats not to love?

While this could be strong in principle, getting a large number of overseers is very expensive and once you're at the point where you can afford them, you're probably also at the stage where changelings are your only good source of vision so you wanna spend your energy on those. You also have to avoid getting into trouble for about 1½ minute after spending a lot of your bank on the overseers in order for them to get contaminate energy
SamirDuran
Profile Joined May 2012
Philippines894 Posts
August 07 2020 18:14 GMT
#16
On August 08 2020 01:12 Zzzapper wrote:
Show nested quote +
On August 08 2020 01:00 algue wrote:
Late game mass overseer contaminate. Surprised it has never been done even as a troll, tbh.

Step 1) Wait for the late game
Step 2) Transform a bunch of overlord into overseers
Step 3) Shift click them around the map to the enemy base when a big fight is about to happen
Step 4) Shift click contaminate the enemy's production facilities once the big fight is over

Outcome : Enemy reprod is crippled while yours is still perfectly fine ; Overseers don't take any supply away from your main army and can still be used in later fights ; The enemy is encouraged to waste money in static defenses in their main base.

Whats not to love?

While this could be strong in principle, getting a large number of overseers is very expensive and once you're at the point where you can afford them, you're probably also at the stage where changelings are your only good source of vision so you wanna spend your energy on those. You also have to avoid getting into trouble for about 1½ minute after spending a lot of your bank on the overseers in order for them to get contaminate energy

and overseers are supply. If the plan failed then you'll be in very big trouble of creating overlord instead of units.
Don't practice until you can get it right, practice until you can't get it wrong.
WombaT
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Northern Ireland25085 Posts
August 07 2020 18:15 GMT
#17
One thing that does trigger me is when units like hellions get behind mineral lines and lings/zealots all enter at one side to stop them and are bottlenecked there, rather than split a bit and coming from two angles.

Minor thing but given the crazy micro feats we see from the pros this is simple enough to do that even I can manage it.
'You'll always be the cuddly marsupial of my heart, despite the inherent flaws of your ancestry' - Squat
DeepElemBlues
Profile Blog Joined January 2011
United States5079 Posts
Last Edited: 2020-08-07 20:15:16
August 07 2020 20:14 GMT
#18
It's a lot different watching games, when you have perfect information and the illusion that the resources (physical, mental, time, in-game) all sufficiently exist to use it, than it is in-game when you don't have perfect information and the situation is no longer the ideal one that you unconsciously create in your head while watching.
no place i'd rather be than the satellite of love
Chemist391
Profile Joined October 2010
United States366 Posts
August 07 2020 20:29 GMT
#19
The attention thing really is crucial. This became very clear to me the first time I watched a Bisu FPVOD from a pro match. His ability to multitask and move his camera around really well didn't surprise me. What surprised me was all of the things that he chose *not* to pay attention to, because he knew that his attention was better spent elsewhere.
NicolasJohnson
Profile Joined April 2016
30 Posts
August 07 2020 21:35 GMT
#20
@MatteDaemon, I don't think your tone is super appropriate, calling strats played by the best in the world "pretty pathetic" and "dumb" is not a good way to get listened to I think .
As far as the ideas go, of course as Scarlett said some cost a lot economy and attention wise, some are already used (Elazer uses bane drops very often, we can see tons of DT harass or toss with big ecos), then some don't work. Early spines ? Against terrans yoloing their hellions the AOE will roast your drone line anyway.
I think it sums up why it is hard for pros to actually listen to the plebs : they suffer already from being criticized, usually when they are the most vulnerable, always by people with less knowledge than them ; why would they be open to any discussion with anyone ? But then the best point for me is simply that even if they discuss freely with us noobs (I know some pros do, I have seen Stephano and Elazer really take chat comments into account and talk about them), then how many ideas would actually be good ? I think one out of a 100, tops. I have been a pro in a competitive sport, and I know I have NEVER listened to a strategic idea on my sport for that exact reason, and thanks god it was irl and not on a sometimes toxic place like Twitch chat .

To sum up : I think we should communicate with the pros mostly to learn, understanding why they act the way they do making us grow as players. Now what if, by miracle during the exchange a good idea pops and they can use it ? Then everybody won.
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