EPTI stopped playing in late heart of the swarm because my wrists gave out on me, and I never enjoyed anything about LotV design that I saw coming. It was clear that blizzard was trying to go all in on deforming the actual game into an 'esports audience magnetizing action packed' moba-fication of the game I actually enjoyed.
So no surprise that I hate basically everything that LotV is.
But what's really ruining my willingness to keep putting time into relearning the game from here, is the fact that the entire F'd up thing is being played on..
Unfathomably bad maps. I literally cannot believe that the standard of mapmaking has collapsed, to my mind, entirely. All of the most important cornerstones and design elements that were always respected by legitimate mapmakers, working in accordance with pros and attuned to real balance.. are just gone.
As a zerg, it genuinely seems as though Terrans and Protosses truly, automatically get third bases now. And simultaneously, the Zerg has to struggle immensely to maybe hold their third.
That's a complete and blatant inversion of the balance of the game at the racial level, in a way that was true back then and would be true now, regardless of the many LotV changes.
It seems like people who understand the truth of this game in its current state have long since quit, and that many have commented on these same things. I guess I just wanted to vent, because for me, coming from a once beautiful past, this future is so much horrific than what I imagined for the game even at the launch of LotV.
How embarrassing is it that brood war honestly trounces this game in terms of support, viewership and balance? I truly hope that starcraft 3 and warcraft 4 are never released, because it's impossible to imagine the people at blizzard doing anything other than the worst job of all time. We spent a decade and some years loving everything blizzard touched, only to watch them destroy everything we loved and grew up on.
Heinous. And then David Kim went to Battle Aces and ruined their game with unmistakably bad David Kim design moves. Their game was popping before he imported the equivalent of the mothership to it. Mothership on roids. Dude really, truly hates it when people are allowed to attack each other. I was so glad to see their VCs pull money and shut it down. Homeboy is the ultimate menace.
RIP the RTS genre, aside from brood war, lol
EDIT: there's also a wildly delusional ongoing fanbase who genuinely believe that through players like serral, reynor and clem, foreigners finally matched the level of Koreans and or transcended the skill of past foreigner greats. I have already deeply explored how dynamically bogus and fantastical that is. It seems like the only people still left just, don't even understand what actually happened to this game. They're on a never ending voyage through alt reality. It's insane. I blame analytically weak casters and diamond players, specifically, for allowing this hallucination to persist.
Clem is definitely two tiers down from MMA on the MMA front, and definitely doesn't register as a korean macro terran level talent, either. And Serral is for sure not better than prime Snute, Stephano or Nerchio. Maybe even footing? But honestly I don't even see the even footing w/ the eye test. Let alone the Koreans who still farmed those guys.
