|
On February 22 2013 17:44 vthree wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2013 17:38 NightOfTheDead wrote: Well real sports do not have fog of war, and there arent unknown 'plays' that can suprise you according to current 'rules' aka metagame. It is best to compare sc2 to real war than real sports. Real war has a lot of unknown just like starcraft, while real sports have very little unknown factors. I am not sure about that. If you look at something like American football, there are lot of different 'plays' that can be run from the same formation. QBs also change their plays after looking at the defense's formation. And it has a meta game. Throwing the football is more common compare to 20 years ago. And even recently, there are things like spread offense, QB option, etc. It is always offense uses some new plays, defense adjusts, then offense find other new plays and it just goes in circles. In this aspect, it is very similar to the evolving meta of starcraft2.
I honestly can't see why you can draw a parallel. Seriously, as someone who have watched the NFL for over a decade, I can't even begin to see how they compare.
Playing SC2 is like playing football where you can't see the defensive formations, whether its in base, nickel, where it's showing blitz or showing cover 2. Where defenses can't see whether it's 5 wide or jumbo formation. And that there's this extra element that the defender can "peek" into the offensive huddle to see perhaps a partial page of the actual play, the entire page, or nothing.
What you're describing with football is like playing SC2 without fog of war. Because even with maphack, your opponent can still do something different from what you imagined. He can still, for example, go early gas and then rax-expand to throw you off. Having no fog of war doesn't mean you can read your opponent's mind. It just means you see everything they do in real time.
|
I think that there is a large combernation of reason why te winrates and hence low predection rates. T
#1 yes this game could ave a larger skill cap but thats not really the biggest one.
the rest of the points are for the same reason, unlike other sports starcraft games can be won by devloping a strat before the game that will give you an advantage. IE; starcraft is not all about execution where most sports are.
#2 there are three races, unlike in basketball where there is only one (balck, i had to, it was there, or pollo, white) each races win rate rises and falls over time, terran winrate was high and now days zergs winrate is his. the playeys each stike to their own race and cope the loose in there races winrates personaly as well. make it harder to eb consitant.
#3 invidaul players who come up with a new strat or just know something that everyone else doesn't know about that game yet will do very very well, for a short time, this is why we see no namers often shoot all the way there out of no where to win a GSL and then fall down in a season or two and hover at less than code S winning level.
#4 unlike other sports, in starcraft, dffernt styles match up well against one another. Now this could be that a players does some research and blind counters a build, making it apear that the game is total build shit.
Now having said aaallll of that, I have no idea how much of a difference each of those things (plus ll the stuf i havn't thought of) rally make. But it will be some, and i would say its quite a bit of a difference.
|
On February 22 2013 18:03 Sephiren wrote: SC2 has a lower skill ceiling than desirable, definitely more so than traditional sports, but it's still there. I do wish there was a greater difference at the very top, but I think you just have to take it as it is and just enjoy it. There are many similar games in the same situation, and people still enjoy them.
I don't think we'll have a game with a truly high skill cap for a long while. Not until the controls have more depth than a mouse a keyboard, or at the least until a new RTS comes out with much less automation than SC2, but a better means for skill-based observation/analysis of an opponent. Until someone can beat the control of Automaton 2000, I would consider the skill ceiling of SC2 more than sufficient.
|
Vote for Zergs and watch your fortunes rise!
|
On February 22 2013 18:11 JazzNL wrote: Vote for Zergs and watch your fortunes rise!
You don't watch much HotS do you ? And your not much of a bettng man either.
OT:
Sc2 has alot lower "mechanical" skill ceiling for sure, though it seems to make it up in faster gameplay. The only real problem with faster gameplay is you get 1 big army and try to melt the other, a single good engagement can win you the game. Hence lower so called "skilled" players can beat those that are considered higher "skilled" players with a good position or some would say luck.
|
On February 22 2013 15:38 Gatesleeper wrote: IYou can say that PartinG is a much stronger player than Curious, he should win 3-1, maybe 3-2. But for then for him to get trounced 0-3, what does that say about this game we watch?
Nothing, absolutely nothing. Curious is really good. That's why that happened. And Artosis agreed on that on stream btw and talked about him being one of the best in practice but despite that always falling down to code A when it counted. But not this time. Also Zerg is still slightly imba (in WoL) imho, let's not forget that. So there you go. The game is a bit too volatile though. Just a little bit. But that's ok.
|
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but there is a much higher population of SC2 games between high level players in a give time frame (say 1 year) then was in BW. Couldn't it be possible some of the discrepancy is due to two different sample sizes?
|
You compare win rates of top players in SC2 and conventional sports. I claim that in sports the top players/teams are really close to the weaker ones in terms of what we call "skill", but there are other factors which differentiate them. The most obvious one is money. A team with more money can hire better players. In individual sports it may not seem as important, but still, top players spend a fuckton of money on equipment and professional training. And the main issue about money is that it snowballs. The best player/team gets the most money from sponsors, so they can get even more ahead of the others. Thus, insane win rates can occur. In SC2 the only factor that decides the outcome of a match is the skill of both players. As there are a lot of pros who train really hard, it's nigh impossible for one of them to get ahead of the rest.
|
On February 22 2013 15:54 inSeason wrote: Why doesn't this change? Why aren't we seeing steps taken for this to improve?
Because now, just like then, Blizzard do not care. Their main goal is not to make a great esports title like BW, they want to make an RTS which even casual gamers will buy and enjoy. Of course, they love the esport scene, it brings a lot of attention and money their way, but they most certainly aren't willing to risk their userbase to make the skillceiling higher.
|
I think the game is still young. If you look at code B compared to code S today there is a much bigger difference in skill than there was in 2011. Also when you look at high profile matches, people still make a lot of stupid mistakes.
Looking at the whole picture, Mvp has 4 GSL golds and 2 silvers. That is enough for me.
|
I feel like I'm the only one who remembers not so long ago we all praised Artosis for rarely predicting a set wrong, in the early days of sotg he even stopped predicting so he wouldn't lose his sick streak. Its just a run of bad luck; Artosis knows what hes talking about as much as anyone who is in his position of analyzing high level starcraft.
Though it is fun to say hes cursed
|
There is no point in discussing these things here. For every well-thought out rational argument on how to fix this game there are a hundred fan bois licking Blizzards asshole and paying them money for more. I have the SC2 forum blocked on this site and every time I unblock it so I can see if HotS had major changes I see 3 threads like this one at once, and you know what? Nothings going to change, you know why? Money All these pros/casters could come together and lead a boycott which would actually change something but they wont because they like money more than they like a good game. EDIT: spelling
|
Consider this: Artosis, perhaps the most knowledgable guy in all of Starcraft II, is constantly predicting certain players to do well and constantly getting it wrong. Hence, the "curse".
There's so many things wrong with this.
The best players lose because it's impossible to play a perfect game of Starcraft. It's as easy as that.
|
On February 22 2013 15:47 inSeason wrote:Show nested quote +Is there something inherently wrong with a game where the supposed best players so often lose to players who are widely considered weaker than them? Like, is the skill ceiling not high enough? Is it too luck based? Why don't the best players beat the slightly less good players more often? This is the biggest problem I see with SC2 as an eSport in general. It seems that luck plays such a significant roll in the outcome. I want to see the skill ceiling be so high that we can have players that generally never lose to weaker opponents. I want to see the best player in Starcraft have a 90% win rate. Not a 60% win rate. Edit: I think I over-estimated when I said 90% win rate, but the idea stands that I'd prefer higher win rates for the best players.
yeah that would be so interesting to watch
|
Again with the ridiculous comparisons of SC2 to real sports... when will it end?
SC2 is a volatile game. If Federer goes into a tennis match and a lower ranked player surprises him with a unique playing style, he still has plenty of time over the sets to adjust and counter it. But in SC2 you don't have that. You get hit with a unique strat or cheese, you're probably already dead. Then you're one game down in a Bo3 against someone that is probably really close to you in skill anyway, and you lose 2-0 despite being favoured. It happens.
People underestimate GSL players so much, these guys practice hours upon hours every single freaking day, they can all take games off of one another. There's a ridiculous amount of pressure and tactical strategy that comes into a (on average) 15-16 minute game. SC2 is punishing as hell, as it should be.
Not to mention map balance and metagame comes into play as well. These things don't exist in real sports.
I have no issues with this. Players like MVP have showed us 70%+ win rates are possible in SC2, you just have to be good enough to earn it. It's just a difference in preference I'd say, I'd rather see the player that played better in a series win than have long periods of dominance by fan favourites for the sake of a high skill ceiling.
|
Also, other sports are volaltile as well. Tennis is an exception, not the rule. Look at a game like soccer which is arguably the most popular sport in the world. Is Barca(The (BW)Flash of Soccer) winning every CL-Final? Not as far as i know.
|
There's no way someone will have like 90% career winrate. BW's top players had 60-70% winrate which is pretty much the same as SC2's top players. SC2's players have to play more games per year too. If skillcap is high enough for someone like Mvp to win everthing in 1 year then it's high enough. The problem with people is that they saw their favourite players lost and think they were defeated because they were unlucky. Which is simply BS most of the time. Your title as "the best player" won't help you to win when you play like shit. If you want to stay at the top forever then you have to keep getting better forever. People who play better are supposed to win not people who people think are better.
|
A lot has to do with how good they play on the day, mindgames, how much preparation, imbalance, jetlag. Many of the best betters probably is comparing x players best shape vs y players best shape + skewing it a little towards his own bias as who he wants to see win. I'm guessing many betters even bet on matches they're not so sure about. I consider myself a pretty good better and has predicted many unlikely outcomes, who wins a mlg or something, which is really ridiculous actually, when you think about the small amount of chance there is to win a mlg with all the contenders that there is, even so the korean domination is already one evidence that the game is not really random at all, the reason why one player isn't beating everything like in SC1/WC3 is that now, there's even more competition.
|
United Kingdom12012 Posts
I would say personally it's because there's a lot of good players, but very few excellent players (say Flash and Jaedong in BW) of course in BW there were some others, but in SC2 there may be a lot of players who play at a high level, but in SC2 I'd say there just isn't anyone who's shown they can be as good as Flash was in SC1. Nobody has looked completely solid outside of maybe MVP and he's been losing recently due to his neck injury.
|
Tennis is random: 1. top players take points off each other all the time, because you can take risks. 2. some points are a lot more important than others. You can win games without winning the majority of the points.
Chess is random: 1. if your game veers into a type of play that you prepared for then you have an advantage. 2. you can't know the consequences of your moves, since you can't look more than x moves ahead.
Both games have moments where you take calculated risks, but in the end the winner is almost always the better ranked player. In SC2 this is not the case. I think it's not a question of calculated risks existing, it's that there aren't enough of them, not enough moments in the game where you have to make some interesting decision of engagement with multiple good choices, and so on. If that was the case then the build order advantages wouldn't matter so much, since with good play you could still catch up.
A few more comments:
People should stop dredging up MVP's 70% winrate. This was during a time with less players at the top, he was far and away the strongest player, and therefore it's meaningless. Look at the stats now: Life is 66% for the last six months, that's with him being both the strongest player and playing zerg. Furthermore, he's an outlier. This season of GSL is prospected (maybe Taeja and MC will prove me wrong) to have yet another completely new Ro4, there again will be no repeat winner, the game seems like it's getting more volatile as time goes on, not less.
|
|
|
|