[ASL3] Ro16 Group D - Page 26

On May 10 2017 06:33 Liquid`Drone wrote:
4: I think the flash vs soulkey game showcased that zerg has options. Because that was not a game where flash fucked up. It was a game where soulkey played absolutely brilliantly, and I think if more zergs played at the level he did in that game, then I honestly have a really hard time seeing how terrans can maintain positive winning ratios.

On May 10 2017 02:41 darktreb wrote:
People are making this into a false dichotomy between "BW is perfectly balanced on every map" and "JD deserved to lose for not playing perfectly".

TvZ probably isn't "perfectly" balanced right now. Jaedong didn't play that great, especially past the 20 minute mark. Both can be true - I think both are true.

What's definitely true is that Jaedong could have won this game had he played better, and not in "everything perfect god mode" ways, but in ways that are completely reasonable to expect for an elite Zerg player. I bet Effort, Soulkey, Zero, perhaps hero, and perhaps Larva (when not on stage) win that game if they get into the position Jaedong did right after the late game Muta switch.

Nobody thinks BW is balanced on every map. But better players can beat worse players most of the time, on most maps. The thing is though, Last is the better player right now. Using this of all games as the prime example of TvZ imba is asinine. There are so many better examples.

I've been watching Jaedong since 2006. One of Jaedong's weaknesses has always been his propensity for aggression (which is also one of his greatest strengths), and relatively mediocre game sense / late game decision making for a person who is probably the second greatest player of all time. Jaedong generally wins off of a combination of hyper aggression, and amazing mechanics. He was always able to scrape advantages other players couldn't, both because they didn't have the mechanics, and because they didn't have the balls.

The problem is this playstyle is so damn effective that Jaedong never developed quite as good of "sloppy game" game sense. He still won a ton of these games because he was almost always the better player, and superior mechanics and killer instinct are still worth a lot in a sloppy game. But as soon as it looks like "attack attack attack" will work, his natural instinct is to go with that route, even if there's a better route.

In this game, that situation came up after the Muta switch. He got a lot of value out of the Mutas, but he could have gotten FAR more value out of them by keeping them alive instead of throwing them away at the top left. If he keeps ~10 Mutas alive and harasses / flanks with them constantly, while taking both mineral only bases and perhaps even 3 o'clock, then he probably wins. This would have been Soulkey's instinct, and probably Effort's and Larva's as well.

This is the stable way to win ZvT on Circuit Breaker once you have a brief late game advantage, because if you take both Mineral only bases, not only is the 6 o'clock gas buffered a bit, but each harass is proportionally less damaging for the very straightforward reason that when an expo is harassed when you're on 6-7 base, it's less damaging than when you're on 4-5 base.

Once Jaedong lost the Mutas, all of a sudden Last could again march all the way down to the high ground outside of one of the mineral only bases. There was very little flanking, partly because Jaedong couldn't afford it having burned like 2000 / 2000 on Mutas. For all of Jaedong's great Lurker drop harass in the beginning of the late game, where was a Defiler and a Lurker under swarm to interrupt the flow of Terran units?

All of this is very hard to do, but what is also getting ignored is how great Last played after the 20 minute mark. It definitely wasn't a great game by him in the first 20 minutes, but whereas a lot of Terrans would have crumbled or gotten passive, Last kept pumping out units and kept going to the high ground. It's really scary to move out as Terran when you don't have the full death ball put together, but Last kept doing it super effectively (though again would have been less effective with the threat of Mutas).

Also, while Vultures are super strong, it does take a ton of work to lay mines over and over again. This is why the mineral only bases on CB benefit Zerg more than Terran. For Zerg, it just means infinity cracklings, which take very little effort to use. You can throw 6-24 cracklings at some expo on A-move in the late game and there's a decent chance they do damage. Sure they might all blow up to one mine, but Terran has to keep laying those mines.

Problem is, Jaedong just never stabilized those mineral-only bases, in spite of the advantage they provide for Zerg in late game ZvT.

Now you might say, "Jaedong badly wanted to kill top left, because if he doesn't it's really hard". I agree. But throwing Mutas only doesn't work. Mutas do like no damage to buildings, and as long as there are a few Factories up there, eventually enough 3-3 Goliaths will pop. It's like in PvT, as soon as the Zealots die, pull back the Dragoons. Here, as soon as you're down to just Mutas, pull them back because they are 10x more valuable as harass / flank / just being annoying, than slowing chipping away at Factories while Goliaths come out 3 at a time. This is a very straightforward concept. I'm not saying I "know better" than Jaedong - he surely knows this too, but his attack instincts are just too much sometimes in the heat of a game.

On May 10 2017 06:44 Last Romantic wrote:
The problem with something like a 60/40 MU is then in a bo5 Z has essentially no chance - <10% to win.

I don't mind the slight edge that Terran has always held over Zerg and in this particular instance agree that Jaedong could have played better. However, don't feel that JD played so markedly worse as to deserve getting crushed like that. The matchup is just not as fun to watch anymore; Z feels like it has no counterplay besides one or two small windows.

On May 10 2017 08:37 darktreb wrote:


Jaedong got "crushed" in a 30+ minute game where he had multiple chances to win...?

On May 10 2017 08:37 darktreb wrote:
The thing about ZvT series is because Zerg at least has all kinds of cheese to try to throw at Terran, the probability doesn't slope down as badly. Stuff that Zerg players wouldn't use over and over on ladder, but might pull out for a big game. Jaedong vs Flash in the last ASL was a prime example of that. So I don't think "60/40 -> 90/10" is an accurate representation of the situation.

On May 10 2017 02:41 darktreb wrote:
One of Jaedong's weaknesses has always been... a relatively mediocre game sense / late game decision.

On May 10 2017 02:41 darktreb wrote:
The problem is this playstyle is so damn effective that Jaedong never developed quite as good of "sloppy game" game sense. He still won a ton of these games because he was almost always the better player, and superior mechanics and killer instinct are still worth a lot in a sloppy game. But as soon as it looks like "attack attack attack" will work, his natural instinct is to go with that route, even if there's a better route.

On May 10 2017 02:41 darktreb wrote:
In this game, that situation came up after the Muta switch. He got a lot of value out of the Mutas, but he could have gotten FAR more value out of them by keeping them alive instead of throwing them away at the top left. If he keeps ~10 Mutas alive and harasses / flanks with them constantly, while taking both mineral only bases and perhaps even 3 o'clock, then he probably wins. This would have been Soulkey's instinct, and probably Effort's and Larva's as well.

On May 10 2017 02:41 darktreb wrote:
This is the stable way to win ZvT on Circuit Breaker once you have a brief late game advantage, because if you take both Mineral only bases, not only is the 6 o'clock gas buffered a bit, but each harass is proportionally less damaging for the very straightforward reason that when an expo is harassed when you're on 6-7 base, it's less damaging than when you're on 4-5 base.

On May 10 2017 02:41 darktreb wrote:
Problem is, Jaedong just never stabilized those mineral-only bases, in spite of the advantage they provide for Zerg in late game ZvT.