Proxy Five Gate

So I’ve been playing in Gold League this season. I’m not sure why but the apparent cause is that players are leaving the game in such large numbers, that the league player distribution tends towards rank decay. In other words, if you were Diamond at the height of the popularity of the game, there’s a good chance you’re Plat or Gold now.

Since the leagues were always just a cosmetic feature of the game, and never really correlated to a player’s MMR, I have to say I feel this was a big mistake from Blizzard. I would have preferred to stay in Diamond league, once I attained that level. You want to keep my MMR hidden? You want to give me the illusion of being better at StarCraft than I am? Fine, then don’t demote me from your meaningless league.

I have enjoyed more victory than usual in my new league. For some reason, this season, I’m having a lot of trouble against terran. And I can’t figure out why. TvT used to be my best matchup. Now it’s my worst. Surprisingly, toss is now my best race. But I was still losing against terran players.

Call me a dinosaur, but one of my best PvT builds was a five gate. I can execute that built without even trying. But lately, my five gates have been shut down by terrans. And shut down hard.

So I devised a new strategy, just for PvT. And I haven’t lost yet. I call it the Proxy Five Gate.

You start off with a standard, one base build. I like to always take both gases, and put two probes in each until I have full saturation. Normally, when your Cybernetics Core is done, you would built a mothership core. I delay the Core in order to built a Robo first. Depending on the map, I may proxy the Robo. Then I proceed very much like a regular five gate.

It’s important to built a Zealot and Stalker in this built, and to poke at the front of your opponent’s base. Warpgate research finishes about the time you would get a Warp Prism. I usually fill the prism with two zealots and two sentries. Then, you do one more poke at the front of his base with your stalker. This time, it’s a diversion. If you time it right, he’ll be rushing to catch that Stalker right about the time you’re dropping and warping in units in his main. Depending on the map and army positions, you can sometimes FF him out of his own base! Or out of his natural.

This attack works because in the current meta game, Terran is encouraged to have a strong front line. Typical protoss attacks involve using an Oracle. Blink favored maps are out of style, so in general Terran players aren’t expecting an attack at this point in the game from anywhere other than the front of their base, or an Oracle flying in.

The advantage of attacking away from bunkers is enough to win the game.

Enjoy.

PS - What happened to the traveling pro players and tournaments that used to happen? It’s like they’ve dried up and now everything is either in Korea or online. I’m sure this effect is as simple as a major sponsor pulling his support. But I must’ve missed the memo on the details.

Spawning Location Rules

I want to talk about a shortcoming in StarCraft that everyone is aware of, but few people talk about.

The loading screen before a match. You know, the screen, where you see the map you’re about to play on, along with the name and race of your opponent. The problem is, this screen is inconsistent, and often missing vital information.

First, the inconsistencies. Sometimes, this screen loads, showing a very nice high resolution photo of the map you’re about to play on. But other times, it shows a very low resolution picture of the map. I can’t understand why. A game like HotS should *always* display a beautiful picture of the map you’re about to play on.

Second is the missing information. Because when the screen loads with high resolution pictures, the map displays all possible spawning locations. But not so when I get the low resolution pictures.

What’s worse, is that showing me the spawning locations isn’t good enough. We need to know the spawning rules as well. What do I mean? On a map like Deadwing, there’s nothing to indicate that horizontal spawns have been disabled. As a result, I’ve watched online tournaments on Twitch.tv where the casters are confused, and don’t understand this simple, yet highly important point.

Hell, back in WoL, I’m embarrassed to admit that I checked disabled spawning locations for *months* without realizing there was a reason why my opponent never spawned there.

TL;DR Blizzard needs to give us the spawning location rules for each map played, i.e. tell us if certain spawns are disabled, and we should always see a high res picture at the loading screen.

Rush v Macro

To rush, or to macro, that is the question. Whether victory will come to the first who is bold enough to attack. Or if she would prefer the patient player who maintains his defensible position?

When you consider that the current map pool is horrible, the maps all tiny, I think its clear that she prefers, at the moment, the rush.

There are some maps, Metalopolis, that are so rush favored, you really can’t play them any other way. As a random player, this can be confusing, simply because there are so many different combinations.

I always like to start with the most volatile and rush friendly matchup. The ZvZ. One of the reasons why I think so many people have trouble assessing a ZvZ is that there are both one base and two base rushes. But after playing many games, I’m happy to report that on smaller, two player maps, the one base rush is superior.

You won’t find many one base rush builds on imbabuilds.com and I think that’s a sad thing. Because it implies that nobody plays the one base rush anymore, and that simply isn’t true. I mean, even Jaedong played one base rushes in a professional tournament. I mean, he lost, but still he played it, and played it well.

But that also ties into the other factor that makes me say you almost have to one base rush. That’s skills. I understand that on the pro level, one base plays kinda suck. But they sure don’t at the platinum level. Because you have to be pro level gosu to be able to defend a one base rush when you open hatch first. I’ve seen players like Taeja do it. But it never works out for me.

Everytime you try and copy something that’s beyond you, you wind up falling flat on your face.

Let’s switch to Terran. Now, on any map, in nearly any game, I have no trouble playing a reaper expand with confidence. But these new map pools, has me going gas first into a 1-1-1 tank push (for TvT). It just wins games, it just feels right.

Protoss is another race where the conventional logic has always been that the first to expand will lose. Which means you can expect to see a lot more 4 and 5 gate attacks. I love to threaten a 5 gate, and if everything isn’t perfectly in my favor, add on a Robo Bay and turn it into a Warp Prism drop, while having an observer for DTs.

Of course, when you plays as protoss, Stargate plays is almost mandatory. The potential of the oracle to flat out win games is so good, you have to roll the dice on that attack. Even if it doesn't work, you can hold onto the oracle for scouting and protection against cloaked units.

I played a PvP the other day where my opponent went for a proxy Starport. I found it, and killed three pylons powering it, only to have the single oracle it produced rock me. I had been going for a Starport in base. I made a phoenix, which eventually killed the oracle. But it didn’t matter. The damage was done. The game was close after that, but ultimately I lost. That didn’t feel fair to me, because I scouted his proxy, and I countered his tech, but still despite throwing a rock to his scissors, the lost drones and mining time gave him compensation.

I guess the point of the post is that, nowadays you almost always have to rush. Because if you don’t and your opponent does, you’re going to outright lose. If you do and your opponent does not, he’s going to lose. And if you both do, it should be a wash, it should be even, or at least come down to skill. With that kind of logic, who would ever open up 15 expand anymore?

Hyun's Roach Build

I took a look at my win rate percentages this season. I’m doing horrible. Sure my Toss play still looks halfway decent. But my Terran play is terrible. And my zerg play is even worse.

I blame it on the map pool. I kind of hate blizzard now, for letting us pick the map pool. It would have been fun for lols for a week, maybe, but they’re assholes for keeping it this way. I think it’s pretty clear that every starcraft player would prefer to play on the same maps that the pros are playing on. Instead we get metalopolis. It’s insane.

To deal with these new maps, I realized I needed a new build. I found it on imbabuilds.com. I use Hyun’s quick roach build. Basically you 15 hatch, 17 gas, 16 pool, 15 overlord. When the pool is done, you make two queens and continue to drone up to 28/28 supply. Then you make a Roach Warren, three overlords, and burrough research. When the roach warren finishes, you max out to 51/52 on roaches and attack. Often times, it can win you the game. It wrecks 4 gate attacks. It denies naturals. It’s a fantastic build, and I don’t know how I survived without it.

In the World of WarCraft, I met up with an old high school friend yesterday. We visited each other’s Garrisons. That was a first for me. It was a bit difficult, figuring out how to do that. You have to be in a group with someone else to do it. Then, when you right click your portrait, you have the option to visit the group leader’s Garrison. I see this being the new way for guilds to meet. Because for the first time ever, we now have easily accessible and private spaces. Having your own castle is great for cybersex, too.

My friend was mainly concerned with doing stable quests. I didn’t know that when you do enough and upgrade to level three, you get 120% speed on your mount. Which is awesome, don’t get me wrong. But it’s more of a grind. And it’s a grind I don’t really want to do. I finished all the available raids yesterday, too. The Wall raid was really quick and easy.

In summary, I’m very close to canceling my WoW subscription. Probably, I’ll come back after they release a few new raids. Until then, I have to work on my micro to win that StarCraft tournament.

WoW

So I think this is the post where I change the blog to Maul’s Blizzard Blog. Or maybe Maul’s SC2  WoW Blog. I like the second better. Partially because I don’t play any other Blizzard games.

But this morning, I really want to type about the World of WarCraft. First thing, I have to say is that this is the best version of WoW ever made. It really is good. They’ve taken out so many annoying aspects of the game, and streamlined the fun.

But long ago, I made a rule about how I play WoW. The rule is that I’m not going to play the same game, the same quests, the same dungeons, over and over again. I’ll play it through once, maybe again on an alt. But I won’t grind for them, like some sort of game bot monkey.

So I leveled my Druid to 100. I leveled all of his professions. I upgraded my garrison. I got Nat Pagle and all the fishing related stuff. What’s left?

Well last night I tried out the raid finder. I que as a Tank/Healer. I got healer, which I’ve never really played. The raid was MC, Molten Core.

Fun fact, Molten Core was the only raid I ever did in Vanilla. I remember after the grind to 60, I was eager to see what the endgame content looked like. MC was the raid. I couldn’t even keep my assigned tank up. We wiped repeatedly on the first mob of the raid. It was so bad, I decided then and there that WoW wasn’t fun anymore, and that I would stop playing.

So in a way, it was nice to return to MC, as a resto Druid, and avenge that earlier loss from a decade ago. We wound up bulldozing through the entire raid, and I upgraded my helm. It was a great raid, and I’m happy that Blizzard has streamlined the game to a point where a player can casually raid.

But there’s only one raid left. Once I do that, I fear, it may be time to cancel my WoW subscription. Maybe I’ll bring it back after they release more endgame content. It’s hard to say, because I really like playing. But then, there’s that StarCraft tournament at the University.

I started using my Razer Naga again. I want to win a StarCraft tournament.

Razer Blues

I won’t lie. Ever since Warlords of Draenor came out, it’s really been eating into my StarCraft 2 time. Before, I might have played set after set of StarCraft matches. Nowadays, I’m lucky to sneak even a single set.

What’s worse -- my wrist is hurting me from all that extra use. That’s what prompted me to make a post on Reddit about StarCraft and wrist injuries. I have no way of knowing how accurate the responses to my post were, but they were overwhelmingly in favor of wrist injuries being a non issue.

The pain in my wrist has forced me to think about the whole dilemma even more. Which made me remember, that when I play StarCraft or WarCraft, for years now, I’ve been using a Razer Naga. If you’re not familiar with the mouse, it’s got a small 10-key where your thumb is. It means you hit the buttons normally reserved for your left hand, with your right hand.

Take a look if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Now I’m thinking, maybe it’s all the extra right hand button pushing work that’s making my wrist hurt. Ultimately, I stopped using my Naga. I have a perfectly orthodox mouse in it’s place. So far, my wrist is still sore. But after a week or two, I should know if it made any difference.

But in the meantime, I’ve adjusted to WoW rather quickly. Mainly due to the way Global Cooldowns work in that game. But in StarCraft, the transition is almost impossible. I’ve lost nearly every match I’ve played, since having to rebind keys. I can feel that the transition will suck. But I’m also wondering how I should bind the keys differently, since I’m making the switch anyway.

It makes it harder, because I play random. There are many guides on how to bind your keys for a particular race. But few to binding keys how a random player might organize them.

One trick I’m making use of, is with Terran. I used to bind Barracks to one key, Factory to another, and Starport to a third. Now, I’m binding all production to a single key and using Tab to switch between the three. This will make rallying troops easier, as with my old setup I used to have to rally each production individually.

Wish me luck, and if you know of any good solution, hit me up on twitter @maulakai

Wrist Injury Much?

There’s an issue with StarCraft 2 that needs to be addressed. The 500 pound gorilla in the room. And with upcoming Legacy of the Void, there’s never been a better time to talk about it.

Repetitive motion injuries. There, I said it. This has been an issue for me since day one. Look at the pros. Many of them have issues with their wrists. I typically play three game sets, then take a break to give my wrist a rest. But pros practice for *hours*. To me, it almost feels like they’ve got some kind of superpower. How do they play so much?

The true answer is that they’re hurting themselves, and on some level, we all know it. When you learn to play StarCraft, you’re probably driven by the graphics, by the coolness of the game, and by the intricacies of the strategy. But when you get to a certain point (I’m random Plat) the game really comes down to speed and micro.

I am a self described strategy game enthusiast. StarCraft is a game that, at the top level, demands perfect micro. And that’s okay, in theory. But with wrist injuries so prevalent, wouldn’t it be nice if they could modify the game in a way where it didn’t kill our wrists?

I’m not sure if such a game would be a tad slower, like WarCraft 3. If slowing the game down would make it more about strategy and less about Taeja level storm dodging and marine splits. But Blizzard is a very clever company, and if anyone can make a game that satisfies our strategy game needs while being nice to our wrists, it’s them.

TL;DR Blizzard should find a balance between fast paced strategy game and wrist injuries.